Page 34 - Studio International - April 1971

the prevailing anti-psychologism. It would be
valuable to know more about the
VKHUTEMAS introductory course, which
seems to have been broadly similar to that of
the Bauhaus, but the exhibition of the
OBMOKHU, the group of younger, radical
VKHUTEMAS students, which included the
Stenberg brothers, suggests that the main
point of interest, for the most talented students
at least, lay in the engineering problems of
cantilevering, tensile strength, etc. Eisenstein
was another who was interested in the psychology
and semantics of art, but he floundered about
hopelessly in a mélange of Freudianism,
Pavlovian behaviouristic psychology and bits
and pieces of linguistics and a heavily
Hegelianized version of Marxism.
Thus very few of the avant-garde artists of
the time were at all equipped even to begin to
wonder what the ideological role of art was. For
the most part this kind of concern fell to the
proletarian artists, who adopted very simple
schematic criteria for abstracting political
messages from works of art and trying to
pinpoint the class position of the artist, on the
assumption that class ideology could be inferred
from this mechanically. The net result of this
inability to think through the ideological role of
art was to open the way for the kind of
hyper-political de-politicization which I have
described above. Where artists were unwilling
to sacrifice the concept of art completely, the
result was a peculiar, striking and ultimately
tragic new grotesque. Consider, for instance,
Tatlin's tower, his production of Khlebnikov's
Zangezi and his Letatlin air-bicycle, designed
on the assumption that the masses would need
air-bicycles. Yet this grotesque, far from being
unsatisfactory, as Trotsky found it, is to my mind
sublime. It expresses more than anything else
the quest for the marvellous and the Utopian
in contradiction with the exigencies of the
practical and the utilitarian. In this respect, it is
like Mayakovsky's last poem, the unfinished
prologue to the second part of a poem on the
First Five-Year Plan:
`Shameful common-sense— I hope, I swear—
Will never come to me.'
Malevich's funeral took place in December
1934, according to the instructions he had given
his pupil, Suetin. He was laid in state in a white
coffin, with a black square above a green circle.
ro Photograph taken during construction of house in rz Vladimir Tatlin Above his head hung his picture of the black
Moscow designed by K. Melnikov, showing the Letatlin, shown without fabric
architect and his wife 13 Kasimir Malevich lying in state in his home. square. A memorial pillar in his late
A. Akhtyrko Leningrad, 1935 architectonic style stood at the foot of the
Exercise in the Simplification of Forms coffin. A poem was read. The coffin, with its
guard of honour, was driven to the railway
of the psychic and semantic content of art. living image of a NEP-man, with folded station on an open truck with a black square on
Unfortunately Lissitkzy himself was out of handkerchief and spats ! —like the caricature the radiator. Over his grave was placed a square
Russia during most of the twenties and, though villains in Kuleshov's Mr West in the Land of of cement on which was painted a red square.
he acted as a catalyst for the European the Bolsheviks.) There was no tendency for the Proletcult was dead. The peasant-singers were
avant garde in general, he did not have much visual arts akin to the OPOIAZ group in literary dead. LEF was dead. Now Malevich was dead.
effect in Russia itself. Indeed, his studies, analysing the formal and semantic At the Hayward Gallery, there is another white
cosmopolitanism only made him suspect. qualities of poetry. Kandinsky had tried to coffin, in which is sealed the Lissitzky Proun
(There is a photograph of Melnikov, the most introduce, along with Vygotsky, a programme room, forbidden by the Soviet regime. One
talented of the ASNOVA formalist-constructivist of studies along these lines while he was in the day all the white coffins will re-open and the
architects, standing outside his own house, the INKHUK, but it came to nothing because of phantoms will emerge to resume combat.
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