Revolution Every Day: A Calendar

Reviewed: Robert Bird, Christina Kiaer, and Zachary Cahill, eds. Revolution Every Day: A Calendar Exh. cat. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2018. 768 pp.; 365 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9788867492947). Marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, 2017 was a year rife with crises and controversies that cast 1917’s legacy as both strikingly familiar and impossibly remote. Amid this turbulence, Revolution Every Day harnesses communism’s tarnished appeal-if only in the space of the museum and while also admitting its contradictions. Doing so is no easy task, and that the exhibition achieves this without lapsing into heavy-handed didacticism or nostalgia, is itself noteworthy. This is not to say that didactic or nostalgic artworks are omitted or such sentiments overlooked. On the contrary, large-scale posters by Mariia Bri-Bein, Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, Nataliia Pinus, and many others are generally instructional in their portrayal of postrevolutionary life, while short films by Olga Chernysheva, such as March (2005) and Marmot (1999), depict anachronistic Soviet-era rituals and ephemera that betray a frustrated longing and confused eclecticism often attributed to art of the post-socialist years. Where such themes have come to be expected in an exhibition that foregrounds art’s relationship to socialism across the twentieth century, Revolution Every Day is unique in how it allows for and challenges these and other tenets-be it Soviet art’s unwavering didacticism or post-socialist art’s melancholic indeterminacy.