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From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
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Subject: Russia's aesthetic revolution: An exhibition of Soviet architecture
at the Royal Academy of Arts (The Independent)
Russia's aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today's
architects
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/russias-aesthet
ic-revolution-how-soviet-building-still-influences-todays-architects-2373447
.html
An exhibition of Soviet architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts will
showcase radical work of great prescience and experimental power. And, says
Jay Merrick, its influence is still felt today
Friday, 21 October 2011
In the courtyard of London's Royal Academy of Arts stands the 20th century's
most avant-garde strand of architectural genetics. The veering red spiral,
intersected by a girder jutting through it like a rocket launcher, is a copy
of the original model of the Monument to the Third International, designed
by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920. Had it been built to its intended scale as the
headquarters of the Communist party, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower.
In a world awash with "iconic" architecture, nothing comes even close to
radiating the raw potency of this truly revolutionary form.
That is why the Royal Academy's new show, Building the Revolution: Soviet
Art and Architecture 1915-35, deserves to be stampeded. The word
"revolution" has become discredited, and this show thoroughly re-energises
its meaning in art and architecture. The key fragments of Russian
revolutionary creativity still glow like radium, living on in its remaining
art and buildings, and hard-wired into the imaginations of some of the 20th
and 21st century's most influential architects.
Today, art and design is rarely prompted by bold and difficult ideas about
human and civil improvement. Even Rem Koolhaas, architecture's most
provocative intellectual, admits that his profession has been reduced to
playing eternal catch-up with corporatised aspirations and trend data. Gil
Scott Heron, the godfather of rap, once proclaimed that "the revolution will
not be televised." But it has been, through the nose-cones of cruise
missiles and the high-res prisms of global marketing strategies, in which we
all have perpetual walk-on parts.
In the Royal Academy's Sackler Galleries, you will enter a creative world
stripped back to its bare nerve fibres by the Third International, the
meeting that created the Soviet bloc in 1919. The exhibits blow-torch the
flaccid "designer" mentality that has robbed most contemporary art and
architecture of fractiously humane otherness. This show is an irony-free
zone, a laboratory containing some of the stark experiments that ignited the
most radical movement that modernist art and architecture has ever known.
In the 1920s and 1930s European modernist designers, primarily influenced by
the ideas and work flowing from the Bauhaus school of art and design in
Germany, were mostly interested in luxurious forms ocean liners, cars,
aircraft, private villas. Their Russian counterparts preferred the imagery
of warships and communal living blocks.
And the greatest of those was the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, which
predated Le Corbusier's much more famous equivalent, the Unitι d'Habitation
in Marseilles, by two decades. The Narkomfin building still stands and, as
the superb recent photographs by Richard Pare in the exhibition show,
physical decay has failed to blunt the power, originality and ethical heft
of its architecture.
Russian revolutionary design continues to inform contemporary architecture.
Zaha Hadid, for example, has always worshipped at the altar of Suprematist
art from that period. The radically fragmented structures designed by Rem
Koolhaas and Steven Holl had already been thought of by Soviet revolutionary
artists. And in London, the inverted L shape of Peckham Library was clearly
prefigured by El Lissitzky's Cloud Iron, beating Will Alsop to that
architectural punch by a mere 75 years.
The unique thing about Russian art and architecture in the 20 years after
the October Revolution in 1917 was that it was specifically intended to
create ideas and forms for a physically and socially recomposed Russia. It
was the only avant-garde design movement in history embedded in government
policy. In Britain, we are used to the opposite statutory approval of
mostly mediocre architecture marketed as being world-class, or even
revolutionary.
In Russia, desperate times generated visionary responses. Vladimir Lenin and
his Council of Peoples Commissars inherited a country riven by violent
economic and social upheaval. Between 1916-17, industrial production fell by
a third; there was mass unemployment and rioting against landowners; the
buying power of the ruble plummeted; and Russia's national debt rose to 50bn
rubles, a fifth of which was owed to foreign governments. Russia faced
bankruptcy and even greater chaos.
Lenin invoked a shock-of-the-new policy that sought radical, collectivist
solutions to housing, cities, and production that would re-educate the
masses in a process called proletkult. The exhibits in the Sackler Galleries
are among the key blueprints for this short, astonishingly experimental
quest for a post-revolutionary utopia.
The art and design that was produced rapidly attracted the interest of
western architects and writers. The French architectural magus Le Corbusier
designed the Moscow headquarters of the Central Union of Consumer
Cooperatives. Erich Mendelsohn, who co-designed the marvellous De La Warr
Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, created the Red Banner Textile Factory in St
Petersburg. Le Corbusier, Mendelsohn, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius
director of the Bauhaus were invited to take part in the design
competition for the Palace of Soviets.
The vast metal frame of that unfinished project, designed by the Russian
architect Boris Iofan, infuriated the visiting French writer Andrι Gide, who
wrote: "The Russian worker will know why he starves in front of this
415m-high monument crowned by a statue of Lenin in stainless steel, one
finger of which is 10m long." America's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd
Wright, attended the 1937 Russian Congress and was equally dismissive.
The steel was re-used for fortifications and bridges in the Second World
War. Stalinist priorities effectively put an end to avant-garde modernist
art and architecture in Russia. Russia was in Cold War mode, and further
creative adventures were out of the question. The proletkult ethos was
revised. Stalin wanted buildings to be more obviously approachable and
accessible, rather than physically or intellectually challenging.
That might, in a postwar situation, seem perfectly reasonable. But it was
implicitly soulless and militaristic. Art became part of the "heroic"
propaganda machine, and architecture more monolithic and barrack-like in
form. The banal slab-blocks that soon scarred the historic cityscapes of
Russia and eastern Europe represented a very different idea of social and
cultural progress.
But in the 1920s, the sheer voltage of ideas that had seethed through
Russian art and design generated two lasting phenomena: Suprematist and
Constructivist art and architecture. The histories of these two strands of
experimental design are complex and interwoven. Put very simply, Suprematism
was invented by the artist Kasimir Malevitch in 1915, when he exhibited a
painting called Black Square at the now legendary Last Futurist Exhibition
in St Petersburg.
His other paintings were composed of circles, squares and crosses on white
planes, which he referred to as the "zero of form". The salient point about
Suprematist art is that it flattened geometry to avoid any hint of
perspective or three-dimensional depth. The geometry was supposed to force
the viewer to imagine, or synthesise, a mysterious fourth dimension of
avant-garde forms and spaces.
At the same exhibition, Tatlin produced a series of constructions that
experimented with abstractions of form and materials. We might, very
broadly, think of Suprematism as the profoundly imaginative and
philosophical basis of Russian revolutionary creativity, and of
Constructivism as the search for a more physically obvious and practical
expression of it in art and architecture.
More rewarding explanations can be found in the exhibition catalogue, whose
authors include Jean-Louis Cohen, Maria Tsantsanoglou, Christina Lodder,
Maria Ametova and Maria Rogozina. The catalogue is the most engrossing foray
into early modernism since the V&A's superb publication, Modernism:
Designing a New World.
But even the most thoughtful texts can't convey the raw effects of the art
and photographs in the Sackler Galleries. It would be easy to say, for
example, that Ivan Kliun's Study for Three-dimensional Construction is
nothing more than a dry intellectual exercise involving an arrangement of
geometric shapes. But look how rapidly they've been sketched and positioned,
denying any possibility of a formal conclusion. By comparison, Tatlin was
always sketching geometric arrangements which clearly begged to be made into
maquettes or models something potentially useful.
Art history nerds will be in their element. It's intriguing to discover
links between, say, Tatlin's 1915 Drawing for a Counter-Relief, and Alexandr
Rodchenko's Spatial Construction No. 5. Or between a tangle of blue angles
by Rodchenko and Konstantin Vialov's designs for the Construction of a Radio
Tower revolutionary art transmuted into broadcasting for the proletkult.
Not all the art on show is visually gripping, or thought-provoking.
Konstantin Medunetski's sketches, for example, are dull and unprovocative
compared with the majority of exhibits; and, though it is heresy to suggest
it, Malevitch's multiple skyscraper model, Architecton Zeta, seems nothing
more than a stolid and pointless constipation of oblongs and cubes. Mind
you, even a dud like that was prescient it's exactly this kind of lumpen,
vainglorious hulk that has become de rigueur in Dubai and China.
On the whole, though, Building the Revolution provides a stream of sharply
edged revelations that slash through preconceptions, and which will be of
great interest to the new wave of artists and architects. Why? Because there
is no such thing as avant-garde art or architecture today. And because the
"new" ways we see and experience art and buildings rarely have anything to
do with purely experimental explorations concerning form or perception. Most
current art and design merely heightens our feelgood sense of ephemerality,
commodifying our thoughts and emotions.
The intellectual and imaginative provocations of the art and photographs on
show are a bracing antidote. These Russian artists and designers were
producing work with titles such as Flying Cities, and Dynamic Cities
utopian phantasms that would, nevertheless, excrete enough useable essence
to produce some of the most remarkable modern art and architecture the world
has ever seen.
For this reviewer, standout works in the exhibition are by El Lissitzky,
Gustav Klutsis and, very particularly, the female artist Liubov Popova. One
only has to glance at the complex fusion of flat-plane geometry and implied
tubular perspective in Lissitzky's Sketch for Proun 6B to sense a hotline to
Daniel Libeskind's multi-plane Micromega drawings in the 1970s. Gustav
Klutsis's Construction series seems to prefigure aspects of the
deconstructive forms suggested by Peter Eisenman at about the same time.
The range of visual and formal experiment produced by Lissitzky and Klutsis
is remarkable. The former was perfectly capable of evoking both the tense
contradictions of Suprematism and textured Constructivist
three-dimensionality in a single work; Klutsis brought brilliant graphic
skills to revolutionary art, producing tough, but inspiring conflations of
different kinds of structure in a variety of media.
Popova was the wild card, producing fearless work that brought together
elements of Cubism, Constructivism and Suprematism. To gaze into the
geometric perspectives of brown, black and red oils and white marble dust on
the big plywood sheet titled Spatial Force Construction is to experience a
kind of ruthless breaching of the unknown. The other works in that series,
and her stage-set designs and maquettes, are equally unsettling.
The architectural photography in the show is by no means of poor cousin
status. Historic monochrome photographs of the Moscow City Electric Power
Station, the proto-Brutalist and Steineresque buildings designed by
Konstantin Melnikov, the vast Gosprom complex in Kharkov, and the
magnificently strange Moscow radio mast designed by Vladimir Shukov in 1922,
transmit with grainy force the sheer effrontery of Russian revolutionary
architecture.
So, too, do Richard Pare's tenderly composed colour images of some of the
great buildings that remain. The highly original architectural power still
radiated by them has been captured with consummate skill, and may yet help
to save superb buildings such as the Narkomfin block from ignominious ruin.
Pare's internal views of the Dneiper dam and the Red Banner factory are
masterpieces of atmospheric detail. I have not seen more compelling images
of rotting modernist buildings since Dan Dubowitz's portraits of Cardross
Seminary in Scotland, taken in the early 1990s.
Tim Tower's excellent interview of Richard Pare in the catalogue is a
must-read for all architectural students: Pare brings an articulate and
poetic sensibility to architectural visual history. He knows not just what
he's looking at, but how to look at it.
And that, ultimately, is what is at the heart of this show. Building the
Revolution challenges us to reconsider a unique way of seeing, designing,
and believing, that refuses virtuosity or obvious reasoning. It is a vision
that is still thrilling in its awkward intensity. The Royal Academy is
harbouring a 21st-century proletkult.
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35, Royal Academy
of Arts, London W1 (020 7300 8000) 29 October to 22 January
'My own work first engaged with the early Russian avant-garde'
By Zaha Hadid
Ninety years ago the October Revolution ignited a most exuberant surge of
creative energy. While some of the artistic seeds were present beforehand,
they blossomed in the first 10 years of the revolution. This explosion of
creativity developed under severe material circumstances fuelled by the
idealistic enthusiasm for the project of a new society.
The pace, quantity and quality of the creative work in art, science and
design was truly astounding, anticipating in one intense flash what then
took up to 50 years to unfold elsewhere in the world. The Russian
avant-garde not only anticipated the urbanist concept of the 1950s, but
projects were designed that anticipated the mega-structure utopias of the
mid-1960s and the high-tech style of the 1970s. Leonidov's 1927 project for
the Lenin Institute was 50 years ahead of its time and his 1934 competition
entry for the Soviet Ministry of Industry a composition of different
towers placed on an urban podium remains an inspiration for metropolitan
architecture today.
One of the most refreshing aspects of this Russian work is the way these
projects were embedded within an intense discourse; promoted by exhibitions,
academic institutions and public competitions. These projects in all their
experimental radicalism had a real social meaning and political substance;
but their originality and artistic ingenuity transcends the context of the
Russian social experiment. For instance, Alexandr Rodchenko's hanging
sculptures are pure explorations of space, which opened up a whole new
sensibility the sensibility of the Space Age.
My own work first engaged with the early Russian avant-garde; the paintings
of Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky's 'Prouns' and Naum Gabo's sculptures, but in
particular with the work of Kasimir Malevitch. Malevitch stands here for the
enormously momentous discovery of abstraction as a heuristic principle that
can propel creative work to hitherto unheard of levels of invention. Mimesis
was finally abandoned and unfettered creativity could pour out across the
infinitely receptive blank canvas. Space, or even better the world itself,
soon became the site of pure, unprejudiced invention.
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