'Eastern' Viewers and European Eyes: Early Soviet Propaganda and Theories of Spectatorship and Difference

• In Event: Visual Culture in Central Asia II: Spectatorship and Consumption

Abstract

In 1922, the Turkestan Main Department for Political Enlightenment claimed that “the psychology of artistic perception and creation among the Muslim population is completely different from the European in its most basic principles.” This was not an unusual position in the 1920s: it was common for Soviet-European art critics and aesthetic theorists to talk about fundamentally different “ways of seeing” belonging to different peoples, divided into ethnic or civilizational categories. Drawing on archival sources from Moscow and Tashkent and published sources in Russian and Uzbek, this paper addresses how spectatorship was theorised within experimental scholarly institutions (such as the State Academy of Artistic Sciences) and in the press, and argues that Soviet theorists constructed an idea of an “Eastern” form of spectatorship which in turn informed the production of agitprop.

Author

• Mollie Arbuthnot, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)