Page 57 - Studio International - October1968

which turns out to be the perfect ordinary business took on a seminal role; here was the revolution of denounced as 'revisionist', 'counter-revolutionary',
suit. It is therefore an exhibition where one can content that the surface revolutions of Cubism, etc. Letatlin re-states the Monument's idea of a
justifiably throw the accent onto the catalogue. Suprematism, etc. according to Tatlin had ignored; fusion of aesthetics and utility; but the stress is
This has been compiled by Troels Andersen; it's this new content paralleled the revolution in clearly thrown away from any identification of
in Swedish and English, and is very well worth society. It attracted considerable attention, from utility with technology. Indeed in a manifesto on
having. the Grosz-Heartfield manifestation to Lissitzky's the project he wrote of 'The artist's.... work as a
As Pontus Hulten writes in his introduction to the collage, from Trotsky to Bruno Taut. It was one of counterpart to technology'. But if some critics had
catalogue—'...it's the initiatives Tatlin took which the symbols of the machine age. In the early 20s attacked the technolatric aspect of the Tower, some
are more important than the projects he realized'. the machine played the role that God had played now were sceptical of 'technological Khleb-
It is on these initiatives that one judges his stature, for earlier artists; but it was a God not only to be nikovism'. (Incidentally the critic who coined that
and there are three such occasions which are of venerated, but, so they hoped, used. So, post- phrase—and whose review was, in fact, generally
considerable importance—for Tatlin and twentieth- revolutionary Constructivism is clearly mechano- favourable, informed and informative—also quotes
century art as a whole: (1) The reliefs of 1913: latric. It was not long however before disillusion these lines of Khlebnikov:
(2) The project for the Monument, 1919: (3) Letatlin, became evident; in 1925 one finds Mayakovsky Tatlin, seer of paddles
his flying machine, 1930-31 (`his attempt to build writing 'not the hymning of technology, but its And strict singer of the screw
wings for the human body'—Troels Andersen). control in the interests of humanity'. At about the Poet of the troop of sun-catchers'.)
All three works reveal an impressive re-assessment same time Tatlin was working in the Shevyprom Khlebnikov's own primitivism was matched in
of his own activity; for this alone he deserves our factory designing textiles, but also staging Khleb- Tatlin; Grosz writes of him in 1922 as living in a
attention in our acceptance culture. The reliefs nikov's epic poem Zangesi, which, characteristically, decrepit apartment which he shared with his hens,
made after a visit to Picasso's studio deny Tatlin's is not only Utopian but primitivist as well. Inci- playing his homemade balalaika, not 'an ultra-
previous work, which was based on fauvist, cubist dentally, Tatlin's note on staging the work seems modern Constructivist, but a piece of the genuine
and primitivist sources; they open the doors to a to indicate that he too believed, like Khlebnikov, ancient Russia....' Letatlin was almost a denial of
new attitude towards 'art'. They develop auto- in the possibility of creating a Zaoume, or trans- technological thought. It was based on the study of
nomously and lead to the idea of the 'culture of sense language. insect flight, its wings expressing for their maker
materials'. Inherently their development is rational; The misplaced optimism of Tatlin and those with aesthetic perfection—indeed he was at pains to stress
formally the works are junk assemblages (though similar ideas was of course the same then as now the artistic side of the work. Probably it never flew.
some of the later pieces do seem more formally —technology belongs in the hands of the power According to contemporary calculations a man
conceived). The culture of materials led to the elite (politico/economic) and has become, via would never have sufficient energy to propel it. But
idea of 'uniting purely artistic forms with utili- their interests, a means of repression. In Herbert that was a practical consideration (static as well).
tarian intentions'. The Russian Revolution drove Marcuse's words 'In this universe, technology also Tatlin's ideas were far more flexible—one would
such conceptions home. Without the Revolution provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom learn to fly it as one learnt to walk, or swim. As
not only would there have been no project for the of man and demonstrates the "technical" impossi- Troels Andersen puts it 'His manifesto with its
monument and a whole host of `constructivist' bility of being autonomous, of determining one's title "Art out into technology" thus has an undeni-
manifestations from Lissitzky's Tribune to Eisen- own life. For this unfreedom appears neither as ably strange and challenging overtone'. That the
stein's Strike, but the face of the world now would irrational nor as political, but rather as submission challenge was fairly specific—aviation, architecture,
be quite different. to the technical apparatus which enlarges the and what he calls 'Constructivism in inverted
In 1918 Tatlin was appointed head of the Plastic comforts of life and increases the productivity of commas'—does not lessen its basic relevance. Just
Arts Section of Narkompros, Moscow; the follow- labour. Technological rationality thus protects as long as the divorce between technology and
ing year the same Commissariat commissioned him rather than cancels the legitimacy of domination, creative society remains (and the art/technology
to design a monument to celebrate the 3rd Inter- and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on experiments of our time are hardly more than
national. He worked on the project in Petrograd a rationally totalitarian society...' Realization of peripheral games), then the artist's role remains
with two chief assistants. Although the concept is this was to come rapidly to the Russians and with- ambivalent—most choices are made in the range of
obviously technologically Utopian (standing as- out the comforts that come with it in the West. Luddite, indifference, or consoler and demonstrator
tride the Neva, towering 1400 ft. in the air, its The Russian avant garde was just one sector to that we learn to live with our alienation—the
thermos walls embracing various revolving offices come under continual attack; Tatlin like many positive role is Revolutionary. It is, I believe, as
though 'not museums or libraries of any kind since others was left no room to even re-question his own clear now as it was in Russia in the 20s that the
their character should be changing the whole basic assumptions. His flying machine—Letatlin— creative person cannot ignore the total social con-
time'— Punin), it is also `artistic'; the technical does not seem to have been sponsored in the same text in which he works. Tatlin's work is indissolubly
decisions grew out of artistic intuitions—that they way as the Monument, and two years after its rooted in such a context—consecutively: intima-
worked is quite a small miracle in itself. The project completion was exhibited as 'formalist', i.e. tion; celebration; opposition. Ronald Hunt