Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyi
zheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet). 1921.
Oil on canvas. Each panel, 24 5/8 x 20 11/16" (62.5 x 52.5 cm).
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow
I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over.
Basic colors.
Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.
--Rodchenko
Well, I guess that's that, then.
Dan Flavin's 'monument' 1 for V. Tatlin" (left) is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes is meant to evoke Tatlin’s colossal-but-unrealized Monument to the Third International (1920) [Right].
All is well that begins well and has no end
El Lissitsky's poster for a post-Revolution production the Futurist play "Victory over the Sun."
The original production sounds like an All Star event with a libretto by Aleksei Kruchonykh, music by Mikhail Matyushin, prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, and stage designer by Kasimir Malevich. The opera, of course, has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first "Black Square" painting (in 1915).
Left: Cover of 1998 reissue of John Berger's Art and Revolution. Right: Original cover from 1969 edition.
I'm late to this--some 40 years late--but John Berger's Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R (1969) is a must-read for anyone seriously exploring Russian nonconformist Art of the post-Stalin or so-called Thaw period. I can't recommend it enough. The publisher’s (Vintage) own description for the book’s 1998 reissue on Amazon puts it about right:
In this prescient and beautifully written book, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger's impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnost Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy--which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khrushchev himself--Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.
That said, this is a case that proves the adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” If the reader was drawn to Art and Revolution based solely upon the pairing of the book's title and cover--I was not--he might be sorely disappointed. Now, I read it on my smartphone, so the "cover" of my edition was really nothing more than an icon. Nevertheless, the tiny image managed to give me pause: Two shadowy figures in trenchcoats leaning in as though one is disclosing a secret in the ear of other. The image is purposefully murky, nearly obscured, but the figures appear to be standing on a train platform in Paris (a portion of sign in the background reads "Quai." Another, below it says "Evian"). There is a whiff of political intrigue and no small suggestion of cloak and dagger espionage. The scene screams "Cold War" or probably more accurately, sometime earlier, during the French Resistance or even in the years just before the German occupation. It really could be the cover of a spy novel by Alan Furst, which are almost always set in those early years of Hitler's rise, in the late 1930s. At the very least, one expects spies. The original 1969 cover design is more true to the spirit of the book: a bold 1960s-style abstract rendering of an example of Neizvestny’s monumental work.
From my review of Radiator Gallery's THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS exhibition for Bomb Magazine.
Now, at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, Queens, the stakes just got higher. In “SLOTS,” multimedia artist Maximus Clarke employs the metaphor of the slot machine to consider randomness in the life of the artist, only the payout isn’t anything like a deluge of coins; rather, it’s Western culture itself. The piece, a projection-mapped video installation, is a part of This Is How My Brain Works, a group exhibition organized by first-time curator Michael Lee that examines the practice of collage in media ranging from works on paper to artist books, photographs, sculpture, textiles, and video. According to Clarke, collage is a practice that can extend across any and all media and “SLOTS,” which questions whether there’s a set of steps that the artist can credibly climb to achieve significance, or if it’s just a game of chance, a “digital, multimedia embodiment of that practice.”
In addition to the traditional and recognizable iconography of slots culture—Lucky 7’s, hearts, and diamonds—Clarke employs images of a Roman coin depicting the profiles of the emperor Constantine and Sol Invictus, the infant Christ by Giotto, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, Edvard Munch’s Scream, a detail from Picasso’s Guernica, Magritte’s man in the bowler hat, Warhol’s Marilyn, and Damien Hirst’s jeweled skull. Also thrown into the mix are quotes from cultural sources (Yeats, Tarkovsky), biblical references, (the story of Jacob’s Ladder from Genesis), even the mundane (an excerpt from a patent description for a kind of slot machine: “the machine must be perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has, within the legal limits under which games of chance must operate.”). And if that wasn’t enough, with “SLOTS” projected onto the stairs leading into the Long Island City gallery, visitors, too, become unwitting participants in the collage. As they ascend toward or descend from the exhibition, the staircase itself becomes a virtual Jacob’s Ladder with ghostly textual passages drifting along the stairs and across their bodies: “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold, angels were ascending and descending on it.”
Meat - Vladimir Tatlin. Artist: Vladimir Tatlin. Completion Date: 1947
"A monument made from steel, glass, and revolution."-- Viktor Shklovsky
Conceived as as towering symbol of modernity, Vladimir Tatlin's constructivist "Monument to the Third International" was designed in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution to embody the aspirations of the fledgling Soviet state. Indeed, it was seen as a challenge to the France’s Eiffel Tower. Only problem: It was never built.
Commissioned by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment in 1919 as the design for the headquarters for, and monument to the Comintern, or Third International, the tower's main feature was a twin helix spiraling some 1,300 feet, around which visitors would be transported with the aid of various mechanical devices. If all went as Tatlin planned, the main framework would contain four large suspended geometric structures that would rotate at different rates of speed. At the base of the structure would be a cube designed as a venue for lectures, conferences, and meetings that would complete a rotation in the span of one year. Above the cube, a smaller pyramid, which would complete a rotation once a month, was planned for executive activities. Further up would be a cylinder housing an information center from which to issue news bulletins and manifestos via telegraph, radio, and loudspeaker. It would complete a rotation once a day. At the top, there would be a hemisphere for radio equipment. There were also plans to install a gigantic open-air screen on the cylinder, and a projector to cast messages across the clouds on overcast day. (While totally unrelated, I can’t help but think of the work of Russian painter Erik Bulatov, 50 odd years later.)
According to the acclaimed art historian and critic Nikolai Punin (also known as the husband of the great poet Anna Akhmatova): “The main idea of the monument is based on an organic synthesis of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting, and was intended to produce a new type of monumental structure, uniting in itself a purely creative form with a utilitarian form.”
Why wasn’t it built? The design proved too expensive and complex to realize in Tatlin’s day, and he only managed to complete a few wooden scale models. However, there’s some evidence that a group called Tatlin’s Tower and the World is planning to build a full-scale version of the monument. Unfortunately, they only plan to build it in separate sections, which will be housed in different venues. But not much is known about the group or the project at this point, so who knows?
Nonetheless, nearly a hundred years after its design--despite never actually being built, mind you--the Tower remains one of the most striking and controversial pieces of work associated with Russian Constructivism and a symbol of the epoch, and surely deserves to appear on a postage stamp.
Erik Bulatov, I’m Going, 1975. Books, paper, plastic sphere and wood.
Books
Poems from Children's Island by Sasha Chernyi
(Lightful Press)
