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Essay all about constructivism
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In what ways has art or design responded to the changing social
and cultural forces from 1917-1927 in Russia?
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During this decade in Russia there was a lot of upheaval and change socially and politically.
The country had just been through its century late industrial revolution and was trying to
catch up with the western world. Many groups arose from this change, such as the avant-
garde of Russia, who wanted to create a new aesthetic that ignored the traditional and
bourgeois ideals that previously existed. The communists wanted to reinvent Russia to
show it as a superpower, modern and better than the rest of the world, all the while hiding
the oppression of its people, famine and general bad working conditions. Artists and
designers responded to this social and cultural change by creating work that reflected the
ideals of the new communist society and sought to persuade the opposition and uneducated
peasants that it was the future of society throughout the world. They used their artwork
especially in propaganda pieces as a tool to spread the message of Bolshevism.
As Mikhail Guerman writes ‘True artists had long expected the revolution ... The revolution;
when it came, lent a new meaning to their work. There were of course no more rich
customers, no more well-born patrons.’ (Guerman. M, 1979, pg.5) The revolution gave
meaning to the artists, during and post-revolution. There had finally come a time where for
once besides creating for the bourgeoisie, they now instead were creating art nobly, for the
people. ‘Art continued to have an audience: people who sought answers in art, who used art
as a means of understanding what was going on around them’ (Guerman. M, 1979, pg.5) Art
had done a full u-turn, it was now full of emotion and meaning and it was now serving the
common people instead of hanging on the walls of the bourgeois. There was a language
developing within the art. Red became the colour of the people, the revolutionaries lost the
pent up anger and oppression of the past. ‘True artists had been brimming over with anger,
anxiety, and expectation long before 1917. They were learning how to look reality straight in
the face, to see the conflicts of the time and the tragedy in the world around them.’
(Guerman, M, 1979, pg.5) This pent up anger wasn’t just sudden of course, it was built up,
however with the revolution they were able to steer the direction and emotion in their art and
they couldn’t have had a better time to take advantage of it through artistic means. This
‘compassion for their oppressed, overtaxed and poorly run country united artists of all
generations and all styles’. (Guerman, M, 1979, pg.6) The revolution helped finally unify the
people to overthrow the bourgeois regime that was oppressing them; the artists came
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together, the young and the old to form the avant-garde. They did away with the traditions of
the past, for some however it wasn’t about that. ‘Their country served only as the backdrop
for their artistic experiments.’ (Guerman, M, 1979, pg.8) The revolution was just the perfect
backdrop for them to go wild as possible in their artistic endeavours in the hope that it would
be accepted by the people as the next new thing. These people couldn’t bear the burdens of
their new found life, post-revolution, they moved away to different countries where they didn’t
have to keep track with what was happening back at home. The revolution happened so fast
and changed so much for many people that it was too much, artists such as these used
Russia as a means of expression. They used it as a means of being more radical and
experimental without having to keep up with the pulsing pace of events. ‘Lenin furthermore,
proposed something entirely new: monumental propaganda.’ (Guerman, M, 1979, pg.12)
The proposed monumental propaganda by Lenin was revolutionary in itself; it was to
combine the past, present and future, in commemoration of the heroic freedom-fighters. This
creation of gigantic monuments brought all the artists together and gave them a reason to
create work for the new social order. The artists didn’t know what to build; they were
exhausted building them and had no clear conception of what the ‘new world sculptures
‘were, all they knew was that they had to be different to what had been created in the past.
Instead of creating monuments of freedom fighters many created the sculptures using their
emotions in memory of the men and women. Their built up emotion decorated the streets
with sixty-seven sculptures around Moscow and the rest of Russia.
The destruction and removal of all that was left of the Tsarist reign took away their influence
and essentially wiped them out of the capital, putting new communist statues in the old
monuments’ places. This epitomises the communist regime: out with the old, in with the new.
‘This was Lenin’s view of how art could most directly serve the masses and the new social
order.’ (Lodder. C, 1980, pg. 53) One such statue was the Marx and Engels statue (fig.1)
built from ephemeral materials, One of these materials was cement which was celebrated
with the new found modernity. It was a revolutionary material in itself, but at the time it was
of low quality. The statues were rushed and cheaply made just in time for the October
Revolution’s anniversary, Lenin wasn’t looking for innovation or artistic quality, and he was
just hoping the names in the inscriptions would suffice. Yet they didn’t because the statue
(fig.1) was laughed at by the public, it was neither liked nor disliked. The testament to the
monumental propaganda was the same as the material it was constructed from, it all
crumbled in the following winter, the materials were of such low quality they just fell apart.
One such critic of the work that was produced was Vladimir Tatlin who was worried Lenin
would have monuments created that would be more un-revolutionary, as Figure 1 illustrates.
In the hope of pulling forth new and talented sculptures to commemorate the true efforts of
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the communist regime, ‘the State, as it is now, cannot and must not be the initiator of bad
taste.’ (Lodder. C, 1980, pg. 53) If the regime was to taint its image now with its first big
undertaking, it wouldn’t do much justice to its reputation and lasting image of being
revolutionary like the rest of the country. What it needed was something that truly celebrated
modernity as well as the state. ‘Post-revolutionary monuments should demonstrate “a
synthesis of the different types of art” and employ the geometrical forms modernity called
for.’ (Lynton. N, 2009, pg. 55) One such art style and movement that came from the
revolution was what came to be called ‘Constructivism’, a movement that did away with the
notion of art for art’s sake, in keeping with the ideals of socialism. Constructivists worked
with materials, celebrating modernity in its purest form. While they did create artwork as
such, it wasn’t to be considered as artwork and it wasn’t work to be sold as they were
creating work for the people in mind. ’In reality it was something much wider: an approach to
working with materials, within a certain conception of their potential as active participants in
the process of social and political transformation.’ (Lodder. C, 1980, pg. 1) They became
part of the avant-garde which took part in the transformation of Russia’s image. Tatlin, as a
constructivist, had a big part within the monumental propaganda taskforce, bringing together
the power of the revolution and the people. The constructivists created abstract monuments
using many geometric forms to symbolise the events and people of the revolution. The
iconography of the Red wedge and White rectangle was born out of this, and was first seen
as part as one of the monumental propaganda pieces by Nikolai Kolli and later made famous
by El Lizzitzky’s ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.’ The constructivists talked to the
people using this imagery, and iconography such as this became common place with the
constructivists, it was a language people could read – despite being abstract - even if they
were illiterate. Red was the colour that summed up the oppression of the people. White was
the colour of the bourgeois and the Tsar, and anyone who opposed the Bolshevik regime.
"Constructivism is not, as one might believe, an artistic trend but an ideology born in
proletarian Russia during the existence of the Revolution ... The aim of constructivism is to
organize communist existence by shaping constructive Man." (Radford University) The
constructivists wanted to use their work to convince more people to think in the same way as
them: as proletarian socialists. This was the objective of the movement, to influence and
create likeminded workers who would contribute to the state through the use of new and
revolutionary methods of thinking. ‘Go into the factory, where the real body of life is made.’
(Lodder. C, 1980, pg. 2) The constructivists wanted to make work just they like factory
workers would. They weren’t concerned with creating works of beauty, and favoured
functional objects that made use of materials according to their capabilities. Their works
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were to be demonstrations of material behaviour; it was never dictated by the artist
transforming a material into something it is not. Instead, the material dictated the
construction itself and the meaning and ideas of the artist came second to the functionality.
One such example of this is The Monument to the Third International (fig.2) constructed by
Vladimir Tatlin, but never built as a fully realised building due to lack of funds. The frame
work of the tower was to be built of steel while the inner geometric shapes where to be made
from glass which would revolve at different periods of time. The use of material here adheres
to these principles and the materials’ behaviour, the use of steel demonstrates its strength
while the extensive use of glass is a modern technique, allowing the shapes to act as rooms
that the people inside can look out from. The glass shapes were functional, as most things
that were Constructivist were. The lowest block was to be a conference room; the triangle
above would house the International’s executive committee while the top cylinder would act
as the information bureau. “Modern technical apparatuses promoting agitation and
propaganda." (Vladimir Tatlin) The tower was to be the agitation and propaganda central
where it would all be produced to then be spread across the rest of the state and the rest of
the world. It wasn’t just going to stand as a monument as the name suggests, but to serve a
very important service in the communist agenda of spreading the message to the people.
Tatlin knew a monument to the revolution would have to be a tower because it would create
a silhouette in the skyline aimed to be taller than the Eiffel tower, it was truly a show of the
power of the people, and the supreme new country that it represented and was built in. A
structure influenced by the Tower of Babel, it would speak to the people internationally telling
them what communism can offer them and eventually unite the people through the use of
the agitation and propaganda made within the Monument of the Third International.
Therefore, the use of new materials show the advancements of Russian society catching up
with the west, and tried to prove it was better with structures grander and taller than those
celebrated in Europe. They also had a purpose in trying to spread Communism
internationally and were not art for art’s sake, which is a radical modernist principle.
The Constructivists’ end goal was something that could be mass produced for the people
and serve a political purpose, which was radically different to the traditional take on art that
everything is a one off sold at a high price to the rich. ‘Art as such had no place in the new
society. In its stead ‘intellectual production’ would serve the new communist collective by
fusing the formal experience gained from making abstract constructions in three dimensions
with the ideology of Marxism and the constraints of industrial production’ (Lodder. C, 1980,
pg. 3) This was the Constructivists’ thinking, that what they were creating was seen as
‘intellectual production’ because the new regime had no need for ‘art’ as it once was. The old
art would be against the ideology of Marxist anti-capitalism that Russia was trying to build its
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new society on. What they were trying to achieve was an art form suited to the goals which
came about as a result of the Russian Revolution. The constructivists were to create this
new society through their analysis and developed solutions to modern problems faced within
the regime, such as the illiteracy of the peasants and the task of persuading them to
embrace the new socialist thinking. Aleksandr Rodchenko designed a lot of work that would
be seen publicly, such as advertising and the poster ‘Books’ (fig.3) for example, created for
the board of the Leningrad branch of state publishing to persuade people to read more
books due to the illiteracy problem in Russia. The new medium and technique of
photography is used, which came about in the explosion of modernity and was seen as a
very easy way to show meaning to the illiterate and to get across a similar message that
would be otherwise done using typography. Figure 3 uses type and image effectively, with
the type rising to represent the fact that the woman is shouting. Hopefully the word books
wouldn’t be too hard to understand so the common people would understand that she is
telling them to read books. It is a work created to represent the communist cause, with the
symbol of the triangle penetrating the circle which represents the moment of revolution.
Women in Russia at this time became a lot more culturally equal with men and were a lot
more prominent than before within the media, the Bolshevik regime favoured women in
propaganda to express views held for hundreds of years. ‘The November Revolution of 1917
proclaimed women's complete economic, political, and sexual equality to men for the first
time. Lenin especially was an ardent supporter of women's rights, and asserted that the
Communists work to achieve total emancipation of women.’ (Lee. S, 2008) This then had an
effect on the art and design that the new world ideology of the Bolsheviks was to be
supported by. Women began to take prominent roles within society, but they were often still
discriminated within the workplace. The participation of women during the revolution was
seen as part of its success and the propaganda created was to try and keep them just as
encouraged to keep on supporting, which made them more prominent. However, the
problem with the women in Russia at the time was that many of them remained illiterate, so
posters such as Figure 3 with a woman shouting ‘Books’ it’s tried to persuade women to
educate themselves. Then, they could get more involved within society so they could serve a
bigger part within political and social matters. If more women were educated, then the theory
was that they could help the rest of the family and pass on their knowledge to the next
generations. This meant that women had the hard task of trying to balance work with looking
after the family in this new ideology.
In conclusion Russia society and culture in this period changed dramatically due to the Civil
war and Revolution which radically altered the way in which the country was run. In a time of
modernity this meant that the people had new ideas on how bring about international change
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in perception of Russia. Rodchenko illustrates this: "We had visions of a new world, industry,
technology and science. We simultaneously invented and changed the world around us. We
authored new notions of beauty and redefined art itself." (Alexander Rodchenko) The
changes in Russian society meant that art and design had to respond in a new way that was
revolutionary. This brought about a new found appreciation for the functionality of materials,
and a visual language that spoke to the people and for them within art and design.
______________________________________________________________________
Bibliography:
Guerman.M (1979 ‘Art of the October Revolution’, Aurora Art Publishers, Finland, First Edition)
Lodder. C (1983 ‘Russian Constructivism’, Yale University Press, America)
King.D (2010 ‘Red star over Russia’, Tate Publishing, England)
Wye.D (2002, ‘The Russian Avant-Garde Book’ Museum of Modern Art, First Edition, America)
Lynton.N (2009, ‘Tatlin’s Tower, Monument to Revolution’ Yale University Press, First Edition)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/04/russian-avant-garde-constructivists
http://www.kettererkunst.com/dict/constructivism.shtml
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art428/constructivism%20introduction.html
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-constructivism.htm
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-rodchenko-alexander.htm
http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0910/lse/lse1.html#ii
http://metropolis.co.jp/arts/art-reviews/rodchenko-stepanova-visions-of-constructivism/
http://everything2.com/title/Vladimir+Tatlin%2527s+Monument+to+the+3rd+International
http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=593
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Figure 1: Marx and Engels by Sergei Maezentsev in
Voskresenkaya square, Moscow.
Figure 2: Vladimir Tatlin, ‘The Monument to the Third
International.’
Figure 3: Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Books!’