CONJENTS

11 Foreword James Rondeau 20 BATTLEGROUND Kathleen Tahk 13 Acknowledgments 26 Plates Matthew S. Witkovsky

!0-9040 ' 15 Note to the Reader 44 SCHOOL )f Publishing at 1: Yve-Alain Bois 17 Introduction 50 Plates lr of Publishing I, Devin Fore and Matthew S. Witkovsky -auren Makholm, ,I

78 , Levi 11: PRESS Maria Gough

86 Plates I' graphy of ; Craig Stillwell, r oto, with I ,rnell and I 114 of Imaging, THEATER Masha Chlenova

,ion Gothic, 11 122 Plates r Br~oks, ,onsIn iphics, I

, ibri, Verona I HOME

[emonstration, itepanova, Textile 140 n byVarvara STOREFRONT i aks Penson, Christina Kiaer . 16: Aleksei Gan, stratsiia byta! 150 Plates Everyday Life!), (Victor Slama), I Shows You the I v' Popova , !4(pl. 64). 218 FACTORY right) : pis . 28, 9, Barbara Wurm , 23, 16, 29, 25, 226 Plates Iated on the two

and materials p Council , which 250 1ement. I FESTIVAL Kristin Romberg

258 Plates

297 Checklist

280 313 Bibliography EXHIBITION Kathleen Tahk Maria Gough 284 Plates

317 Index

324 Photography Credits 288 DEMONSTRATION Devin Fore Devin Fore and Matthew S. Witkovsky

1. , "Proletarian Culture When the Bolshevik Revolution were photographed and filmed, their physical reactions and Proletarian Art," in Literature and correlated to responses that were collected in written Revolution, t rans. Rose Strunsky convulsed Russia in October 2 (University of Michigan Press. 1968), surveys distributed after the performances . These p. 155. 1917, it was not clear whose experiments delivered a picture not of sociocultural homogeneity but of multiple , dynamically intersecting 2. On the analysis of muse um cause it served. visi torship , see the doc uments in interests and identities. The Soviet subject was lu. U, Fokht-Babushkin, ed .. Publika Although Communist Party propaganda was unequiv­ not singular. khudozhestvennykh muzeev i vvstavok v Rossii: Sotsiologicheskie svitedel'stva ocal about the identity of its addressee - the proletar­ Reopening these vexing questions about audience 1920-1930-kh godov (Aleteiia, 2014). iat- this political entity was anything but evident. identity and practices of cultural reception one century On "bibliopsychology," see N, A, First, the industrial working class was scarce in this after October 1917,Revoliutsiiat Demonstrats1iat Soviet Rubakin, Psikhologiia chitatelia i knigi: Kratkoe vvedenie v bibliotecheskuiu largely agrarian country and became even more Art Put to the Test explores early Soviet life through psikhologiiu (Kniga, 1977). On theater endangered as a result of the civil war that ravaged a series of exemplary spaces of experience . Following spectators , see, for exampl e, M. B. Zagorskii . "Kak reagiruet zritel'7 " Russia's economy over the next five years: when the the premise that subjects are physically and socially Let, no . 6 (1924); and A P Borodin, finally took control of the nation in 1922, defined through constant interaction with their "O razlichny kh priemakh izucheniia Russia's industry had fallen to 30 percent of its environments, the book examines nine spaces that teatral'nogo zrite lia:· Sovetskoe iskusstvo 9 (1925), prewar capacity. What is more, from the perspective were used to interpellate Soviet citizens -the battle· of Marxist theory, the proletariat was technically not ground, the school, the press, the theater, the home, a class at all but rather the social force that abolishes the storefront, the factory, the festival, and the exhibi­ class affiliation as such to establish for the first time tion -and concludes with thoughts on the paradigm in history the conditions for a truly universal subjec­ of demonstration itself, exemplified by the ubiquitous tivity. A universal subject, however, can have no image of Lenin's outstretched arm. In emphasizing inherent identity. As a result, one could neither define the ways in which visual production was shown and the beneficiary of the Bolshevik revolution theoretically shared, this book seeks to redefine art of the early nor manifest it empirically. Soviet period by considering its metabolic exchange This absence resonated in the arts of the period. with the people and spaces around it. The mass organization Proletkul't (Proletarian Culture) The wide variety of objects addressed in these was founded in 1917with a mandate to develop the pages attests to the range and pluralism of expression culture, habits, and lifestyle for this missing subject, explored by postrevolutionary makers . From paint· yet many remained skeptical that this could be done. ings to dinner plates , every class of object needed None other than Leon Trotsky concluded in 1923 restructuring; activities as disparate as brushing one's "that there is no proletarian culture and that there teeth or building monumenta l public works were never will be any.''1 Haunted by uncertainty over the freighted with symbolic as well as practical signifi· social identity of art audiences, researchers at the cance. Very few moments in history exhibit a cultural time mobilized experimental methods to contour this output comparable in its diversity, resourcefulness , or mysterious addressee: visitors to museum exhibitions sheer frenetic energy. If, as Evgenii Polivanov claimed were scrutinized and dissected according to every in 1931,the process of linguistic evolution accelerates possible parameter, from gender and age to education exponentially when more social groups are given and profession; consumers of the printed word were access to means of expression and encounter each subjected to analysis according to a new research other in the field of language, one could assert a field dubbed "bibliopsychology";and theater spectators similarly causal relationship between creolization and

17 3, Evgenii Polivanov, "Revoliutsiia i invention in other symbolic fields such as art: the more realization in the display space offered by the press 7. Asja Lacis, quot! literaturnye iazyki Soiuza SSR;' in inclusive and heterogeneous the body of art produc­ itself" (p. 84). " Diary," ( Za marksistskoe iazykoznanie (Moscow, 1985), p.82- 1931), pp, 73-94 . Bruno Latour has ers and audiences grew, the more rapidly Soviet society Klutsis's kiosks belong to the countless proposals made the same argument about turned out one aesthetic innovation after another.3 for new modes of existence that came out of this 8. Sergei Mikhailo creolization and technoscientific "Velikodushnyi rog invention in We Have Never Been As some of the Russian Formalists liked to observe, brief diapason (as the Russians called it). The Soviet no. B (1922), pp. 1 Modern, trans. Catherine Porter the best art came not from purebred, specialized culture of invention was inherently also a culture (Harvard University Press, 1993). cultural producers but from those who combined of testing, called forth by an era of profound skepti­ 9. Building upon! concept of Nachl, 4. See Shklovskii on the necessity professional identities and frameworks of experience cism toward inherited knowledge and customs. temporalities of aI for artists and authors to have a that were normally unconnected. War and Peace Everything from the number of days in the week to "survival" have be "second profession." Viktor Shklovskii, developed in Alex could never have been written if Tolstoy hadn't also "O pisatele i proizvodstve;' in Literatura conventions of child-rearing came under exacting ChristopherWooc fakta, ed. Nikolai Chuzhak (Federatsiia, been an artillerist, insisted Viktor Shklovskii. 4 scrutiny. This rigorous reevaluation extended as well Renaissance (MIT 1929). pp, 189-94 ; and Tekhnika The Latvian Riflemen likewise included several to art and literature , whose prerevolutionary struc­ See also Georges pisate/'skogo remesla (Molodaia important essays gvardiia, 1930) artist-artillerists, such as Gustav Klutsis (Gustavs tures and idioms were similarly subject to interroga­ Warburg and afte Klucis) and Karl Ioganson (Karlis Johansons): these tion. How would the geometric abstraction of Image: AbyWarb1 5. Walter Benjamin, "On the Present Anthropology," 0. avant-gardists were recognized in their dual functions, Suprematism and the transrationalist language of Situation of Russian Film," in Selected no. 1 (2002), pp. e Writings, vol, 2, ed Michael W. both guarding and exhibiting at the Kremlin in 1918, Futurism, for example, fare outside the cloistral the Image, Before Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary as Kathleen Tahk discusses in her essay "Battleground." contexts where they had incubated before the war, of Anachronism;' Smith (Harvard University Press, 2005), in Compelling Vis, p, 14, The nascent Soviet government took another remark­ when they now joined in the jostle and din of public in and out of Hist, able step, as Yve-Alain Bois points out in "School," life in the new Soviet republic? Could the arsenal and Robert Zwijn, 6. On the drive to test in modern ity, when it mandated a working synthesis of museum, of Constructivist devices, which had migrated from Minnesota Press, see Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (University of Illinois Press, 2007), laboratory, and classroom settings in its arts institu­ exhibitions and book covers to theater and clothing, 10, Eigenzeit, or t i p. 164. tions. The government also financed, at times lavishly, be adapted, say, to instill physical hygiene and individual artifact. to the field of me the mass commemoration days that Kristin Romberg modernize labor habits? Russian art was put to the where it is used t analyzes in "Festival," operating, as she argues, under test, assigned new vocations and dispatched into perspective of trc the theory that the dualism of "art" and "context" uncharted territory. This universal testing was, in phy. See the won especially "From should be abolished in favor of an all-encompassing turn, facilitated by technologies of mass reproduction Zeitkritik;' Theory environment of "creation" (tvorchestvo). such as film, radio, and photography, which put no 6 (November Such an environment, and such recombinations new forms into circulation on a scale previously or syntheses of prerevolutionary functions and unimaginable: the introduction of these technologies institutions , would demand fluidity from citizens inaugurated, as Walter Benjamin described it. "one and objects alike. The portability of Constructivist of the most grandiose mass-psychological experi­ furniture, examples of which are discussed by Masha ments ever undertaken in the gigantic laboratory Chlenova ("Theater") and Christina Kiaer ("Home/ that Russia has become." 5 Storefront"), led its makers and users from the stage The tests were intentionally inconclusive-they were to the street or from the shopwindows of GUM, the never meant to conclude. Whether we are considering department store that to this day faces Red Square, Kseniia Ender's Constructivist fabric designs (pl. 63) to the conventionally private space of the domestic or Nikolai Suetin's Suprematist porcelain (pls. 55, apartment. Motion could also be encouraged within 197, 198),the results of these experiments should not a single, discrete space of display , on the model of be judged according to the criteria of success versus El Lissitzky's "demonstration space" (Demonstrations­ failure, viability versus sterility, efficiency versus waste. raum) in Dresden (pp. 284-85)-explained by Maria Cultural evolution never follows this Darwinist logic. Gough in "Exhibition"-where walls of ribbed slats Rather, Soviet art's incessant testing should instead be painted white on one side, black on the other, and understood to indicate a collective process of learning gray on the front edge created a changeable aspect whose final product was nothing less than a new that shifted as the viewer walked through the space. perception of reality. Nowhere was modernity's "test Even recursive movement could become productive: drive" -that is, the drive to test-more palpable and the filmstrip and the conveyor belt, already expressed prevalent than in the Soviet Union in the 1920s: in as one word in Russian (lenta),were conjoined at this "gigantic laboratory" for inductive experiment, Aleksei Gastev's Central Institute of Labor (TsIT)into testing became a strategy for discovering and inventing an ideal prototype of a feedback loop, according to new frameworks for existence. 6 From this perspective, Barbara Wurm ("Factory"). Similarly, Gough suggests the examples of audience testing mentioned earlier in "Press" that Klutsis's many designs for media reveal not just the desire to identify the Soviet subject kiosks, widely illustrated in books and magazines but, more profoundly, the drive, or project, to shape but never actually built, succeeded as a chiasmus: this previously absent subject both socially and "Drawings dedicated to the resolution of the distribu­ psychophysically. tion crisis encountered by the Soviet press in the The inventiveness of Soviet art is often considered aftermath of the October Revolution find their ultimate at odds with its propagandistic function . Fixed

18 Fore and Witkovsky Introduction d by the press 7. Asja Lacis, quoted in Walter Benjamin, iconographies and schematic politics, however, were Revoliuts1ia!Demonstratsiia! allows for more skid "Moscow Diary,'' October 35 (Winter hardly a constraint in this period. The superficiality and slippage between art and history. This decision 1985), p. 82, 1tlessproposals of the readymade language used in Klutsis's posters­ underpins the book's division of material not into out of this 8. Sergei Mikhailovich Tret'iakov, quite in contrast to the force of the images - suggests, chronological phases or particular mediums but into it). The Soviet "Velikodushnyi rogonosets,'' Zrelishcha, no. 8 (1922), pp. 12-13 . for example, that working with dictated subject overlapping spaces. The noncontemporaneous lessons so a culture matter can spur artists to more ambitious formal and resources of art are especially valuable - and lfound skepti­ 9. Building upon AbyWarburg's experimentation by liberating them from concerns methodologically necessary-where they challenge concept of Nachleben, the nonlinear 9 customs. temporalities of art's "afterlife" or with content. The Russians themselves pointed out and contradict overbearingly linear narratives. n the week to "survival" have been most productively that regime propaganda was no different from the Organizing the artwork spatially-as an archaeology­ developed in Alexander Nagel and ler exacting advertising found in the capitalist West, except that illuminates a different, and notably less tragic, vantage Christopher Wood, Anachronic rtended as well Renaissance (MIT Press, 2010). the product in Soviet ad campaigns was the state on early Soviet culture. In place of an evolutionist ionary struc- See also Georges Didi-Huberman's itself (see pls. 192, 193, 207). The defining cultural framework, a host of lateral relations and resem­ important essays on the subject of ;t to interroga­ Warburg and afterlife: "The Surviving impulses of the epoch, especially during the period of blances comes into view, likenesses that cannot be ;tion of Image: AbyWarburg andTylorian reconstruction that followed the ground zero of the explained in terms of simple genealogical influence. language of Anthropology,'' Oxford Art Journal 25, civil war, were located not at the level of ideological Permitted to inhabit its own artifactual temporality, no. 1 120021,pp . 59-70; and "Before i cloistral the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty thematics but in the material stratum where artists the artwork drifts out of phase with the historical fore the war, of Anachronism," trans , Peter Mason, and engineers engaged. As the dramaturge Asja Lacis parameter of political exigency and enables alterna­ l din of public in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago observed in the middle of the decade, the period tive accounts of Soviet culture on this centenary the arsenal and Robert Zwijnenberg (University of after 1922 witnessed the "conversion of revolutionary occasion and into the future. 10 ligrated from Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 31-44 . effort into technological effort": "Now it is made clear and clothing, 10. E1genzeit, or time proper to the to every communist that at this hour revolutionary .ene and individual artifact, is a concept central work does not signify conflict or civil war, but rather to the field of media archaeology, :ts put to the electrification, canal construction, creation of facto­ where it is used to challenge the linear tched into perspective of traditional historiogra­ ries."7 Famously defined by Lenin as "Soviet power ingwas, in phy. See the work of Wolfgang Ernst, plus the electrification of the entire country," Russian especially "From Media History to s reproduction Zeitkritik,'' Theory, Culture & Society 30, communism had from its earliest days promised two rhich put no. 6 (November 2013), pp, 132-46 . revolutions, one political and the other industrial, reviously but during the era of reconstruction political impulses J technologies were overtaken by technological ones. Processes ibed it, "one of construction and physical making superseded ;al experi­ partisan crusading as the principal arena of revc1u­ laboratory tionary activity, causing artists and engineers to gain privileged status as experts in the politics of form. sive- they were Better than any statesman, they understood the ·e considering proclivities and restrictions of matter. They knew igns (pl. 63) which human potentials and ranges of activity were 1 (pis. 55, enabled by certain objects and which ones these s should not objects inhibited. Their ideological principles were cess versus fashioned out of fabric, wood, and chemicals: in the y versus waste. theaters they created models for the "stairwells and winist logic. floors, walkways and passages that our muscles 1ldinstead be have to master"; and in research centers like Vasily ;s of learning Kandinsky's Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, nanew they tested the interface between pictorial forms rnity's "test and the human perceptual apparatus. 8 They knew lpable and best through which material forms the values and 1920s: in prospects of Soviet existence could be demonstrated - periment, displayed, manifested, but above all, proven. and inventing An antihistoriographic wager is perhaps the most ; perspective, important intervention that an exhibition of early ted earlier Soviet art could attempt today. We want to chasten oviet subject the impulse to align this culture with the familiar t, to shape historical teleology that begins with the heroic :ially and events of 1917,proceeds through reconstruction and Thermidor, and terminates in the Stalinist terror ~n considered of the 1930s. Rather than binding our chosen n. Fixed objects firmly to the fate of a miscarried revolution,

19