Page 29 - Studio International - September 1970

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society. And, in opposition to those Con- Golosov, Project for a commercial centre, Moscow
1926
structivists who went into decoration and
graphic art, Tatlin asserted that material 9
Constructivist theatre costumes by Vesnin (top left
should not be subordinated to simply formal and bottom right), Exter (top right) and Rodchenko
tasks but rather ally itself to what he called (bottom left)
`concentration', namely the technological re- 10
Book title-pages by Iliyn (top right), Ouchakov-
finement which extends the simplistic use of Poskotschine (top right), Rhodosevich (bottom left)
material forms towards new complicated re- and Pojarsky (bottom right)
lationships determined by technological 11 & 12
Leftist and official design: Suerin's `Suprematist'
rather than aesthetic economy. Only with this plates of 1920 and plates produced by the state
collaboration 'a form necessary for life emer- factory at Leningrad in 1924
ges'. He thus 'proceeded from material con-
structions of simple forms to more compli-
cated : clothes, articles of utility in the
environment'. And with the emergence of new
cultural institutions what was needed was not so
much 'a feeling for the superficially decorative
but above all for things which fit the new
existence and its dialectic'.15 These objections
to a formalist-orientated 'culture of materials'
are echoed, but from the opposite direction,
by Malevich who believed it to be 'about the
beauty of the organism's feathers instead of
producing the image through the utilitarian
perfection of economic necessity'.1 6 It has
been suggested that Malevich was not so
much an anti-materialist as an artist wishing to
refute narrowly conceived materialist con-
ceptions,17 and there is probably much truth
in this. His God is not cast down was not an
attempt to discredit materialism (though his
contemporaries took it as such) but an artist's
attempt to reconcile his spiritual beliefs and
his social conscience. Yet this was done
through solipsism, by suggesting that both
church and factory represent a struggle for
spiritual perfection.18 Malevich's social ideal
is of Heraclitean flux rather than of dialectical
forward Marxist movement. 'Man is also a
Cosmos or Hercules', he wrote, 'around which