Research Interests:
Research Interests:
“Music on bones”—as it was referred to in KGB documents and anti-propaganda movies circulated by the Soviet Government— was a dissident practice in the USSR during the Cold War from 1946 to the early 1960s. No longer regarded as a... more
“Music on bones”—as it was referred to in KGB documents and anti-propaganda movies circulated by the Soviet Government— was a dissident practice in the USSR during the Cold War from 1946 to the early 1960s. No longer regarded as a medical document, no longer serving as a record of human physical identity, the exposed X-rays became the foundation of a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of “secret” and “precious” information. This paper reads the phenomenon of «Music on Bones» against the grain in three major respects. First, it looks at crisis as the major inspirational source, that stimulated an extreme solution to produce the object of trans-rational. Second, it considers crisis as an act of social critique and separation delineating the society into shadowy illegal dissidents and the so-called official “music patrol”. Finally, it tends to follow the logic of material culture under political pressure, where the mediums of music and photography are being taken to a whole new extreme. Laying at the intersection of politics, collective memory, secrecy, science, danger and social privilege, “Music on Bones” became a radical visual representation, a metaphor and a trope of crisis in its political, economical and ideological domains.