Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumor on Madison Avenue.

Vision and Communism presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky's art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by its five editors, this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the exhibition Vision and Communism, opening at the Smart Museum of Art in September 2011.

Robert Bird is an associate professor in the departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago.

Christopher P. Heuer is an assistant professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University.

Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the departments of visual arts and art history at the University of Chicago.

Tumelo Mosaka is curator of contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Stephanie Smith is deputy director and chief curator at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.