From Aestheticized Politics to Politicized Aesthetics
An enquiry into Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photography
Thesis Research Master Arts and Culture: Art Studies University of Amsterdam August 2017 Word count: 23.933 M.M.C. (Michelle) de Wit; student number 10202374 Supervisor: dr. M.H.E. (Mirjam) Hoijtink Second reader: dr. I.A.M. (Ihab) Saloul
ii Key words
Aleksandr Rodchenko; White Sea – Baltic Canal; Soviet Union; art and politics; canonization; visual studies; cultural memory
Abstract
This thesis examines today’s inherently problematic aspect of the representation of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs and photomontages of the White Sea – Baltic Canal Gulag. Executed according to the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde, these images portray the violent story of the creation of a new Soviet landscape and a new Homo Sovieticus. These originally highly aestheticized political images lost their meaning over time. Today, this results in a new politization of these images to connect them back to their cultural memory of the Gulag. The goal of this thesis is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it aims at gaining insight into the dynamics behind the process of meaning making of these images in order to understand how an aesthetic and a political interpretation could become so removed from one another. On the other hand, it aims at providing an analysis that takes into account both the political and aesthetic qualities of these images. This way, it offers an enquiry into Rodchenko’s images of aestheticized regime made disaster suited for today’s museum space.
iii
iv Acknowledgements
Dear reader,
Two years ago, while I was studying in Saint Petersburg for a semester, I stumbled upon a series of photomontages made by the Russian avant-garde artist Aleksandr Rodchenko. The images accompanied a short article by Erika Wolf. The photomontages, which were modernist in form, portrayed a Gulag camp, a laboratory for socialist ideology. The images struck me in two ways. First, they refuted within an instant everything I had always learned about the Russian avant-garde in my art history classes. Rodchenko’s photomontages showed me how the avant-garde and the state could reinforce each other, even if this occurred only for a brief period. Second, the images made me rethink everything I had learned about the relation between art and politics, and how it is we define the notion of “good” art. These themes will certainly be discussed in this thesis. Rodchenko’s images of the White Sea – Baltic Canal Gulag introduced me to a whole range of fascinating Soviet artists book. After two years of enquiring into these materials during this research master, I can say that their craftsmanship as well as often problematic subject matter still keen to amaze me. I am therefore grateful that I was given the opportunity to dig deeper into this subject matter during the last two years. I am especially grateful to Mirjam Hoijtink and Ihab Saloul, who guided me during this process and stimulated me to keep exploring this subject matter. I would also like to thank the many experts on the Russian avant-garde that enthusiastically shared with me their knowledge. I would like to thank in particular Erika Wolf (University of Otago), Sjeng Scheijen (Leiden University), Wouter Jan Renders (van Abbemuseum), Bernadette van Woerkom (Jewish Cultural Quarter), Hubert Smeets (NRC Handelsblad/Raam op Rusland), and Albert Lemmens and Serge Stommels (LS Collection van Abbemuseum) for discussing Rodchenko’s Gulag photography with me. Last but not least, I would like to thank a special person very close to me, Armin Karimi, who has bravely kept up with my “Soviet photo book obsession” and often found time to assist me during the editing process.
I hope you can read this thesis with as much pleasure as I spent working on it.
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vi Contents
Abstract and key words………………………………………………...………….iii Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………v
Introduction…………………………………………………………………….….1 1. Modernist in Form…………………………………………………………...... 12 Experiments for the future………………………………………………...14 From faktura to factography………………………………………………18 From reality to truth……………………………………………………….22 2. Modernist in form, socialist in content…………………………………………26 Perekovka, or the reforgement of men…………………………………….27 An exercise in “showing seeing”……………………………………….…31 USSR in Construction……………………………………………………..36 3. From conflicted heritage towards prosthetic memory……………………….…45 The conflict of comparison…………………………………………….….47 Questioning the notion of the photograph as trace………………………..49 Mass culture, museums, and memory……………………………………..51 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………..………58
Bibliography……………………………………………………………..………..62 List of illustrations…………………………………………………...... …………69
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viii Introduction
“I want to make photos such as I’ve never made before, ones that are life itself and the most genuine life, photos that are simple and complex at the same time, that will surprise and amaze… Otherwise there’s nothing to do in photography, then it’s worth working and fighting for photography as art.” - Alexandr Rodchenko, 1934.1
“Here before us lies the volume, in format almost equal to the Holy Gospels, with the portrait of the Demigod engraved in bas-relief on the cardboard covers.” - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974.2
From 1931 – 1933, the artist, designer and photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891 – 1956) travelled to the region Karelia in Russia’s north to document the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal [hereafter: Belomor – see figure 1]. This construction project was carried out by the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settlements, also known as the Gulag.3 The aim of Belomor was not just to build a canal; it also served as a laboratory for the creation of a new Homo Sovieticus. Culture played an essential role in this process. Rodchenko had the task to propagate this ideological undertaking, a task he took on willingly.4 It resulted in two high quality publications: the book The Stalin White Sea Canal: being an account of the construction of the new canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea [hereafter: The White Sea Canal] and the 12th issue of the magazine USSR in Construction of 1933. Modernist in form, his images told a socialist narrative. To reconstruct a new person, the old one needed to be violently broken down. Conditions at Belomor were harsh and there was a lack of equipment.
1 Aleksandr Rodchenko, diary entry, March 14, 1934. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 310. 2 Solzhenitsyn 1973: 81. 3 Russian: Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́ тельно-трудовы́ х лагере́й и коло́ний, [Glavnoye upravleniye ispravityelno-trudovykh lagerey i koloniy]. The Gulag administered and controlled a vast network of labour camps. Overtime it became known not just as the administration of concentration camps, but as a system of slave labour and Soviet repression. The Gulag originated almost immediately after the 1917 Revolution and initially focussed on “rehabilitation” through labour. From 1929, a major expansion of the camps began. The camps disappeared when Stalin died – although the camps did not disappear altogether. According to historian Anne Applebaum, 28.7 million people passed through the Gulag. For more information see: Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: a History. New York: Anchor Books. 4 Wolf 2008: 170.
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Figure 1. Map of the White Sea – Baltic Canal waterway.
Belomor began and ended with a labour force of 126.000.5 Officially, 12.000 prisoners died during the twenty-one months of construction work. According to Applebaum, 25.000 prisoners lost their lives.6
I started this introduction with two citations: one from Rodchenko, in which he described his photographic practice during the 1930s, and one from Solzhenitsyn, in which he described the book The White Sea Canal. The diary entry by Rodchenko is often used by art historians to underscore the a-political nature of Rodchenko’s photographic work and his constant search for perfecting photography as a form of art.7 The second citation counteracts this art historical
5 Applebaum 2003: 64. 6 Applebaum 2003: 79. 7 This becomes most clear in the work of Olga Sviblova, who is a curator at the Moscow House of Photography. See: Sviblova, Olga (2008). Alexander Rodchenko: revolution in photography [exhibition catalogue]. Moscow: Moscow House of Photography; Lavrent’ev, Alexandr, Olga Sviblova (2006). Alexander Rodchenko: photography is an art. Moscow: Interros publishing program. See also: Lavrent’ev, Alexander. ‘Reconstruction of the artist: 1930 – 1940’ In: Lavrent’ev, Alexander [ed.] (2005) Alexander Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future – diaries, essays, letters, and other writings. New York: the Museum of Modern Art; Lavrent’ev, Alexander (1995). Alexander Rodchenko – Photography 1924 – 1954. Köln: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH; Sviblova, Olga (2008) Alexander Rodchenko: revolution in photography. Moscow: Moscow House of Photography; Tupitsyn, Margarita (1996). The Soviet Photograph: 1924 – 1937. New Haven: Yale University Press.
2 discourse, by describing the book for which Rodchenko shot most of the pictures as a bible of evil. To me, these two citations articulate an inherently problematic aspect of the artists’ photographs of Belomor. On the one hand, the art historical discourse presents the images as experiments in form. On the other hand, particularly within the historical discourse on Belomor, the images represent the falsification of history and a glorification of Stalinism. The conflict between these two different discourses is not a resolved one – on the contrary, it was only recently that a discussion regarding the different interpretation of Rodchenko’s images of Belomor gained attention. This discussion played out mainly in the Netherlands, where recently several exhibitions were held that displayed Belomor within the broader context of the Russian avant-garde. These exhibitions were held at the Photography Museum in Amsterdam (Foam), the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, and the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam. Even though all exhibitions historically contextualized Rodchenko’s images, they received severe criticism from the collective Window on Russia that their approach was too aesthetic and neglected to tell the story of the prisoners portrayed.8 The critics often compared the images of Belomor to Nazi art. Images created by artists who collaborated with the Nazis should naturally be considered as “bad art”, they argued. Then why was this not the case with these propagandistic photographs of Stalinism? These images should be treated as a historical document and not be displayed in an art museum, was one of their main statements.
The dual aspect of modernist in form while socialist in content intrigued me, especially because this posed a problem to museums. The aesthetic and politic aspects of the images, that were so closely intertwined when Rodchenko created them, seemed to have gone separate ways over time to now meet again. Where the art museum seemed to neutralize the political content of the aesthetics of the Belomor images, these aesthetics were now politicized anew
8 Window on Russia aims at analysing East-West relations in order to understand Russia’s politics today and reinforce debates. It has a special focus on Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and Syria. raamoprusland.nl/ [last accessed: 17 August 2017]. For the articles of Oleg Klimov, Hubert Smeets, and Hella Rottenberg see: Klimov, Oleg (4-8-2015) ‘‘I wanted to be the devil myself’: the forgotten history of how a Soviet photographer glorified the Gulag’s White Sea Canal’. Meduza: the real Russia today. www.meduza.io. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/08/04/i-wanted-to-be-the-devil-myself [last accessed: 23 Dec. 2016]; Klimov, Oleg [transl.: Hubert Smeets] (11-12-2009) “De montage van de terreur”. NRC Handelsblad www.nrc.nl. http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2009/12/11/de-montage-van-de-terreur-11823738 [last accessed: 15-07- 2016]; Rottenberg, Hella (7 August 2016). “Expositie Stalinistische kunst verhult historie”. Volkskrant www.volkskrant.nl. https://www.volkskrant.nl/opinie/expositie-stalinistische-kunst-verhult-historie~a4353409/ [last accessed: 19 August 2017]; Smeets, Hubert (09-03-2016). “Wél het kunstwerk, niet de hongermoord”. NRC Next www.nrc.nl. http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/03/09/wel-het-kunstwerk-niet-de-hongermoord-1596310 [last accessed: 15-07-2016]
3 by this group of journalists. How did such a change come about? In order to examine this, I formulated the following research question. How can we reach an understanding of this changed reception of Rodchenko’s Gulag photography, while also reaching an understanding of the images that moves beyond an opposition of art and politics?
This master thesis will therefore concern this line of conflict between the aesthetic and political aspects of the Belomor images made by Rodchenko. The goal of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it aims at gaining insight into the dynamics behind the process of meaning making of these images in order to understand how an aesthetic and a political interpretation could become so removed from one another. On the other hand, it aims at providing an analysis that takes into account both the political and aesthetic qualities of these images. This way, it offers an enquiry suited for today’s museum space. It is important to emphasize that this study treats only one aspect of the creative production of Rodchenko, although it is an aspect of great importance that has been often overlooked. This thesis thereby contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Rodchenko’s work created in the 1930s. On a larger lever, it will contribute to a better understanding of art made under dictatorial regimes in the twentieth century.9 Situating it within one particular discipline is therefore a difficult task. As I briefly explained above, the conflict I will examine takes place between different disciplines. My methodology will therefore be a multidisciplinary one, based on interdisciplinary studies from the fields of visual culture and memory studies. But before going into this theoretical aspect in detail, let me first explain why I consider this multidisciplinary approach relevant for this thesis and elaborate on the different discourses and disciplines concerned with Belomor.
The explicitly political and propagandistic character of Rodchenko’s images of Belomor, which he made during the early 1930s when the state adopted a more centralist and
9 Within this rising field of study, some interesting comparable studies as well as novels can be found. To name just a few examples: Claartje Wesselink’s study Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: geschiedenis en herinnering (2014: dissertation: University of Amsterdam) offers an interesting analysis of Dutch artists who collaborated with the Nazi regime. Eva Maria Troelenberg recently conducted the study “Directions of the Gaze: A Visual Cultural History of the Suez Canal”, in which she scrutinized the propaganda that surrounded the opening of the Suez Canal. With regard to novels, the moral dilemma’s artists had to face who collaborated with repressive states has produces some fascinating stories. I would like to highlight two in relation to the Soviet Union: Michel Krielaars’ Voor het moederland (2017: Amsterdam: Atlas Contact) tells the story of the writers Isaak Babel and Vasilii Grossman, who both initially actively supported the Soviet state. Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time (2016: London: Vintage) tells the story of the highly complex relation between the composer Shostakovich and the Soviet state.
4 coordinating role, pose a discomfort to some art historians. This period is often described as repressive, treating its artistic production as completely subservient without any personal agency of the artist.10 From this perspective, the Stalin era is thus defined as a totalitarian one, which makes it easy to draw a line between “free” artistic works made before Stalinism and “totalitarian” ones made during. The art historical discourse that Stalin was personally responsible for all the horrors that occurred during the 1930s freed artists from any accountability and turned them into martyrs.11 The German-Russian art critic Boris Groys offered a more nuanced approach, by arguing that the state did not suppress the avant-garde, but became the avant-garde by taking over the role of artistic innovation.12 In his study The Total Art of Stalinism, Groys critically analysed how the avant-garde was persecuted. This occured because they operated within the same territory as the state, he argued.13 The idea of art as subordinate to the state that the concept of totalitarian art presupposed, was counteracted in a slightly different way than Groys’s approach by several authors who were relatives of the artists who worked under Stalinism. Of most interest for this thesis is the Russian art historian Alexandr Lavrent’ev, grandson of Rodchenko. He provided a positive account of the designs Rodchenko made during the 1930s. In many of his writings he discussed the Belomor images as an important aspect of Rodchenko’s oeuvre. Lavrent’ev provided a historical context in relation to the images, informing his readers on the nature of the camp Rodchenko visited. However, he discussed the images only for their formal qualities and did not discuss the ideology inherent to these forms as well as the reasons why Rodchenko visited Belomor. The political dimension of the works Rodchenko created remained overlooked or minimized. The German art critic Benjamin Buchloh has been one of the few scholars to argue for a paradigm shift on the Soviet avant-garde.14 Buchloh argued to make a clearer distinction
10 As I indicated earlier, this stance can mainly be found in the work of Sviblova, Tupytsin, Golomstock, and sometimes Lavrent’ev. 11 Russian art historian Igor Golomstock, in his book Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China, used the term “totalitarian art” to describe a complete subordination of art to politics. Golomstock, Igor [transl.: Robert Chandler] (2011). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China. New York: Overlook Duckworth. 12 Groys 1992: 44. See also: Groys, Boris (1990). “The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Avant-Garde”. In: Gunter, Hans [ed.] (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin Press. 122-147; Groys, Boris [transl. Charles Rougle] (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 13 Groys 2013: 35. 14 Buchloh, Benjamin (1984). “From Faktura to Factography”. October. 30:3. 82-119.
5 between the notions of “faktura” (a focus on form) and “factography” (a focus on creating a visual narrative through form), two different aspects of the avant-garde that will be discussed at length in the first chapter. Within the art historical discourse on Rodchenko, this distinction isn’t made clear enough, which Buchloh considered to be the origin of the misinterpretation of the photographs of Belomor. Although Buchloh’s argument remained rather marginal, there are art historians and scholars within the field of book studies that prefer a more critical approach towards Rodchenko’s work. Recently, Manfred Heiting argued for a discussion on the lengths to which governments can go to convincingly package their ideology and make it irresistible.15
The historical and literary discourses concerned with Belomor tell a slightly different story. Within this discourse, Solzhenitsyn played an important role. In The Gulag Archipelago, he extensively wrote about Belomor and the horrors that occurred at its construction site. He argued that the propagandistic publications, to which Rodchenko actively contributed, should be taken more seriously when studying the Gulag for understanding to what extent the state was willing to go to implement ideology.16 Applebaum took over this stance in her historical account of the Gulag, where she discussed how The White Sea Canal served to underscore the idea that the prisoners portrayed were not human, but “units of labour”.17 Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick moved away from the totalitarian concept and argued for a give-and-take relation between artists and the state.18 Julie Drascoczy, in her study on criminal prisoners at Belomor, argued to understand the camp as a laboratory for society.19 The camp offered an intense space to experiment with ideological constructs that could later be implemented on society at large. Where Drascoczy closely scrutinized the faith of criminal prisoners at Belomor, Cynthia Ruder examined its literary qualities and the faith of political prisoners.20 She described Belomor not only as a historical event, but also as an important literary experiment. This more nuanced approach towards the dynamics between artists and the state is something I consider crucial to this study and to the study of Soviet artists in general. As the first chapter
15 Karasik and Heiting 2015: 9. 16 Solzenitsyn 1973: 78 – 120. 17 Applebaum 2003: 102. 18 In discussing Fitzpatrick’s study, Margolin explains how in 1985, during a scholarly debate, her more objective approach to the 1930s was considered unsatisfactory by historian Stephen Cohen. He argued that Fitzpatrick’s approach ignored the emotional resonance of the purges. Margolin 1997: 164 – 165. 19 Draskoczy 2010: 7 20 Ruder, Cynthia (1998). Making history for Stalin: the story of the Belomor Canal. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
6 of this thesis will show, Rodchenko’s relation with the state was a complex one. This aspect is often overlooked in criticism on Rodchenko’s involvement at Belomor.
As will become clear in this thesis, museums play a crucial role in understanding the process of meaning making behind Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. In the introduction to his collection of essays on the logic of collections, Groys analysed the role of the art museum in our era of media.21 Within our era of media, the museum needed to become more engaged, it became a public space. This way a larger audience could be reached.22 It attributed a new power to the museum to position itself within the public space as a place for public debates to be analysed and play out. It placed the museum within our time, instead of a timeless white cube that only concerned itself with aesthetics. “We challenge ourselves and our visitors to think about art and its place in the world, covering a range of subjects, including the role of the collection as a cultural ‘memory’ and the museum as a public site”, is how the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven describes itself.23 This makes clear why the memory aspect of Rodchenko’s images of Belomor was not discussed earlier but was only recently politicized anew. If the museum is more engaged with society and presents itself as a space for public debate, the objects of its collections are pulled into this space of public inquiry. It is here that I would like to position the current discussion concerning Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. Where first the political aspect of these images was neutralized within the sacred space of the art museum, the move of the museum towards a space for public debate allowed for these same aesthetics to be politicized anew.
As I will demonstrate in this thesis, understanding the images of Belomor within the museum as a public space can be found in the fields of visual studies and memory studies. Let me elaborate on the importance of visual studies first. This field developed with the aim of moving beyond an exclusive focus on the artistic quality of images. Instead, in takes into account the entire domain of images and the entire spectrum of the visual experience as well as practices of looking. Visual studies operate with a double objective in mind: that of understanding the historical as well as the social criteria according to which value is ascribed to images.24 According to William T.J. Mitchell, visual studies offers “a more nuanced and
21 Groys, Boris [transl. Jan Sietsma] (2013). Logica van de verzameling. Amsterdam: Octavo Publicaties. 22 Groys 2013: 11. 23 Statement “who we are” on the website of the Van Abbe Museum: https://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/about-the- museum/organisation/who-we-are/ [last accessed: 14 august 2017] 24 Somaini 2012: 25.
7 balanced approach located in the equivocation between the visual image as instrument and agency: the image as a tool for manipulation on the one hand, and as an apparently autonomous source of its own purposes and meanings on the other. This approach would treat visual culture and visual images as “go-betweens” in social transactions, as a repertoire of screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human beings.” Mitchell doesn’t consider the social sphere to construct the images, but instead considers images to construct the social field.25 In order to discuss Rodchenko’s images of Belomor as instruments and agents, I will refer to Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the photograph as event, a concept she developed within her study of images of regime made disaster.26 By considering the photograph as event, the gaze of the spectator is invited to wander beyond the frame of the image, inviting individuals to display interest and responsibility for what they see.27 Azoulay divides the photograph as event into two distinct moments: the event of photography, which occurs in relation to the camera, and the photographed event, which occurs in relation to the photograph.28 Through this event-based approach, the opposition between an aesthetic and a political stance can be bridged, Azoulay argues. As her case studies she analysed photographs made by the Israeli military of the destruction of Palestinian property. She closely analysed the dynamic between spectator, photographer, and photograph subject (or lack thereof) within the image. Azoulay specifically focused on the dynamic between aesthetics and violence within the process of meaning making. This makes her study of particular interest for this thesis, for Rodchenko’s images were concerned with the destruction and rebuilding of the Karelian landscape and the destruction and rebuilding of people. With this approach, I aim at conducting as what Mitchell calls a “showing seeing” exercise, an approach that aims at questioning the veil of familiarly we have been accustomed to when analysing the avant-garde. In order to tackle the actively manipulated aspect of Rodchenko’s images of Belomor, I will refer to the concept of “visual doublespeak”. Doublespeak can be understood as a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words, or what is true. It can be closely associated with political language and propaganda. It is a term mainly used in literary studies and its origins can be traced to Leo Strauss’ study Persecution
25 Mitchell 2005: 351. 26 Azoulay, Ariella [transl. Louise Bethlehem] (2012) Civil Imagination: a Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso. 27 Azoulay 2012: 107. 28 Azoulay 2012: 26.
8 and the Art of Writing from 1952.29 It has also been related to George Orwell’s 1984, where this notion is referred to as “doublethink”. Orwell’s novel has recently gained new attention with regard to fake news stories and “alternative facts”. The concept of what I call visual doublespeak has never been used in relation to images. I therefore would like to make use of this thesis in order to take this concept to a test and see what it can contribute to the analysis of visual culture. I think it could be of value, for it helps to articulate the manipulated aspect of the images that will be analysed. As has been put forward in almost every study on photography the photograph is always considered a mediated representation, never an objective document. However, the images Rodchenko made were not just mediated, but actively manipulated in order to establish a false narrative and falsify history. Through the notion of visual doublespeak, I aim at critically analysing this manipulated aspect and how Rodchenko played with the notion of “archive” in order to create a past according to Stalin’s wishes.
One aspect of the methodology has thus been dealt with. However, there is still a second aspect to enquire, the aspect of memory and conflict. As indicated earlier, in criticism on the display of Rodchenko’s images of Belomor, a comparison was often made with Nazi art. As I will explain in this thesis, this is not a surprising relation to draw. In order to analyse this problematic aspect, I will refer to Aleida Assmann’s concept of the canon and the archive, and the mnemonic quality of images, two concepts that can be placed within the interdisciplinary field of memory studies.30 The concepts of canon and archive are presented by Assmann to closely scrutinize the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. By referring to something as “archive” or “canon”, it becomes possible to explore how different memories were stored, activated, and changed over time. Assmann modelled her concept of the mnemonic power of images after the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929). In contrast to other scholars of his time Warburg considered images to be always interwoven with culture in general. With this approach, he distanced himself from his contemporary art historians, who tended more and more towards an interpretation that considered the image as the autonomy of aesthetic form.31 The mnemonic power of images, Warburg argued, could store and mediate memory. Not only an image, but also an artists’ style could influence
29 Strauss, Leo (1952). Persecution and the Art of Writing. Westport: Green Press Publishers. 30 Assmann, Aleida (2011). Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 31 Assmann 2011: 214.
9 memories. Assmann followed this interpretation within her framework on cultural memory, emphasizing the dynamics of memory and forgetting behind the processes of meaning making. Assmann’s theory is of particular interest for my thesis for it focuses on the interaction between form, memory, and reception. This allows insight into how a certain artistic style could be used in order to influence artistic taste and thus decide what was considered “good art” and what “bad art”.
The concepts of Azoulay and Assmann will thus help me to closely analyse the Belomor images within their social sphere and articulate how their meaning changed over time. However, this does not yet offer any concrete ideas on how to exhibit these images in the future. Azoulay’s approach offers an alternative analysis, but not an alternative form of display. At the end this thesis, I will therefore refer to Allison Landberg’s concept of prosthetic memory.32 Originally based on film, Landsberg argued how modernity created a new and necessary form of cultural memory, which she explained as prosthetic memory.33 With prosthetic memory, Landsberg refers to the production and distribution of memories that are not directly connected with a person’s past or heritage. However, they do play an essential role within the creation of subjectivity.34 These memories can play out in sites such as the experiential museum, which enables a connection between a person and a historical narrative.35 In this way, I aim at closing this thesis with a remark on how the concept of prosthetic memory can help us understand how to exhibit ideologically charged images like Rodchenko’s in the future.
The concepts phrased above will be structured according to an inquiry into the form, content, and conflict (and its solution) inherent to Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. Every chapter will be introduced by one of the three exhibitions that were recently held in the Netherlands during which Rodchenko’s images of Belomor were displayed. The chapters will not offer a full analysis of these exhibitions; I will take one problematic aspect of a particular exhibition as a starting point in order to analyse this closely according to the concepts explained above. The first chapter will be concerned with form. The exhibition Red!: Utopian Visions from the Soviet Union, held at the van Abbe Museum in 2015 – 2016, will serve as its point of
32 Landsberg, Allison (2014). Prosthetic Memory: the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. 33 Landsberg 2014: 2. 34 Landsberg 2014: 20. 35 Landsberg 2014: 2.
10 entry in order to scrutinize the notion of propaganda as art. The position of Rodchenko will be closely looked at, as well as his relation to Alfred Barr, the first director of the New York based Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Barr would become an important actor within the canonization of Rodchenko. I will track his influence on this process of canonization from the 1920s to the end of the Cold War. Then I will discuss Buchloh’s distinction between faktura and factography. This chapter will also gain some insight into Rodchenko’s position as an artist. How did he, and other artists involved in the Belomor project, consider their own position? And how was this described by scholars? The second chapter will be concerned with content. As a point of entry, I will use the exhibition Alkesandr Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography! which was organized by Foam in 2010. Criticism on this exhibition accused the curator Olga Sviblova of presenting Rodchenko as an artist purely concerned with form. This chapter will therefore be concerned with understanding the content of these forms. I will do so by closely analysing the images of The White Sea Canal and USSR in Construction. I will do so by asking the reader to adopt the perspective of the viewer of the photograph, while critically scrutinizing his or her own position as viewer of these images. The aim of this approach is to involve the reader in understanding the particular ways of seeing Rodchenko constructed. These particular ways of seeing are essential for understanding the ideological content inherent to the images. This chapter will therefore first offer a close enquiry of the content of Rodchenko’s Belomor images, to then move into an analysis that scrutinizes how form and content worked together. The exhibition The Power of Pictures, held at the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam in 2016, will serve as the point of entry for the third chapter. Criticism on this exhibition mainly focussed on a lack of historical context and compared the way of displaying Rodchenko’s images with ways of displaying Nazi art. The first part of this chapter will therefore be concerned with the conflict of comparison between Soviet and Nazi art. One particular point of interest within this discussion is the notion of a photograph as trace, a concept I will look at critically. I will close this chapter by enquiring how Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory could offer some interesting ideas for exhibiting Rodchenko’s work in the future.
11 1. Modernist in Form
From January till July 2016, the exhibition Red! Utopian Visions from the Soviet Union [hereafter: Red!] took place at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle and at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. I visited the exhibition in Eindhoven where it was on display in the library. The key publications within the exhibitions, all 121 issues of the magazine USSR in Construction, immediately struck my attention [figure 2 and 3]. The strong and colourful visual language that was used to package utopian and propagandistic ideas still had the ability to amaze me – they introduced me to a dazzling and colourful world filled with happy and hardworking people. I knew this wasn’t reality, but the utopian idea portrayed intrigued me. It was through USSR in Construction that the curators of the exhibition, Serge Stommels and Albert Lemmens, explained their aim. They wanted to express how the vision of the young communist state was distributed worldwide through radical avant-garde designs made by the country’s cultural elite and how influential these ideas and designs were.36 This was meant to provoke a discussion regarding the nature of “art”. Should a magazine like USSR in Construction, a propaganda magazine, be considered a work of art? Can a great work of art still be a great work of art if it was produced and distributed under and for a dictatorship? The curators were clear in their statement that they considered the works on display works of art, a statement that was not shared with the journalist Hubert Smeets. Smeets responded to the exhibition through an article in NRC Handelsblad called “Wel het kunstwerk, niet de hongermoord”.37 Smeets found it hard to believe that the artists who worked for USSR in Construction were blinded with enthusiasm and not aware of the horrors they so thoughtfully concealed. He therefore argued that the exhibition not only lacked historical context, but failed to refute the propaganda altogether. Smeets’ argument was picked up by Martin Bossenbroek in his book Fout in de Koude Oorlog.38 Bossenbroek related Smeets’ observation to the question of representing Nazi propaganda. According to Bossenbroek, to Dutch cultural memory Nazi ideology means the most dangerous ideology of all, surrounded by crimes that directly affected many Dutch citizen. That the same sort of crimes occurred in the Soviet Union could never be truly understood in the Netherlands. It is therefore that we can exhibit Stalinist propaganda as art, while this would never be possible
36 Lemmens 2016: 6-7. 37 Smeets 2016. 38 Bossebroek, Martin (2016). Fout in de Koude Oorlog: Nederland in Tweestrijd, 1945 – 1989. Amsterdam: Prometheus – Bert Bakker.
12
Figure 2 and 3. Rood! Utopian Visions from the Soviet Union. Van Abbe Museum, 2016. Figure 2 shows the exhibition entry. Figure 3 shows the second part of the exhibition that was located in the library’s basement. Here we can see several issues of USSR in Construction and a spread from the Belomor issue (issue 12, 1933). with Nazi propaganda, Bossenbroek argued.39 As I was reading the critique by Smeets and Bossenbroek on Red!, it intrigued me that they instantly considered art and propaganda as two different entities. “Art” was “good” and “propaganda” was “bad”. Stommels and Lemmens, on the other hand, considered art and propaganda to be inseparable. According to them, a great work of art could simultaneously serve as propaganda; “look at the works Michelangelo made for the Catholic Church”, they told me, “that was great art and clever propaganda.”40 It didn’t surprise me that a dialogue between these two different stances was not taking place, for their treatment of the element of “form” relied on completely different interpretation that excluded one another.
The different stances of Smeets and Bossenbroek, and Stommels and Lemmens are just a micro version of the larger discussion regarding the relation between the Russian avant-garde and the Soviet state, a discussion I shortly referred to in the introduction of this thesis. This chapter is therefore shaped around the treatment of “form” in relation to the work Rodchenko made of Belomor. This first chapter will have as its central point of focus Assmann’s concept of the mnemonic power of style and her concept of the dynamic between canon and archive. I will start by outlining Rodchenko’s position within the Russian avant-garde and discuss his meeting with Alfred Barr, who would play an essential role within the canonization of the artist. I will then discuss Buchloh’s essay “From Faktura to Factography”, in which Buchloh strongly criticized Barr’s way of canonization. In relation to the notion of “factography” I will
39 Bossenbroek 2016: 300. 40 Stommels, Serge, Albert Lemmens. E-mail conversation on Red!. 22 June 2017.
13 introduce the concept of “visual doublespeak”, which I consider essential in order to reach a critical understanding of the images of Belomor.
Experiments for the Future The material of the artists of the Russian avant-garde was the world, or more specifically: creating a new one. The role of the artist was to visually and socially organize this new world.41 Rodchenko explained this as the engineering will of the artist.42 Rodchenko’s life and work form a fascinating account of the artistic life of the early Soviet period. His family story suggests the sincere social progress that was underway in Russia; as the revolution advanced, the lives of Rodchenko and his family changed for the better. Rodchenko’s father, the son of a former serf, taught himself how to read and write and was a labourer in Petrograd. After the turn of the century the family moved to Kazan, where Aleksandr received his elementary education. He learned about the art world through magazines and got enrolled in the local art school.43 There he met Varvara Stepanova, who would become his lifelong companion. In 1915 Rodchenko moved to Moscow, where he entered a vibrant artistic environment, now known as the Russian avant-garde. After the October Revolution, the avant-garde was the only artistic group to side unambiguously with the Bolsheviks.44 Rodchenko saw himself not so much as an artist, but as an engineer of social life. He described his works as “experiments for the future”.45 He was greatly concerned with the question on how to be an artist in the new Soviet Union and worked within a variety of mediums. After 1921 his main concern was mass media and its effective communication, which let him to work in advertisement, propaganda, and photojournalism. The prominence he enjoyed, however, diminished during the late 1930s and eventually left him, as he put it, “an invisible man”.46 Rodchenko was constantly rethinking his relation to and use of mass media, a position that put him in constant dialogue with the authorities. His work in mass media can therefore be referred to as an attempt to develop a political modernism.47 However, this was initially not picked up by someone who would play an important role in his canonization. This was Alfred Barr (1902 – 1981), who in 1927 visited the Soviet Union. A few years later, Barr became the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In what follows, I will outline how Barr, through the
41 Groys 1992: 18. 42 Groys 1992: 19. 43 Dabrowski 1998: 10. 44 Dabrowski 1998: 12. 45 Rodchenko, Aleksandr (1920). “Everything is Experiment”. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 108 – 111. 46 Cited in Dabrowski 1998: 16 47 Dabrowski 1998: 64.
14 MoMA, canonized Rodchenko as a modernist artist.
In 1927, Barr was busy defining the concept of modernism, which he understood as a highly international European movement.48 His trip to the Soviet Union would form a key element in his understanding of modernism as well as in his later programme for the MoMA.49 Today, the MoMA owns 184 works by Rodchenko ranging from 1919 to 1941.50 Together with his friend Jere Abbott, Barr had the freedom to travel the Soviet Union without supervision for ten weeks and was allowed into the basements of museums and private collections.51 What stands out from Barr’s diary entries is his fascination for the cross disciplinary approach of the artists he met. Where he was constantly looking for modernist painters, the Soviet Union at first disappoints him. On a visit to Lissitzky, he noted: “I asked whether he painted. He replied that he painted only when he had nothing else to do, and as that was never, never.”52 The same can be read from his diary entry on a visit to Rodchenko and Stepanova: “We left after 11 p.m. – an excellent evening, but I must find some painters if possible.”53 Rodchenko and Stepanova would later donate many of their works to Barr. They considered the paintings of little value, for they weren’t the “new art”.54
Barr thus witnessed a shift in Soviet art, a shift that Buchloh later described as the development from faktura to factography. Further on in this chapter, I will discuss this shift at length. Even though this change in Soviet art shimmers through in Barr’s writings, he doesn’t seem aware of the importance of what he was witnessing. This becomes clear in his notes on a visit to Sergei Tretyakov, the leader of the group Lef (of which Rodchenko and Stepanova were members) in which he noted that Tretyakov “seemed to have lost all interest in everything that did not conform to his objective, descriptive, self-styled journalistic ideal of art. He no longer writes poetry but confines himself to reporting.”55 Barr considered Tretyakov’s change of focus towards reporting (or what Buchloh would call factography) to
48 Kantor 2002: 147. 49 Kantor 2002: 161. 50 MoMA online collection database: https://www.moma.org/search/collection?query=Rodchenko [last accessed: 18 August 2017]. 51 Kantor 2002: 162. 52 Cited in Sandler 1986: 10. 53 Barr, Alfred. Diary entry 4 January1928. In: Sandler 1986: 113. 54 Cited in Kantor 2002: 171-172. 55 Cited in Kantor 2002: 168.
15 be a mere distraction from modernist art. It was only a year later, in the fall of 1928, that Barr realized the importance of this shift to factography.56 The Western discourse on modernism, however, would not follow this implication. For the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, held in 1936 at the MoMA, Barr summarized his findings in a now famous chart [figure 4]. In this chart, we find the Russian avant-garde (represented by suprematism and constructivism) on the right side, underneath French cubism. This presents the Russian avant-garde as an early twentieth century European
Figure 4. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. "Flow chart" diagram of art movements, from the jacket of the catalogue for the 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art. movement separated from the political sphere of its time. It is placed at the periphery as well, which made it even more important for scholars of the Russian avant-garde to present it as a purely artistic movement able to compete with the Parisian centre.57 Barr thus preserved a specific quality of the Russian avant-garde: its experiments in form. He actively preserved this fragment within the museum, making it an important aspect of his canon on modern art. From his writings we learn that his process of selection was solemnly concerned with form – the political implications of the Russian avant-garde, in particular of Rodchenko, were stored away. Not because Barr deliberately wanted to falsify Soviet history abroad, but because
56 Kantor 2002: 169. 57 John Bolt during the panel discussion of the conference “The Many Lives of the Russian Avant-Garde (2-3 June 2017). Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
16 these specific political implications did not fit his model of European modernism. It simply fell out of his frame of interest. Here we can distinguish what Assmann calls the process of selection, value, and duration, three elements she considers essential for the process of canonization.58 Barr selected his modernist artists and their works, he ascribed new meaning to these works, and he included them into his (what would become dominant) canon of modernism.
On this foundation of European modernism, Barr started building an American modernism. Barr was not the only one working on this project. There were many other important stakeholders involved – amongst them the American government, who during the Cold War discovered the potential of abstract art as a weapon for soft power politics. Abstract art, especially abstract expressionism, focussed purely on aesthetics: pure use of form and colour. It was an art form that broke with traditions and focussed purely on the formal problems of the artist. During the Cold War, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was in charge of public diplomacy. This agency found in abstract art a perfect ally. The presentation of abstract expressionism as freedom could easily be contrasted with socialist realism, which was considered a product of a repressive and backward state. This might best be expressed by the words of the chief spokesman of the USIA, Andy Berding, in 1953. He asserted that the USIA was only interested in art insofar as it was a “medium of communication, a means of interpreting American culture to other peoples.”59 In practice, this meant that artworks in a certain visual style that the USIA did not approve of as being representative for American culture were banned from exhibitions abroad.60 Gabriel Rockhill explained this use of style in his essay “The Politicity of ‘Apolitical’ Art”.61 Rockhill made clear how governmental organisations provided patronage in stimulating certain artistic practices at certain places, thereby using the canvas of the artist as their canvas for ideology. Simply speaking, this meant that abstract art represented the free West, while figurative art served the occupied East. A work of art is seen trough the eyes of a cultural identity, Assmann stated.62 As I aimed at illustrating above, the model of European modernism Barr created was later used as an example of artistic freedom, a search of the free
58 Assmann 2008: 100. 59 Cited in Sandler 1986: 221. 60 Sandler 1986: 221-223. 61 Rockhill, Garbiel (2014). “The Politicity of ‘Apolitical’ Art”. In: Rockhill, Garbiel (2014). Radical History & the Politics of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. 62 Cited in Wesselink 2013: 333-334.
17 artist concerned with form. The Russian avant-garde was just a piece within this foundation, that relied heavily on France. This foundation was used by Barr to construct an American form of modernism in which all previous forms of art culminated. When the Cold War broke out, this was then used to contrast the Western, free identity against the Soviet, repressive identity. Even though Rodchenko’s works expressed socialist realist ideals, these were never shown by Barr. We can thus speak of a passive form of forgetting, to refer back to Assmann’s concept of the creation of the canon, that during the Cold War resulted in a purely aesthetic representation of art.63
Seen through the eyes of western identity, Barr’s process of canonization ascribed to the Belomor images a mnemonic power of artistic experiments that represented freedom. Even though the images clearly represented the Soviet Union, to a Western audience they would represent only an experiment in form, the prequel of American modernism, and the last bits of artistic freedom in Soviet Russia. It is here that we can understand one aspect of the argument of Smeets and Bossenbroek. It explains why we, as a Western audience, don’t consider the Belomor images to represent mass violence. However, Smeets and Bossenbroek relate this to an inability of the Dutch audience to understand Stalinism. This is a whole different topic, to which I will refer partly in the third chapter. I don’t consider this mnemonic power of style to exclude a Dutch memory on Stalinism, but I do find that it complicates this process. But don’t let me jump ahead. Before diving into this material further, I would like to analyse the work of an art critic who was (and still is) very sceptical of Barr’s process of canonization: Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh understood very well how Barr failed to underscore the change in Rodchenko’s work and how mass media and photojournalism were used by the Soviets.
From faktura to factography In explaining the continuity between the avant-garde and socialist realism, Buchloh referred to the notions of faktura and factography. While faktura describes the initial formal artistic experiments of the avant-garde that took place during the 1910s and 1920s, factography refers to the mobilization of these artistic tendencies for propaganda purposes during the late 1920s and 1930s. According to Buchloh, analysing early Soviet art according to these concepts makes clear the transformation in aesthetic thinking in relation to the rapid industrialization of society the artists underwent. The notion of faktura developed during and shortly after the
63 Assmann 2008: 97 – 98.
18 revolution. It had a focus on the particular material properties of an object and emphasized the placement of an object and its interaction with the spectator. Through the strong focus on materiality, objects created according to the notion of faktura underlined the importance of construction. The technical means of construction were incorporated into the work itself and relate it to the existing standards of the development of society at large. During the late 1920s, however, this theory was no longer sufficient. Art and visual culture needed to be tailored towards the needs of the working class. Painting was largely abandoned; in order to reach the masses photography became the main medium for representation, as well as architecture and industrial design. In order to create convincing images, the photographs and photomontages needed a documentary character that contained aspects of reality. “The photographic print is not the sketch of a visual fact, but its precise fixation. The precision and the documentary character gives photography an impact on the spectator that the graphic representation can never claim to achieve”, is how an anonymous artist described the practice.64 Many scholars believe this artist to be Rodchenko. Faktura is thus more strongly related to form and focuses on an individual viewer, while factography had a specific focus on writing a visual narrative aimed at the collective. Factography manifested itself in photojournalism, which emerged during the mid 1920s when illustrated magazines became more popular and accessible.65 Photojournalists had as their aim to create convincing photographic narratives on the industrial progress of the Soviet Union. Magazines often created a network of photo-correspondents all over the country and facilitated domestic and international agencies with the production and distribution of the photographic materials.66 The resources for producing photographic works were, however, increasingly limited and controlled, especially during the first Five Year Plan (1928 – 1932). For Belomor, Rodchenko created a coherent and readable visual narrative that leads the viewer through the process of change the landscape and prisoners underwent. This approach differed from his earlier photomontages that aimed at creating a visual historical narrative, as can be seen for example in the history posters Bloody Sunday [figure 5].67 What is interesting about these posters is the relative lack of ideological guidance. The viewer is not
64 Anonymously published in the magazine Lef - although many scholars have attributed this text to Rodchenko. Cited in: Buchloh 1984: 98. 65 An example of one of the most important magazines at that time is Ogonek (the Soviet equivalent of the American Time and Newsweek). Soviet Photo also played an important role within the field of photojournalism. 66 Wolf 2004:108 67 In January 1905, during a protest that would subsequently be called ‘bloody Sunday’, demonstrators marched to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to let tsar Nicholas II know about their poor economic positions. They were fired on by troops. This event catalysed a series of demonstrations and strikes, which eventually led tsar
19
Figure 5. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Bloody Sunday. 1925 – 1926. guided into a specific narrative, as will become clear when analysing Belomor, but is asked to construct his or her own interpretation out of the presented fragments. The viewer can thus negotiate between various positions. On his posters, Rodchenko displayed photographs of protesters and corpses, as well as newspaper clippings. The viewer can identify the event, but little has been done to create a coherent narrative. Rodchenko often used juxtaposing images in order to let his viewer negotiate between different positions, allowing different understandings of the same event. As an archive of history the posters had a clear message: the past is just as unstable as the present, today’s leaders may not be tomorrow’s. The archive as poster thus becomes a public tool to constantly present historical events from a different perspective, creating an ever changing and unstable past - a constant reconfiguration of the past takes place. The archive, presented in this way, becomes a tool for shifting the meaning of collective social memory. Yet where in these history posters the power of constructing a narrative remains with the viewer, the power over the narrative of Belomor, as I will explain in the second chapter, shifted completely to the state.
Nichloas II to concede the principle of a constitution and parliament. In the aftermath of the Revolution, history was dropped for a time from the educational curriculum of the new Soviet Union. These history posters indicated a return of history to daily life, although according to the party line.
20 Photojournalism was thus concerned with creating a “truthful” visual language on the Soviet Union that was used for propaganda purposes. The ways in which artists searched for such a visual language was relatively free, as Rodchenko’s early history posters indicated. When analysing photojournalism through the concept of factography, we can outline its double intention. I would like to discuss this double intention of Soviet photojournalism through the concept of visual doublespeak. To define this notion of doublespeak, we need to look at literary studies. In 1952, Leo Strauss analysed the politics of public culture in relation to literature in non-liberal societies in his book Persecution and the Art of Writing.68 With this study, he created a framework for analysing what has been said between the lines; an analysis that seems fruitful for unravelling hidden narratives or double intentions. Considering Strauss’ focus on dismantling double intentions on a conceptual level, his analysis can be used outside the context of the literature as well. He aims at laying bare claims on “any truth”.69 Strauss, however, does not mention the notion “doublespeak”. This term was first used by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) of the United States, which they based on the novel 1984 by George Orwell, where it is described as “doublethink”. Since 1974, the NCTE hands out every year the NCTE Doublespeak Award, as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centred.”70 The NCTE also hosts the Orwell Award, which is given to an author or producer who contributed to honesty and clarity in public language. The notion of doublespeak has since then been used to analyse deceptive language within all kinds of fields, ranging from literature and politics to real estate and health insurance agencies.71 The term hasn’t been used within art history and barely within visual culture. This surprises me, for I think it could be an interesting tool in analysing propaganda or political soft power mechanisms. The notion of visual doublespeak allows focusing specifically on the dual aspect of visual language that intends to deform truth or create an intentionally deceptive image of reality. In relation to images that are strongly mediated, as is the case with Belomor (and also many other projects of Soviet photojournalism), this notion doesn’t only help us to underscore what is real and what is an illusion, but also aims at emphasizing how the
68 Strauss 1952: 36. 69 Strauss 1952: 34. 70 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) www.ncte.org http://www.ncte.org/volunteer/groups/publiclangcom/doublespeakaward [last accessed: 12 February 2017] 71 Kehl, D.G. (1977). “Public Doublespeak: Hocus-Pocus and the Gift of Double Focus”. College English. 39:3. 395-398. Kehl, D.G. (1988). “The Two Most Powerful Weapons against Doublespeak”. The English Journal. 77:3. 57-65. Gibson, Walker (1975). “Public Doublespeak: Doublespeak in Advertising”. The English Journal. 64:2. 14-15.
21 mnemonic power of the image was altered. In the second chapter I will use this concept when analysing some images of Belomor, while in the third chapter I will use it to complicate the use of the concept of the photograph as trace. But before going into these discussions, I would like to return to the early Soviet Union and its photojournalists. Because how did they relate themselves to photojournalism? Had they concerns about the ethical implications of these projects? Little is known to answer these question, for so many of the artists and writers did not survive the 1930s. On Belomor, however, quite some information survived. I will therefore spend the remaining words of this chapter on elaborating on the positions of these artists and writers, before diving into an analysis of the images themselves. I find it enlightening to briefly elaborate on the position of artists at Belomor for it sheds some light on the complex social situations they worked in. It is not an excuse to relativize their participation in Belomor. On the contrary – I consider it important to take into account a glimpse of how Rodchenko and others considered their own position in relation to the state and the Gulag.
From reality to truth The position of Rodchenko’s involvement at Belomor remains ambiguous. According to Slavonic scholar Erika Wolf, Rodchenko was not coerced into working at Belomor by the Soviet state.72 Buchloh argued that Rodchenko had no other choice than to accept the commission if he wanted to remain a respected artist, while Lavrent’ev stated that Rodchenko simply followed his contract with the publishing house Izogiz, with whom he had an agreement to document several construction sites.73 The most extensive explanation can be found in Wolf’s dissertation USSR in Construction: from avant-garde to socialist realist practice.74 During eight years, she extensively researched the magazine USSR in Construction, and therefore also how Rodchenko ended up at Belomor. She argued that Rodchenko had indeed a contract with Izogiz, the state publishing house responsible for USSR in Construction.75 It is presumed that Izogiz commanded Rodchenko to go to Belomor, but no contract or letters specifically referring to this event have been found. However, Rodchenko was not exclusively working for Izogiz. Motivated by a lack of money as well as his persisting wish for artistic recognition, he took on many other commissions. In 1933,
72 Wolf 2008: 170. 73 Wolf 1999: 239. 74 Wolf, Erika (1999). USSR In Construction: from avant-garde to socialist realist practice [dissertation]. The University of Michigan. 75 Wolf 1999: 240.
22 Rodchenko started working for the Worker’s International Relief (Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe – hereafter IAH), a German press agency that collected materials on Soviet construction sites for publication in Germany. These photographs were always published anonymously. With IAH, Rodchenko made an agreement that he would photograph Belomor. This founding by Wolf would prove that Rodchenko was not sent to Belomorstroi by the Soviet state or a Soviet organization. Disappointed that IAH would publish his photographs anonymously, while at the same time realizing the potential of the project he was working on, Rodchenko wrote to Stepanova to sell his photographs to other newspapers and magazines, particularly Izogiz.76
In Making History for Stalin: the story of the Belomor Canal, Slavonic scholar Cynthia Ruder closely analysed not only the practice of collective writing, but also discussed the moral dilemmas these writers encountered. This provides an interesting insight into the creation of a socialist realist aesthetic and the agency artists had in participating in state projects. Considering the position of Rodchenko is surrounded by ambiguity, it seems interesting to shortly reflect on how other artists reflected on their participation in this project. Most interesting might be the position of Maxim Gorky (1868 – 1936), the chief editor of both The White Sea Canal and USSR in Construction. He had a difficult relation with the communist party and spent the 1920s in exile in Italy, while defending human rights. In 1932 he was personally invited by Stalin to return to the Soviet Union as the “father of Soviet literature”. One of his activities would be actively propagating the spiritual reforgement of criminals in Gulag camps like Solovetsky and Belomor. How to understand this radical transition from human rights defender to concealer of Stalinist brutality? Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal reflected on this question in New Myth, New World: from Nietzsche to Stalinism. Rosenthal discussed the influence of Nietzsche on “left” Bolshevism from 1917 onwards.77 With regard to artistic creativity, this group considered art a power that could transfigure the world. Especially Gorky was influenced by Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian, she argued, which he interpreted as being anti-individualistic. The Dionysian idea of breaking down individuality through a direct appeal on emotions could create a new collective creativity, while transforming passive spectators into active performers.78 Rosenthal legitimizes Gorky’s
76 Rodchenko to Stepanova, Medgora, August 18 1933. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 292. 77 Rosenthal 2002: 112. 78 Rosenthal 2002: 310. One needs to take into account as well that Gorky considered kulaks (middle class peasants) an inferior race that
23 decisions according to this notion of the Dionysian, which blinded him for the suffering of the present. This idea remains unquestioned in her study, which is unfortunate. It would have been of great interest if she had expanded her argument in order to discuss how Soviet artists saw the present as what was real, that was completely in service of the utopian vision of what was considered “true”. This notion of “truth” referred to the future and had yet to be created. When Gorky speaks about a truthful artwork he does not refer to something real, but to something that will be real in the future. This would complicate the idea that Gorky was blinded by reality. He saw reality as something that needed to be overcome in order to reach “truth”. Other writers involved in the project showed different motivations. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, for example, first refused to work on the project because they considered it morally questionable. However, they eventually did contribute, later stating that participating in issues of collective authorship was unavoidable.79 For other authors, participating in the project was an honour. In retrospect, Aleksandr Avdeenko considered himself to be full of self-deception and self-blinding at the time. More sceptical voices could be heard as well. Viktor Shkovksy only participated in the project because he was promised the release of his brother, who was one of the prisoners. Tamara Ivanova noted in her memoirs that the writers “wanted to believe”, a strong psychological pressure that was in some cases self-imposed.80
During his stay at Belomor, Rodchenko wrote many letters to his wife Stepanova. They are mainly concerned with material issues and some short notes refer to Rodchenko’s mother, who died during his work at the canal. He also wrote intimately about the wellbeing of one of the camp commanders, Semyon Firin.81 During his stay at Belomorstroi, Rodchenko made some close friends among the elites of the Soviet secret police. This gives the idea that Rodchenko was very aware of his own position and manoeuvred his way through the dangerous political landscape in order to make the best of it as an artist. In his letters, Rodchenko was mainly concerned with finding buyers for his photographs. He constantly informed with Stepanova which newspapers she had contacted. That Rodchenko was very aware of this own positions becomes clear in his essay
was associated with capitalism. Then there were also the material rewards. Gorky received several orders and honours, the city of Nizni Novgorod was named after him, and films and magazines were devoted to him. 79 Ruder 1998: 230. 80 Ruder 1998: 231-232. 81 Rodchenko to Stepanova, Medgora, July 19 1933. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 292.
24 “Reconstruction of the Artist”, which he wrote in 1936.82 In this essay, he had to defend his position as a Soviet artist by critically reflecting on it. His visit to Belomorstroi takes up almost half of the essay:
“A gigantic will gathered here, on the canal, the dregs of the past. And this will was able to raise such enthusiasm in people, the likes of which I hadn’t seen in Moscow. […] Man came and conquered, conquered and reconstructed himself. He arrived downcast, penalized, and angry, and left with head held proudly high, a medal on his chest, and a ticket to life. And life opened to him in all the beauty and genuinely heroic creative labour. I was bewildered, amazed. I was caught up in this enthusiasm. It was all familiar to me, everything fell into place. […] I was struck by the sensitivity and wisdom with which the re-education of people was conducted. There they knew how to find an individual approach to each person. At that time we didn’t have this sort of sensitive attitude to creative workers.”83
Rodchenko mirrors his own transformation into a Soviet artist with the process of reforgement the political prisoners underwent. In the chapter that follows, I will elaborate on that transformation at length. Rodchenko presented himself as an example of someone who underwent reforgement in order to rise as a true Soviet photographer. The essay had a clear purpose: Rodchenko presented himself to the authorities as someone worthy of being a Soviet photographer. We can read how he defends but also explains his own position according to the state rhetoric presented in The White Sea Canal, which I will refer to in the second chapter. If Rodchenko questioned the moral nature of Belomor, it never became clear in his writings. From his writings on Belomor we get to know an artist who, more than anything, wanted to be an artist, whatever the costs.
82 Rodchenko, Alexander (1936). “Reconstruction of the Artist”. Sovetskoe foto. Vo. 5, nr. 6. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 279. 83 Rodchenko, Alexander (1936). “Reconstruction of the Artist”. Sovetskoe foto. Vo. 5, nr. 6. In: Lavrent’ev 2005: 279.
25 2. Modernist in Form, Socialist in Content
From December 2009 until January 2010, the Photography Museum in Amsterdam (Foam) organized a retrospective exhibition on Rodchenko in collaboration with the Moscow House of Photography. The aim of this exhibition was to show the development of Rodchenko’s photographic works, framing him as an autonomous artist who was purely interested in the formal elements of photography. The exhibition was called Aleksandr Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography. I never visited this exhibition, but when I started to gain interest in Rodchenko’s Gulag photography in 2016, this retrospective show was the first that outlined to me the problematic opposition between art and politics inherent to the representation of Rodchenko’s work today. In 2009, this problem didn’t go unnoticed either. Olga Sviblova, who curated the exhibition, had chosen to focus on Rodchenko as an autonomous artist. Rodchenko’s political motivations to undertake his photographic experiments were highly marginalized. As a response to this choice of representation the photojournalist Oleg Klimov (with the help of Hubert Smeets) published an article in NRC Handelsblad called “De montage van de terreur”.84 This article focussed specifically on the photographs of Belomor. Klimov strongly criticized the framing of Rodchenko as an artist solemnly concerned with form and not with politics. He underscored how Rodchenko willingly worked with the secret police in creating a false narrative on the Gulag. In response to this criticism, Foam added an explanation of the historical context of Belomor to the exhibition. There are a few interesting and problematic aspects of this exhibition that I would like to point out. We can see how Sviblova aimed at portraying Rodchenko as an important modernist artist within the canonical discourse on modernism Barr set out. Rodchenko undeniably was an artist of great influence, but as I discussed in the previous chapter as well, the difference between faktura and factography needs to be taken into account in order to fully understand especially his photographic works. The exhibition at Foam showed how a focus on only “faktura” and not “factography” became problematic. This made it difficult for them to then historically contextualize the photographs, for it was not discussed how they served ideological goals and reconfigured history. Focussing on the images as purely experiments in form ignored their ideological goals. In this chapter, I will focus on the content of these Belomor images. What was the ideological message behind them? And how was this message translated into a visual
84 Klimov 2009.
26 language? I will also demonstrate how this ideological message developed over time. The last part of this chapter will be dedicated to providing a close analysis of some of the images of The White Sea Canal and USSR in Construction. In these analyses, I will bring form and content back together, in order to demonstrate how they reinforced each other. This way, I aim at providing an analysis that moves beyond a dominantly aesthetic or dominantly political one – the two positions presented by Foam and their critiques.
Perekovka, or the reforgement of men Central to both propaganda publications is the notion of perekovka. This term can best be translated into “reforgement”. The word “forge” can be understood both as a noun and a verb: it refers to the fire that melts the metal and the process of melting itself.85 The word has a strong industrial connotation and illustrates the violence with which the remaking of selfhood the prisoners underwent was carried out. Belomor was not only a site for transforming the landscape of wild Karelia, but served as a building ground of the new Homo Sovieticus as well. The reforgement of “criminals” into New Soviet Men was not only carried out through harsh industrial work, but also through many creative acts, like theatre, music, and painting. Not only the bodies of the criminals needed to be remelted, their minds needed to undergo a transformation as well. The White Sea Canal explains reforgement to us quite well. Written collectively by a group of 36 writers (whose minds would also be “reforged” by contributing to this book), the book guides its reader through the different stages of construction of landscape and men. The story starts by outlining “The Problem”: a canal needed to be dug immediately to benefit the economy. The tsars had always refused and ignored the need for this waterway, the writers tell us, but Stalin immediately acknowledges the importance of the construction: “the new world attacked the old.”86 But how was such an expensive undertaking to be realized? The writers tell us how the Soviet state generously provided criminals the opportunity to better their lives through construction work. “In prison one thinks of how to get away, and here one had to contrive and calculate (…) “You see”, the engineer was thinking, “I am useful.””87 That the workers were prisoners was not kept a secret, but openly explained. Even though the prisoners consisted of varied groups (intellectuals, political prisoners, Ukrainian kulaks, and criminals), they were all portrayed as wreckers, saboteurs and thieves. Working at
85 Draskoczy 2014: 25. 86 Gorky 1934: 3. 87 Gorky 1934: 23.
27 Belomor was not presented as a punishment, but as an opportunity for these people to change their lives for the better. That the secret police was heavily involved in “recruiting” these prisoners was not kept a secret as well. The second chapter of The White Sea Canal is called “The Big House at the Corner of Lubyanka”. This chapter describes how qualified engineers were “recruited” from all over the country and summoned to “the big house at the corner of the Lubyanka”. This house was the headquarter of the NKVD – its basement would be the execution site for thousands of “enemies of the people” during the Great Purges. The third chapter is called “The G.P.U. Men” and explains to the reader the system of the Gulag and the Cheka. It also presents in detail the secret police officers who worked at Belomor. The story goes on and describes how the first prisoners arrived at Belomor. Some “personal stories” are told. One chapter, for example, is devoted to a Kulak who expresses his deep regret for not understanding at first the great plan of the Soviet leaders. Another chapter tells the story of an engineer. He initially supported Trotsky and later became a saboteur, keeping large sums of money for himself. “Engineer Ananyev found himself at Belomor”, is how his story ends.88 Several stories of guards and secret police officers are included as well. We learn about four of them: Naftalny Frenkel, Jacob Rappoport, Genrikh Yagoa, and Lazar Kogan. The story tells us how the guards and officers managed to motivate the prisoners in order to speed up construction. As the “criminals” started to transform into “Soviet men”, the relation between the officers and the prisoners becomes more humane. The four officers described were responsible for the suffering and deaths of thousands of Soviet citizen. At Belomor, they were free to experiment with inhumane working conditions such as over 24 hour working shifts.89 The White Sea Canal learns us that “the prisoners themselves ask for a rifleman to guard them; they say it is safer so.”90 This citation can be read halfway the book and indicates to its reader how the prisoners underwent a reforgement of their minds. The book goes on and on about this remarkable transformation the prisoners underwent. Where they are first referred to as “half-animals” (this term was reserved for Ukrainian kulaks), “wreckers”, “saboteurs”, “enemies” or even “units of labour”, the ones that were released when construction was completed were considered worthy of the title “human”. The White Sea Canal thus presents Belomor as a source of pride for the Soviet state and its people. Where capitalist countries imprisoned their criminals, the Soviet Union offered them the opportunity to change their lives for the better, the official propagandistic rhetoric
88 Gorky 1934: 86. 89 Applebaum 2003: 66. 90 Gorky 1934: 190.
28 claimed. That the working conditions were described as harsh and that the photographs captured the prisoners quite “realistically” (a full analysis of some of the photographs will follow later) only confirmed this message. Especially outside the Soviet Union, the book encouraged communists to believe in the Soviet dream. Even though the book had been destroyed by the end of the 1930s within the Soviet Union (almost the entire staff and prisoners of Belomor had been executed during the great purges – owning images of “enemies of the people” could mean years of imprisonment), the content of Belomor survived. As I will explain below, the idea of the Gulag as a source of pride that The White Sea Canal propagated was utterly tenacious.
Only days after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953, a first amnesty decree was written to start the release of large numbers of prisoners. In 1954 and 1955, 1.300.000 prisoners returned from the Gulag.91 People sentenced for both political and non-political crimes were released.92 The authorities failed, however, to explain that many of these people were innocent. The stigma of “enemy of the people” was difficult to shake off. In her book Krushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin, Miriam Dobson discussed the use of Belomor as a “tool-kit” for prisoners in order to construct a compelling life narrative that could lead to their release as well as acceptance by society.93 Dobson argued that Gorky’s account of Belomor offered a model for psychological transformation, offering guidance to those who returned from the Gulag on how to find their way back towards Soviet society. It created an image of the Gulag as a place for personal salvation, even enlightenment.94 According to this model, the released prisoners would acknowledge their crimes, to then describe how the Gulag had changed their life for the better. The White Sea Canal thus offered a way for prisoners to make sense of their life within the regimes own rhetoric by making an appeal on the notion of reforgement – something we saw earlier with Rodchenko’s essay “The Reconstruction of the Artist”. However, this posed problems as well. The Belomor model did not offer any solution to those wrongly convicted, or for those who considered the Gulag a site of corruption and violence. There were even those who tried to expose the concept of Belomor to be nothing more than a deception. They challenged the official state
91 Dobson 2009: 51. It needs to be kept in mind here that even though large numbers of prisoners were released, new prisoners still entered the Gulag: 421.995 in 1954 and 432.670 in 1955. 92 Dobson 2009: 52-53. 93 Dobson, Miriam (2009). Krushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin. Ithaca – London: Cornell University Press. 94 Dobson 2009: 56-57.
29 rhetoric of Belomor, laying bare the difficulties of de-Stalinization that were yet to come.95
In 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn laid bare these horrors and deceptions of the Gulag to an international audience. In The Gulag Archipelago: 1918 – 1956, a three-volume book, he extensively scrutinized the Gulag system based on oral testimonies, primary research material, and his own experiences as a prisoner. The books had a huge impact on how the Gulag was seen internationally. Solzhenitsyn devoted over forty pages to describe the propagandistic character of The White Sea Canal. He described it as the Holy Gospels of the Gulag, with the portrait of Stalin as a demigod engraved on its cover.96 The book was an attempt to explain the Gulag as a good and necessary institution; it was an attempt to rewrite history, Solzhenitsyn argued, at the costs of thousands of people. Solzhenitsyn condemned Gorky and his writers and artists brigade for glorifying the Gulag staff – in particular Yagoda and Frenkel, who were among the most brutal of the NKVD. Solzhenitsyn didn’t stir back to expose the brutal reality that took place underneath the book’s shiny cover. His words make clear how deep the impact of the Belomor propaganda was in covering up and justifying the Gulag. It’s a past that can’t be forgotten: “My Lord! What canal is there deep enough for us to drown that pas in?” is how Solzhenitsyn ends his chapter on Belomor.97 In the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago first circulated as samizdat.98 In 1986, as a result of glasnost, the official ban on The White Sea Canal was lifted.99 In 1989 The Gulag Archipelago was published in the literary journal Novi Mir. Almost a decade later, in 1998, The White Sea Canal would make a public appearance again. That year, the book was reprinted, surrounded by a mysterious aura. No information on who reissued this copy or why it was reissued was given. It was printed only in Russian, but distributed outside Russia as well. Scholars are still puzzled over the origins of this 1998 edition.100 The 1998 version of The White Sea Canal did have one addition page. The publisher included a short note on the first page following the flyleaf. This note explained the reason for reprinting The White Sea Canal. The note starts by addressing the reader of the book, followed by the words “to those who do not like to read
95 Dobson 2009: 65. 96 Solzhenitsyn 1973: 81. 97 Solzhenitsyn 1973: 120 98 Samizdat can be considered as an important form of dissident activity that took place across the Soviet Union. It consisted of officially censored publication that were reproduced and distributed by individuals within their social network. 99 Ruder 2008: 227. 100 Ruder, Cynthia, Mary Nicholas (2001). “In Search of the Collective Author”. Book History. 11. 221 – 244. Ruder, Cynthia (1998). Making History for Stalin. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
30 between the lines”101 placed between parentheses. What follows, is a short explication of the history of the book. The publisher informs his or her reader how The White Sea Canal originated in 1934, and how its was destroyed in 1937. It tells us that the book has not been published ever since and that only a few copies managed to survive. The publisher argues that “someone great once said that books, just like people, have their own fates.” The publisher than emphasizes the tragic fate of The White Sea Canal. Published by the NKVD and the Communist Party, it was banned by those same agents. It is symbolic, the publisher states, that most of the people portrayed in the book as well as most of the writers and designers who worked on its completion did not survive the Great Terror of 1937. The publisher then states that the book is a document of its era, describing time through the eyes of the people who lived it. In the last lines, the publisher makes a strong statement. It is been 60 years since The White Sea Canal was published, he or she argues, and now the past has come to take its revenge. “Read this book, and remember the past, and we will not argue if this past was good or bad; what is important is that we don’t forget, because what will that do to our future?” The publisher explicitly doesn’t instruct the reader what to think of the book. He or she provides the reader with some factual background information and then leaves us alone with the story, expecting of us to construct our own ideas regarding this propaganda publication. Most important is that the past is known.
An exercise in “showing seeing” In the first part of this chapter, I explained the ideology inherent to Belomor. It forms a great contrast with the first chapter, in which I demonstrated how this ideological message fell out of the frame of canonization. However, as I explained above, this content was not forgotten. It reappeared in different ways within and outside the Soviet Union: from a tool-kit to make sense of life, to an example to criticize the extent to which the Soviet state went to implement ideology. Where this first approach of the tool-kit decontextualized The White Sea Canal and made it into an object of pride, as time passed on the archive surrounding this official canonical rhetoric became stronger and stronger. Especially Solzhenitsyn and the publisher who reprinted The White Sea Canal, and later Oleg Klimov, called upon revitalizing the passive memory of Belomor.102 These authors didn’t present Rodchenko’s images as objects of modernist devotion, but placed them back within their historical context. Their strategy of calling upon the memory of the archive aimed at destroying both the modernist aura Barr
101 Translations of this additional letter by the publisher are my own, unless stated differently. 102 Assmann2008: 102.
31 created around Rodchenko, as the idea of the Gulag as a source of pride. However, as I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, it is not my goals to create an opposition between a canonical and archival approach towards Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. Rather, I aim at providing an analysis that takes into account how form and content, art and politics, reinforced each other.
In order to gain such an understanding a position is needed that merges an aesthetic and political approach while taking into account the manipulated nature of the image. Such a stance can be found in Ariella Azoulay’s study A Political Ontology of Photography. Azoulay argues to rethink the assumption that photography can only be discussed from the point of view of its product that attributes to the photographer the sole rights over it. She claims that photography needs to be seen as the product resulting from the actions of many agents. The photograph is only a sample of the relations between people, something that cannot be reduced to the object of artistic imagination.103 The event of photography is subject to temporality, for it is made up of an encounter that occurs in relation to the camera or its hypothetical existence.104 It is this specific encounter that produces the photograph. It involves three protagonists: a camera, the person behind the camera lens, and whoever faces the lens.105 The relations between them are not equal, for usually only the person behind the lens goes home with the material that captured the photographed encounter.106 The photograph does not seal the event of photography, although the spectator might treat it this way.107 An example of one of Rodchenko’s photographs of Belomor that is often discussed for both its political and its aesthetic quality is Brass Band at the White Sea Canal construction site [figure 6 – hereafter: Brass band].108 The image is striking indeed; it seems an exercise in abstraction rather than a photograph documenting a construction site. The photograph consists of three layers structured as levels, fixed by two means: the use of a strong diagonal from the lower left to the right corner and the standing point of the camera. Breaking up the
103 Azoulay 2012: 52. One needs to keep in mind here that Azoulay refers to aestheticized photographs of regime made disaster, in her case the Israel – Palestine conflict. 104 Azoulay 2012; 26. 105 Azoulay 2012: 219. 106 Azoulay 2012: 20. 107 Azoulay 2012: 225. 108 “The shot Working with an orchestra reflects the hidden conflict between the authorities and the convicts who were building the canal.” These are the only words by Lavrent’ev on a hidden conflict within Rodchenko’s work. He doesn’t go into an explanation of this conflict or why he considers it to be there. Lavrent’ev 2006: 436.
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Figure 6. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Brass Band at the White Sea Canal construction site. 1933. photograph into different levels makes it possible to analyse these different parts into greater detail and move away from the strong aesthetics that overshadow the photographed subjects. On the lowest level we see a group of male prisoners, building a wooden base on the bottom of the canal with some small tools and a wheelbarrow. They don’t seem aware of the presence of the camera. On the second level we can see a group of prisoners as well, playing in a brass band. They seem elevated compared to their fellow prisoners, for they are situated on a higher level and are allowed to play musical instruments. The third level, the point of view at which the photographer has positioned his camera, creates this specific photographic encounter. The camera is positioned over the prisoners, focusing on their backs or on the top of their heads. No faces are visible, making identification with the portrayed persons impossible. This separation between the prisoners and the camera gives us the idea that the camera has the position of a watcher, guarding the spectacle underneath it. Music was of great importance to the Bolsheviks; the performance of labour was paralleled to musical performance, which both achieved the socialist ideals of the corporal and the creative. Rhythm should improve the work force and fill the minds of the prisoners with socialist thoughts every second of the day. The presence of the brass band gives a strange, almost cultured aspect to the construction site, as if the orchestra was accompanying
33 the performance of human reconstruction. However, it also makes one think of colonial practices of slave labour, during which the presence of a brass band was also used to increase the workforce. In its encounter, Brass band portrays a clear hierarchy between the photographer and the photographed subject. Through this particular point of view, the spectator becomes complicit within the image as well – the viewer of the photograph takes on the position of a bystander. The White Sea Canal emphasized this. Prisoners (especially political prisoners) were described as “enemies of the people” or “units of labour”; the Ukrainian kulaks were referred to as “half-animals”.109 These people were not considered full citizens of the Soviet Union. The point view from above and behind Rodchenko chose is significant. Rodchenko’s placement of the body of the spectator looking down on the bodies of the prisoners not only denies the prisoners any form of individual character, but also hierarchically elevates the body of the spectator above the scene. The viewer is forced to reflect on its own position: the position of a full (Soviet) citizen. Rodchenko thus activates the gaze of the spectator with his aesthetic construction.
In the photograph Camp Theatricals [figure 7], the position of a bystander can be encountered in a different way. In a snowy landscape, we see on the left a line of women and on the right a line of men. In the middle, two people dressed up as a horse can be seen, as well as a small dog. Here we encounter the theatricalization of identity, for which the stage was the camp itself. Performances were an essential aspect of life at Belomor. Not only did theatre serve as a motivational tool, it was also considered an important instrument for internalizing ideology.110 Prisoners literally had to perform their reforgement and imagine their lives and work in the context of the regime.111 Through publicly performing their new identity, they would internalize the ideology and transform themselves while motivating others to do the same. The group photographed was an “agitational brigade”, a special mobile performance group that gave short shows all over the construction site. The productions were assemblages of music and background props. Igor Terent’ev, an avant-garde poet from the group 41° who
109 Gorky 1935: 341. 110 Drascozy 2014: 145. 111 Drascozy 2014: 147.
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Figure 7. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Camp Theatricals. 1933. once worked with Rodchenko, was the leader of this brigade. In his futuristic performances Terent’ev always brought the physicality of the human body directly into the spectacle as part of his aim for creating a new worldview. At Belomor, he could bring these ideas into practice. In contrast to Rodchenko, Terent’ev wasn’t at Belomor voluntarily. Not born into a working- class family, he was declared an enemy of the people. From April 1931 onwards, his brigade was named after camp commander Semyon Firin, with whom both Terent’ev and Rodchenko had friendly connections.112 When relating this photograph to Azoulay’s notion of the photographed event an interesting discrepancy becomes clear. Azoulay argues for investigating the scope of the gaze in order to create a wider perspective for recognizing disaster as a form of on-going domination rather than as a discrete temporal event.113 Such an approach would attribute to the Soviet secret police the position of “occupiers” that aim at destroying the “occupied” enemies of the people through the process of reforgement. The photograph portrays both methods of reforgement as one, by letting prisoners perform their own reforgement through labour. They are the non-citizens who need to be broken down and remodelled into a new
112 Drascoczy 2014: 99-100. 113 Azoulay 2010: 154.
35 working class. This photograph reveals to us the element of cultural destruction, the invasion of intimacy. The photograph Camp Theatricals seems to pose a paradox. On the one hand, it shows how far the camp commanders went in implementing reforgement, which required a complete breakdown of a persons’ character, culture, and often even physical appearance. In order to create a new Soviet citizen, everything old needed to be destroyed, which meant an invasion of intimacy to the prisoners, which often resulted in their death. At the same time this element of culture may distract the viewer from the harsh reality of destruction that was inherent to the almost impossible process of reforgement. The photograph captures the impossibility of the violent reality of creation through destruction; this could only be realized as a performance.
USSR in Construction In USSR in Construction, images were not used to illustrate text as we see in The White Sea Canal. It was rather the other way around. In Rodchenko’s photomontages of Belomor made for USSR in Construction issue 12, 1933, we see an integration of text and image in two ways: as an integral part of the composition (trough the use of photographs containing banners, signs, and slogans) and as additional informative blocks of text for the viewer, often placed in the corner of the image. This visual narrative of Belomor starts with the cover of the magazine [figure 8], which emphasizes the importance of the new waterway in contrast to the old route. The map is placed against the background of a photograph of one of the locks of the canal. This cover indicates the industrial progress of the new Soviet state. When opening the magazine, the canal’s importance to Stalin is made clear [figure 9]. On the right page, placed against the backdrop of light flickering on the water, we see his portrait, proudly looking up. Above his head we read: “Stalin Canal – White Sea to Baltic”. On the left, a more detailed map is placed against the backdrop of again water reflecting light, pointing out the various sites where construction work took place. The photomontages that follow start by portraying the rough landscape of Karelia [figure 10] that needed to be transformed. It then describes the people that came to transform it [figure 11]: criminals who thought their lives were over, but were given a second change. Then several spreads follow portraying the work [figure 12 and 13], which emphasize the use of local materials and the strength of the people who changed the rough landscape into an industrial project. There is also a spread that displayed the camp staff [figure 14]. In the end, the opening of the canal is celebrated, and Groky’s approval of the work is shown [figure 15]. This visual narrative clearly guides the viewer through a particular
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Figure 8. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Cover USSR in Construction. Photomontage. USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm.
Figure 9. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Map and portrait of Stalin placed against water. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm.
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Figure 10. Aleksandr Rodchenko. The rough landscape of Karelia. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. reading of the construction: the successful reforgement of landscape and people. It resolves into a single plot: men as well as nature can be tames through the will of the leader. One of the first images the reader encounters is a black and white montage of simple looking people against a black background [figure 11]. In front, taking up the lower half of the image, we can see a man playing an accordion while smoking; his clothes are torn. Behind him, on the middle left side of the image, a group of five people is placed: two women and three men. They are looking at something lying on the ground; the man in the middle seems to make a gesture of throwing something at the object. In the upper right corner, we can read the caption of the image:
“They were the people of the depths, people taken from the very dregs. As they came they thought ‘This is the end of life for us.’ But real life had only begun for them. For not only was the nature of the landscape changed, but the nature of the people also. People with a shady past were transformed into honest workers.”
This caption implies that the people we see in this image are the prisoners; they are described as having a shady past. This is stressed by their gestures: the accordion refers to traditional Ukrainian and Russian folk songs, which is emphasized by the folklore engravings on the
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Figure 11. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “They were the people of the depths, people taken from the very dregs. As they came they thought ‘This is the end of life for us.’ But real life had only begun for them. For not only was the nature of the landscape changed, but the nature of the people also. People with a shady past were transformed into honest workers.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. instrument. The man has a relaxed attitude and doesn’t seem to worry about working. The people in the back illustrate the same attitude. This invigorates their position of the criminals who not yet understand the transformation they are about to undergo. In the photomontage “They laid 390.000 cubic meters of concrete, or 11 times as much as the celebrated hydroelectric station at Volkhovstroy.” [figure 12], the gaze of the spectator is guided through a dynamic visual zigzag structure. The position of the spectator is located behind and below the back of a guard, who is overseeing the workers. Underneath him, in a diagonal from the lower right to the middle left of the spread, we see a large group of workers. Above them a wooden shed is placed, on which a text can be read, explaining the high production quota the workers achieved. The shed is pointing to the upper right corner of the image, following a path in the rocks. From this point one last diagonal of rocks can be distinguished, leading our gaze out of the frame of the image. Along these diagonals, groups of workers can be distinguished. It emphasized the use of an endless chain of human capital as machinery, which we are overlooking together with the guard. This is one of the few
39
Figure 12. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “They laid 390.000 cubic meters of concrete, or 11 times as much as the celebrated hydroelectric station at Volkhovstroy.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm.
Figure 13. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “For the first time in the world, wood was used here on a large scale as the chief building material in the construction work. Most of the spillways and dams are wooden.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm.
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Figure 14. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Spread of the camp commanders. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. photomontages in this issue signed by Rodchenko; his signature can be found in the lower left corner.
What I aimed at illustrating above is how an awareness of the framing of one’s gaze can unravel the ideology portrayed. One of the spreads that illustrates this exercise well is accompanied by the words: “For the first time in the world, wood was used here on a large scale as the chief building material in the construction work. Most of the spillways and dams are wooden.” [figure 13]. This spread consists of two separate photomontages. On the left, one of the locks is visible. We are watching over the water to a guard who is standing on the opposite side, barely visible. Underneath him a slogan is written. The image on the right portrays a group of workers, standing on the drags of the canal, while listening to someone we can’t see. Behind them, a slogan is visible, propagating with what speed and enthusiasm the prisoners worked on both the construction as their own reforgement. Above the slogan, we can recognize the guard from the picture on the left. By framing our gaze on the same level as the guard, which is directly done in the picture on the left and adopted in the montage on the right, Rodchenko again places us on a level above the prisoners. The photomontage on the right side of the spread is signed by Rodchenko as well.
The last two photomontages form a spread informing us about the completion of Belomor
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Figure 15. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “The canal is ready. Start on another canal! These fine workers of Belomorstroy have gone to build another stupendous canal from Moscow to the Volga. Writers on a visit to theirs heroes – the shock workers of the construction of the Volga-Moscow Canal. On the platform is Maxim Gorky. Never had the words of the great proletarian writer, “Man – How proud it sounds” been so plainly carried into reality.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm.
[figure 15]. Its caption, placed in the upper right corner above a picture of a preaching Gorky, reads:
“The canal is ready. Start on another canal! These fine workers of Belomorstroy have gone to build another stupendous canal from Moscow to the Volga. Writers go on a visit to theirs heroes – the shock workers of the construction of the Volga-Moscow Canal. On the platform is Maxim Gorky. Never had the words of the great proletarian writer, “Man – How proud it sounds” been so plainly carried into reality.”
The left page of the spread consists of two images that separate the page in two. On the bottom half, journalists and writers are gathered in a circle listening to a speech. Behind them guards are standing. The picture is taken from a point slightly higher than the people pictured. On the right, a picture of Gorky giving a speech can be seen. The viewpoint of the camera is placed slightly below Gorky, which makes the viewer look up to him. This creates an interaction between both images: while Gorky is looking down on the crowd, they are looking
42 up to him. The camera is placed in between. Above Gorky’s photograph the title of the spread can be read. Especially the last line of the caption is interesting: “Never had the words of the great proletarian writer, “Man – How proud it sounds” been so plainly carried into reality.” It implies that the workers, who came to the canal as criminals, have been reforged into proud men, ready to enter “reality”.
Together, the photomontages of Belomor create an account on the reforgement of men though labour and culture. As could be seen in the photomontage of USSR in Construction first discussed, Rodchenko clearly portrayed the prisoners as simple-minded criminals, whose lives were considered over. This gives the OGPU, the Gulag, the position of a benefactor. This power relation as well as the framing of Gulag prisoners as criminals would become highly problematic during the return of many prisoners during the late 1950s, which I explained earlier.114 The power structure that creates the possibility for seeing the prisoners as not yet full Soviet citizens, is emphasized by Rodchenko’s framing of the gaze of the spectator, which could be seen most clearly in the photomontages discussed second and third; it’s a framing of the gaze that could be found as well in the photograph Brass band. The last spread of the magazine tells us how the prisoners are now ready to enter “reality” according to the ideas of the Soviet state. When looking beyond this idealistic story of reforgement through labour, it becomes clear that the visual story portrayed by Rodchenko is nothing more than an illusion. It is here that we can encounter the concept of visual doublespeak: history is reconfigured. Rodchenko’s visual account of the history of Belomor, carefully carried out according to the guidelines of factography, created an exciting justification of the process of reforgement. The documentary character of the photomontages provides it with an aura of reality that asked for an engaged spectator. Besides this call upon the documentary character of photography, form is structured in such a way that is serves content. Rodchenko’s unconventional angles and use of colour combined with the montage technique create an image that draws the spectator in. At the same time, Rodchenko strongly frames the direction of the gaze to that of a camp commander, looking down on the not yet full Soviet citizen. It grants the viewer a privileged point of view, a point of view of governance. When unravelling this construction of the gaze, a social hierarchy becomes visible. A historical context is therefore not enough to understand these images. What I aimed at demonstrating in this chapter is how the reconfiguration of
114 Dobson 2009: 113-114.
43 history Rodchenko constructed cannot be countered by a historical context. An awareness of the construction of ones gaze is needed in order to lay bare the element of visual doublespeak in order to understand how this reconfiguration of history took place and how the bystander position of the viewer is related to this process.
44 3. From conflicted heritage towards prosthetic memory
“This book answers two questions: the first and most often asked is, “What happens to political prisoners in the USSR: does a Soviet labour camp differ from a concentration camp in, say, Nazi Germany?” (…) The White Sea Canal tells the fate of the political prisoners. - Amabel Williams-Ellis, “Introduction to the English Edition” in The White Sea Canal, 1935. p. ix
In 1935, The White Sea Canal was published for an English speaking audience. Above, I cited the first words from its “Introduction to the English Edition”. In these first words, translator Amabel Williams-Ellis made a strong comparison with the 1930s concentration camps of Nazi Germany.115 It tells us how important it was for the Soviets to propagate their Gulag camps abroad as something progressive. These words from the English edition underline a competition with the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, in which the Gulag is put forward as the better model. This competition between the Soviet and Nazi concentration camp systems would emerge again after the end of the Cold War and form an important argument within the criticism on Rodchenko, be it in a different form. But before diving into this material, I would like to introduce the third museum that recently exhibited the Belomor images of Rodchenko. This was the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam with the temporary exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography and Film (2016). The exhibition was originally created for the Jewish Museum in New York. Its initial title had been Stalin’s Jewish Photographers, but this was withdrawn.116 In the end, the exhibition didn’t focus primarily on Soviet Jewish artists, but sketched out the position of Jewish artists within the context of the Russian avant-garde. The exhibition clearly stated the innovative ideas of the photographers and filmmakers of the early Soviet Union, but emphasized the propagandistic character of the works as well. Hella Rottenberg, who sent a letter criticizing the exhibition to De Volkskrant, understood The Power of Pictures differently.117 She argued that the exhibition failed in laying bare the interaction between art
115 Williams-Ellis made a comparison with the Nazi camps from before 1935, which were mainly aimed at political prisoners. 116 Woerkom, Bernadette van. Personal conversaion on 20 June 2017, Amsterdam. Van Woerkom explained how the original title was later changed on behalf of the board of the museum in New York. 117 Rottenberg (2016).
45 and politics. Rather, the relation between propaganda and reality was disguised, she stated; the visitor didn’t encounter the historical and political context surrounding the images at all. She said the framing of the images created a façade that discretely blocked what remained hidden behind the shiny propaganda. Rottenburg argued that this had to do with the starting point of the exhibition, which emphasized the positive effects of artistic innovation the early Soviet Union enabled; no Jewish museum would host an exhibition called Stalin’s Jewish Propagandists - and no Jewish museum would do the same with Nazi art. Rottenberg insisted that the exhibition should have been balanced with stories of survivors of Stalinism.
Rottenberg, but also Smeets and Bossenbroek who I introduced earlier, heavily relied on a comparison with Nazi art and photography in their criticism. They all argued for a much more historical approach towards Rodchenko’s Belomor images that would have a primary focus on the narratives of the victims of the Gulag. Smeets and Bossenbroek even extended their argument and argued that the aesthetic representation of Rodchenko derived from a Dutch inability to understand the memory of the Gulag. The push towards such a comparison between Soviet and Nazi art was often implicated by the nature of some museums that exhibited the Belomor images, like the Jewish Cultural Quarter, Kamp Vught, or the Resistance Museum Amsterdam.118 These are all museums strongly affiliated with the history of the Second World War, but a reflection on the comparative and often competitive nature of these two histories was not discussed. This is a complex topic that I can’t fully address in this chapter. I therefore chose to pick one specific and returning element that is often foregrounded when comparing the images of Belomor with Nazi photography or art: the concept of the photograph as trace. I found this concept specifically interesting because all critics argued so strongly for a more historical context and the inclusion of victim narratives. As I will explain in this chapter, understanding a photograph as trace often enables such a historical as well as personal approach towards images. After briefly introducing the idea of competitive memories, I will discuss this concept of the photograph as trace at length. I will close this chapter with an attempt to move beyond the conflicting comparison between Soviet and Nazi art by referring to Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory”. This concept focuses specifically on assimilating a personal experience to a historical event through which the person in question did not live. I would like to explore the concept of prosthetic memory
118 Kamp Vught and the Resistance Museum Amsterdam recently organized the exhibition De Goelag. This was a historical exhibition, focussing on the (Dutch) victims of the Gulag. It also provided interesting background information for high schools. http://goelaginbeeld.nl/index.php [last accessed: 18 august 2017]
46 to see if this can lead towards a more productive way of representing Rodchenko’s images of Belomor in the future.
The conflict of comparison But first, let me elaborate a bit more on the competition between the memory of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. An example of this that I consider enlightening is the case of the construction of the European History Museum in Brussels, a case study closely analysed by Assmann. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to the idea of a European History Museum in Brussels. This museum, it was argued, would emphasize the history of a European unification and communicate the notion of a transnational identity to citizen of the European Union (EU). However, the realization of such a museum would turn out to be highly problematic.119 On 6 May 2017, more than 25 years after the plan originated, Brussels finally became home to the “House of European History”.120 One of the main problems that occurred in presenting the EU as a unified whole, was a clash between the emerging memory surrounding the Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) terror and the Western European metanarrative of the Holocaust.121 Within this discussion, Assmann focused specifically on the problem why Europe is still divided according to its two core events of the twentieth century: the Holocaust and the Gulag.122 In her article “Transnational Memories” Assmann explained how the Holocaust became a transnational and transgenerational memory, a founding myth for Europe. The memory of the Holocaust became strongly institutionalised on a transnational level. Especially Bossenbroek referred to this idea in relation to the Netherlands. This can’t be said about the memory of the Gulag. A Russian national monument never appeared and the memory of the Gulag remained mainly a victim’s narrative; it kept perpetrators from being held responsible.123 This provided especially Eastern European states with a national narrative of victimhood. Assmann stresses that the Eastern European Gulag narrative of victimhood
119 Assmann 2014: 25. 120 European Parliament - Press Release: “European Parliament opens the House of European History on 6 May 2017” http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20170504IPR73468/european-parliament-opens-the-house- of-european-history-on-6-may-2017 [last accessed: 8 May 2017] 121 Zessin-Jurek 2015: 131. 122 Interesting studies regarding this topic have also been done by, for example, prof. dr. Rob van der Laarsen at the University of Amsterdam. 123 Assmann 2013: 29; 31.
47 created a competition for the Holocaust narrative, for the sole emphasis on communist victimhood excluded responsibility for collaboration with Nazi Germany.124 The combination of a Holocaust and a Gulag memory often leads to an “either-or” dichotomy focussed on mutual exclusion and competition, rather than a “both-and” approach.125 Ironically, the first words of the English edition of The White Sea Canal already seemed to anticipate on this competition – be it in a different way then it is today. The criticism of especially Smeets and Bossenbroek focussed on this notion of the Holocaust as a European metanarrative that made it impossible for the Gulag to be understood in the Netherlands. They considered the relation between these two memories as mutually exclusive. In their criticism, and here is where Rottenberg comes in as well, they therefore aimed at using similar exhibition strategies that are used for exhibitions related to the Holocaust in order to represent the Gulag. One of these strategies is the concept of the photograph as trace, something that was especially put forward by Rottenberg. She was most explicit in her wish to represent Rodchenko’s photographs (and Soviet photography in general) as historical narratives contextualized by narratives of victims. What is interesting about the Belomor images, however, is that they so strongly articulate a perpetrator and bystander narrative, no so much the narrative of the victims. As I discussed in the second chapter this wasn’t done by explicitly photographing crimes, but by implementing ideology through a thoughtful visual langue – a language that reconfigured history and that I referred to as visual doublespeak. I would therefore like to argue that displaying Rodchenko’s images within a victim narrative doesn’t fully do justice to these victims. I will discuss this at length when referring to the concept of the photograph as trace, an often used concept when discussing the relation between victim narratives and photography. Assmann, amongst others, referred to this strategy. It has also been used by Marianne Hirsch, who in her article “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory” elaborates on it at length.126 The concept postmemory can be understood as retrospective witnessing by adoption.127 Although Hirsch specifically focuses on material representations such as photographs or photo albums within the context of the family and the Holocaust, postgenerational memory is not restricted to these frames. It can be more broadly available through particular forms of identification or projection.128 In order to understand the function
124 Assmann 2013: 32. 125 Assmann 2013: 32-38. 126 Hirsch, Marianne (2001). “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”. The Yale Journal of Criticism. 14:1. 5-37. 127 Hirsch 2012: 10. 128 Hirsch 2012: 9-10.
48 of photographs within postmemory, we must start by reading the photographs themselves, Hirsch argues. The photograph can be considered as a trace that has the ability to unravel the extremely potent connection between image and referent.129 The concept of trace always takes into account that the photograph is a mediated image, depending on the position of the photographer. It is always considered a fragment of a whole. However, I would like to argue that a mediated image has a different character than a manipulated one. Especially in relation to Rodchenko’s images of Belomor, we must therefore be careful not to fall back on familiar ways of representing trauma. In the first chapter, I emphasized this by introducing the notion of visual doublespeak, a notion that to me helped to underscore the specifically manipulated character of photographs in creating an alternative account of history. In the second chapter, I underscored how we can find this notion of visual doublespeak in the image itself. In what follows, I will explain how an understanding of Rodchenko’s Belomor images as trace complicates forwarding the narratives of the victims these images portray.
Questioning the notion of the photograph as trace It is a dominant tendency in photographic studies to refer to an image as an indexical sign – the thing portrayed refers to something (an event or person) beyond the image. This approach developed into the understanding of the photograph as trace and found a strong resonance in memory studies. The photograph was thus understood to be a trace of something or someone. These traces could even take on a life of their own for their beholder.130 In exploring the idea of images as carriers of memory, Assmann referred to the work of the art and cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. Of particular interest to Assmann was Burckhardt’s distinction between “messages” and “traces”. Messages were aimed at a particular addressee, where traces were not. “Burckhardt mistrusted the messages, which were usually written and effectively staged by the carriers of power and state institutions; he considered them tendentious and therefore misleading”, is how Assmann articulated Burckhardt.131 In relation to the images of Belomor, I would like to argue that we should understand them as examples of messages: they had a propagandistic agenda and were aimed at a particular audience. Burckhardt made another interesting observation in relation to the power of images that I would like to mention here. Burckhardt argued that images could bring an autonomous
129 Hirsch 2012: 13. 130 Assmann 2011: 210. 131 Assmann 2011: 98-99.
49 aesthetic sense of expression that reached beyond the external context of the image itself.132 This would imply that overtime even highly political images could be appreciated purely for their aesthetic quality. This idea was very popular amongst art historians during the late nineteenth century, when Burckhardt lived, and was used specifically in relation to paintings. Assmann doesn’t extend Burckhardt’s concept of images as messages and their potential for aesthetic autonomy to photography, but I think it is exactly at this intersection between aesthetic autonomy and political messages that we find Rodchenko’s images of Belomor today. I will return to this observation later. To Assmann’s analysis of photographs, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida is of particular interest. Understanding a photograph as trace has the potential for a resurrection of the dead, Barthes explained when he spoke of photography as the most important medium for memory. “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. Form a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”133 This would imply that the photograph provides a record of a past that no longer exists, and makes this past tangible for the spectator today. However, the memory remains mute without a voice to frame its narrative.134 I wanted to articulate the influence of Burckhardt and Barthes on the work of Assmann, for both accentuate a different approach towards the understanding of the memory of images. Where I consider the idea of messages more fruitful in relation to Rodchenko, the idea of the image as trace seemed to have gained a dominant position amongst critics of Rodchenko’s Belomor images today. I found it therefore fascinating that so many of the critics of today’s representation of Rodchenko did an appeal on this notion of the photograph as trace in order to understand the narrative of the victims portrayed. The concept of an image as message, as Burckhardt argued, is of particular interest to the production of the images of Belomor. It articulates their constructed and manipulated nature that shouldn’t be trusted. As I illustrated in the first chapter, the process of canonization stripped the Belomor images of their political and historical meaning and gave them the aura of aesthetic autonomy. The aesthetic autonomy loosened the historical narrative of propaganda from the images. This aesthetic autonomy leads us to Barthes. Not realizing the strong ideological narrative that structured these images, a viewer that might not be aware of the workings of factography may easily understand the images as trace as explained by Barthes. This is, after all, an interesting analysis for understanding the images of the death.
132 Barash 2016: 125. 133 Barthes 1980: 80. 134 Assmann 2011: 210.
50 However, as I discussed in the second chapter, we are provided with a false image. I would therefore like to argue that understanding the photographs of Belomor as trace provides an interpretation in line with the official rhetoric of visual doublespeak, taking on only the position of bystander and blocking the agency of the prisoners portrayed. Even though the Belomor photographs provide a record of a past that no longer exists, they ultimately provide a record of a past that never existed at all, a made up story that refigured reality. This illustrates how the indexical nature of a photograph can be mobilized for different agendas and that one should not simply take on the assumption of a trace without critically questioning the medium itself. This requires a strong framing of the mute voice of the image, but also an understanding of how this image functioned as a message.
Since Rodchenko’s images of Belomor served the role of creating an alternative account of history that diminished the suffering but also the humanity of the prisoners portrayed, I consider his images an insult to those who suffered from the Soviet terror. I don’t think they can truthfully represent the narratives of the victims portrayed and I therefore find a representation of the images as trace insufficient, even if they are surrounded with a strong historical context. However, I do consider it of great importance to exhibit these images, for they tell us to what extent Soviet officials as well as artists went to implement ideology. Rodchenko’s images provide us with a perpetrator and bystander narrative. Not in the way that his images teach us about the crimes committed by the secret police – on the contrary, it teaches us how these crimes could take place on the most personal lever, how they were justified, and how they were concealed. They can teach us how the secret police presented itself, and how they dehumanized their prisoners. As I indicated earlier, Assmann stated that the memory of the Gulag is mainly a story of victims. It remains complicated to put forward those who were responsible for the crimes committed. Smeets and Klimov actively argued to reach such an approach, but their criticism on the representation of Rodchenko as a perpetrator only focussed on adding historical context that implied an understanding of the images as trace, not an understanding of the images as the implementation of ideology. Their strong comparison with the representation of Nazi art, that considered the art of dictatorial states as “bad” and “repressive”, made it impossible for them to see how the Soviets could mobilize artistic innovation for ideological goals that created beautiful artworks, even if this occurred only during a short period. In continuing this chapter, I would therefore want to focus on what I consider to be a more productive way of representing Rochenko’s images of Belomor. I think such an approach could partially be found in Landsberg’s concept of
51 prosthetic memory.
Mass culture, museums, and memory In the second chapter I argued how through Azoulay’s concept of the photograph as event we can create a “showing seeing” exercise that moves beyond the frame of the image and reconstructs the relations between photographer and photographed subject. This exercise allowed me to pull the different layers of the image apart and lay bare its ideological implications. In exploring how such a “showing seeing” exercise could be translated to a museum context, the work of Alison Landsberg on what she calls “prosthetic memory” seems to offer an interesting potential. In Prosthetic Memory: the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Landsberg argues how modernity created a new and necessary form of cultural memory, which she explained as prosthetic memory.135 With prosthetic memory, Landsberg refers to the production and distribution of memories that are not directly connected to a person’s past or heritage. However, they do play an essential role within the creation of subjectivity.136 These memories can play out in sites such as the cinema or an experiential museum, which enable a connection between a person and a historical narrative.137 I would like to start with arguing that we can consider Rodchenko’s images already a form of prosthetic memory in themselves: they were aimed at an audience who didn’t live through Belomor but who needed become unconsciously aware of the ideology this camp expressed. The Belomor images were distributed through the mass medium of photojournalism in order to create a sense of realness of the ideological backbone of the Soviet Union. They didn’t focus on trauma, but on justifying means of repression. In a way, here we encounter a very early form of prosthetic memory as used by a state. Mass media was exploited by the Soviets in order to implement and construct false memories. Today, we encounter these utopian stories from a save distance within the space of the museum. However, I already explained when discussing the notion of the photograph as trace that I consider the representation of Rodchenko’s images within a display case with a historical context to be insufficient, for this doesn’t address how the viewer actually sees the image and what kind of relation this creates with the victim. I would therefore like to argue that a possibility for a second layer of prosthetic memory presents itself here, if an ethical relation
135 Landsberg 2014: 2. 136 Landsberg 2014: 20. 137 Landsberg 2014: 2.
52 between the museum visitor and the Belomor images could be created. I think this is not yet the case when the images are placed in a display case and provided with historical context. As I will argue in this chapter, an aware bodily relation between viewer and images needs to be reached in order to create such an ethical relation. When discussing the concept of postmemory within the museum space, Landsberg specifically refers to experiential museum. I consider such an experiential approach necessary because of the changed nature of many museums today. The museums that presented Rodchenko’s images of Belomor were criticized for not constructing a critical perspective towards these images; they were accused of obstruction an ethical relation. This critique could arise because museums today are considered social spaces, places for experiment and discussion. Therefore they fit well within the idea of a museum as a place of mass media. In what follows, I will discuss two aspects of Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory that I find particularly relevant for displaying Rodchenko’s images of Belomor today. These are the notion of structuring vision, and the creation of an ethical relation between photographed subject and spectator through difference.
The medium Landsberg focuses on is cinema: historical narratives that are mediated through film. Film is equally available for all for the price of a ticket; the accessibility of this mass medium makes it of great interest to Landsberg. But what fascinates her most is the ability of film to structure vision, for “film attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative.”138 The viewer is forced to see through someone else’s eyes and experience the historical event through a (fictional) character. Film can therefore structure ethical thinking, Landsberg argues.139 In relation to ethical thinking, Landsberg underscored the notion of empathy rather than sympathy. Where empathy moves beyond one’s own desires and creates the possibility for ethical thinking based on a relation of difference, sympathy focuses on an identification of wallowing that reinforces victimhood and creates a hierarchy.140 This emphatic relation not only creates the possibility for taking on memories of the past, but underscores as well a person’s own position in the present.141 Especially this element is interesting towards Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. If an ethical relation can be reached that makes the viewer understand how ideology was visually implemented on a personal level, this viewer might be able to recognize such strategies within
138 Landsberg 2009: 222. 139 Landsberg 2009: 222-223. 140 Landsberg 2014: 149. 141 Landsberg 2014: 22.
53 todays society as well. Yet we must remain cautious, Landsberg argues, for the commodification of the past can also create possibilities for ideological manipulation. The process of reception must be seen as a complex one, which is constantly mediated. Therefore a person must be actively engaged within the process of meaning making in order to create a greater capacity of emphatically understanding the historical narrative told.142 Spectatorship can also be used as an ideological apparatus that mobilizes the structure of vision in order to implement certain perspectives.143 It is exactly this form of the ideological structuring of vision that needs to be tackled. I would like to argue that this form of spectatorship that implements ideology is a form of prosthetic memory we can find within the Belomor images themselves, while today we can take on the challenge to tackle this visual doublespeak. Landsberg thus speaks here of a mass medium that aims at structuring vision, potentially for ideological purposes. It is this aspect of her theory on prosthetic memory that I found particularly useful for analysing Rodchenko’s images of Belomor in the museum space. As I discussed in the second chapter while making use of Azoulay’s concept of the photograph as event, I demonstrated how the ideology inherent to the image could become visible when the image is deconstructed. When critically examining ones own gaze it became clear how the picture was seen; the seeing itself became visible. I consider this of great importance for understanding the ideology that was so carefully visually constructed by Rodchenko, for it allows us to understand that what we see was never real. It lays bare the visual doublespeak of the image. Especially in USSR in Construction we encounter a strong visual narrative that leads the gaze of the viewer through its story. The cinematic notion of “structuring vision” Landsberg refers to seems an accurate description of what Rodchenko initially aimed for.
In relation to the exhibition The Power of Pictures, Rottenburg argued that such a distinction between what was “real” and what was “propaganda” was not made clear. However, when I spoke to the Dutch curator of the exhibition Bernadette van Woerkom, it struck me that she had a great awareness of this distinction.144 She even added USSR in Construction to the Dutch version of the exhibition because the magazine so clearly demonstrated the push and pull between artists and the state. She made the propagandistic aspect of the images clear through the distinction between “reality” and “truth”. Where reality consisted of poverty and hunger, “truth” could be found in the future and reflected the goals of the young Soviet
142 Landsberg 2014: 143 - 145. 143 Landsberg 2009: 224. 144 Woerkom, Bernadette van. Personal conversaion on 20 June 2017, Amsterdam.
54 Union. It was the “truth” that the photographers and filmmakers captured.145 “A miserable reality is hiding behind these images”, van Woerkom said in an interview with Raijko Disseldorp for the newspaper Her Parool.146 As one of the most interesting examples of the artists working under Stalinism, she mentioned Rodchenko. His struggles with the regime are fascinating: it seemed like the restrictions he suffered only encouraged his artistic experiments more in order to be recognized as an artist. Belomor might be the best example of that. It forever caused a stain on his reputation, Van Woerkom argued, for he neglected a critical view, retouched the images, and created a heroic visual narrative on the deadly labour camp. Van Woerkom stated clearly the difficulty that the exhibition posed as a whole: the images are all both art and propaganda. The exhibition was not about Stalin, but about the complex relation many artists had with the state. This emphasizes the tragedy of the enthusiasm portrayed. All energy and new ideas were crushed. The distinction between “truth” and “reality” might not have been very strongly present within the exhibition space itself, but was carefully explained by Van Woerkom in an additional article in the museum’s journal and in interview.147 I think the distinction between these two ideas captures the essence of factography and visual doublespeak. It makes the viewer aware that what is seen is not “real”, but “true”. This allows for both a critical stance towards the images displayed, as an understanding of the enthusiasm of the artists who made them. Together with the “showing seeing” exercise, the cinematic idea of “structuring vision” allows to lay bare the way in which Rodchenko positioned his viewer in order to implement ideology. If this can lead towards an ethical thinking of the spectator that visits the museum, I think an interesting way of representing Rodchenko’s images could be found.
Landsberg uses the term “prosthetic” to emphasize that the memories expressed in the films or museum she analyses are not the product of a lived experience, but resulted from a mediated representation. The word prosthetic underlines to her the useful potential of such memories in creating an ethical relation between a person and the other that is based on empathy.148 In the case of Rodchenko, however, we see how a prosthetic connection was created that fostered an emphatic relation with the “true” Soviet citizen, the bystander. As I discussed earlier, the possibility for an emphatic relation with the prisoners was denied. Landsberg argues how the viewer of a film or the spectator of an exhibition does not
145 Disseldorp 2016. 146 Disseldorp 2016. 147 Bertina, Daniel (2016). “De macht van het beeld”. JCK Magazine. 25:1. 148 Landsberg 2014: 21.
55 experience the memories themselves, but that these memories do create a sense of realness. In relation to Belomor, this realness is focussed on the positioning of the viewer as a “witness” to the construction site of both landscape and men. In relation to traumatic memories, such a prosthetic connection can be problematic especially if these traumatic memories are highly manipulated through its medium of representation. This offers again an interesting reference towards Rodchenko, for he created such a strong witness or bystander point of view. I would therefore like to exploit this position of the viewer as witness or bystander. However, I do think we must take Landsberg’s warning towards ideological implementation into account here, for we must be careful not to consider Rodchenko’ images of Belomor as a trace. When experiencing Rodchenko’s images as “mediated” but not “manipulated” accounts of the construction of Belomor, understanding these images as traces of the camp could lead us right into the false narrative of visual doublespeak Rodchenko created. This would do no justice to the victims of Belomor. Instead, we must treat these images as messages, of which we learned how to dissect them. I consider this to be important groundwork before a relation based on ethical thinking can be reached. But let me return to my argument of exploiting the position of the viewer as witness or bystander. Before elaborating on this, I would like to exemplify how Landsberg explains the construction of an ethical relation based on difference. Landsberg exemplifies the creation of an ethical thinking concerned with trauma through the film The Pianist. She describes how this film first builds upon identification with the main character, to then complicate this connection. Distance and difference between the main character and the viewer of the film are emphasized but by the end of the film, the main character appears inhuman.149 It is through this difficult process of identification that a relation based on ethical thinking can be realized, Landsberg argued, because the degradation and dispossession of the main character is supplemented by the extreme violence of the perpetrators.150 The position of the perpetrator becomes unravelled by accompanying it with the increased dehumanization of the victim. I consider this an important argument for understanding how a relation of ethical thinking can be reached towards Rodchenko’s images of Belomor. But how can we move from this theoretical concept of prosthetic memory towards an actual idea for representing these Belomor images? The potential for prosthetic memory can mainly be reached within experiential museums. These specific museums raise questions concerning the ownership of events or memories. An experiential museum is thus seen as a place where knowledge can be
149 Landsberg 2009: 225. 150 Landsberg 2009: 226.
56 acquired.151 As I will explain below, I think such an experiential museum site could be a key for reaching a relation of ethical thinking towards Rodcheno’s Belomor images that takes as its starting point Rodchenko’s initial prosthetic memory of the viewer of the image as bystander or witness (a “true” Soviet citizen looking down on the prisoners) but then refigures this idea by letting the viewer ask “how is the way I see this image constructed?”, “what does this do with the bodies of the prisoners below?”, “how does this position that the photographer gave me influence the way I think about these prisoners portrayed?” and “how does it make me think about my own position?”
I already conducted such a “showing seeing” exercise in the second chapter and I think the method used for conducting this exercise could easily be transferred towards a museum space. It doesn’t have to be complex – a simple audio guide could already provide a step in the right direction. The main difference with previous exhibitions that displayed Rodchenko’s images of Belomor would be that I propose a model based on the experiential museum, that takes a strong narrative as its focus point, instead of a form of exhibiting that consists of only display cases and wall texts. I think that this specific strategy of the experiential museum (the museum model that engages the viewer within its process of meaning making) tackles the problem critics like Smeets, Bosssenbroek, and Rottenberg aimed to express, but failed to do so through their focus on the comparison between Soviet and Nazi art. How the image is seen is essential for understanding not only how ideology was implemented through visual strategies, but also how prisoners could be dehumanized. The viewer will thus reach an awareness of how his or her vision is structured according to aesthetics. I think such awareness can reach two important goals. It will make the viewer conscious to what extent the Soviet state went to implement ideology and through which means this occurred. An understanding of this idea by the viewer could contribute to one’s own subjectivity, I argue, for these visual strategies were not used by the Soviets alone. I also consider that through this awareness of the structuring of ones vision a relation of ethical thinking can be established with the victims portrayed, for the viewer can now understand how these Gulag victims were portrayed and how one’s own point of view relates to it. The showing seeing exercise addressed the distance and difference created by Rodchenko’s aesthetics. If the viewer of the images becomes aware of this distance and difference he or she can recognize these elements and thereby critically reflect on his or her own position. My suggestion for a guided
151 Landsberg 2014: 129-130.
57 experience of the viewing of these images might be a simple one, but I think this forms the essence for a different approach towards images such as Rodchenko’s work on Belomor. It doesn’t only help us realize how Rodchenko used aesthetics to implement ideology, it also has the possibility of creating awareness towards our position (or subjectivity) in relation to recognizing ideology that has at its aim to falsify reality and dehumanize people.
58 Conclusion
“Man puts up a building – and falls apart himself. Who’ll be left to live then?” - Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit (1930).
In his gloomy and satirical novel The Foundation Pit, Andrei Platonov tells the story of a machine operator, Voshchev, who in a search for truth joins a group of workers who are digging the foundation pit for a gigantic house for the people. Every day they work harder and dig deeper into the huge construction site in order to reach a utopian future. As their work progresses and the foundation pit becomes bigger and bigger, Voshchevs slowly start to understand the real meaning of his work. The pit that is being dug is not the foundation for a house, but an immense mass grave that sucks out all energy. Platonov finished this critique on Stalin’s domestic policies in 1930, two years before Belomor was built.152 He was a strong believer in the communist cause, but like many others lost his faith in the Soviet state along the way. I wanted to cite this short sentence from Platonov’s novel while this thesis coms to an end, for it captures the essence of Belomor in a number of ways. Belomor created the illusion of a wondrous place where the utopian dream of rehabilitating criminals through labour and a flourishing creativity could come true. It would be a place where a new society would be built and a new Homo Sovieticus would be born. In reality, it was nothing less than a mass grave. What started as a dream, turned quickly into suffering and despair. It also underscores a contrast: Rodchenko never openly criticized the Soviet state or Belomor and kept on producing work for the Soviets regardless of the crimes they committed. His blinded enthusiasm (or fear) and constant strive for artistic recognition highly problematizes the presentation of his work today.
I started this thesis because Belomor was a utopia as well as a dystopia, a combination that fascinated me. It was a place of dreams and destruction, presented as art by Rodchenko and Gorky while written down as horror by Solzhenitsyn. As I indicated at the beginning of this thesis, the utopian and dystopian sides of Belomor lost their connection, a gap that grew bigger and bigger over time. While Belomor initially presented an example of aestheticized politics, the framing of the images changed overtime. Within today’s public sphere of the museum they meet again – Rodchenko’s aesthetics are politicized anew. The goal of this
152 The Foundation Pit was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.
59 thesis was therefore twofold and resolved around the question how to lay bare these dynamics of meaning making in order to work on an interpretation and representation of the images that reached beyond the opposition of aesthetics and politics.
Sometimes all you have to do is “…to rend the veil of familiarity and awaken the sense of wonder, so that many of the things that are taken for granted about the visual arts (…) are put into question”, W.J.T. Mitchell concludes his essay “Showing Seeing” on visual studies.153 In a way, this is what I aimed for with this research. Through Azoulay’s concept of the photograph as event, I asked you, the reader of this thesis and viewer of these images, to wander beyond the frame of the image and question the aesthetic construction that leads your gaze. Through the notion of visual doublespeak I aimed at underscoring how to grasp this manipulated aspect of the image. In this way, I was able to show the way Rodchenko’s aesthetic choices make us see something in a particular way, which then led to an understanding of our own position within the regime made disaster that was Belomor. Assmann’s concepts of the canon and archive helped me to underscore how the meaning of these images became reconfigured, changing into autonomous art in the Western world while figuring as a historical victims document as well as an object of national pride in the Eastern block. Assmann’s concept of the mnemonic power of style helped me to articulate why we can present Rodchenko’s images of Belomor as art, for its style still reminds us of freedom and not of repression.
Let me pause here to make a short comment on the mnemonic power of images. Clearly, the distinction it makes between “good” abstract art and “bad” figurative art is still evident today. Within the contemporary art museum as a public space, I would like to argue that this has created a problematic and one-sides approach towards political art. It greatly favours the protest art, the position of the artist as dissident, the kicking and screaming against institutions of power. I don’t want to downplay these works and people, for they are of great importance and interest. But it represents a small and even short sighted aspect of art and politics to only focus on this one group as the representatives of art and politics. The relation between art and politics is so much more, and often very unpleasant for it also teaches us about perpetrators and the implementation of ideology, as I tried to underscore in this thesis. It is not only how artists work against a state, it is also how they work with a state; sometimes as a means to
153 Mitchell 2005: 356.
60 survive, sometimes to create comments in the most subtle ways, and sometimes because they support this system with a blinded enthusiasm. But it is also how a state, or a powerful commissioner, works with artists. This last point clearly discomforts some art historians, especially in relation to the visual culture of dictatorial states of the twentieth-century. It has recently become of interest to historians and has served as the main theme for some fascinating works of literature.154 Within art history, however, there is still a lot of work to be done. The museum plays an important role in this as well, for as a public space of enquiry and discussion it can guide an interpretation and understanding of these often complicated works. I consider it the obligation of a curator to tell this tragic story of utopian blindness as well as ideological manipulation to make clear to the viewer how Rodchenko constructed these images of visual doublespeak. I don’t think Rodchenko didn’t saw the horrors surrounding him – I think he chose not to see them, as did so many. I consider this a task for the art museum maybe even more than the historical museum. The art museum can move beyond the historical context of Belomor and take its viewer on a journey of understanding “seeing”. How did artists portray notion of truth and reality, and how can we distinguish them clearly? And how do we, the viewer of the image, relate to this representation of a “truthful” world in contrast to a “real” world? As Landsberg underscored with her concept of prosthetic memory, the construction of an emphatic relation based on distance remains crucial when encountering such ideologically manipulated images of violence. Such a journey of seeing not only creates an understanding how Rodchenko mobilized aesthetics for ideological purposes, but it also helps the viewer to recognize these practices in other cultural contexts and reflect on its own subjectivity within the process of meaning making of these images.
The model for exhibiting Rodchenko’s images of Belomor I briefly proposed in this thesis is one that is based on the experiential museum, a model that actively guides and involves the viewer through gaining awareness of the processes of how one’s gaze is constructed. With this approach, I attempted to illuminate that the artistic form and the socialist content of Belomor should not be seen as two separate elements that exclude one another, but as two elements that reinforce each other and that can provide a fascinating account of how far states and artist can go in order to implement ideology and obscure violence. Rodchenko’s images of Belomor are best understood when taking the reinforcement between modernist in form
154 In the introduction I already referred to Krielaars’ Alles voor het moederland and Barness The Noise of Time in relation to the Soviet Union.
61 and socialist in content into account. It helps us to gain insight into the difference between what was considered “real” and what was considered “true”, something a historical narrative might find harder to articulate. I consider it of great importance that a museum visitor not just reads this on wall texts, but is actively involved in understanding his or her gaze forms an essential part of this process of ideological meaning making. It is only then that this visual doublespeak can productively be counteracted. I articulate productively, for I think such an interactive approach towards understanding Rodchenko’s images of Belomor can lead towards an ethical thinking based of difference that can teach the viewer of the image about his or her subjectivity. It is therefore important, I think, to see the potential of the showing seeing exercise for understanding images of disguised violence and ideology. This distinction between the suffering of todays world and the promise of a better future that the strategy of modernist in form and socialist in content so vividly captured is something I would like to articulate specifically while ending this thesis. Not only because it allows us to understand the complexity of artistic production under Stalinism, but because it reaches beyond this time period as well. The extent to which ideology can be implemented and the extent to which visual strategies can be used to dehumanize other can both be scrutinized and deconstructed in Rodchenko’s Belomor images. As I suggested when exploring the potential of prosthetic memory for exhibiting these images, I hope the “showing seeing” exercise I conducted can also attribute to understanding other cases of aestheticized regime made disaster beyond the scope of the Soviet Union.
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69 List of illustrations
Front. Aleksandr Rodchenko. From left to right: fly leaf; cover; final spread. Photomontage. All published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 1. Map of the White Sea – Baltic Canal waterway. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/White_Sea_Canal_map.png [last accessed: 17 August 2017]
Figure 2. Exhibition overview when entering Red! Utopian Visions from the Soviet Union. Source: Van Abbe Museum media bank https://mediabank.vanabbemuseum.nl/vam/start/museumarchief/2016%20Bibliotheektentoons tellingen%3A%20ROOD%21%20%3A%20Heilstaatvisioenen%20uit%20de%20Sovjet- Unie%201930-1941/Zaaloverzicht?view=preview&fuid=wielm1/coxp/_DSC5552.tif [last accessed: 18 August 2017]
Figure 3. Several issues of USSR in Construction and a spread from the Belomor issue (issue 12, 1933). Source: Van Abbe Museum media bank https://mediabank.vanabbemuseum.nl/vam/start/museumarchief/2016%20Bibliotheektentoons tellingen%3A%20ROOD%21%20%3A%20Heilstaatvisioenen%20uit%20de%20Sovjet- Unie%201930-1941/Zaaloverzicht?view=preview&fuid=wielm1/coxp/_DSC5578.tif [last accessed: 18 August 2017]
Figure 4. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. "Flow chart" diagram of art movements, from the jacket of the catalogue for the 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art. Source: MoMA online archive https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2000/madm/start/01_03/barr_pop.html [last accessed: 18 August 2017]
Figure 5. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Bloody Sunday. From: "The History of the
70 VKP(b) [All Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)] in Posters" (Istoria VKP(b) v plakatakh). 1925-26. A series of twenty-five lithographic poster. Source: Dabrowski, Magdalena [et.al]. Aleksandr Rodchenko [exhibition catalogue]. New York: Museum of Modern Art. P. 183.
Figure 6. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Brass Band at the White Sea Canal construction site. 1933. Copyright: Estate of Aleksandr Rodchenko. Source:https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/32916?returnUrl=%2Fart%2Fsearch%3Fculture%3D Russian%26show%3D50%26page%3D9 [last accessed: 18 August 2017]
Figure 7. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Camp Theatrical. 1933. Published in: Gorky, Maxim [ed.] [transl.: Amabel Williams-Ellis] (1934). The Stalin White Sea Canal: being an account of the construction of the new canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. Moscow: Istorija Fabrik I zavodov. p. 216.
Figure 8. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Cover USSR in Construction. Photomontage. USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 9. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Map and portrait of Stalin placed against water. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 10. Aleksandr Rodchenko. The landscape of Karelia. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 11. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “They were the people of the depths, people taken from the very dregs. As they came they thought ‘This is the end of life for us.’ But real life had only begun for them. For not only was the nature of the landscape changed, but the nature of the people also. People with a shady past were transformed into honest workers.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
71 Figure 12. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “They laid 390.000 cubic meters of concrete, or 11 times as much as the celebrated hydroelectric station at Volkhovstroy.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 13. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “For the first time in the world, wood was used here on a large scale as the chief building material in the construction work. Most of the spillways and dams are wooden.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 14. Aleksandr Rodchenko. Spread of the camp commanders. Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
Figure 15. Aleksandr Rodchenko. “The canal is ready. Start on another canal! These fine workers of Belomorstroy have gone to build another stupendous canal from Moscow to the Volga. Writers go on a visit to theirs heroes – the shock workers of the construction of the Volga-Moscow Canal. On the platform is Maxim Gorky. Never had the words of the great proletarian writer, “Man – How proud it sounds” been so plainly carried into reality.” Photomontage. Published in USSR in Construction: issue 12, 1933. 39.5 x 30 cm. Source: LS Collection van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
72