Tina Di Carlo’s paper Constructivist Deconstructivist: Modern Haunts in “Deconstructivist Architecture” will open the annual conference Princeton Conjunction, this year themed “Illusions Killed by Life”: Afterlives of (Soviet) Constructivism.

“Deconstructivist Architecture had no relation to deconstruction and Constructivism, linguistic, formal or otherwise Catherine Ingraham argues in her fall 1988 review ‘Milking Deconstruction: Or Cow Was the Show?’ The reference to deconstruction was ‘parasitic and predatory.’ The reference to Constructivism was ‘confused and unnecessary.’ Any formal resemblance to Constructivism resided in a tenuous reduction to the diagonal and belied a depoliticized formalism, albeit it is the formal virtuosity of the ‘titled arcs and warped planes’ that was perpetuated in the language surrounding the show and through black and white photography of the catalogue and press. Did a word play – Deconstructivist, deconstruction, Construction, Constructivist – bely MoMA’s latent modern position within the installation despite the curators protests to the contrary? In an exhibition that was heralded as the end of postmodern architecture, did ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ paradoxically and covertly, perpetuate the Museum of Modern Art’s modern? Or more to the point: Did the installation spatialise the founding director and curator Alfred H. Barr’s, Jr. modern vision 52 years after his 1936 landmark exhibition ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’? And could this be read through the installation of the first gallery ‘of Russian Constructivist paintings and sculptures’ - a phrase circulated by the Museum within the press release that elided the distinction between the Constructivism and Suprematism in the installation from the start?”

// Excerpted from Constructivist Deconstructivist? : Modern Haunts in “Deconstructivist Architecture” by Tina di Carlo (2013)

– – –

“Illusions Killed by Life”: Afterlives of (Soviet) Constructivism continues the series of annual interdisciplinary conferences that have been taking place at Princeton University in the last few years. This year the conference brings more than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, and Eurasia including:

Pep Avilés, Vadim Bass, Djurdja Bartlett, Fabien Bellat, Daria Bocharnikova, Yve-Alain Bois, Anya Bokov, Ellen Chances, Esther da Costa Meyer, Tom Cubbin, David Crowley, Caryl Emerson, Eva Forgacs, Devin Fore, Hal Foster, Ginés Garrido, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Steven Harris, Yulia Karpova, Maria Kokkori , Joshua Kotin, Inessa Kouteinikova, Masha Kowell, Sergey Kropotov, Ilia V. Kukulin, Vladimir Kulić, Alexandra Köhring, Mari Laanemets, Daniil Leiderman, John Kenneth MacKay, Virág Molnár, Pablo Mueller, Michal Murawksi, Serguei Oushakine, Richard Pare, Petre Petrov, Kevin M.F. Platt, Kristin Romberg, Irina Sandomirskaja, Kim Lane Scheppele, Jane Sharp, Iuliia Skubytska, Elise Thorsen, John Tyson, Iliana Veinberga and Xenia Vytuleva.