The Death of Painting (After Plato)

7/27/2019 The Death of Painting (After Plato)

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Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 2344 brill.nl/rp

R e s ea r chi n

Ph enomeno l ogy

Te Death of Painting (After Plato)

Ryan DrakeFairfeld University

AbstractWhereas the entrance o the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in

light o movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory ollowing in its wake, this essay

seeks to understand the motivations or, and the efect o, the monochrome in the work o

Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reerence to Platos analysis o pure pleasure and absolute

beauty in the Philebus. I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to

contend with the aesthetic and psychological efects o gurative semblance, or what Socrates

calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world o sensuous mate-

rial objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenkos strategy is to be understood

as a kind o materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Platos objects

o absolute beauty to be, in the context o industrial capitalism and the crisis o perception thatBenjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites o loss and meaninglessness or modern

consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential or a social order that

has been systematically alienated rom itsel and its environment.

Keywords

Plato, painting, constructivism, pleasure, Philebus, Gadamer

What spirit promises, not the sensual pleasure o the observer, is the locus o the sensual

element in art.

Teodor Adorno

Was it not Plato himsel who pointed out the direction or the reversal o Platonism?

Gilles Deleuze

We begin with the last picture. Or to be exact, with the last three, any o

which, in its very singularity, could hold an equal claim to be the last: PureRed Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color, a triptych o monochro-matic canvases, each adhering with utter severity and discipline to the letter

o its respective title. Some eighteen years later, recalling their initial


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24 R. Drake / Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 2344

exhibition in the all o 1921 in Moscow, Aleksandr Rodchenko ormulated

his achievement in equally spare terms with the amous statement: I reduced

painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue andyellow. I armed: its all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane, and there

is to be no more representation.1 Te critic Nikolai arabukin was the rst

to seize upon the historical consequences o these monochromes in his

address beore the general assembly o the Institute o Artistic Culture

(Inkhuk) scarcely a month ater their exhibition. Singling out the red canvasas his ocal point, he proclaimed: It is not merely a stage which can be ol-

lowed by new ones but it represents the last and nal step o a long journey,

the last word, ater which painting must become silent, the last picture made

by an artist.2 Te logical conclusion to which Rodchenko had pushed paint-ing was in act the realization o its inner teleology as a practice; in paintings

quest to demonstrate the material conditions o its possibility, to lay bare

those elements according to which painting could generate its particular

orms o aesthetic meaning, it encountered its own end in the orm o a

meaningless, dumb and blind wall.3 Paintings purity and sel-denition

was thus shown to be its death, the revelation that its essence consisted sim-

ply in illusion, in non-identity, and ultimately in its ight rom the sensuous

material world. Yet with regard to these last paintings, the very poverty oaesthetic content to be ound therein stands in dialectical relation to the

resourceulness o their critical, and indeed emancipatory, potential.

Te human epoch to which Rodchenkos gesture puts an end, according to

arabukin, could only now appear within its proper limits as an age marked

by an aesthetic longing articulated through dream-images, whose existence

presupposed that world which they could not reach and or which they could

only act as consolations or a subjectivity alienated rom its own sensuous

existence. In reeing the canvas rom its role as the bearer o images, o all sig-

niying distinctions as such, Rodchenkos monochromes attempt to overcomewhat Jay Bernstein has called arts Platonically decried liability, that is, the

1) From the manuscript Working with Maiakovsky (1939), published in excerpts in From

Painting to Design, exhibition catalogue (Cologne: Gallery Gmurzynska, 1981), 19091, quoted

in Magdalena Dabrowski, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Innovation and Experiment in Aleksandr

Rodchenko, ed. M. Dabrowski, L. Dickerman, P. Galassi (New York: Te Museum o Modern

Art, 1998), 43.2) N. arabukin, From the Easel to the Machine, trans. C. Lodder, in Ot Molberta k mashine

(Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1923). Reprinted in Modern Art and Modernism, ed.

F. Frascina, C. Harrisson (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 139.3) Ibid.


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R. Drake / Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 2344 25

liability which, beyond its sensuousness, has always made artworks abject,

deserving o the philistine disdain or the disappointment they cannot help

eliciting, namely, their being orms o mere semblance, hopelessly cut ofrom the domain o the real.4 Te Kantian schism between appearance and

existence, according to which all ree judgments o taste were presumed

possible,5 could no longer be maintained in the ace o an art orm that insists

upon nothing but its own material presence. As Rodchenko put it, not with-

out a note o triumph: We know that taste and pleasant sensations are dead

or ever.6

Yet i Rodchenkos monochromes are aligned with the Platonic aspiration

to transcend arts pretension to embody sensuous reality, the aims o the new

historical epoch that they sought to usher in can be seen, on closer inspec-tion, as both a radicalization and, in a certain sense, an inversion o a more

undamental tendency to be discerned in Platos writing, a tension that rubs

against the grain o Platonism as it is traditionally conceived. For, in sealing

the limits o the canvas and thereby seeking to put an end to the practice o

mere aesthetic contemplationa practice criticized most orceully by Boris

Arvatov, in that it inculcates a passive pleasure in illusion, and leads away

rom lie7Rodchenkos larger project was to rehabilitate human perceptual

lie, and thus the capacity or authentic experience, out o the anaesthetizingsphere o social relations in which art, and easel painting in particular, had

become increasingly complicit.8 Te modern crisis o the human sensorium,

its alienation and stultication in an expanding culture characterized by its

phantasmagoric efect on the subject,9 is, I wish to argue, the realization o

a potential pregured in the very origins o aesthetic discourse in the West. It

is precisely in light o Platos attention to the power o the phantasm, its

4) J. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning o Painting(Stan-

ord: Stanord University Press, 2006), 237.5) C. Kritik der Urteilskratin Werke(Cologne: Knemann, 1995), 4:57 f.6) From the transcripts o the Inkhukarchives, quoted in Selim Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko:

Te Complete Works(Cambridge, MA: MI Press, 1987), 84.7) Utopiya ili nauka, LEF [Levy Front Iskusstv], no. 4 (1924), 18. rans. and reprinted in

Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 105.8) As Christina Kiaer writes: Constructivist aesthetics was an attempt to enrich the body o the

socialist subject through the most appropriate orms o modern objectsto have industrial

technology ampliy sensory experience, rather than sedate or lull it, as it did under capitalism

(Imagine No Possessions: Te Socialist Objects o Russian Constructivism [Cambridge, MA: MI

Press, 2005], 37).9) For a thorough account o this crisis in perception, see Susan Buck-Morss Aesthetics and

Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, Octoberno. 62 (1992): 341.


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ever-present danger o transorming into a psychological etish wherein desire

and perception enter into an antagonistic relationship, that Rodchenkos rev-

olutionary gesture arises as the redemption o a Platonic demand: to discloseobjects in their sensuous presence, and thus to harmonize human practical

lie with the world. Tis attempt at redemption, holding true to the utopian

moment in Platos text, necessitates a sublation o the latter into a material-

ist Platonism10 placed in the service o beings within the lieworld. Yet it is

also on the basis o this shared commitment that such beings, among them

embodiments o pure color as displayed in the last paintings o 1921, through

which perception is to be redeemedor Plato, objects o pure, absolute

beauty and pure pleasuremust, or Rodchenko, appear rst and oremost

as objects devoid o aesthetic meaning, objects o disappointment, rustra-tion, and loss.

I.

As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, the search ater an understanding o

the concept o the phantasm begins with the Philebus, wherein the represen-tational activity o phantasy comes orth as painting in the soul.11 It is pri-

marily with thispsycho-zoographiathat Plato contends in his search to uncovera species o pleasure that may be harmoniously mixed with knowledge in

order to produce a orm o lie ( )12 that can be designated asunqualiedly good, and thus as the model o human striving. In particular,

in the PhilebusPlato is concerned with distinguishing between true and alsepleasures, conceived analogously with the status o belie () in its quality

o truth and alsity. It is in act due to the intrinsic link between and

psychic images, the latter originally owing their genesis to the

ormerthat an inquiry into the alsity o pleasure can take place, and in

which both are seen as graphics o the soul. As he has Socrates state, in the

context o perception

Memory alls together with the senses, and they and the eelings which are connected with

them seem to me almost to write words in our souls; and when the eeling in question

10) Bernstein,Against Voluptuous Bodies, 133.11) G. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. R. Martinez (Minnea-

polis: University o Minnesota Press, 1993), 7374.12) Plato, Philebus, trans. H. N. Fowler, in Plato VIII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1925), 35d; cited as Phil.


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writes the truth, true opinions and true statements are produced within us; but when the

writer within us writes alsehoods, the resulting opinions and statements are the opposite

o true. . . . [o which must be added] the presence o another workman in our souls at

such a time. . . . A painter, who paints in our souls pictures to illustrate the words which

the writer has written. . . . [As] when a man receives rom sight or some other sense the

opinions and utterances o the moment and aterwards beholds in his own mind the

images o those opinions and utterances. (Phil. 38e39c)

I it is out o the experience o perception, as the gathering together o mem-

ory with afections and , that the mental image, the phantasm, is rst

generated, we nd in the Philebusthat it is in the phantasms connection withdesire, that is, where it takes on a guiding role or conscious striving ater

pleasure, that the efect o the phantasm threatens to inhibit the healthy unc-tioning o perception. Specically, Socrates reers to the experience o antici-

patory pleasure wherein enjoyment is taken in the mere imaging that relates

to the uture in the modes o expectation and hope, or example, those

. . . [in which] oten a man sees an abundance o gold coming

into his possession, and in its train many pleasures; and he even sees a picture

o himsel enjoying himsel immensely (Phil. 40a). In essence, the phantasmarises in such cases in the orm o the wish-image. Withdrawn rom an imme-

diate orientation to the sensuous world, the pleasure arising rom the phan-

tasm that places itsel under the banner o desire,13 as Agamben puts it,

bears within itsel a potentiality to obscure ones own sensuous relations to

what is present at hand.

Tis efect o obscurity subtends the ethical rame, the reason or which is

not readily apparent, into which anticipatory pleasure is immediately set once

it has been proposed as an object o analysis. With regard to these images o

the soul that ofer virtual pleasures prior to the realization o those events in

which the desired pleasure is to be had, Socrates states that those are or the

most part true which are presented to the good, because they are riends othe gods, whereas those presented to the bad are or the most part alse . . .

[and urthermore] the bad rejoice or the most part in the alse, and the good

in true pleasures (Phil. 40bc).It was Hans-Georg Gadamer who rst drew out the phenomenological

implications inherent in this ethical connection,14 locating the decisive difer-

ence between the good and bad individual not, as it would seem, in the

13) Agamben, Stanzas, 74.14) H.-G. Gadamer, Platos Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the

Philebus, trans. R. Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 163 f.


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apparent luck o ate or in a superior power o predictive capacities on the

part o the good person, but rather in the diference to be discerned in the

respective being o each sort o individual. A bad persons anticipatoryenjoyment is deceptive because, in it, hope becomes a process o dreaming o

pleasant things, which as such directly conceals the possibilities that are given

in act and need to be provided or, and thus sees what is present in a light in

which it can never be satisying.15 Te alsity o the virtual pleasure taken

in the phantasm on the part o the bad individual is not, as it were, merely a

actual alsity, a wishing or things that will never materialize, but rather a

alsity that characterizes the very orm o liethe habits, motives,

attentivenesso the person in his or her undamental relation to the world

and to others. In coming to overlook the sensuously present world preciselyin an excessive attachment to the wish-image o the phantasm, the inerior

individuals sought-ater lie o enjoyment is thereby transormed on the

whole into its opposite in such a way that even its pleasure in a chimerical

image o hope is devalued by subsequent disappointment.16 Gadamer notes

that the alsity o such pleasureand in act, o the phantasms giving rise to

itis rooted in a perversion . . . in the persons whole being: 17

Precisely by continually intensiying hopes to unulllable levels in this way, this perver-

sion determines the persons overall state-o-mind as one o displeasure. Te continually

repeated shiting away rom what is present and rom the immediate uture or which one

can make provision only strengthens ones dissatisaction with the present, and thereby

ones displeasure.18

Te perversion o the soul to which Gadamer calls our attention within the

Philebus is not to be assessed simply as ones tendency to retreat rom theworld into phantasmic wish-images, nor as the inevitable process o sel-

orgetting in the character o pain to which one is drawn. It is also to be mea-

sured in its anaesthetizing efect,19 which subjects ones sensitivities toatrophication in a state o numbness that, as a concealment o ones pain,

comes to be regarded, alsely, as pleasure in its positive orm. Tus, where the

phantasm is increasingly held to as a value in itsel, even in circumstances

where its possibility o realization is no longer to be expected or hoped or, it

15) Ibid., 171.16) Ibid., 172.17) Ibid.18) Ibid.19) Ibid., 180.


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takes on the character o a hypostatized wish-image, a etish within conscious-

ness, in the ace o which material beings in ones midst are depleted o their

vital connection with the subject. Instead, they are apprehended in a mode oinsuciency or lack, and cease to become objects o potential sensuous ulll-

ment. In this way, the perversion o the soul to which Gadamer reers efects,

in its etishization o the image, a perversion o bodily perception.

In this sense, Arvatovs criticism o gurative painting, its unction o pro-

ducing a passive pleasure in illusion, applies just as orceully to the intrin-

sically valued phantasm o consciousness. Te latter coners upon the subject

a peculiar passivity precisely in virtue o the act that in such cases desire is

turned inward in such a way that it is incapable o exercising its powers o

revealing the nature o existent things to consciousness in its practical activ-ity. Tereore, its alsity is not based merely upon things that have not or will

not happen, but as well upon an ignorance o the world in which its pre-

tended pleasures would ostensibly take place, an ignorance that it sustains

and perpetuates.20 In such ignorance, concretely present objects are as well

made passive in their inability to make any vital claim upon the receptive

capacities o the individual, and are hence sterilized. It is this perpetuated

alienation rom the sensuous world precisely by means o the image-etish

that imprisons the subject in a sel-contradictory orm o lie: its virtual plea-sure associated with the phantasm actually creates the antipathy toward the

world which it, in turn, seeks to escape in its dreamlike passivity. It is also in

this light that Rodchenkos condemnation o art in its mode o mere

exhibitionthe phantasm externalized on the canvas and presented as a sel-

contained value21is to be understood, as he writes: Down with art as a

means o escaping rom a lie that is not worth living.22

Rodchenkos conviction is in keeping with Platos proposed alternative to

such orms o passive, narcotizing pleasure; indeed, or Plato representational

painting bears within it the same potential or a psychologicaland thereorepsycho-somaticdynamic o sel-contradiction. In the Philebus, even thoseanticipatory pleasures that are true, those o the good individual whose

desires are measured and appropriate, nonetheless carry with them the

20) C. Philebus40cd, wherein Socrates remarks that he who had an opinion at all always

really had an opinion but it was sometimes not based upon realities (), whether past,present, or uture . . . must we also not grant that pleasure and pain stand in the same relation to

realities?21) C. arabukin, From the Easel to the Machine, 13738.22) From Slogans, Khudozhestvennokonstruktorskoe obrazovanie[ArtisticConstructive Edu-

cation] 4 (1973): 206. Reprinted in Khan-Magovedov, Rodchenko, 291.


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possibility o concealing worldly objects at hand, insoar as they are tied to

the phantasm.23 Tus, in what has come to be a amous passage,24 he limits

the only genuinely true pleasures o perception to encounters with specickinds o sensuous objects, encounters that are themselves ree o desire and

thus ree o any guiding image:

Tose [pleasures] arising rom what are called beautiul colors, or rom shapes, most o

those that arise rom odors and sounds, in short all o those the want o which is unelt

and painless, whereas the satisaction urnished by them is elt by the senses (),

pleasant, and unmixed with pain. (Phil. 51b)

He continues:

For when I say beauty o orm, I am trying to express, not . . . the beauty o animals or o

paintings, but . . . the straight line and the circle and the plane and solid gures ormed

rom these by turning-lathes and rulers and patterns o angles . . . For I assert that the

beauty o these is not relative, like that o other things; but they are always absolutely

beautiul by nature. (Phil. 51bd)

It is clear here that the absolute beauty () to which Platoreers is not the otherworldly, eidetic absolute beauty o the Symposium,25reserved only or the philosophical soul, but rather aesthetic, i.e., embodied,

perceptual beauty. Te objects so designated provide the subject with pure

23) As Sylvain Delcomminette writes, by contrast with the , the is not

aroused by a perception: what makes it necessary is precisely the absence o an actual percep-

tion. Te unction o imagination is to compensate or this absence by producing a quasi-

perception which replaces it. Te main diference between such a quasi-perception and a real

perception is certainly that the rst can only be purely mental, while the second has been

dened earlier in the dialogue as a common motion o the body and the soul (c. 33 d234a9) (False Pleasures, Appearance and Imagination in the Philebus, Phronesis48, no. 3 (2003):

226). C., as well, Gadamer, Platos Dialectical Ethics, 178.24) Tis section o the Philebushas been requently cited in connection with the rise o abstract

art in the twentieth century, yet little work has been done to explain Platos choice o aesthetic

objects in terms o his motivation to release consciousness rom the seductions o the image.

C., or example, Alred Barr, Jr., Introduction to Phillip Johnsons Machine Art (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1934), 1; Ismail unali, Te Validity o Modern Art, Te Journal o Aesthetics

and Art Criticism 22, no. 2 (1963): 162; Edward Henning, A Classic Painting by Piet

Mondrian, Te Bulletin o the Cleveland Museum o Art55, no. 8 (1968): 243; Karsten Harries,

Building and the error o ime, Perspecta19 (1982): 63.25) Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in Plato III(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1925), 211b.


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pleasure precisely in virtue o the act that they do not presuppose the per-

ceived lack that is concomitant with desire and the pain that attends it. Being

ree o desire, they are thereore also ree o the phantasm that mediates onesrelation to sensuous beings, including, as seen above, the

depicted in paintings, which as well give rise to the associative desires o pos-

session, consumption, or use.26 And it is the latter that coner upon images

their character o relative beauty, insoar as these are subject to the contingent

associations, aims, and moods o difering individuals.

Yet the signicance o such beautiul objectspure, unadulterated colors,

sounds, and three-dimensional shapeslies as much in their positive charac-

ter as in what is negated therein. For Plato they appear to the subject imme-

diately, in their ull sensuous presence, such that their being and theirbeing-perceived are disclosed as a single unity o sense. In maniesting them-

selves as sel-identical (the sense o which is contained in the Greek phrase

, with respect to themselves), these objects possess a status thatwe might call elemental, because in them the very elements o all perception

as such are laid bare.27 Seen in this light, pure beauty and pure sensuous plea-

sure are or Plato naturally coextensive with complete revelation, what

Gadamer reers to as discoveredness in its extreme possible instance, and

thus truth.

28

In virtue o the absolutely beautiul objects complete prece-dence in perceptionits exclusion o any subjective actor that might limit

the ullness o its maniest sel-identityit is the locus o a non-conceptual 29

orm o aesthetic truth to which the human naturally responds in the recep-

tive mode o pure pleasure. Such pure objects thus enable a variety o

26) See Gadamer, Platos Dialectical Ethics, 18889.27) Te present reading o this passage runs in direct contradiction to the interpretation ofered

by Seth Benardete (Te ragedy and Comedy o Lie: Platos Philebus [Chicago: University o

Chicago Press, 1993]), who sees in Socrates discussion o pure pleasure only the characteristico lielessness, wherein such pleasure is true only because it cannot be sensed to be alse

(209). In going beyond lie, he continues, the objects o absolute beauty let us experience

the pleasure o non-being (210). Benardetes reading here is conditioned, as I see it, by limit-

ing his assessment o purely beautiul objects to their negative character without the corre-

sponding awareness o their elemental status within perception. For, in the Philebus analysis,

pleasures ailing had been seen up to this point in terms o its power to conceal beings and thus

to come about in direct opposition to the natural unction o perception; pure pleasure, on the

other hand, thus represents not non-being but, on the contrary, phenomena in their ull mea-

sure o maniestness and thereore harmonizes with our perceptive aculties.28) Gadamer, 190.29) Te pure pleasures connected with this revelatory aspect o elemental perception are explic-

itly distinguished rom the pure pleasures o understanding or knowledge at Philebus52a.


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sel-examination that complements the conceptual sel-examination that is

shown most explicitly within the dialogues: an analysis o the perceptual

aspect o human lie, alongside the cognitive one.Tis disclosive relation to the sensible ofered in the Philebusreveals not

simply a variety o pleasure that is ully harmonious with the good lie as

Plato sees it, but represents at the same time a model o human spontaneity

(spontaneous precisely because it is not shaped beorehand by and its

phantasm)30 and ulllment rooted in our embodied connection with the

world o things. Tis is to say, then, that the realization o human capacities

in a particular orm o lieeven, as Plato would have it, our ascent to

increased stages o metaphysical cognition that ultimately takes leave o the

particular, contingent, and transient dimensions o existencetakes as one oits preconditions a practice o shaping the material world with the purpose o

invigorating our sensory experience, its possibilities or bringing entities to

ull appearance, in an objective manner.

It is this overlooked (one might even say repressed) utopian moment in

Platos text, namely, the aspiration o orging meaningul, transparent rela-

tions with objectsthat is revived in the context o nineteenth- and

twentieth-century historical materialist discourses and the aesthetic practices

linked to them. Yet in the social and worldly landscape o the modern period,characterized primarily in terms o cognitive and perceptual alienation and

thereore o a dissolution o collectively-binding sources o meaning, the aspi-

rations conorming to Platos elemental model had themselves been reduced

to the status o a dream. In the context o this landscape, the oundational

purity o such visions that unite Plato and Rodchenko were to be experienced

in strikingly diferent terms.

II.

Narratives that seek to account or the ate o perception in modern lie over-

whelmingly invoke the ubiquitous presence o the phantasm as an increasing

presence within everyday existence under the mobilizing orces o industrial

capitalism. Beginning with Baudelaire the excess o the image emblematic o

30) Tis phenomenon constitutes the only apparent exception to Agambens overhasty statement

that desire and pleasure [in the Philebus] are impossible without this painting in the soul

(Stanzas, 74). It is true that desire or Plato is never without the phantasm (a conviction shared

by Aristotle in De Anima3, 10), but not so, as is clear above, with respect to pure pleasure.


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urban modernity, as a phantasmagoria . . . distilled rom nature,31 was dia-

lectically linked, in its intoxicating efect, with the impoverishment o indi-

vidual experience.32 In being constantly oriented to the new in the orm oever more dazzling and eeting spectacles, modern consciousness becomes

less able to retain the transient sensible appearances parading beore it.33 And

in his analysis o commodity etishism, wherein the sensuous material prop-

erties o an object that tie it to its use value are overlooked in avor o its

abstract exchange-value (that is, the primary way in which an object can

make its claim upon a subject through an elusive, ever-deerred source o

value), Marx as well took recourse to such language in characterizing the

metaphysical subtleties34 inherent within the commodity relation: Tere it

is a denite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the an-tastic (phantasmagorische) orm o a relation between things.35 In Marxsschematic, desire maniests itsel predominantly as the desire or possession,

in which sensuous contact between an object and the human subject is sec-

ondary to the abstract category o ownership and, thereore, where the sense

o having, as a purely contemplative pleasure o the imagination, usurps

actual embodied ulllment.36 As erry Eagleton writes, in the pervasive

bourgeois consciousness o capitalism, [d]esire, unconstrained by material

circumstance, becomes in [the subject] perversely sel-productive, a matter orened unnatural and imaginaryappetites which cynically luxuriate in theirown supersubtlety.37

In this contradictory, ascetic attitude characteristic o modern existence

contradictory because, in parallel with the aesthetic-psychological model o

the bad individual in the Philebus, desire is continually increased while its

31) C. Baudelaire, Te Painter o Modern Lie, in Te Painter o Modern Lie and Other Essays,

trans. J. Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press, 1964), 12.32)

For most o us, Baudelaire writes, and particularly or men o afairs, or whom naturehas not existence save by reerence to utility, the antastic reality o lie has become singularly

diluted (ibid., 15).33) C. Walter Benjamin: Baudelaire describes the eyes o which one is inclined to say that they

have lost their ability to look (On Some Motis in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, trans.

H. Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1968], 189).34) K. Marx, Capital, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

1978), 319.35) Ibid., 321.36) C. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o 1844, trans. M. Milligan (New

York: International Publishers, 1964), 139: All these physical and mental senses have

thereorethe sheer estrangement o all these sensesthe sense ohaving.37) . Eagleton, Te Ideology o the Aesthetic(Oxord: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 201.


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potential or actual satisaction becomes ever more diminishedconcrete

objects and the ulllment they promise orm the backdrop against which the

real actors are the constructions o socially-manuactured antasy. Indeed,capital itsel, to return to Eagleton, is transormed into

a phantasmal body, a monstrous Doppelgngerwhich stalks around while its master sleeps,

mechanically consuming the pleasures he austerely orgoes. Te more the capitalist or-

swears his sel-delight, devoting his labors instead to the ashioning o this zombie-like

alterego, the more second-hand ulllments he is able to reap.38

With an eye to Platos analysis o alse pleasure, such ormulations o modern

perception can be seen in terms o a particular relation to the phantasm thathas become pervasive as a mode o social practice wherein it is no longer a

perversion rooted merely in the being o the individual, but rather a perver-

sion proper to the order o social lie in general. As such, this perversion

transorms the everyday environment o the collective itsel into a sensory

dreamworld o etishized objects. Walter Benjamin, developing his diagnosis

rom both Marx and Baudelaire, writes that the new orms o behavior and

the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the

nineteenth century enter the universe o a phantasmagoria.39 Indeed, on

Benjamins diagnosis, objects within the urban dreamworld o the commod-ity relation had assumed a urther alienated status wherein even exchange-

value had been superceded in avor o their exhibitionary orce as

representational value,40 namely, as merely aesthetic semblances, advertise-

ments or their own ostensive worth in which the individual subject could

antasize his or her own wishes or their possession.41 It was thereore no

38) Ibid., 200.39)

W. Benjamin, Te Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press), 14.40) Susan Buck-Morss, Te Dialectics o Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project(Cam-

bridge, MA: Te MI Press, 1989), 8182. Buck-Morss reading o representational value

deepens the connection between the extreme orm o anticipatory pleasure in the Philebus,

where the seduction o the image is no longer a matter o hope, due to the act that its appear-

ance as a real possibility no longer matters to the desiring subject, on the one hand, and the

utile desires o the modern consumer, on the other: Everything desirable, rom sex to social

status, could be transormed into commodities as etishes-on-display that held the crowd

enthralled even when personal possession was ar beyond their reach (ibid., 82).41) It is this phenomenon that Guy Debord reers to as the spectacle: Te etishism o the

commoditythe domination o society by intangible as well as tangible thingsattains its ulti-

mate ulllment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection o images which


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longer simply the sphere o ne art in which the phantasm had been exter-

nalized in the guise o wish-images, but the perceptible world itsel, whose

efect was to mirror and intensiy the desires o its inhabitants while numb-ing the very sensory apparatus through which such desires could be ulti-

mately realized.42

One o the primary results o this dialectic between the externalized image

(and the desire attached to it) and perceptive atrophy on the part o the col-

lective was a constant psychological and practical armation o the social

order through which commodity productionand thus, the alienation o

humans rom the sensory world and rom each otherproceeded. Buck-

Morss notes that the excess o the phantasm in everyday lie carried with it a

compensatory social unction, namely,

manipulation o the synaesthetic system by control o environmental stimuli. It has the

efect o anaesthetizing the organism . . . through ooding the senses. Tese simulated sen-

soria alter consciousness, much like a drug, but they do so through sensory distraction

rather than chemical alteration, andmost signicantlytheir efects are experienced

collectively rather than individually.43

raditional orms o art, which had been regarded, at least since the publica-

tion o Kants Critique o Judgment, as possessing their own autonomoussphere o productive reedom, could not help but become enmeshed in this

dynamic and thereore could not avoid serving as high cultural armations

o the market society rom which they pretended to be aloo.44 For, as Peter

Brger puts it, even in ofering utopian images o transcendence beyond the

present state o alienating social relations, bourgeois culture exiles human

values to the realm o the imagination and thus precludes their realization.45

are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as theepitome o reality (Society o the Spectacle, trans. K. Knabb [London: Rebel Press, 1987], 19).42) It is in this sense that Buck-Morss observes that [b]eginning in the nineteenth century, a

narcotic was made out o reality itsel (Aesthetics and Anaesthetics, 22).43) Ibid., 2223.44) As Yve-Alain Bois states, in the context o painting, Even at the outset, industrialization

meant much more or painting than the invention o photography and the incorporation o the

mechanical into the artists process through the readymade tube o paint. It also meant a threat

o the collapse o arts special status into a etish or a commodity. It is in reaction to this threat

that the historicism and essentialism o modernism was developed (Painting: Te ask o

Mourning, in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model[Cambridge, MA: Te MI Press, 1990], 233).45) P. Brger, Teory o the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota

Press, 1984), 11.


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Te purported autonomy o artworks could be secured, then, only at the cost

o social and political inefectuality. In attempting to exploit the limited

degree to which it was deemed to exist untouched by mundane reality, artsefortsthose o painting, in particularat critiquing existing hegemonic

institutions rom within its own aesthetic domain by means o gurative rep-

resentation ended up producing psychological efects antithetical to its own

liberatory intentions. Benjamin Buchloh rightly discerns that modes o paint-

ing that remain within traditional orms o representation and their attendant

models o iconography can only culminate in a kind o practical resignation:

[s]uch paintings, experienced by a certain audience as sensuous, expressive,

and energetic, perorm and gloriy the ritual o instant excitation and perpet-

ually postponed gratication that is the bourgeois mode o experience.46 Likethe etish-character o the commodity, the projection o objects through the

mists o antasy served to arm, as it were behind the backs o their audi-

ence, their own ultimate unattainability.

In the ace o this threat o complicity with the reiying mechanics o com-

modity culture, avant-garde art inaugurated an inward turn, away rom the

armative character o its objects with respect to the world and toward an

investigation o its own technical and historical means o production. On

Clement Greenbergs amous account, the sel-critique o painting, itsattempt to puriy itsel o all inessential elements, was an attempt to solidiy

its position as a sel-contained source o value within modern culture.47 Yet

such solidication o independence through sel-critique was at the same

time a means o laying the groundwork or a rehabilitation o human percep-

tion and, thereore, or the possibility that art could gain a measure o politi-

cal salience available in no other eld o practice. Tis is to say that with its

46) B. Buchloh, Figures o Authority, Ciphers o Regression: Notes on the Return o Represen-

tation in European Painting, October16 (1981): 57. C. also Peter Brgers kindred assessment:Art allows at least an imagined satisaction o individual needs that are repressed in daily

praxis. Trough the enjoyment o art, the atrophied bourgeois individual can experience the

sel as personality. But because art is detached rom daily lie, this experience remains without

tangible efect, i.e., it cannot be integrated into that lie (Teory o the Avant-Garde, 13).47) C. Modernist Painting, in Clement Greenberg: Te Collected Essays, ed. J. OBrian, vol. 4

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 8593. It quickly emerged that the unique and

proper area o competence o each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature o its

medium. Te task o sel-criticism became to eliminate rom the specic efects o each art any

and every efect that might conceivably be borrowed rom or by the medium o any other art.

Tus would each art be rendered pure, and in its purity nd the guarantee o its standards o

quality as well as its independence. Purity meant sel-denition, and the enterprise o sel-

criticism in the arts became one o sel-denition with a vengeance (ibid., 86).


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entry into abstractness, the artsand painting in particularwere aimed

ultimately at an ameliorative engagement with practical lie, in other words,

with the concrete material conditions o their own possibility.48 In order todo so, armation in the representational sphere, i.e., in the realm o the

phantasm, was countered by its rigorous negation, not merely or the sake o

arts survival against the commodity-relation, but or the sake o sensuous lie

as such.

III.

It is within the context o these aesthetic and political dimensions, in theirintrinsic connection with the enchantments o the phantasm, that Rodchen-

kos monochromes are to be viewed. Te latter constitute the most radical

maniestations o this sel-critical tendency within avant-garde painting, a

reduction o painting to its essence, and thus, as he puts it, to its conclu-

sion. In their resolute atness and chromatic uniormity, beret o discern-

ible marks and even o texture, all that is let to perception is their color and

support structure. No narrative or literary elements intrude upon the canvas,

which is to say, in Platonic terms, that no visibly inects its mode o

appearance, and color is allowed to come orth without subordination to thegurative orm, the illusion, to which gives rise. With his own achieve-

ment o the monochrome in mind, Rodchenko writes:

Once artists began to look at the problem o color separately rom that o representation,

the signicance o the pictorial surace emerged in all its clarity, as a substitute or the illu-

sory nature o gurative painting. Te surace took on the whole o its unction.49

Tis analysis and separation, while reeing color rom its traditional bondage

to any sort o subject matter, was at the same time a phenomenologicalanalysis,50 in practice, o the bare elements o perception, an analysis

48) Rodchenko characterizes the practice o overlooking the material qualities o painting in

terms reminiscent o the alienation o the sel rom the world in the mode o anticipatory plea-

sure in the Philebus, namely, as a kind o orgetting: Trough illusion, the trompe loeil o real-

ity, [gurative art] tried to make the observer orget the presence o the at surace o the

picture (Te Line, in Rodchenko, 292).49) Te Line (1921), rom the InkhukArchives, trans. S. O. Khan-Magomedov; reprinted in

Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko, 29294 (here 293).50) C. Benjamin Buchlohs assessment o the Russian constructivist program as a whole, in par-

ticular his statement that these artists, Rodchenko among them, ultimately developed the rst


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consistent with the laying-open o pure sensuous elements in the Philebus.Yet at the same time, in superceding the predominance o the gure in paint-

ing, Rodchenko presents the painted surace as no longer the necessary back-drop that must become invisible or a gure to appear against it, but as

present materiality whose presence reuses to recede under the pressures o

representational semblance. In this way, the monochrome is no longer

painting-as-semblance, but rather painting-as-object, inserted into the world

o real objects in such a way that its embodied existence would be inseparable

rom its mode o appearance. A new approach to painting has emerged,

writes Rodchenko, and the picture has ceased to be picture, so as to become

painting and object.51

In its standing as a material object, Rodchenko envisioned the mono-chrome as ullling an indexical unction or human perception, a zero-point

o meaning upon which a universal perceptual logic could be constructed, in

distinction rom what he took to be the irreducibly arbitrary signicance o

painted compositions. In the latter, meaning was subject to the conventional

or even capricious views o individual ancy, mood, and most importantly,

social classwhat he dismissed as mere taste.52 With these last paintings,

on the other hand, the pure maniestation o color and surace were to neu-

tralize the spell o the phantasm precisely because there was no illusory mat-ter into which consciousness could invest its doxictendencies and, thereore,also no room or ideological mediation within the act o perception itsel.

Tus, or Rodchenko the monochrome had not only the potential to allow

sensuous materiality to appear to the subject on its own terms, as it were, but

also to appear in an objective, i.e., universally valid, manner, making an iden-

tical claim upon the consciousness o all viewers alike, regardless o any con-

tingent actors.53

systematic phenomenological grammar o painting and sculpture (From Faktura to Factogra-phy, October30 [1984]: 82119 [here 8788]).51) Te Line, 293.52) It was in act Rodchenkos antipathy toward arbitrary compositional efects in painting that

ultimately led to his reusal to ollow Kandinsky, who had been appointed the director o

Inkhukin 1920, and whose methods had been deemed too mystical in their criteria, relying as

they did upon the artists (linguistically) inexpressible attitudes, moods, and eelings. For a more

detailed account o this controversy, see Maria Gough, Te Artist as Producer: Russian Construc-

tivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 2005), 2833.53) Tis sentiment is echoed some orty years later in ony Smiths minimalist investigations o

shape and orm (deeply indebted to Russian Constructivism), taking as his supreme value o

reception a kind o direct and primitive experience as something everyone can understand

(Samuel Wagstaf, Jr., alking with ony Smith: I view art as something vast, Artorum 5,


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Yet i, as arabukin observed, the monochromes succeeded in embodying a

kind o painting that resisted all aesthetic meaningulness (associated, again,

with the phantasmic efect o semblance and all that it implies: beauty, taste,and those pleasurable sensations that Rodchenko saw t to dismiss), they

were also intended to inaugurate the end o the sort o contemplative com-

portment upon which art-objectsas well as commoditieslive: the passive

orientation to phenomena criticized by Arvatov and, as we have seen, by

Plato as well. Despite the act that Rodchenko claimed to have transormed

the painting rom semblance to object, he would have certainly been aware

that such transormation does not amount, at the same time, to an immedi-

ate transormation o socially and historically conditioned modes o seeing

and o the habitual comportment toward art-objects that betrayed an implicitconsciousness o their circumscription withinor rather, their relegation

toa non-worldly sphere. Tis latter transormation begins with a conron-

tation o the very conventions o viewing that have been shaped by an over-

riding orientation to the phantasm as such. Rather than being initially seen

in terms o their proper objecthood, his monochromes are haunted by what

they exclude; this is to say that they come orth to the viewer in a mode o

absence wherein the desiring vision attuned to scours the surace

o the paintings, searching ater the semblance that articulates its orm, thatgives it a meaning and thus an ever-deerred telos, and thereby claims desires

allegiance.54 Neither beauty nor aesthetic pleasure is to be gleaned rom their

suraces, but instead the disappointment o an aimless contemplative wan-

dering without resolution.55

no. 4 [December 1966), 1419. Quoted in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, (1967), inArt

and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 158.54)

In this vein arabukin proclaims that the artist working on pure orm and pure orm alonehas ultimately deprived his creation o meaning because an unadorned, empty orm can never

satisy us, who seek always or a content in it. A work created by a traditional artist had its

meaning in its aesthetic efect, on which its author counted. A construction made by a contem-

porary artist has lost this last meaning because the aesthetic was consciously rejected rom the

very rst step which determined the path o the new art (From the Easel to the Machine,

138).55) I nd this point to be a much-needed corrective to common, and undoubtedly Platonic,

misunderstandings oPure Red, Pure Yellowand Pure Blue, namely, that the latter are instituted

to recapitulate the ancient Greek vision o beauty in pure orms. Dabrowski, or example,

writes in regard to Rodchenkos monochromes that [t]he viewer was to ocus on the physical

parameters o the surace, admiring this styleless artistic object or the straightorward beauty o

its shape and color (Aleksandr Rodchenko, 43). As I have been arguing, however, or Rodchenko


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Te monochromes cannot, then, rst appear as unambiguous sites o pure

discoveredness in the way that the objects o absolute beauty are perceived

in the Philebus. In their unction o rustrating consciousness anticipation o,and in, , Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blueevince the loss osemblance as the reverse side o the loss o the sensuous world or modern

consciousness. In their liminal metaphysical position, they gesture to the

world o objects only by implicitly gesturing at the same time to those con-

structed orms o mediation through which objects no longer have their own

sensible vitality or the intuiting subject. Whereas the emptiness or lack that

makes possible the sensation o pure pleasure in the Philebus is an unper-ceived lack56 (which thereore makes the pleasure o the absolutely beautiul

objects a pleasure without antecedent desire), in this context it is the lack omediation itsel that becomes palpable in the ace o these canvases. Rod-

chenkos monochromes present us, then, at leastprimaacie, with materialityin the guise o absence, o a painting suciently direct and strong enough tonegate the phantasm, yet without being able thereby to become wholly part

o the world (i.e., mere object) nor to stand wholly at a distance rom it. o

put it otherwise, Rodchenkos attempt to overcome the Platonic lament o

art and its semblance-character, by Platonic ormal means, culminates in a

moment o conspicuous aesthetic meaninglessness that points to a necessarysublation o art itsel. Tis sublation, he understood, must begin rom within

the context o modern aesthetic comportment, must o itsel reveal the social

and psychological bankruptcy o paintings essential connection with illusion

and the unulllable desire that it provokes.57 In his commentary accom-

panying the 1921 exhibitions, Rodchenko writes: Tis is the nal achieve-

ment in the battle with representation, illusion in art, and the antastic. 58

Te death o painting had to be achieved by its own hand.59

beauty as well as the contemplative, admiring comportment to artworks belonged to the same

set o ideological practices and categories that served to anaesthetize the modern subject.56) C. Philebus34e35a, 51e52b.57) As Bernstein states, Te anti-art moment o modernist works, the moment that Duchamp

and Rodchenko attempt to make complete, enacts arts desire to be world and not art; but only

as art, as semblance, can art evince its desire, perorm it (Against Voluptuous Bodies, 247).58) From manuscripts in the A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova archive, Moscow. Reprinted in

Aleksandr Rodchenko, 51.59) Yve-Alain Bois notes here that [i] Rodchenkos gesture was so important . . . it was because

it showed that painting could have a real existence only i it claimed its end. . . . Rodchenkos

painting needed to attain the status o a real (nonimaginary) object, which meant its end as art

(Painting as Model, 238).


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Tis death was, then, the revelation o paintings own historical essence as

semblance; yet at the same time, Rodchenkos monochromes constituted a

re-denition o the essence o painting in its efort to undo the divide betweenthe concrete lieworld and, as he puts it, the antastic. Tis essence he reerred

to as aktura, that is, the material elements o the surace o the work.60 In

concert with paintings transition rom site o semblance to site o material

presence is the shit toward a new practical relation between subject and object,

a new relation that seeks to overturn the passive, contemplative stance toward

phenomena and to rehabilitate the connection between concrete sensuous

qualities and use-value. And in this connection the artwork receives its new

objective and universal meaning, namely, its relevance or social utility. Arts

new socially justied content, according to arabukin, once it has beenrmly anchored in the world o real objects, is the utility and expediency o

the object, its tectonism which conditions its orm and construction, and

which justies its social purpose and unction.61

In this light, the monochromes can be seen as an unparalleled achievement

o meaninglessness in both the old and new senses, a revelation o the

medium o painting in its utter inefectuality. Yet they nonetheless maintain

a critical, historical meaning insoar as they serve to clear the ground or a

mode o creative production aligned with the perceptual aculties and thevital needs o humanity as such, ree o all ideological mediation.62 Te move

that the monochromes inaugurated rom two- to three-dimensional objects

dynamic and practically orientedin the constructivist program was to be a

subsumption o artistic impulses under the discipline o engineering, the

shaping o materials or the requirements o practical social lie. Objects were

thus to be designed not rst and oremost or the admiring contemplation o

the subject, but or her embodied interaction with them, supplanting the

60) Te Line, 294.61) From the Easel to the Machine, 142. arabukin reers to this new practical art as truly

democratic: Lie no longer justies art objects which are solely dependent on their orm and

content. Te new democratic art is social in essence, just as individualistic art is anarchic and

nds its justication among separate individuals or groups. I the teleological art o the past

ound its meaning in recognition by the individual, then the art o the uture will nd such

meaning in recognition by society (ibid.).62) For critics such as Arvatov, this critical dimension o the monochrome could actually be sub-

sumed under the heading o a kind o utilitarian purposeulness. As Kiaer writes, in relation to

Arvatovs theory o art, the purpose [o a construction] in question is not necessarily only the

mechanical purpose o the thing, but can be interpreted as the larger purpose o conronting the

phantasmic power that the commodity wields in capitalism (Imagine No Possessions, 35).


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pleasurable sensations o detached and passive comportment with appear-

ances with the sensuous ulllment o active, unmediated engagement with

the concrete properties o real things.63 Te latter were in turn to be orgedand recognized in the status o equals, comrades, Rodchenko writes in a

letter to Varvara Stepanova, and not these black and mournul slaves64 that

he encountered on his trips abroad through the commodity culture o West-

ern Europe.

IV.

Tis shit to a new orm o sensuous ulllment in interaction with objectsboth in their production and in their use and consumptionthrough the

turn toward engineering is, in light o our attention to the Philebus, less astep away rom Platonic thinking than a salient point o accord with it. For,

o the orms o practical, worldly knowledge with which pure pleasure may

be harmonized in the composition o ones ideal orm o lie, Plato has

Socrates identiy the art o construction () as the supreme mode o

knowledge due to its rigorous observation o measure and, hence, exactness.65

Indeed, the tools according to which the primary objects o absolute beauty

are created, turning-lathes, rulers, and patterns o angles,66 are preciselythose with which the tectonic cratsman operates. Trough an adherence to

the demands o measure and accuracy, the senses or Plato are, on the one

hand, to be habituated in the direction o pure intuition in both the con-

struction o objects as well as in beholding and making use o them and, on

the other, to be protected rom the obscurity and uncertainty o obuscating

63) Te strategies o minimalism, the work o Donald Judd, ony Smith, Robert Morris and

others, could be said to comprise a re-instantiation o an interactive relation between viewerand object that is to this extent aithul to the constructivist program. Yet in withdrawing their

objects rom the world o utility and concentrating on the relational context between viewer

and object without directing that object to a particular social use, the minimalists open them-

selves to the same critique that Buchloh levels at El Lissitzkys 1926 installation oDemonstra-

tion Rooms, namely, that the objects in question, while introduc[ing] a revolution o the

perceptual apparatus into art, nonetheless are inserted into an otherwise totally unchanged

social institution, one that constantly rearms both the contemplative behavior and the sanctity

o historically rooted works o art (From Faktura to Factography, 9293).64) Letter o May 4, 1925, translated by G. Varese, M. Weaver, G. ihanov. Excerpted in Kiaer,

Imagine No Possessions, 3.65) Philebus55d56c.66) Ibid., 51c.


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appearances.67 We nd this attitude echoed by Rodchenko in 1921, at the

threshold o his transition rom construction on canvas to construction o

practical objects:

Te paintbrush, so essential or a painting that had to convey the illusion o an object in all

its detail, has become an inadequate instrument and been replaced by others. . . . Press,

roller, pen, rule and compass have come into use.68

Tis emphasis on tectonic measure was not, however, or Rodchenko a super-

imposition o mathematical ormulae onto matter, but was to be guided by a

consciousness o the specic qualities o the matter itsel. While having

recourse to the resources o measurement, the artist-producer took as her pri-mary point o orientation those material properties o the object with which

she was to work, conceiving out o them the objects ormal possibilities and

laws o construction in relation to human bodily needs and capacities.69 Tus,

the ideologically-neutral reliance upon mathematical and geometrical mea-

sure was to occupy a dialectical relation with the measured perception o

material quality, bringing to the human organism a consistent, disciplined

awareness o the physical conditions and preconditions o her existence. In

this way, it was hoped that the desire o the modern individual would not

starve itsel on abstractions o exchange value or semblances, that is, on thecollective ideological alienation o embodied existence rom intellectual and

imaginative , but would be coordinated essentially with the intu-

itions o real material use-value presented to it in the mode o a reshaped cul-

tural landscape, a landscape directed to reuniying the individual in his or her

67) Tis is a point overlooked by H.J.M. Broos in his essay Plato and Art: A New Analysis o

the Philebus (Mnemosyne4, [1951]), where he states, to my mind erroneously, that the abso-

lutely beautiul objects o pleasure are made by Plato as unsensuous as a Greek could possiblyimagine them (123). Platos emphasis here on the crating o such objects should serve as an

indication that such objects are the product o sensuous contact and shaping o material. Te

sensuousness that Broos seems to have in mind, on the other hand, would appear to be aligned

with the phantasmic impulse, tending to result, as we have seen above, in anaesthesia.68) Te Line, 293.69) C. Boris Arvatov,Art and Class: [F]or the rst time, thanks to the abstract [constructivist]

school, which teaches the mastery o materials in their pure orm, the artist can create a orm

or a given objective or content not rom a stereotype and not photographically, but by pro-

ceeding rom a given concrete case and rom experimental, laboratory practice. Tis afords the

possibility o artistic creation, in essence, contemporary, socially, technologically, and ideologi-

cally useul, prooundly vital and evolutionary (translated by J. Bowlt, excerpted in Te radi-

tion o Constructivism, ed. S. Bann [New York: Da Capo Press, 1974], 4348 [here 46]).


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comportment to the world. Such unication, and the production o objects

ostering it, would be the expression o a ree society, delivered rom the

reproduced perversions o desire and perception that constitute the crisis ocontemporary social lie.70

Behind the loss made thematic by the monochrome, then, lay the hope or

constructing a society in which traditional art and the pleasurable, consoling

sensations it occasioned would no longer have any place, where art, as

arabukin explains, continues to live not as a denite orm but as a creative

substance.71 Tis creative substance would be born out o constant contact

with objects in their concrete particularity, bringing about a orm o objective

sensuous ulllment that maniests itsel as the modern correlate o Platos

postulation o a pure pleasure in absolute beauty. Only thus, in accordancewith Rodchenkos aspirations, could the dream o pure discoveredness inau-

gurated in the Philebusbe realized in practice, a dream that seeks to put anend to the distorting dreamworld o the phantasm and leads to that harmony

o sense and consciousness, the lie dened by measure and unication,

which Socrates reers to as happiness.72 For Rodchenko, in the wake o the

Bolshevik Revolution, it went by another name, utopia, wherein every indi-

vidual would be capable o emulating the man who has organized his lie,

his work, and himsel,

73

and would thereby become a genuine artist.

74

70) Tis was, in act, the direction toward which Rodchenkos production moved in the 1920s,

where he, Stepanova, and Vladimir atlin designed a series o unctional objects or everydaysocialist lie, including beds, clothing, theater sets as well as the interior o a workers club, com-

plete with tables, chairs, and a speakers platorm. For a more complete study o this phase o

constructivism, see Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions.71) From the Easel to the Machine, 142.72) Philebus11d.73) Rodchenko, Slogans, 206.74) Earlier versions o this paper were presented at the 2009 New England Society or Conti-

nental Philosophy in Faireld, Connecticut, at Te University o exas-Pan American, and at

the 2010 Conerence o the Pacic Association o the Continental radition in San Francisco.

Tanks are due to Adriel rott, Jefrey Gower, Marjolein Oele, Gerard Kuperus, Michael Eng,

Anne-Marie Schultz, and especially Sara Brill or their helpul comments on, and encourage-

ment throughout, various drats o this essay.


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The Death of Painting (After Plato)