Art in the Age of Binary Inversion: Russian Constructivist Graphic Design and the Interwar Grid

What can we learn about Russian constructivism’s aesthetic and ideological investments when we privilege the movement’s engagement with typographical printing rather than the laboratory constructions that have long framed constructivism’s interests in sculptural terms? Print was arguably the realm in which the group realized its most successful projects. Their theoretical program was authored by Aleksei Gan, who worked primarily in print. This chapter analyzes the constructivist program along with examples of the group’s print production and the period’s rhetoric, in order to explore how historical structures of thinking manifested both mediologically and ideologically. It considers not only print’s character (its mass reproducibility), but also its construction of meaning through binary difference, thereby bringing together two seemingly contradictory logics relevant to the period’s complex politics: one based on universality and the other on inversion and difference.