Page 25 - Studio International - September 1970

Constructivism

and the

objective world:

an essay on

production art

and proletarian

culture

John Elderfield

The revolutionary monument: a simplified version of The philosophers have only interpreted the world, connection coincided with the establishment
Tatlin's Monument to the Third International carried
through the streets of Leningrad in various ways; of Lenin's 'New Economic Policy', which
the point, however, is to change it. effected a 'normalization' of social organiza-
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. tion, it would be wrong to assume that the
compulsion for change towards the utilitarian
The term 'Constructivism' is now used to employment of artistic labour was the result
define so vague an area of art, both histori- of political pressure from a hostile state :
cally and thematically, as to be virtually Tatlin, Rodchenko, Vesnin, Mayakovsky,
meaningless; but in Russia of the early twen- Meyerhold, Eisenstein and others did not
ties its meaning was relatively clear. In his `sell-out' to the state but gave their services
editorial manifesto to Veshch, El Lissitzky freely in the hope of achieving a new society
explained the 'life' connections of the word : as much as a new art. Of the pure artists,
`Art which is constructive, which will not nearly all by 1922 had left the country, re-
decorate life, but organize it... not distracting tired to less prominent positions, or had joined
people from life, but helping them to organize the ranks of the Constructivists. Constructi-
it.' Although 'beyond' art itself, Constructi- vism thus marks the end of the period of free
vism was directed not towards anti-art but to artistic experiment, but the beginning of the
non-art and thus represents, in post-revolu- attempts to transfer the foundations of art
tionary Russia, an attempt to achieve a genu- into daily life.
ine socially useful aesthetic, an attempt to The great seducers of the human race, the
answer Marx's call for a philosophy aimed aesthetes and artists, have demolished the
not at interpretation but actually doing bridges ... and through a haze of mawkish
something.' narcosis they have offered art and beauty in
exchange. Man's brains, the essence of the
I world, are being wasted and dissipated to
The term Konstruktivism was first used by swell the morass of aestheticism. Having
Tatlin and his associates in 1920, and meant, weighed the facts on the balance of their
basically, 'art is dead'. It referred not simply honest relationship to the world's inhabi-
or necessarily to an art of construction-type tants, we declare art and its bosses to be
principles, but beyond art to an involvement outside the law.3
in social and technological ideals, through the Reading like a Dada manifesto, this pamphlet
materials of its society; and Tatlin's stand of the 0 bmokhu Constructivists (Society of
for these principles occasioned the schism of Young Artists) reveals their intense and vio-
leftist artists, dividing those concerned with lent opposition to anything other than what
art-autonomy, the `Suprematists' and 'Real- one of their members, Yoganson, called
ists',2 and those who from respect for the state `direct usefulness'. It is 'the factory where the
established felt it their duty to make a use- real body of life is fashioned', and the shortest
fully-orientated kind of object. Although the route there 'is called Constructivism, the
abandonment of pure art by Tatlin and his highest springboard into universal human