Christina Kiaer's imaginative study of the socialist object is one of the most important, provocative, and illuminating works yet published on Russian Constructivism. Unpacking the myth of Constructivism, it focuses on the everyday objects of mass consumption that the Constructivists theorized and produced in a calculated response to the hybrid consumer culture spawned by the New Economic Policy. The author's fresh, penetrating critique is bound to alter and deepen our understanding of the human dynamics as well as the theoretical imperatives that vitalized the Constructivist project.
Anatole Senkevitch, Jr., Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
This is one of the most stimulating and original books that I have read about the objects and designs produced by the Russian Constructivists. By elucidating the theoretical and practical complexities of the Soviet context within which these artists were working, and by using recent theory, the author throws important new light on their work of the 1920s. Without trivializing Constructivism or its achievements, Kiaer injects a vivacity, sexual excitement, and creative flamboyance into the movement and its main protagonists that have been missing for far too long.
Christina Lodder, University of St. Andrews, author of Russian Constructivism
...a book so luminously written and gorgeously illustrated that Sovietologists, art historians, and students of modern culture of all stripes will find it a treat to open and impossible to put down.
AAASS Vucinich prize committee
Kiaer has written perhaps the most through study of this brief but highly provocative and original era...Imagine No Possessions is a valuable consideration of a period that, some seventy years after its end, continues to generate fertile discussion.
Times Literary Supplement
Splendid...Kiaer's very rich study...succeeds in convincing us that what had thus far been considered a fairly limited and even aberrant aspect of Constructivism was part and parcel of its ideological program.
Artforum
Imagine No Possessions is a fascinating analysis of the early Soviet socialist object as a uniquely compelling historical phenomenon, and as the key to a reevaluation of Russian Constructivism. In its recovery of the utopian desires motivating the design of the object-as-comrade, Kiaer's incisive yet accessible book is a stirring reminder that there are alternatives to present-day capitalist triumphalism.
Jonathan Flatley, Department of English, Wayne State University