Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
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Utopias: Models vs Processes Naturally, we must be careful to distinguish the “pure” models of diff erent modes of production, such as capitalism or socialism (or communism), from their daily life or their uneven development. The systems themselves, by virtue of the very fact that they are systems—that is to say, concepts of systems—seem to impose themselves with a massive homogeneity, as though each one tended imperiously to assimilate
Detail of CAT. 152 Aleksandr Deineka In the Donbass, 1925 Drawing for the cover of the magazine U stanka no. 2, 1925 Tempera and India ink on paper, 29.7 x 28.8 cm State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
Fundación Juan March possibility of doing so is clearly enough related to the strengths and weaknesses of the system in question itself. In what follows I shall sketch out a few utopian possibilities of a painter—Aleksandr Deineka—who worked under one of the two hegemonic systems I have just outlined, although, as mentioned above, I shall also make reference to an artist who could be regarded as his inverse equivalent or contrary paral- lel, his antithesis in the capitalist system, since both the capitalist system and the output of an artist who lived in its milieu will invariably be more familiar to us than the work of Aleksandr Deineka.
If the United States is taken to be the purest form of capitalism, owing to the absence of feudalism and aristocracy from its history, then in retrospect the climax of that capitalist development must be identi- fied as the present day, with its immense monopo- lies, its radical immiseration and class divisions, and the virtual auton omy of capital as such in its finan- cial stage. This means that the history of industrial capitalism in the United States (from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Cold War) must be seen as a transitional period, and that the concept of com- modification and commodity production should not be allowed to distort our perception of the process of the accumulation of capital as such. Commodity production implies markets and wage labor: it perpetuates an Imaginary of things and money, and of a relationship between them that in hindsight looks virtually natural. Objects seem to have a value in themselves (an equivalence strenu- ously disproven by Marx). From the standpoint of present-day finance capital—in which money of that seemingly natural appearance has long since been transformed into an abstract capital, with ebbs and flows across the former boundaries of the world system, in well-nigh inexplicable meteorological rhythms experienced in everyday life only in their consequences—this view of a market America, with its factories and big cities, its suburbs and their inde- pendent single-family dwellings, has become as nos- talgic and mythological as Jeff ersonian democracy was in the earlier period; and indeed the republic of individual farmers (already mythical and ideological with Jeff erson) has known something of a synthesis with the later and more urban market image, such that their combination today constitutes a regressive mirage designed to conceal what capitalism really is (or to stimulate the belief that it is the essence hidden away behind the unpleasant “mere appearance” of late capitalism as such). This Imaginary is then both ideology and utopia all at once: real elements of capi- talism’s past—small farms, factories, commodities as objects you buy and wages as money received from productive work—are then, in a time where none of this constitutes the dynamic of the system as such, isolated and endowed with a mesmerizing power and with an intensely ideological nostalgia. Some of the works by American precisionist artist Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) can be interpreted in this light, albeit with all the ambiguity to which I shall refer later. Such is the case of his photographs of Shaker interior architecture and farm view [figs. 1, 2], which he later drew in even more explicit degrees of abstraction [fig. 3] and, of course, of his 1927 photographs of the Ford Factory in River Rouge, Detroit [fig. 4], at that time the largest industrial complex in the world. Now it should be observed that the utopian im- pulse takes many forms, finds many varied expres- FIG. 1. Charles Sheeler South Salem, Living Room with Easel, 1929 Gelatin silver print 19.5 x 24.4 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Lane Collection
Side of White Barn, 1915 Gelatin silver print 18.6 x 23.8 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Lane Collection FIG. 4. Charles Sheeler Photograph for the cover of Ford News vol. 8, no. 22 (October 1, 1928) FIG. 3. Charles Sheeler Barn Abstraction, 1918 Lithography, 50.2 x 64.8 cm The Lane Collection Fundación Juan March
88 FIG. 5. Charles Sheeler Classic Landscape, 1931 Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 81.9 cm National Gallery of Art Washington, DC, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth sions and outlets in any given society or mode of production. In Western capitalism, but also in the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the early 1920s, much that was utopian found its outlet in abstraction, but the utopian analysis of abstraction is too complex to be pursued any further here. While figurative or representational art also sur- vived in the West, even though marginalized by art historians and curators, in the Soviet Union it became something of a state aesthetic. Returning to the ap- proach we outlined at the beginning, it is however important to grasp the ways in which these kinds of representation had diff ering utopian values in the two systems. One’s impression is, for example, that bodies in capitalism were most often grasped in their after-hours leisure postures, in crowds, bars, Coney Island, peep shows, beauty pageants, and other situ- ations which purported to negate work or somehow to escape from it. This does not seem to have been the case in the Soviet Union, as we shall see. Meanwhile other kinds of artists expressed the utopian negation of business society not through the human figure but rather by way of the object world, through salvaging utopian fragments of America’s ruined past (or of its ideological image): such arts selected carefully isolated bits and pieces of the American landscape. Thus artists like Charles Sheeler isolated objects, factories, houses, equip- ment, and other kinds of things
[figs. 5] which in a virtually Heideggerian manner—transcendentally purified—could suggest a utopian transcendence of what was otherwise a grimy and exploited world, and thereby forged a creative link to the nostalgic social ideologies I have already mentioned, while by their streamlined forms proclaiming an equally utopian American modernity and a kinship with the European avant-gardes of the period. So much for references to Sheeler, the artist I sought to pit against Deineka, because it is obvious that this kind of transformation of the object world had little enough in common with the landscapes of a frantic Soviet modernization and its construction of socialism.
To be sure, the quarrels about what the Soviet Union was, and what it should be called—communism, so- cialism, state capitalism, the “new class,” “revision- ism”—have enormous significance for the future. In particular they turn on the question of whether an- other, a diff erent, an alternate, mode of production is possible in the first place; and the more serious discussions turn on the possibility of an alternative economic structure. Meanwhile, even the most po- litical and ideological versions of these debates— “totalitarianism” versus democracy—have not prevented the crucial social question from arising, namely whether new kinds of social and collective relations in fact came into existence in the Soviet pe- riod, which still persist and which are not attributable to pseudo-cultural explanations in terms of some hy- pothetical Russian or Slavic “character” or tradition. But let us return to our artist: in reality, the utopi- an visual elements we wish to attribute to Aleksandr Deineka’s work do not require any definitive position on such questions, nor do they demand recourse to deeper metaphysical or essentialist causes. We Fundación Juan March FIG. 6. Double-page spread in URSS en construction, no. 2 February 1936 (French edition of
SSSR na stroike) Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 128]
in
SSSR na stroike no. 7–8, 1934 Fundación José María Castañé [cat. 201] FIG. 8. Double-page spread in URSS in Construction, no. 9 September 1931 (English edition of SSSR na stroike) Fundación José María Castañé FIG. 9. Double-page spread in USSR in Construction, no. 5 1932 (English edition of SSSR na stroike) Fundación José María Castañé [cat. 114] Fundación Juan March
90 Fundación Juan March may here indeed remain at the level of a description which accommodates any of the various ideological options, namely the hypothesis that the fundamental reality of the Soviet Union was the process of mod- ernization as such, and this on all levels, from “base” to “superstructure.” Education and agricultural tech- nique [fig. 6-10], bureaucratization and industrializa- tion, surveillance technologies and artistic experi- mentation, the “commanding heights” of political and economic control as well as the monopoly of vio- lence and the never-ending search for internal and external enemies—such are some of the new possi- bilities, for good or ill, of the modernization process.
Modernization is a reality, with its own complex his- tory; and it is also a concept, or an ideology, with a history of its own, a slogan or a value—a goal which is set and celebrated (by both the United States and the Soviet Union) and a bogus ideal or mirage deplored by critical observers. In both these forms—reality and ideology—modernization is profoundly ambivalent, meriting the same kind of dialectical mixed feelings with which Marx and Engels greeted capitalism itself in the Communist Manifesto: at one and the same time the most productive and the most destructive force the world has ever seen. And indeed the rel- evance of their account is scarcely surprising, since modernization is virtually the same as capitalism itself: Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work imperceptibly through market mechanisms in the capitalist world, imposed by decision as a program and a goal in the socialist one. This is not to revive the accusations cited above about the convergence of the two systems, but rather to take all this in another direction, namely the profoundly transitional nature of the process, which hurries us toward a future we cannot imagine except in the mutually exclusive modes of utopia or dysto- pia. (Meanwhile, the advent of postmodernity before the very term of modernity has itself been reached complicates all this further in ways that are not par- ticularly relevant for this painter of an earlier era.) For transition means that the heterogeneous elements of any moment of an on-going process can be iso- lated from each other and serve as the locus of a uto- pian investment. Thus one familiar way in which the ideology of modernization is staged and celebrated is that of production, and production can, in its turn, be packaged and projected in any number of ways. The utilization of the factory situation conveniently allows for a multiple investment by fantasies about technology, collectivity and even Stakhanovism: here the interests of the government and the utopian impulse overlap in a loose and sloppy fashion. Aleksandr Deineka has however outlived that particular moment (which produced its own magnifi- cent works in the late 1920s or 1930s, such as Before the Descent into the Mine (1925), Building New Facto- ries (1926) and Female
Textile Workers (1927) [cat. 115, 116, 125], as well as of sorrier standardized eff orts): for him productivity can now be identified and interpel- lated in the no less institutionalized phenomena of sport, and it is the productivity of the body he is able to celebrate. It has long been a commonplace of the students of “totalitarianism” that the Nazi appeal to collective sport “significantly” coincided with the Soviet one. But this is to misread the contextual meaning of these two utopian projections. For the Nazis clearly felt the idealized body to be the apotheosis of race itself, and athleticism—particularly in its contests and agons— to be the very space in which racial superiority was to be demonstrated. In the Soviet system, however, as we have argued here, it is the body’s productivity which is foregrounded: here the athletic body is not the expression of racial primacy but rather the proof of achieved modernity. Aleksandr Deineka perfects a kind of vitalism of modernization; in a period in which the body is once again of theoretical attention (along with vitalism itself), his achievement should not be without interest.
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Rabochaia Krestianskaia Krasnaia Armiia [Workers and Peasants Red Army], 1934 Fundación José María Castañé [cat. 215] Fundación Juan March Fundación Juan March Fundación Juan March 94 WORKS ON EXHIBITION (1913–53) Fundación Juan March The works in the exhibition are organized into three sections. The first (1913–34) traces a line between the origins of the Russian avant-garde and the double context—pioneering and revolutionary—of Deineka’s work and that of socialist realism. In the focused presentation of that artistic and ideological continuity of thought there is a series of works that play an important role and exemplify the parallels between the function of light in avant-garde poetics and of electricity in the praxis of the Soviet system. In addition, this section presents a series of monumental works by Deineka in the context that most befits the artist: the industrialization and technical modernization of the country. The concentrated period of Deineka’s work as a graphic artist during the 1920s has led us to include in this section a text by Irina Leytes on his graphic output. The second section (1935) is specifically given over to the commission Deineka received for the Moscow Metro. Given its particular interest, a text by Alessandro De Magistris on the construction of the Moscow subway system has been included here. It features details on the Deineka commission: the design for the ceiling mosaics for two of the stations, Maiakovskaia and Novokuznetskaia. This section closes with an essay by Boris Groys highlighting the symbolic aspects of this project, which was the most successful achievement of the Stalinist utopia. The third and final section explores the dialectic between the intentions of that utopia and the reality of the Soviet system under Stalin and its impact on Deineka’s final works (1936–53). The works follow a basically chronological order, from the first—the futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913)—to the last, dated 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. Nevertheless, given the marked contextual and comparative character of the exhibition, on occasion the strict chronological order has been disregarded— as can be seen, without excessive temporal leaps—to facilitate the perception of the evident visual relationships established between the works. Deineka’s production has been placed on a black background. Aside from Deineka’s autobiographical text [cat. 248], published in 1961, the first work by Deineka in the exhibition is dated 1919 and the last, 1952.
Fundación Juan March 96 I 1913-34 From Victory over the Sun to the Electrification of the Entire Country Fundación Juan March 1. Aleksandr Deineka Avtoportret [Self-Portrait], 1948 Oil on canvas 175.2 x 110 cm Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery Inv. ZH-1277 Fundación Juan March
98 2 and 3. Kazimir Malevich and David Burliuk Cover (Malevich) and back cover (Burliuk) of Aleksei Kruchenykh’s opera Pobeda nad solntsem [Victory over the Sun], 1913 Book. Letterpress, 24.6 x 17 cm EUY, Saint Petersburg Libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh and music by Mikhail Matiushin Collection Maurizio Scudiero and private collection
Cover of Konstantin Bol’shakov’s book Solntse naizlete. Vtoraia kniga stikhov, 1913–1916 [The Sun in Decline: Second Book of Poetry, 1913–16], 1916 Lithography, 23.4 x 19 cm Tsentrifuga, Moscow Private collection 5. Kazimir Malevich Cover of the book Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisni realism [From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism], 1916 Lithography, 18 x 13 cm Unknown publisher, Moscow, 3rd ed. Private collection Fundación Juan March 6. Kazimir Malevich Suprematicheskaia kompozitsiia [Suprematist Composition], 1915 Oil on canvas, 80.4 x 80.6 cm Fondation Beyeler, Riehen Basel, Inv. 06.2 Fundación Juan March
100 7. Vladimir Tatlin Kontrrel’ef [Counter Relief], ca. 1915–16 Wood panel, brass and oil 85 x 43 cm Private collection Fundación Juan March
8. El Lissitzky Cover and layout of the book Russland. Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion [Russland. The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union], 1930 Book. Letterpress, 28.8 x 22.7 cm Verlag von Anton Schroll & Co., Vienna Fundación José María Castañé 8b. Pages 46–47 illustrating Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920 Fundación Juan March
102 9. Liubov Popova Painterly Architecture no. 56, 1916 Oil on canvas, 67 x 48.5 cm Private collection 10. Liubov Popova Da zdravstvuet diktatura proletariata!, [Hail the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!], 1921 Sketch for poster. Ink, watercolor, pencil, cut paper, 20.1 x 24.9 cm Private collection Fundación Juan March 11. Gustavs Klucis Untitled (The Red Man), 1918 Lithography, 25.4 x 15.2 cm Collection Merrill C. Berman 12. Gustavs Klucis Vorkers of the vorld unite [Workers of the World, Unite!], 1922 Linocut, 23.5 x 13.5 cm. Sketch for revolving stand for propaganda designed on the occasion of the 6th Komintern Congress Collection Merrill C. Berman 13. Valentina Kulagina Untitled, 1923 Lithography, 22.9 x 15.2 cm Text at top: 1923—V. Kulagina —Lithography/32/K.V. 1923 Collection Merrill C. Berman Fundación Juan March
104 14. El Lissitzky Klinom krasnym bei belykh [Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge], 1919 Lithography, 23 x 19 cm Collection Merrill C. Berman 16. Ustroite “Nedeliu krasnogo podarka” vezde i vsiudu [Establish a “Week of the Red Present.” Here, There, and Everywhere], ca. 1920 Planographic print, 23.7 x 46 cm Collection Merrill C. Berman Download 4.48 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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