Page 25 - Studio International - April 1966

Outlines for a public art

by David Thompson

Inasmuch as Gabo is often thought to be Constructivism, assumptions behind it are always those of human progress
his career brings us up against the two contradictory and development; when he writes of the 'Constructive
things about it as one of the seminal movements of Idea' he uses the word 'constructive' in its most conversa-
modern art—that it is in a sense already static, com- tional sense, meaning simply 'helpful' or 'contributing
pleted, realized, and at the same time hardly begun. towards progress', quite as much as its more technical
The first of these statements is obviously heresy to any one. (`The artist in his art is led by an idea of which he
Constructivist artist, let alone to Gabo himself, for one of believes that it epitomises . . . what the collective
the most conspicuous characteristics of the movement is human mind of his time feels and aspires towards. . . .
that 'brave new world' tone which rang out so thrillingly Though his idea may or may not eventually prevail . . .
in Moscow between 1917 and 1920, became the keynote it nevertheless is performing a function without which no
of The Realistic Manifesto and has been sustained ever progress is possible', as he says in the Trowbridge Lec-
since, without loss of challenge or idealism, in Gabo's own ture.) The Constructive aesthetic is sustained by the
Monument for Bijenkorf writings. Gabo himself avoids talking about his own art belief that because of the logic inherent in its assumptions
Building, Amsterdam as 'an art of the future' : he states quite emphatically that about the role of art in the modern world it can in the
Begun 1954, completed 1957
Height 50ft. it is about the present and exists in the present. Yet the end contribute something towards making that world a
saner place to live in.
What is there, then, static, completed or realized about
it? I don't intend to imply that it is anything which, in
fact, cancels out Constructivism's potential as a forward-
looking art, but only to recognize the existence of a
criticism which Gabo has himself recognized, at least to
the extent of feeling obliged to contradict it. 'I have often
used the word "perfection",' he wrote to Herbert Read,
`but "perfection", in the Constructive sense, is not a
state but a process; not an ultimate goal but a direction.
We cannot achieve perfection by stabilizing it—we can
achieve it only by being in its stream.' That such a funda-
mental point should be misunderstood may be naive, but
it is, frequently, misunderstood.
One of the most extraordinary things about The Realistic
Manifesto (one of the very few manifestos of its kind in
the early history of modern art which doesn't read
slightly embarrassingly today) is that in it Gabo set out
in its entirety a programme which has barely required