Painting Subjects: Self-Portrait as an Egodocument in Early Soviet Central Asian Art

• In Event: Daring, Subversive, Transgressive: Strategies of Self-Representation in 20th-Century Central Asian Art

Abstract

Central Asian modernist and avant-garde artists are not believed to have produced any significant written texts, such as manifestos, statements, or declarations, to accompany their artistic works. Apart from a few interviews recorded by researchers of the time, which have been reproduced in edited versions in several monographs, there is very little “first-person speech,” i.e., the artists’ own reflections on their artworks and general life conditions, that has been employed in the analysis of early Soviet art in the Central Asian context. The lack of the artists’ own voices often creates a longstanding liberal delusion that ideological coercion is the only source of artistic creativity during this period, which ultimately diminishes the artistic achievements and political subjectivities of early Soviet modernists and avant-gardists in Central Asia. In this paper, I propose to overcome this “first-person” silence by directing attention to a sub-genre of self-portrait. I approach self-portraits produced by early Soviet artists from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan as specific historical documents that embody characteristics of both manifestos/declarations and egodocuments. This approach will also allow us to reinstate subjectivity—both artistic and political—among early Soviet modernist painters in Central Asia and complicate established views of the cultural and artistic process in the region during the 1920s and 1930s.

Author

• Georgy Mamedov, U of Melbourne (Australia)