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Subject: Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism: reviewed by Peter
Campbell (LRB)
And what, had its aims been achieved, would the constructivist world have
been like? There wouldn't have been paintings, because an art for the people
would have so shaken and renewed the forms of bourgeois creation that the
pictures shown here would be no more than discarded laboratory notes. ...
Narrative forms of film, writing and theatre would have undergone a
transformation. Life itself - recorded as documentary film, the crowd
becoming the audience for its own performances - would have taken over.
There would no longer be a need for authorial invention. The avant-garde in
Western Europe contemplated the dissolution of traditional forms; the
constructivists, high on the experience of revolution, looked to melt the
social matrix.
* LRB
* 9 April 2009
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n07/print/camp01_.html
At Tate Modern
Peter Campbell
Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, edited by Margarita Tupitsyn.
Tate, 192 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 8543 7796 8.
Liubov Popova was only 35 when she died of scarlet fever in 1924. Osip Brik
remembered her saying that 'no single artistic success gave me such profound
satisfaction as the sight of a peasant woman buying a piece of my fabric for
a dress.' Popova's designs (mainly simple geometric patterns, but also a
pretty one sprigged with a hammer and sickle motif, reproduced below) are
among the mass of material - paintings, drawings, stage and costume designs,
constructions, magazines, books, posters and advertisements - that fill the
12 rooms of Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism (at Tate Modern
until 17 May). The material is lively, inventive and memorable, poignant
even, because you know that early Russian modernism didn't die a natural
death but was cut down within a decade or so of its germination.
Popova's pleasure reflects the constructivist belief that art would, or
should, come to penetrate and transform every aspect of life, from
architecture to poetry, from manufacturing to the theatre. That a severe
version of abstraction with its origins in the isms of the prewar
avant-garde could be a design tool integral to a new socialist society was
not the most realistic notion bred by the Russian Revolution. The curator
Margarita Tupitsyn's account in the catalogue of the debates that took place
in the years after the Revolution documents the high ambitions, intense
arguments and divisive theories that the work can be used to illustrate.[*]
These discussions are not easy to follow and taken on its own the work more
often brings to mind an art deco cigarette case than a new vision of the
place of art in work and life. But the paintings are often handsome, the
drawings and constructions delicate and intricate, the pleasure in making
things new palpable.
The sour joke was that while at home the constructivists were ousted by
socialist realists, lost official backing, migrated into applied arts and
didn't achieve their high aims, abroad constructivism began a long afterlife
as a quotable source. Modern architects mined it for ideas. Graphic artists
used its conventions as a shorthand for 'revolution'. Any document printed
in black and red, illustrated with a photomontage and with sans serif type
set at an angle, is probably a distant descendant of something by Rodchenko
or Vladimir Tatlin. A 1917 design by Rodchenko for an aircraft hangar
decorated in red, blue-black and yellow with a star and slogans reminds one
of the folk art of conflict - Republican and Loyalist gable-end paintings in
Belfast, for example. The visual style of the Red Army would never be that
cheerful.
What was it like to live the constructivist life? The paintings tell us
nothing, except what colours to give the works we see on the walls of
studios and apartments in black and white photographs. Those photographs
themselves tell a little more. The living-rooms and workspaces look tight,
and you can imagine impassioned arguments among groups sitting close
together around crowded tables. At the end of the exhibition there is a
reconstruction of the library of the USSR Workers' Club, as it was shown in
the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels
modernes in Paris (Rodchenko's design for it is shown on the right). You can
sit in one of the very uncomfortable, hard chairs and turn the pages of a
book. The room is more aggressive than you imagine: the black and white
photographs in the catalogue disguise the quantity of red paint.
And what, had its aims been achieved, would the constructivist world have
been like? There wouldn't have been paintings, because an art for the people
would have so shaken and renewed the forms of bourgeois creation that the
pictures shown here would be no more than discarded laboratory notes. (One
reason Rodchenko and Popova went on making them was that they needed the
money - in the early days state collections were buying modern pictures.)
Visible social hierarchy would, of course, have disappeared; functional
clothing would have replaced the class identifiers of suit, overalls and
peasant costume. There are designs for rational clothing by Rodchenko and
Popova (the one here is by Rodchenko). Narrative forms of film, writing and
theatre would have undergone a transformation. Life itself - recorded as
documentary film, the crowd becoming the audience for its own performances -
would have taken over. There would no longer be a need for authorial
invention. The avant-garde in Western Europe contemplated the dissolution of
traditional forms; the constructivists, high on the experience of
revolution, looked to melt the social matrix.
The acknowledgments thank a 'new generation of Russian collectors who have
finally expanded the hitherto minuscule coterie of native owners of these
avant-garde pieces' for the loan of seminal works: a reminder that the
physical manifestations of the attempt to renew the relationship between art
and the people are now herded into commercial galleries and auction rooms
where markets make commodities of them. Perhaps it is a slip of the pen
which has Tate Modern's director, Vicente Todolí, say in his foreword that
the heart of the exhibition is 'the creative dialogue of the two most
significant artists of the 20th century and their fundamental conviction in
the potential of utopian abstraction to transform everyday life.' But even
if you read it as 'two of the', and accept the suggestion that their
'collaborative way of working and direct involvement in local industries has
influenced 20th-century fashion, media, theatre and cinema', you would also
want to say something about failed hopes and unsustained ambitions. Popova
and Aleksandr Vesnin's 1921 design for 'The Struggle and Victory of the
Soviets', a 'mass spectacle' intended to celebrate the Third World Congress
of the Communist International, was never used: the spectacle failed to take
place because of 'new control over street activities'. Although Popova's
fabric designs were successful, rational clothing never took off, and she
doesn't seem to have worn it herself. The relationship between the
constructivists and the people has the sadness of unrequited love. Too much
was being asked of them.
Note
* Tate, 192 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 8543 7796 8.
Peter Campbell is the London Review's resident designer and art critic.
