Page 27 - Studio International - September 1970

which the Obmokhu group emerged). Although But from the artistic point of view this replaced by that of 'function' it placed their
the excessive freedom of the studios eventually machine-romanticism was important in that, work further from the possibility of holding a
caused their closure (each student chose his as Lissitzky put it, 'it cut a way into the old Marxist meaning system. Functionalism was
own teacher under whom he worked without idea of art, thereby launching the operation thus disgraced. But well before this, the
any special restraint or examination), while for the conquest of art'. 'It was the economy autonomy of artistic groupings had been
they lasted they went far towards the ideal of of the age which created the machine. The successfully challenged, proved heretical, and
eliminating the distinction between artist and machine showed us movement, showed us isolated by the state. What happened to the
artisan and emphasizing the 'materialistic' circulation. It showed us life and how it Proletkult well illustrates the authoritarian
basis of their work (albeit in the somewhat vibrates and palpitates from the forces that reaction to unofficial 'reformism'.
unreal condition of state subsidy and spon- flow through it ...' The machine, it is implied,
sorship), thus prefiguring Gropius's Weimar gave to artists a clue to the workings of the II
School, even to the Constructivists' objections life-force. And although they 'reached a kind The heyday for the Proletkult, as for all the
to 'style', as expressed in this manifesto from of material-fetishism and forgot the necessity advanced groups, had been the years im-
the first number of Lef, the official constructi- of creating a new plan', 'the merit of Tatlin mediately following the Revolution. From
vist organ: and his colleagues lies in the fact that they 1917-18 it had opened study groups and
The material formation of the object is to accustomed the painter to working in actual studios for workers, students and the
be substituted for its aesthetic combina- space and on contemporary materials. They armed forces, pursuing its objectives towards
tion. The object is to be treated as a whole, approached constructive art'. (In another proletarian culture in such fields as theatre,
and thus will be of no discernible 'style', place, Lissitzky talks of Tatlin's synthesis of films, publishing and the fine arts. It operated
but simply a product of an industrial order Technischen and Kunstlerischen.)7 The implica- within the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of
like a car, a plane, etc. Constructivism is tions of technological theory are thus present Education, through the good offices of its
purely mastery and organization of ma- not only in the work of true Constructivists Minister, Lunacharsky, whose policy of non-
terials according to three principles : a, but also in that of such artists as Gabo and interference in artistic affairs, however, while
tectonic (act of creation) ; b, factura (man- Pevsner whose European activities gave it welcomed by the Proletkult, met strong party
ner of creation) ; c, construction. broad artistic currency. Moreover, the ma- opposition. But since the artists were now
Although Constructivism depends upon con- chine formed a common ground for both supported by and ideologically responsible to
struction-type principles it is more basically artists and architects and permitted the intro- the state, once it had time to consider the
a functional time-art,5 concerned with the duction of specifically aesthetic concepts into social role of the artist from its own stand-
creation of objects in a world of objects, to later architectural theory, for which the point changes were likely to occur.
which it has closer affinities than to the illu- machine-idea itself was more catalyst than Although the Revolution had been the great
sionist act of painting. Nicolai Tarabukin's content. As Mumford has said, 'the control of opportunity for the Proletkult to put its ideas
1923 publication, From easel painting to the the machine liberated the architects of this into practice, it had been formed as early as
machine, is not only a manifesto but also his- school (the International Style) from the 1906; and in its early years the philosophical
tory. But this 'from ... to' approach to theoreti- canons of architecture and enabled them to notions of its ideological leader, A. A. Mali-
cal writing, to become useful later to Moholy- superimpose on their compositions the canons novsky, called Bogdanov, had come under
Nagy,6 suggests that some values connected of painting'.8 sharp attack from Lenin. This dispute de-
with art are transposed into the new machinist Within Soviet architecture, the Ladovskian serves mention here for the light it throws on
activity. This is supported by Alexei Gann's ASNOVA group (Association of New Archi- some basic principles of Russian revolu-
Konstruktivism, written in 1920 but not pub- tects) of 1923, concerned with speculative tionary aesthetics, as well as for the later his-
lished until two years later : 'Art is dead', he formalism, gave way in 1928 to the constructi- tory of the Proletkult itself. 10
writes, 'Let us cease our speculative activity vist grouping of Ginsburg, Melnikov, Korn- The year prior to Lenin's foundation of the
(pictures) to take over the healthy bases of feld, the Vesnin brothers and others, who Communist party in 1903," his What is to be
art—colour, line, materials, and forms—into later took the name of SASS (Section of done? described his ambitions for the party as
the field of reality, or practical construction'. Architects of Socialist Construction), defining the 'vanguard of the revolutionary forces of
But the point was that they hadn't killed off Constructivism in the quasi-functionalist our time' (using, incidentally, the Russian
art at all; rather extended their aesthetic sense of the derivation of a building from an word avangard),12 insisting on narrow centra-
principles (`the healthy bases...') into a non- objective formulation of each of its parts.9 lized control and opposing 'spontaneity'. The
art field with their objectivist preoccupations, But this was as dangerous to vested interest as schism of Anarchists and Marxists at the
thus supporting their opponents' charge that the formalist romanticism of their predeces- Hague Congress of the 1st International had
Constructivism was mechanistic fetishism. sors: since the concept of content was here already been caused by similar problems : one