Co-Opted

From the 1860s to the early 1920s, Camilla Gray writes in her history of the Russian avant garde art community, a debate raged over what art should be, whom it should serve and where the artist should fit into society. There were two general positions on the matter. On one side, a crimson thread beginning with the group known as "The Wanderers" and ending with the Constructivists just after the Revolution believed that art existed for something beyond itself, that it should speak to and live within the context of human life. The opposite perspective, a white thread beginning with the wholistic artistic vision of a group known as the "World of Art" community and ending with the abstract Supremacists, believed that art was spiritual and that the artist's job was to bear witness to these highest ideals.

The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1992 (Thames and Hudson, 1986, 324 pp.) tells the story of how the crimson thread won. This edition, revised and enlarged from Gray's original 1962 manuscript, tells a story of how art in the modern world took its place in social change, then lost it in the agit-prop of Socialist Realism. Artists dropped their easels--and the idle speculation that took place there--to become industrial designers, creators of a futuristic aesthetic that melded people to machines.

The Marxist overtones in Gray's narrative, though unexplored, are clear. Marx believed that simply creating art for art's sake was unproductive labor because the artist would be simply a merchant of his or her produce and would exist outside the relationship of capital. The artist needed a job that would connect him or her to the material facts of economic life. The Constructivist aesthetic was a materialist aesthetic, which means that it dealt with the materials first and then explored the consequences of those materials. It created art from the bottom-up, using the mundane aspects and motifs of common life as the substance of expression and making stoves, coffee pots, buildings, clothes sites of artistic creativity. It explored the concrete functions of life and the relationships between flesh and steel. But ultimately, it required that the artist have something to do.

In a way, Gray's work suggests that the appeal of Communism among artists was not just ideological but existential. In the triumph of Communism, artists throughout Russia and the West found a purpose again.

In Communism they saw the answer to the sad isolation of the artist from society which the capitalist economy had introduced. In Russia, under this new-born regime, they felt a great experiment was being made in which, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the artist and his art were embodied in the make-up of common life, art was given a working job, and the artist considered a responsible member of society.

The times were heady. Just after the Revolution, during the period of heroic Communism, artists were grasping at ideas that were beyond their reach. Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for a Monument to the IIIrd International was perhaps the most expansive:

Tatlin's Monument was to be twice the height of the Empire State Building. It was to be executed in glass and iron. An iron spiral framework was to support a body consisting of a glass cylinder, a glass cone and a glass cube. This body was to be suspended on a dynamic asymmetrical axis, like a leaning Eiffel Tower, which would thus continue is spiral rhythm into space beyond. Such "movement" was not to be confined to the static design. The body of the Monument itself was literally going to move. The cylinder was to revolve on its axis once a year: the activities allocated to this portion of the building were lectures, conferences and congress meetings. The cone was to complete a revolution once a month and to house executive activities. The topmost cube was to complete a full turn on its axis once a day and to be an information centre. It was constantly to issue news bulletins, proclamations and manifestoes--by means of telegraph, telephone, radio and loudspeaker. A special feature was to be an open-air screen, lit up at night, which would constantly relay the latest news; a special projection was to be installed which in cloudy weather would throw words on the sky, announcing the motto for the day--"a particularly useful suggestion for the intemperate North."

Dealing with the material facts of existence did not mean relinquishing imagination, but channeling it towards revolution. And revolution, it seems, lay at the core of what these artists were about.



The fact that Gray begins her history two years after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 is important. The idea of a modern Russia seemed to be in the air, but no one seemed to know what it meant. A 1907 painting by Valentin Serov, Peter the First, seems to capture the spirit. This painting, drawn in a traditional representational style, shows the tzar striding against the wind as his retinue struggles to keep up. One gets the sense that Russia was--perhaps always has been--struggling against an invisible force pushing it back from the modern West, which it seems to want to be but never can be. The artists Gray depicts are similarly passionate, striking out against the world and themselves. Artists starved to death and engaged in fisticuffs. There is something passionate and violent here, a self yearning to break free. One can see Ayn Rand happening.

Though she died in Russia of hepatitis in 1971, Gray's book is important because of its comprehensive treatment of a period of Russian art history that is little understood. It is not without its defects, though some of these were beyond Gray's control. At the time, few good color images existed of many of the works she discussed, and little about the period has been published. As it admirably perseveres against these issues, however, Gray's brisk prose sometimes moves too briskly. She fails to offer a proper intellectual context, such as the relationship with Marxism, that would make the artists more intelligible.

In addition, the rejection of Constructivism in favor of Socialist Realism and the effects of that rejection on the artists who saw Communism with hopeful eyes is also neglected. This is an important question, because it speaks to the arts in our own time, when artists of all kinds have been incorporated into the relations of capital. What happens to art when it becomes a commodity, when it must become "useful"? What happens to artists when they face censorship, no matter how noble the reason? And human creativity? In finding a purpose and a paycheck, the artist runs the risk of losing her soul.