A disturbing event to report. As I walked on the streets this morning, I came across a poster bearing the following title: "Realistic Manifesto." One hears increasingly of the avant-garde's growing influence (who can avoid Tatlin's Monument -- they parade the model through the streets like some sort of icon to which we should pray), but this manifesto was absolutely absurd. The poster was ostensibly to announce an exhibition by three artists, but a long and boring text comprised the majority of the poster.
"We." What compels these people to overuse this pronoun? Seemingly benign (in the past, I would even have ventured to say that it had positive connotations), "we" has sadly been appropriated by the ideologues. This poster was no exception, as the main points were listed as a series of statements beginning with the "we affirm" or "we renounce." For example:
But this is only the beginning. The perpetrators write:
And finally, the most offensive statement of the diatribe: "We [artists] construct our work as the uniserve constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits." The avant-garde would like to dismiss bourgeois norions such as representation in favor of construction, and hence appropriate the engineers and their equations. One often hears the phrase "art into life" (attributed to Tatlin), but how can this be extended to a notion of constructed art? Engineers solve problems and use their tools (e. g., equations) to reach a solution, but an artist has only one tool, inspiration. Inspiration cannot be quantified, and I hope that in the future one will not be able to produce a sonata "simply by turning a handle" (6). Such "mathematical composition" (7) no longer designates the label "art."
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September, 1921
A frustrating day. I attended the opening of an art exhibition called 5x5=25. It included the works of the more prominent figures of the Constructivist movement: Rodchenko, Stepanova, etc. I recognized their names from this past spring, when they established with much publicity their Constructivist Working Group of INKhUK. I found the pamphlet they distributed this poast spring; as I remembered, they attempted to outline the three components of making art effective. Upon rereading, I found their three categories, tectonics, construction, and faktura, even more complicated and trite than I had remembered. I thought of this today as I stared at Rodchenko's series of paintaings, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color. I overheard Rodchenko saying, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. very plane is a plane, and there is to be no more representation" (8).
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January, 1922
I attended another Constructivist art exhibit; this time works by Medunitskii and the Stenberg brothers were shown. As I arrived, I was handed the customary catalog, and on the first page I found a declaration entitled, "The Constructivists Address the World." The rational, yet overly optimistic, minds of these people never cease to amaze me. They claim, "Constructivism will enable humankind to achieve the maximum level of culture with minimum expense of energy." (9), churning out verses for the state. Furthermore, if just one figure did in fact control the allocation of assignments, the interests of that single individual would become the de facto interests of the collective. The pamphlet went on to describe artists as "the great corrupters of the human race," who have "destroyed bridges along that way and replaced them with a huge dose of sugar-sweet opium, art and beauty." This statement adds credence to my earlier concerns about suppressing dissenting voices. If an artist can no longer choose the way in which he utilizes his artistic talents, will art and beauty be subjected to a complete denial? This is not the first time that I have expressed such concerns, and I think that this must indicate the extent of my fears of an authoritarian society. If society can treat artists as expendable and easily-manipulated, who is to say that this might not be extended to the society as a whole? "If poets no longer soar in the empyrean," if a poet's lyre "encompasses the morning scraping of electric toothbrushes," then society has degenerated to a sterile existence. Moreover, though the Constructivists "declare art and its priests illegal," aesthetes and artists will automatically suppress neither their more visceral tendencies nor their cynical sarcasm. Even if state poets officially dismissed the great talents of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, one could find a cynical dismissal of the proponents of logic (10).
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July, 1922
I just received from a friend a copy of From Representation to Construction, INKhUK's volume of published personal statements on Constructivism. Remembering their earlier polemics, I noted the two statements by the Stenberg brothers. Vladimir Stenberg writes, "I reject the art of senseless beauty, the saccharine art of the aesthete, which weakens the strict discipline of universal culture and slows down its development!" Though Vladimir Stenberg can dramatically declare a strict adherence to a universal culture, what does he expect -- everyone to live in unending rows of barrack-like structures, wearing gray uniforms? Why doesn't he, like myself, fear a universal culture that denies individual expression and the invaluable contributions of the individual to society? For example, my friend's apartment, with its unique fireplace, sofa, and wardrobe, reflects his personal taste, and I would never subject him to life in a room of Rodchenko's straight lines and flat planes, or Georgii Stenberg's sheets of gladd ("The surface that does not violate the spatial arrangement is the sheet of glass"). Where Rodchenko or the Stenberg brothers would see "the precise beauty of it -- not a single repeated gesture, curve, or turn" (12).
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December, 1922
Today my friend brought me a copy of Alexei Gan's self-proclaimed Constructivist manifesto, Constructivism. Though my friend warned me that Gan is something of an iconoclast (even within the avant-garde scene), she did suggest that Gan's book does signal a fundamental shift within the Constructivist movement. According to her, Gan dismissed the earlier Constructivists such as Tatlin in favor of "an ideologically rationalized social and utilitarian art" (13). Though thoroughly warned, I was not prepared for Gan's polemical manifesto. He assumes that the inspired and subjective artist must be replaced by the rational and methodical engineer. He declares, "Art is finished! It has no place in the human labor apparatus. Labor, technology, organization." Of course, Gan's "unconditional war on art" precludes imagination; engineers need no imagination -- their "compass-drawn philosophy" (14) provides solutions to any problem. And if the artist may sometimes break into a "distant, foolish, dreamy smile" (15) at the moment he realizes his masterpiece, those such as Gan would suggest that such a sentimental, bourgeois concept of art deserves no recognition in our modern world. Instead, the "machinelike" (16) engineers will provide us with benevolent boredom.
Original Structuralist writings
NOTES:
(1) We, p. 128. (BACK)
(2) We, 17. (BACK)
(3) Alexei Gastev, an influential poet and proponant of Taylorism, wrote a poem entitled "Factory Whistles, Rails, and Tower." From New Worlds: Russian Art & Society, p. 18. (BACK)
(4) We, 4. (BACK)
(5) We, 66. (BACK)
(6) We, 17. (BACK)
(7) Ibid. (BACK)
(8) I must admit that I had no reason for including Rodchenko's quote (that is, I could not find an appropriate passage in We to incorporate into Zamyatin's reaction). However, I couldn't resist Rodchenko's statement -- it seemed so extraodinarily absurd, yet sincere. (BACK)
(9) We, 42. (BACK),
(10) We, 43. (BACK)
(12) Ibid. (BACK)
(13) "The Sources and Ideals of Constructivism in Soviet Architecture," Anatole Senkevits. In Art into Life, p. 171. (BACK)
(14) We, 179. (BACK)
(15) Ibid. (BACK)
(16) We, 180. (BACK)
Informal INTRODUCTION:
I originally became interested in Russian Constructivism to understand Dziga Vertov's films better. However, after submerging myself in your books, I became fascinated by such an ideologically weighty art movement, and the primary documents included in Art into Life, Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932 especially piqued my interest. I thought, if I, a denizen of late 20th century America, am reacting so strongly to these manifestos, how would a person such as Zamyatin have reacted? I assumed that Zamyatin, as a member of the intelligentsia, would have been familiar with the artistic avant-garde. Moreover, based on my reading of his novel (We), I inferred that his reaction would not have been positive, because the tone of these documents often comes dangerously close to that of the utopian tracts of the 1920's, the movement satirized in Zamyatin's dystopian novel.
Though the novel is a general description of a futurist society, the role of art is significant, or at least art is a proxy for more general social trends. The reader learns of this society through D-503's reactions to his surroundings, and often he is responding to art, a derivative of art, or some other visual or aural stimulant. As becomes clear from D-503's descriptions, all art has been reduced to ideological purposes, and only a sterile shell of art exists. Unfortunately, from these Constructivist documents, one can easily see the tendencies of Soviet art that Zamyatin uses (and exaggerates) in his novel.
As I thought about this assignment, I considered various ways to explicate Zamyatin's hypothetical reactions. At first, I thought to transcribe imaginary conversations between Zamyatin and the larger figures of the Constructivist movement (e. g. Tatlin, Rodchenko, Stepanova), but this seemed overly tedious and necessitated understanding the subtleties of many complex and significant figures. I toyed with other similar ideas (e. g., a series of letters between Zamyatin and art critics), until I returned to one of your suggestions, the journal entry format. Looking through your books, I was repeatedly struck by the primary documents (rather than the criticism), so I decided to try to incorporate the more polemical statements into Zamyatin's journals, thus giving myself some substance to which to react. Moreover, since I knew that my "journal entries" would be poor imitations of any of Zamyatin's writings, I decided to incorporate direct quotes from We, if only for descriptive purposes.
I have drawn from four documents, plus two other sources in the Art into Life book (a Rodchenko quote on the 5x5=25 exhibit, plus a few scattered quotes by Alexei Gan). I have maintained the chronological order of the events and documents, and I cover a period from 1920 to 1922, the time during which Zamyatin was writing We and Constructivism was going through a time of change and solidification. Though I admit that Constructivism is an over-simplified label, certain tendencies did dominate, and I have tried to note where certain figures (e. g., Gan) seemed radical even within artistic circles.
Disclaimers having been made, I present my version of Zamyatin's journals in an attempt to answer the following question: How would Zamyatin have dissented against the Soviet avant-garde of the late teens and early twenties?
Documents from which I have drawn, in order, in their entirety:
(1) Realistic Manifesto
Above the tempests of our weekdays,
Across the ashes and the cindered homes of the past,
Before the gates of the vacant future,
We proclaim today to you artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, poets... to you people to whom Art is no mere ground for conversation but the source of real exaltation, our word and deed.
The impasse into which Art has come to in the last twenty years must be broken.
The growth of human knowledge with its powerful penetration into the mysterious laws of the world which started at the dawn of this century,
The blossoming of a new culture and a new civilization with their unprecedented-in-history surge of the masses towards the possession of the riches of Nature, a surge which binds the people into one union, and last, not least, the war and the revolution (those purifying torrents of the coming epoch), have made us face the fact of new forms of life, already born and active.
What does Art carry into this unfolding epoch of human history?
Does it possess the means necessary for the construction of the new Great Style?
Or does it suppose that the new epoch may not have a new style?
Or does it suppose that the new life can accept a new creation which is constructed on the foundations of the old?
In spite of the demand of the renascent spirit of our time, Art is still nourished by impression, external appearance, and wanders helplessly back and forth from Naturalism to Symbolism, from Romanticism to Mysticism.
The attempts of the Cubists and the Futurists to lift the visual arts from the bogs of the past have led only to new delusions.
Cubism, having started with simplification of the representative technique ended with its analysis and stick there.
The distracted world of the Cubists, broken in shreds by their logical anarchy, cannot satisfy us who have already accomplished the Revolution or who are already constructing and building up anew.
One could heed with interest the experiments of the Cubists, but one cannot follow them, being convinced that their experiments are being made on the surface of Art and do not touch on the bases of it, seeing plainly that the end result amounts to the same old graphic, to the same old volume and to the same decorative surface as of old.
One could have hailed Futurism in its time for the refreshing sweep of its announced Revolution in Art, for its devastating criticism of the past, as in no other way could one have assailed those artistic barricades of "good taste"... powder was needed for that and a lot of it... but one cannot construct a system of art in one revolutionary phrase alone.
One had to examine Futurism beneath its appearance to realize that one faced a very ordinary chatterer, a very agile and prevaricating guy, clad in the tatters of worn-out words like "patriotism," "militarism," "contempt for the female," and all the rest of such provincial tags.
In the domain of purely pictorial problems, Futurism has not gone further than the renovated effort to fix on the canvas a purely optical reflex which has already shown its bankrupcy with the Impressionists. It is obvious now to every one of us that by the simple graphic registration of a row of momentarily arrested movements, one cannot re-create movement itself. It makes one think of the pulse of a dead body.
(2) (Document)
The pompous slogan of "Speed" was played from the hands of the Futurists as a great trump. We concede the sonority of that slogan and we quite see how it can sweep the strongest of the provincials off their feet. But ask any Futurist how does he imagine "speed" anad there will emerge a whole arsenal of frenzied automobiles, rattling railway depots, snarled wires, the clank and the noise and the clang of carouseling streets... does one really need to convince them that all that is not necessary for speed and for its rhythms?
Look at a ray of sun... the stillest of the still forces, it speeds more than 300 kilometers in a second... behold our starry firmament... who hears it... and yet what are our depors to those depots of the Universe? What are our earthly trains to those hurrying trains of the galaxies?
Indeed, the whole Futurist noise about speed is too obvious an anecdote, and from the moment that Futurism proclaimed that "Space and Time are yesterday's dead," it sunk into the obscurity of abstractions.
Neither Futurism nor Cubism has brought us what our time has expected of them.
Besides those two artistic schools our recent past has nothing of importance or deserving attention.
But Life does not wait and the growth of generations does not stop and we who go to relieve those who have passed into history, having in our hands the results of their experiments, with their mistakes and their achievements, after years of experience equal to centuries... we say...
No new artistic system will withstand the growing pressure of a new culture until the very foundation of Art is erected on the real laws of Life.
Until all artists will say with us...
All is a fiction... only life and its laws are authentic and in life only the active is beautiful and wise and strong and right, for life does not know beauty as an aesthetic measure... efficacious existence is the highest beauty.
Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals... need is the highest and most just of all morals.
Life does not know rationally abstracted truths as a measure of cognizance, deed is the highest and surest of truths.
Those are the laws of life. Can art withstand these laws if it is built on an abstraction, on mirage, and fiction?
We say...
Space and time are re-born to us today.
Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed.
States, political and economic systems perish, ideas crumble, under the strains of ages... but life is strong and grows and time goes on in its real continuity.
Who will show us forms more efficacious than this... who is the great one who will give us foundations stronger than this?
Who is the genius who will tell us a legend more ravishing than this prosaic tale which is called life?
The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art.
In them we do not measure our works with the yardstick of beauty, we do not weigh them with pounds of tenderness and sentiments.
The plumb-line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass... we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits.
We know that everything has its own essential image; chair, table, lamp, telephone, book, house, man... they are all entire worlds with their own rhythms, their own orbits.
That is why we in creating things take away from them the labels of their owners... all accidental and local, leaving only the reality of the constant rhythm of the forces in them.
1. Thence in painting we renounce color as a pictorial element, color is the idealized optical surface of objects; an exterior and superficial impression of them; color is accidental and it has nothing in common with the innermost essence of a thing.
We affirm that the tone of a substance, i. e. its light-absorbing material body is its only pictorial reality.
2. We renounce in a line, its descriptive value: in real life there are no descripive lines, description is an accidental trace of a man on things, it is not bound up with the essential life and constant structure of the body. Descriptiveness is an element of graphic illustration and decoration.
We affirm the line only as a direction of the statis forces and their rhythm in objects.
3. We renounce volume as a pictorial and plastic form of space; one cannot measure space in volumes as one cannot measure liquid in yards: look at our space... what is it if not one continuous depth?
We affirm depth as the only pictorial and plastic form of space.
4. We renounce in sculpture, the mass as a sculptural element.
It is known to every engineer that the static forces of a solid body and its material strength do not depend on the quantity of the mass... for example a rail, a T-beam etc.
But you sculptors of all shades and directions, you still adhere to the age-old prejudice that you cannot free the volume of mass. Here (in this exhibition) we take four planes and we construct with them the same colume as of four tons of mass.
Thus we bring back to sculpture the line as a direction and in it we affirm depth as the only form of space.
5. We renouncethe thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only element of the plastic and pictorial arts.
We affirm in these arts a new element the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time.
These are the five fundamental principles of our work and our constructive technique.
Today we proclaim our words to you people. In the squares and on the streets we are placing our work convinced that art must not remain a sanctuary for the idle, a consolation for the weary, and a justification for the lazy. Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts... at the bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play; on working days and holidays... at home and on the road... in order that the flame to live should not extinguish in mankind.
We do not look for justification, neither in the past nor in the future.
Nobody can tell us what the future is and what utensils does one eat it with.
Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will.
We assert that the shouts about the future are for us the same as the tears about the past: a renovated day-dream of the romantics.
A monkish delirium of the heavenly kingdom of the old attired in contemporary clothes.
He who is busy today with the morrow is busy doing nothing.
And he who tomorrow will bring us nothing of what he had done today is of no use for the future.
Today is the deed.
We will account for it tomorrow.
The past we are leaving behind as carrion.
The future we leave to the fortune-tellers.
We take the present day
(signed by Naum Gabo and Noton Pevsner, Second State Printing House, August 5, 1920, Moscow)
Copyright Nina Williams
(3)
I reject the art of senseless beauty, the saccharine art of the aesthete, which weakens the strict discipline of universal culture and slows down its development!
The Futurists have done what they had to do, they have destroyed the "unshakable" art of the long-haired bohemians, they have ripped to shreds the ideology of the aesthete, they have shown us the bare numbers, but it is not their business to build the modern world. Today's world needs a mathematical consciousness of things. The age has arrived when truth is to be found in engineering, and as a Constructivist I express that truth, by creating my experimental spatial constructions. My aim is solely to realize the highest possible degree of economy and efficiency in the use of the particular material, which is the sole organizing principle of dynamics, space, volume, surface and line, light.
V. Stenberg (private collection)
(4)
Constructivism is the new science.
Constructivism is the movement in the development of world culture that teaches engineering to be efficient, practical, and socially useful.
The experimental spatial construction is the inner essence of the material.
The line conquers space.
The surface that does not violate the spatial arrangement is the sheet of glass.
The aim of constructive experiments is to arrive at a new basic formula for real application in technology.
The diagram of a spatial construction.
The area on which a construction stands is used for the movement of those externally necessary components that constitute the organization of the construction in question.
The general development of engineering gives rise to Constructivism when the narrow preoccupation with applied engineering is discarded.
G Stenberg (private collection)
(5) The Constructivists Address the World
"Constructivism will enable humankind to achieve the maximum level of culture with minimum expense of energy" (From slogans)
Before returning into his shell, every individual born on this planet can learn the quickest way to the factory that is developing the earth's one and only organism.
To the factory where a gigantic trampoline is being created for the leap into universal human culture -- the name of the way is Constructivism.
The great corrupters of the human race, the aesthetes and artists, have destroyed the stern bridges along that way and replaced them with a huge dose of sugar-sweet opium -- aart and beauty.
It is uneconomical to expend the essence of the world, the human brain, on reclaiming the marshes of aestheticism.
After weighing the facts on the scales of an honest attitude to the earth's inhabitants, the Constructivists declare art and its priests illegal.
K. Medunitskii, V. Stenberg, G. Stenberg.
Moscow, January 1922.
(From the catalogue of the Constructivists exhibition, Moscow, 1922)
Quotations are taken frm Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932, published in conjunction with the exhibition held: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, July 4-Sept. 2, 1990; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Oct. 7-Dec. 30, 1990; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Feb.-Aug., 1991. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1990.