2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Art and the people
Between 1919 and 1920 Vladimir Tatlin was busy working on his Monument for the Third International. It would never be built, of course, but this is hardly the point. Tatlin was, at this stage in his career, in the process of turning his back on the purist art of his earlier reliefs and constructions -- pieces which he regarded, in any case, as laboratory works, one of the reasons why so few have survived -- in favour of a more utilitarian application of constructivist ideas to production and design.
In The Work Ahead of Us, the manifesto Tatlin wrote for the Daily Bulletin of the Eighth Congress of Soviets (it was written towards the end of 1920 but appeared only in the 13th number, on 1 January, 1921), this transitional phase is described thus: "The investigation of material, volume and construction made it possible for us in 1918, in an artistic form, to begin to combine materials like iron and glass, the materials of modern Classicism, comparable in their severity with the marble of antiquity. In this way an opportunity emerges of uniting purely artistic forms with utilitarian intentions. An example is the project for a monument to the Third International.
"The results of this are models which stimulate us to inventions in our work of creating a new world, and which call upon the producers to exercise control over the forms encountered in our new everyday life."
Tatlin's monument, for subsequent generations at least, has become, perhaps unfairly, the embodiment of retro sci-fi. The spiral structure was certainly intended to be monumental: though Tatlin was always vague about precise dimensions the base was, with a quite impractical hyperbole, at one point intended to span a river while the three spaces contained within the towering metal structure were intended to contain, and reflect, the administrative structures of the new state. On the lowest tier a vast, rectangular chamber would house all the peoples' representatives. Above, a square chamber would serve as the meeting place for the various committees elected by the Congress of Soviets. The third tier, with its enclosed hemispherical space, would house the Politburo. There would, too, be various devices on this upper tier capable of projecting slogans onto the clouds and broadcasting radio transmissions. The chambers, furthermore, would all move, the lowest completing a revolution once a year, the second once a month, the uppermost once a day.
El-Lissitzky, Tatlin at Work on the Third International, ca. 1920
The technology to construct this vast kinetic sculpture did not exist in 1920; it may well not exist today. The utilitarian, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, and in Tatlin's hands, was a far more utopian concept than it had ever been before, or is likely to be again. Other Russian artists would soon be engaged in slightly more practical endeavours -- the design of stoves suitable for installation in peasant homes, designs for furniture, industrial clothing and textiles -- though these were by no means always successful. One unfortunate example of artistic ineptitude was the production of a stove, by one of Tatlin's associates, which though elegant in silhouette had a tendency to explode in the faces of the peasants in whose homes it was installed. Quickly, though not quickly enough, it was withdrawn from production.
For his part Tatlin spent the years immediately preceding the 1932 declaration that would effectively make Socialist Realism the only acceptable artistic style at work on another impractical scheme, his flying machine, the Letatlin, only to return in later life to easel painting, and not in the prescribed manner. His death went unnoticed -- he had been out of favour for so long no one really remembered his name, though unlike many of his one-time associates, he died peacefully enough, and at home rather than the gulag.
The significance of Tatlin's Monument for the Third International, which was once paraded through the streets of Leningrad attracting huge crowds, is more than emblematic, though there are few more heroic moments in the short-lived history of the Russian avant- garde. And there is a kind of convoluted, Egyptian connection: one of the sources Tatlin would develop for his structure was the ziggurat of the great mosque in Sammara, which served too as a model for the minaret of Ibn Tulun.
Tatlin, Popova, Goncharova, Rodchenko, Gabo, Pevsner, Malevich, El- Lissitsky: all are names safely canonised within the history of modernism, and in its most dramatic of phases. There were those who left the Soviet Union: it became increasingly necessary as the 1920s progressed, increasingly difficult once the 1930s were reached. The bulk of those that left became art historical footnotes: from designing agit-prop trains trundling through the Russian countryside, from the almost daily issuing of manifestos overflowing with a revolutionary fervour to formulate an art that would serve the people, they turned to theatre design, often for Diaghilev and the wildly fashionable Ballet Russe, which had seasons in both Paris and Monte Carlo. Those that stayed died, if they were lucky, in obscurity. And the heroic worker, going about his business in model factories, exceeding production targets and eventually sending his countrymen into space, took over, his arrival announced in the Decree on the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organisations issued by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party in 1932.
Art and the people: it runs and runs, and there is a certain reassurance in that. Now, on these very pages, I read that some of Cairo's very own galleries are striving to close that gap. One can only wish them luck.
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