Demolition Artists

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitt's 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Communism · Constitution · Demolition · Epistemology · Object (grammar · Painting · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sovereignty · Subjectivity · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · German History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy