Table Of ContentA H M A N $ O N ■ M U R P H Y
FINE ARTS I MP R I NT
T H F. A H M A N S O N F O U N D A T I O N
has endowed rhts imprint
to honor the memory of
F R A N K I. 1 \ n. M U R V H Y
who for half a ccniurv
served arts and letters,
beauty and learning, in
equal measure by shaping
with a brilliant devotion
those institutions upon
which they rely.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous
contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment
Fund of the University of California Press Associates, which
is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.
THE ARTIST AS PRODUCER
The Artist
as Producer
Russian Constructivism in Revolution
M a ria G o u gh
UNIVERSITY Of CALIFORNIA PRESS / Berkeley Los Angeles London
mmmmmm
\ ,
■. N
d? i ^ . 5
i C> C? "i
i
o
' ' J I j
In memory of my father
University of California Press
Berkeley and I.os Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 200; by The Regents of the University of California
The author and publisher have made considerable effort to contact copyright
holders and to secure permission prior to publication. Any copyright holder
who remains unacknowledged may contact the publisher, who will correct the
oversight at the earliest opportunity.
Note on Transliteration: The Library of Congress System for the transliteration of
Russian is followed here, except m the case of names already familiar to English-
language readers in oilier forms (for example, Lissiizky and Mayakovsky),
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gough, Maria.
f he artist as producer : Russian constructivism in revolution / Maria Gough,
p. cm.
■‘Ahmanson-Murphy fine arts imprint.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 97k-0-520-216i8-o (cloth 1 alk. paper)
1. Constructivism (An)—Russia (Federation) 2. INKhUK (research
institute) 5. Art—Political aspects—Russia (Federation) I. Title.
N6988,5x64068 zoo;
709 -47 09°4* — dezz 2004016110
Manufactured in the United States of America
14 13 iz 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 j 2
I lie paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso
739.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments / vii
Introduction: Made in Moscow / 1
1 Composition and Construction / 21
Motivation
Vasily Kandinsky’s Inaugural Program: The Psychology
of Expression and Perception
Medium-Specificity: The Working Group of Objective
Analysis
Historicizing Medium-Specificity: In the Galleries
of Sergei Shchukin
Differentiating Composition and Construction
The Debate s Broader Contexts
2 In the Laboratory of Constructivism / 61
Tableaux
The Advent of a New Form
The Program
The Gallery
A Catalogue of Cold Structures (and One Mechanism)
Systemic Invention
3 Formulating Production / 101
Declaration and Dilemma
The Constructivist as Inventor
Two Drawings and the Problem of Sequence
Electrical Circuit (Representation)
Invention, without Determinate End
4 The Death of the Object / 121
Not Our Sputnik
I
I
1/
The Mortality of Cultures
Intermission: The Spenglcr Controversy in Russia, 1921-22
The Utopia Silently Contained in the Image of Decline
Nonobjectivity: Urphanomen of Contemporary Culture
w Nikolai Tarabukin’s Art of Production
if:;
■■ ..■ 5 Red Technics: The Konstruktor
>t in Production / 151
c
-:■ The Archaeology of an Experiment
In the Institute/ At the factory
l
Prokatchik’s Profile and Reconstruction
The Inventor at the Bench
ii-
Party Agitator and Production Organizer
The Artist as Administrator
ij
Conclusion: Constructivism in Revolution / 191
f;
Glossary and Abbreviations / 195
Notes / 199
f :
Selected Bibliography / 231
I
fist of Illustrations / 245
Index / 249
'i
Pi-
N
S;:
|::.i
F::
P~'
&
I
1
I
N
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The question is no longer whether the suprematist image is a better or more beautiful
image than the impressionist image; rather the question is whether the image as such
can continue to supply us with an accepted, fruitful area of work. The image itself is
in crisis—not because a couple of painters thought this up but because the modern
individual has experienced changes in intellectual structure that alienate one from the
image. The image is an aesthetic matter whereas what the radical artists of all nations
want is to lend immediate form to reality itself.... Soviet Russia was the first to
recognize the possibilities inherent in this great new goal and give it free rein.
Adolf Behne, on the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (Berlin, 1922)
As the co-editor of an exciting new series of books on contemporary
art—the Bauhausbiicher of the 1920s—Laszlo Moholy-Nagy proposes that the first book
focus on Constructivism, a phenomenon initially developed in Soviet Russia, but at the time
proliferating also in Europe and Japan, both engaging and confounding those encounter
ing it. In a December 1923 letter to Moscow, he invites Aleksandr Rodchenko— one of Con
structivism’s original and key practitioners—to author the proposed book. Moholy-Nagy
explains that the term “Constructivism” is now frequently used by germanophone artists,
but that few genuinely understand its meaning or significance. Reluctant to trust the testi
mony of Russian artists living in Germany, such as El Lissitzky and Naum Gabo, the edi
torial board wants the Constructivist story straight from the horse’s mouth.
How, 1 have often wondered, would Rodchenko have approached the task had he accepted
Moholy-Nagy’s invitation? Given the rapid accumulation of competing claims on Con
structivism by artists in Russia and abroad—in 1924 the De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg
notes the existence of at least eight Constructivist magazines-—what problems, objects, artists,
institutions, programs, terminologies, events, exhibitions (or industries, factories, rrusts, and
cooperatives, for that matter) would Rodchenko have included in the inaugural Bauhaus-
buch on Constructivism? And what would he have excluded? I raise this imponderable not
to second-guess the artists judgments, but rather to broach an essential caveat of the present
study: that every history, whether primarily speculative, polemical, critical, positivist, or ar
chaeological in orientation, inevitably leaves out more than it chronicles.
The place and time of this book is Moscow in the early 1920s. Most of its action and ar
gument occurs in and around the city’s Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut khudozhest-
vennoi kultury; INKhUK), an interdisciplinary research center in which Constructivism—
now widely acknowledged as the major innovation of the revolutionary period—first
materializes as a set of self-consciously articulated theories and practices. Its chief protago
nists are the seven original members of the institutes Working Group of Constructivists
(Rabochaia gruppa konstruktivistov), along with four of its theoreticians. Proceeding more
or less chronologically, this book offers a new account of the Constructivists’ laboratory ex
perimentation and their paradigmatic shift into industrial production, suggesting that what
these artists and theoreticians share as a group is less a set of formal procedures or political
imperatives per se than an unrelenting drive to determine the role and efficacy of the van
guard artist in revolution.
Focusing on a single—though without doubt the single most important—hotbed of Con
structivist activity, rather than attempting a broad survey of its every manifestation, has a
number of distinct advantages. Most immediately, it allows me to undertake an almost ar
chaeological reconstruction of a particular set of Constructivist objects—not only physical
artifacts, but also lexical inventions, theoretical principles, and polemical tracts—in an effort
to explicate the meanings inscribed in these objects but not immediately legible in them.
For a variety of reasons, such close reading has not played a vital role in the study of Con
structivism to date, but seems to me essential in order to bring its often difficult objects into
focus tor the contemporary viewer. This process of reconstruction enables, in turn, a map
ping of a range of Constructivist positions within the original group. By foregrounding this
relational field, it becomes possible to move previously marginalized figures out of the his-
toriographically constituted backyards and low haunts of history—to borrow an expression
from lurii Tynianov—and into its front parlor. Ultimately, a new story of Constructivism
emerges, one that challenges the existing historiography with respect to three critical prob
lems that inevitably arise in discussions of this extraordinary phenomenon: formalism, func
tionalism, and failure.
This story of Constructivism was written in the wake of the archival revolution of the
1990s. Like much recent scholarship on the cultural life of the former Soviet Union, it has
benefited not so much from the declassification of sensitive documents as from the more
liberal archival access granted researchers during the post-Soviet period. Given Construc
tivism’s contestation of the traditional division of art, labor, and technology into discrete,
mutually exclusive fields of research, this policy shift has played a key role in my research.
Instead of being confined to the state and private repositories pertaining to my specific dis
