Page 28 - Studio International - September 1970

of the dilemmas of Marxist theory had been theory of a vanguard party and any diversion said in 1885 that realism was inadequate for
that while Marx was concerned to effect an from party doctrine a threat to its 'democratic expressing revolutionary ideas in art). But the
equilibrium between voluntarism and de- centralism', as it came later to be called. Constructivists did come close to one Marxist
terminism, consciousness and existence, his Two points are thus involved: the degree of idea in their wish to dissolve art itself. 'With
insistence on the foundation of his system on willing subordination to centralized control a communist organization of society', wrote
so-called scientific principles led to an over- and the relationship to dogmatic materialism. Marx (in his critique of the anarchist Stir-
emphasis on a kind of fatalism irreconcilable In the history of the avantgarde before the ner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), 'the
with either voluntarism or with the idea of First World War, most artists, not surprisingly, artist is not confined by the local and national
sensible experience. In the introduction to avoided centralization like the plague for its seclusion which ensues solely from the division
Capital he wrote : 'The ideal is nothing else than links with academies and governments, and, of labour, nor is the individual confined to
the material world reflected by the human when politically inclined, veered towards the one specific art.... In a communist society,
mind and translated into terms of thought'. anarchist ideal which, while positing social there are no painters, but at most men who,
Until 1904, when he joined the Mensheviks, ambitions, allowed far more room for in- among other things, also paint.' This is
Plekhanov had been Lenin's ideological dividualist freedom and self-expression, its mirrored, for example, in Lissitzky's question
adviser, and Plekhanov had refuted this idea spontaneous and romanticist objectives for `whether art is a self-contained, independent
of a passive reflection of reality, suggesting `revolt' rather than 'revolution' finding domain, or a part of the whole remaining
instead that received sensations are symbols sympathy in the self-centered attitudes of pattern of life'. He answered :
to be decoded and activated in the mind. artists revelling in the activist and antagonist In the new order of society, in which work
Lenin, however, came to oppose this, follow- aspects of social change rather than in its will cease to be slavery, in which there will
ing the orthodoxy that sensation provides specific creeds.14 In fact, it probably isn't no longer be small groups producing luxur-
'mirror-reflections of things', while on the too strong to suggest, as Jeff Nuttall has done, ies for a restricted stratum of society, but
organizational front similarly opposing Plek- that Anarchism is 'the only firm political where work is being done by everyone for
hanov's activist, voluntarist, emphasis. At ground for art'. While the dynamism of the everyone, in such a society work is given free
this time, however, when he desperately Russian revolutionary movement enrolled the scope and everything which is produced is
needed support, Lenin enrolled a small group leftist artists to its cause it is only with art. Thus the conception of art as some-
of intellectuals led by Bogdanov and influ- difficulty that they can, as a body, be de- thing with its own separate existence is
enced by the phenomenalist ideas of Ernst scribed as true communist artists. In the abolished.
Mach." But Bogdanov's acceptance from matter of submission to centralized control, And yet, this seems closer to Morris than to
Machism of the monistic notion that the no such requirements were demanded in the Marx, and related to the emotional mythicism
physical does not exist except in sensible early years of the revolution, and when they of contemporary artistic utopianist thought: to
experience, and the publication of these were made the artists tried, as we shall see, to Van Doesburg's 'modern' artist and Huelsen-
views in 1908, incensed Lenin, who recognized stave off this interference as long as possible— beck's neue Mensch where art in its freedom
a threat to materialism. His reply (Materialism for in his interpretation of a state aesthetic reflects rather than submits to advanced social
and Empirico-Criticism, 1909) identified reality Lenin came to follow, as did Stalin after him, tendencies.
to matter. Refuting the more 'dynamic' the Saint-Simonian/ Marxist line that a So far as materialism is concerned, of the
notions of the phenomenalists he warned that socially relevant art is one that is usefully Constructivists, Tatlin seems most obviously
to admit the mental coordination of experi- didactic, and comprehensible to the masses— a 'materialist' artist by allowing form to be
ence was to open the way to the heresy of i.e. realism, rather than anarchist-voluntarist dictated by content-holding material, thus
idealism. Moreover, the publication of facti- principles of free expression favoured by the creating a determinist system equally applic-
ous opinion was incompatible with Lenin's artists (incidentally, the anarchist Kropotkin able to revolutionary art and revolutionary