Nikolaos bogiatzis

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was an act of rebellion that affected not only one country, but many others as well. The ultimate aim of Communism, the abolition of the state and the creation of classless society, could offer a utopian land for all the progressive and radical thinking people. Many artists realised that their role had to do with the ‘ praxis of life ‘ ( Lodder, 2004, p. 359 ). An art movement could not fulfill this ambition entirely. It was their work that had to intrude engineering and technology and interact with science, that could fully inspire and support the new ideals. Soviet Constructivism was the child of an evolutionary process that arose before the October Revolution and reached a point to claim even that ‘ Art is finished! ’ ( Gan, 1988, p. 223 ). Through the urge to produce useful objects, Constructivist artists embraced the Communist ideology and practiced their understanding of historical materialsm. The term Constructivism was used for the first time by the Working Group of Constructivists in 1921. The members of the group were Aleksei Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Konstantin Medunetskii, Karl Ioganson, Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg. They were interested in the distinction between composition and construction. Moreover, alongside the fact of the continuous changes in Russian society just after the Revolution, ‘ the Constructivists were compelled to modify both their theory and their practice ‘ ( Lodder, 2004, p. 359 ). The period after October 1917 was a new era that every aspect of social life should be a conquered territory by the Communists. In revolutionary conditions, tradition and reactionary aesthetics could not flourish. They had to wither. Herbert Read criticised people who imagined that ‘ revolutionary art is a kind of folk - art, peasant pottery, madrigals and ballads ‘ and that ‘ surely that is not a conception of art worthy of the true Communist ‘ ( Read, 1982, p. 127 ). Constructivism instead, proved its radicality.

St Petersburg, 1913. A musical called Victory over the Sun was presented at Luna Park. It was a play described by the promoters as ‘ cubofuturist ‘. Painter and art theorist Kazimir Malevich did the designs and the whole impression depicted the lust for the creation of a new world. ‘ The Revolution rehearsed a cosmological convulsion ‘ ( Conrad, 1998, p. 231 ). Artists, theorists and radicals of that period wanted to make a rupture with the past in a way that history had to be denounced. The new world and the new man had to be free from the chains of the past. Vladimir Mayakovsky expressed this lust for the new through his inspiring poems. ‘ The great break - up that Mayakovsky envisaged, began as an aesthetic programme, attacking received notions of beauty ‘ ( Conrad, 1998, p. 230 ). Four years before the October Revolution, the seeds of Constructivism appeared in the sayings of Malevich and his Suprematism : ‘ A system is constructed in time and space independent of any aesthetic beauty, experience, or mood, and emerges rather as a philosophical colour system of realising the new achievements of my imagination, as a means of cognition ‘ ( Malevich, 1988, p. 144 ). The coming of the Revolution in 1917, created new needs. An architectural reconstruction, the necessity of making objects useful in the new environment and the support of scientific values made artists consider themselves as designers and engineers, as well. It was a move to ‘ scientific Communism, built on the theory of historical materialism ‘ ( Lodder, 2004, p. 361 ). They embraced technology and supported ‘ intellectual production ‘ ( Lodder, 2004, p. 361 ). They claimed that construction could be used to define only three dimensional and utilitarian structures and their views were in clear coherence with the social and ideological conditions of their time. Industry was the driving force behind progress, so the artists had to identify themselves with the industrial workers. Soviet society was ready to embrace ‘ the aesthetics of the machine age ’ (Conrad, 1998, p. 247). El Lissitzky’s Prouns ( Fig. 1 ), designed between 1919 and 1924 had already served ‘ as a station on the way to constructing a new form ‘ ( Lissitzky, 1988, p. 151 ).

( Fig. 1 )

The definitive passage from two to three dimensional structures came with the Constructivists. From 1918 until 1921 Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin envisaged new aesthetics in Soviet society. They both worked for IZO which was the Department of Fine Arts and they were responsible for artistic matters in USSR. Tektonika summarised the Constructivist view : ‘ Tectonics or the tectonic style emerges and derives from the characteristics of Communism itself on the one hand, and from the functional use of industrial material on the other ‘ ( Rodchenko, 2004, p. 364 ). Moreover, mathematics and geometry could promote the progress to the three dimensional structures. Rodchenko’s Oval Hanging Constuction Number 12 ( Fig. 2 ), explored ‘ the internal spatial culture and dynamic potential of the basic forms of Euclidean geometry : the circle, hexagon, square, ellipse and triangle ‘ ( Lodder, 2004, p. 367 ).

( Fig. 2 )

Apart from tektonika, the Constructivists relied on the principles of faktura and konstruktsiya, which mean ‘ texture ‘ and ‘ construction ‘. Tatlin’s Model for the Monument to the Third International or Tatlin’s Tower ( Fig. 3 ), linked architecture with Constructivism and presented an ‘ organic synthesis of architectural, sculptural and painterly principles ‘ ( Bowlt, 1988, p. 205 ).

( Fig. 3 )