Maria Gough gave a Visiting Lecturer Talk at the Arts Research Center on Feburary 21, 2014.
Maria Gough’s primary area of research and teaching is early 20thC European art, with special attention to the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes, Weimar aesthetics, and French modernism.Tackling problems in the history of abstraction, drawing, para-architecture, photography, print media, propaganda, exhibition design, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Gough’s research has appeared in journals such as October, New German Critique, Modernism/modernity, Parkett, Artforum, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, the Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, and many exhibition catalogues. Her book on the Constructivist debates of the 1920s, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, was published by the University of California Press in 2005. She is currently completing two book manuscripts: The first is on the drawings of Gustavs Klucis (How to Make A Revolutionary Object), the other on the photographic practices of foreign travelers in the Soviet Union during the 1930s (The Soviet Photographic Utopia of Radical Tourism). She also writes occasionally about post-war and contemporary art, including on such topics as the work of Tatiana Trouvé, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Buckminster Fuller, Josiah McElheny, and Monika Sosnowska.