Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world
Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I’m not an art historian or anything myself, but I’m pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I’m sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.
The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn’t have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren’t of workers at all, they’re just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool
Having grown up in USSR, I’m pretty sure that I do in fact have a conception of what Soviet art looks like. Obviously socialist art encompasses more than simply glorification of labour. The point I’m making is that labour is an essential part of socialist art. The critique of solar-punk as an ideological and political project isn’t regarding what it depicts but rather what it omits.
Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I’m not an art historian or anything myself, but I’m pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I’m sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.
The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn’t have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren’t of workers at all, they’re just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool
Having grown up in USSR, I’m pretty sure that I do in fact have a conception of what Soviet art looks like. Obviously socialist art encompasses more than simply glorification of labour. The point I’m making is that labour is an essential part of socialist art. The critique of solar-punk as an ideological and political project isn’t regarding what it depicts but rather what it omits.