Full Description
Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists' photographs, dramas, films, and writings—centered on class conflict—differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them.
Contents
Introduction: An Exact Picture of the World
Chapter 1: The Great Production:
Rodchenko/Brecht/Eisenstein with and against Adorno and Barthes
Chapter 2: Rodchenko's Photographic Communism
Chapter 3: Art and Political Consequence: Brecht's Critique of Affect
Chapter 4: Seeing Differently and Seeing Correctly: Brecht on Artistic and Political Abstraction
Chapter 5: Class into Race: Brecht, Adorno, and the Problem of State Capitalism
Chapter 6: Relentlessness: Eisenstein's Automatic Writing
