The Revolutionary Aesthetics of the Second Russian Avant-Garde

The text focuses on the stiob (the Russian word for a particular form of parody) and subversive aesthetic praxis of the Second Russian Avant-Garde. In particular, Ioffe analyzes Michail Grobman’s oeuvre from the perspective of various irreverent techniques associated with the political left and the cynic tradition, drawing a conceptual parallel between the avant-garde’s life-creational outrage and Surrealist patterns of discursive terror. Ioffe reflects on the synthetic nature of the avant-garde, which puts equal emphasis on visual and verbal arts. His analysis explores the radical artistic gesture that represents one of the unique contributions of this cultural paradigm.