(Dis)play: Paper Showrooms of Soviet Labor

Abstract

This article analyzes how the avant‐garde display techniques of the early Soviet period were remediated into the book format to transform visual literacy into production skills. Illustrated children's books adopted multi‐media visual techniques originally found in exhibitions to transform the printed page into a dynamic tool for teaching children how to become the workers of the future. In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet displays were unrivaled propaganda tools, capable of activating and mobilizing visitors as much as modern media such as cinema and radio. Because of their reliance on a combination of tactile, visual, auditory and physical communication strategies, exhibitions offered Soviet authors and illustrators a set of formal and narrative strategies that responded to new theories of child‐reader perception in the field of Soviet pedagogy. By analyzing the representational language of At the Exhibition against the background of El’ Lissitzky's demonstration room, I show that thematic and formal aspects of exhibition display transform the book into a visual template and a road‐map that gradually leads the reader from observing to making Soviet things. Similarly, in analyzing the role of text and image in the preschool picture book Our Review I show how curatorial strategies typical of dioramas are embedded in the book medium and transform it into an interactive display. Radically transformed into a portable diorama, the book becomes a training device directs the child‐reader to inscribe his or her actions into a system of collectively enforced social practices. Through the book‐turned‐display, Soviet children were trained into new visual practices that promised to transform them into producers, organizers and surveyors of their own culture.