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1 Avant-Garde Art and Bolshevik Time* Debates Among These The images reproduced here accord with fair use. Please acknowledge credits. 1 © Susan Buck-Morss, 2006. * Avant-Garde Art and Bolshevik Time ," t po a e , T l a Debates among these "Futurists," as c . r. " apot i ori e l t ow m T s a Lenin called all of these experimental groups, i c i c z . a r. os H i ori e t t ow were waged on numerous issues, but they shared m s i a c , M i h, K t z c a os H um vi e a general tendency in their move t e e “Art of the l a , M h, K t a us c proletariat is not a M 1923. S M um away from art -- particularly away vi e e holy shrine where l a us from oil painting -- and into "life," things are lazily M 1923. S M regarded, but work, e t a factory which a the lived experience of the everyday. a t r produces new nd a r artistic things.” nd rva . They understood their work not as a a rva kovo S a um Cup a . - Nikolai Punin, 1918 e kovo us Cup documenting the revolution but as nd V . " us us um a nd V e i . “ a a i realizing it, serving (and also leading) the us n M a kova i kol a kova i l 1923. K e kol n M hni i i proletariat in the active building of a new society. s 1923. K a hni r," l s vi n, N orc e e i r,” t vi n, N P e i uc Constructivists and Suprematists and others of e t ue a orc t uc a S Ruka S P ue a t S Ruka S S the avant-garde both turned to "production art," applying their earlier formal and technical innovations to the design of everyday objects and architectural spaces that the masses would produce and use.1 Although production art was variously practiced, it provided the sense of a shared political task.2 "The proletariat * Based on material from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 1. The Russian avant-garde had similar ideas even before the revolution. In a real sense, Constructivism was a continuation of the movement of "art into life" that had begun in Europe and the United States with the arts and crafts moment, and had taken an industrial turn with the decorative art produced at the turn of the century. The difference of the movement in post- Revolutionary Russia was the absence of commodity logic, and the fact that the consumer was here understood as the new collective, the working class. 2. Theories of production art were developed in the avant-garde journals by Punin, Boris Kushner and Osip Brik. The differences in understanding among the artists were sometimes very great: Although Tatlin established with Arvatov a "production laboratory" in Petrograd, he claimed that he was never a true Productionist: "I want to make the machine with art and not to mechanize art -- there is a difference in understanding" (Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 213). Constructivists claimed the 2 Liubov Popova, Textile Design and Shape, d by e t 1923-24, reconstructed by van Laack , 1979. s ruc t he c according to the original artist's sketches, t ons ke c s s 1979.will create new houses, new streets, ' t s i 24, re - new objects of everyday life," wrote rt a l Nikolai Punin as early as 1918: "Art of the na , 1923 gi e i proletariat is not a holy shrine where or he o t things are lazily regarded, but work, a t ng gn and Shap factory which produces new artistic i s e ordi 3 c D c things." Vladimir Maiakovskii spoke of e l i k a t from c x ," a making "the streets...our brushes and the e s a T e , 4 h n L squares our palettes." ot va opova y Cl The avant-garde turned to a commercial forms such as fabric design, ryd ubov P ve i E L children's books, journal covers, r. " i advertisements, street decorations, theater m di , 1923. a l sets, porcelain design, photo- and cine- n, V i l t ovy Byt montage. The UNOVIS group, which a T N Suprematists' objects were not utilitarian enough; Malevich returned the insult by accusing Tatlin of having planned a Monument to the Third International the structure of which was scientifically unsound, and could not be built. In fact, all of the avant-garde can be accused of (or praised for) having what Hubertus Gassner describes as a "utopian supplement" in their work, a theme to which I return below. 3. Nikolai Punin (1918), cited in Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, p. 220, a republication of The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962). 4. From Maiakovskii's "Order to the Army of Art," in the first issue of Isskusstvo kommuny (March 1918). Ivan Puni later reflected that this statement marked the redefinition of Futurism, now a "clearly and definitely expressed tendency to go beyond the limits of the work of art enclosed within itself, i.e., the trend toward the liquidation of art as a separate discipline" (cited in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 48; Puni's statement is from Isskusstvo kommuny no. 19). 3 described themselves as collective creators of a "new utilitarian world of things," was commissioned by the city of Vitebsk to apply Suprematist design to signboards, street decorations, buildings, interior decors, trams, and even ration cards.5 Lissitzky recruited the Suprematist square as protagonist in a children's book, The Story of Two Squares. 6Popova applied it to women's dress. Tatlin designed and produced workers' clothing (a coat and a suit) and an economical oven in five variants, establishing contacts with the Novyi (new) Lessner factory in Petrograd to develop his idea of the "artist-constructor."7 The Constructivists' program of 1921 stated explicitly that artists should enter the factory. Rodchenko wrote: "All new approaches to art arise from technology and engineering and move toward organization and construction"; "real construction is utilitarian necessity."8 Illustrations from the children's book, The Story of Two Squares, El Lissitzky, 1920: [Left] “Behold two squares.” [Right] "They fly to earth from far away..." 5. Shatskikh, "UNOVIS: Epicenter of a New World," Great Utopia, p. 57. The neologism "unovistic" entered the Russian language as synonymous with revolutionary style. 6 For the entire Story of Two Squares, please see http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/el/pro.html. 7. When Tatlin returned to Moscow in 1927 he taught at the VKhUTEIN (formerly VKhUTEMAS) in the Wood and Metal faculty (Dermetfak) and in the Ceramics faculty, and worked in his Scientific and Experimental Laboratory in the Novodevichii Monastery on his flying machine the Letatlin. In 1929 he wrote that he viewed his role as an "organizer of everyday life" (Paul Wood, "The Politics of the Avant-Garde," Great Utopia, p. 11). 8. Rodchenko, cited in Christina Lodder, "The Transition to Constructivism," Great Utopia, p. 267. 4 he T 1918 . d on, i ut rogra “I set myself the task of changing l t e the historical image of the vo P , square, and transforming it into a Re re r place where a revolutionary people would come to celebrate qua obe S t its victory....I decided not to c ) O e decorate the square. The c a creations of [the eighteenth- l he a t century architects] Rastrelli and P of y Rossi required no decoration. I rl wished instead to contrast the e ry a new beauty of a victorious people rs with the beauty of imperial ve (form Russia. I did not seek harmony nni ky a with the old, but contrast with it. s t t I placed my constructions not on ri rs i U the buildings but between them, F ) where the streets opened the " for e t square....Only three vast ng paintings, almost the height of i burg. uni s w rs the buildings, were placed in e e t ri t front of the facades....a e dra P worker...unfolding a banner... oun gn t i `He who was nothing will be c S s l e l , everything,' ...a peasant holding D a banner...`Land to the Working um of a e n, People,' ...a worker...bearing the a ns us a m slogan: `Factories to the Working t M l ri 9 a People.'" A t n e a i n s a rol t P a N Rus (" 9. Natan Altman, cited in Street Art of the Revolution, p. 71. 5 In the process of championing the revolution, the avant-garde artists were redefining it as their own accomplishment. This entailed, significantly, an appropriation of the chronology of revolutionary time. Tatlin claimed that the "events of 1917 in the social field were already brought about in our art in 1914," when material, volume and construction were made its basis.10 Lissitzky went so far as to declare that Communism, which had “set human labor on the throne,” would have to “remain behind,” because its reign of labor would be overtaken by those working in a posterior historical position to Suprematism's "square pennant of creativity."11 Malevich claimed for his UNOVIS group the status of a "party" in art shadowing the official one, with UNOVIS branches in other art schools both domestic and abroad, and with his own Vitebsk school as the "Central Creative Committee."12 The slippage in the meaning of words borrowed from the discourse of the political vanguard and applied to that of artistic practice was a strategy for gaining power in terms of the new idiom of cultural hegemony.
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