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LPSR dizains. Process un personibas

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Martinsone I.

Materiali Latvijas makslas vesturei

2012

vol. 8

186-197

Although design processes in Latvia are coming into focus (the state has included design in its list of cultural priorities) research in the history of design still needs to be intensified. Various circumstances stand in the way of this, the most paradoxical being the questioning of the very need for this research because of the non-existence of design in Latvia. The need to change these assumptions was the motivation for examining Soviet Latvian design in this article. It may be that the sense of the insignificance of Latvian design stems from memories of low-quality industrial production that prevailed in the 1980s. However, this attitude may also have emerged from the specificity of Latvian culture that focused on the role of personality in creative work; thus any conditions limiting the artist’s ‘ego’ are perceived as diminishing the value of artefacts they have created. Exploring the design processes in Latvia, one has to face the problem of appropriations and copying: industrial espionage was one of the methods used to implement the USSR plans. It is hard to describe the proportions of appropriated and original elements in the products of Latvian design; designers’ testimonies could serve as a source of information. The first graduates of the Industrial Art Department entered Latvian industry only since the 1970s. The industrialisation of Latvia began with the restoration and reorganisation of work in expropriated factories after World War II; already in the 1940s artists’ studios were being created in the plants; that was a step towards the fostering of design. There is the wide-spread belief that changes in the culture of the USSR and Latvia came with the Khrushchev Thaw. In reality things started to change already right after Stalin’s death in the early 1950s when a series of decrees were passed, aimed at the raising of the people’s quality of life, including that of consumer goods, and thus promoting the development of design. Industrial design in the USSR created a complex system with many functioning parts: education, laboratories for technological research and artistic construction offices, design theory, periodicals dealing with everyday culture and design, exhibitions and conferences at the international socialist bloc level, exchanges of information and teaching staff. Various promotion institutions along with control mechanisms were created at the USSR Council of Ministers. This inflated bureaucratic apparatus may have played a role in the later collapse of industry.

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1 Materiali Latvijas makslas vesturei

1 Martinsone I.

1 2012

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LPSR dizains. Process un personibas