The First Page: ARTMargins
THE FIRST PAGE
ARTMargins: The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts
edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
25 September 2025
This First Page is not so much a first page but the introduction to a special issue of online and print journal ARTMargins. Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at the Institute of Advanced Studies, the special issue is themed ‘The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts.’ The assembled contributions result from their research project of the same name – in short, SAVA – and investigate the records of the transformation of nature in socialist art history by discussing artworks that disclose the environmental impacts of the system’s extractivist, infrastructural, and terraforming interventions in the natural world.
Introduction
“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber’s salt [and] phosphorites,” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.”1 This entry under the heading “Socialist Metabolism” appeared in an issue of the showcase journal USSR in Construction devoted to the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet Kazakhstan, cataloguing the precious minerals, metals, rocks and hydrocarbons extracted from the Central Asian Republic to supply the expanding socialist industrial complex. In an ideological balancing act, the raw materials come back in the form of machinery to transform the mountains, bring water to the steppe, tend crops and herds, completing the biomorphic cycle by which “the riches of the Earth’s interior become riches of the surface – meat, wool, leather, fish and cotton.”2 This short passage in a richly illustrated edition designed by artist couple Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova does not fail to emphasize that the metabolic exchange of material substances in the socialist industrial organism pulsates “in obedience to the beating of its mighty and wise heart – the Kremlin,”3 inadvertently revealing the imperial agenda hardwired into its circulatory system.
The artful analogy of socialist metabolism was deployed here in order to justify extraction and rationalize the extension of infrastructural networks with a dual function as economic connectors and conduits of centralizing control. Missing from the metaphor however was the environmental component of these metabolic exchanges and their impact on ecosystems through interference in the biogeochemical processes of the Earth. Consideration of these complex mechanisms of accelerated economic expansion in relation to the altering of the natural environment though the critical framework of the Socialist Anthropocene, and the way artists reflected on these developments, is at the heart of this special issue of ArtMargins.4 The contributions gathered here investigate how artistic practice articulated, documented and reflected critically on the extraction of natural resources and harnessing of hydraulic power, the circulation of minerals and goods along the infrastructural routes of the planned economy, and the transformation of the countryside in the service of industrialization.
They also shed light on untold frictions in the expanding socialist system, conflicted attitudes to nature, and the clash of modernizing, Indigenous, geological and atomic temporalities in the unfolding of the Socialist Anthropocene. Hotspots of development and sites of nature transformation were also staging posts for socialist artists whose depictions bear the imprint not just of the metamorphic processes they were expected to amplify, but also of the uprooting and forceful remaking of social and ecological relations that underpinned these exchanges.
Continue to read the rest of the introductionon here.
MAJA AND REUBEN FOWKES are art historians, curators and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. They work on the twentieth-century art history of socialism from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and contemporary artistic engagements with ecology, climate and the Anthropocene. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and East European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), a special issue of Third Text guest-edited by Reuben on the “Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism” (2018) and Maja’s monograph The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015).
On 30 September 2025 Maja and Reuben Fowkes will launch their special issue of ARTMargins at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.
Lead Image by Wolfgang Mattheuer. Bratsk Landscape (detail), 1967. Oil on canvas, 96 x 118 cm.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Roman März.
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