Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
Download 4.48 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- From the Easel to the Machine
|
344 this sense, the futurist must be, least of all, the owner of his production. He must struggle against the hypnosis of the name, and the patent of priority connected with the name. Petit-bourgeois self-importance, beginning with a name tag on the door and ending with a stone name tag on the grave, is alien to the futurist; his sense of worth comes from awareness of himself as an essential gear of his pro- duction collective. His true immortality lies not in the possible preservation of his own verbal composition, but in the larger and more complete assimilation of his production by the people. It does not matter whether his name is forgotten. What matters is that his achievements enter the life process and there generate new improvements and new training. Not the politics of locked skulls of patented pro- tection against all thoughts, all discoveries and designs, but the politics of skulls open to all those who want, jointly, side by side, to search for a form overcoming both stagnation and chaos in the name of the maximal organization of life. And, at the same time, attacking with sharpness and decisiveness, maneuvering with the greatest flexibility, in the struggle for a new individuality. Where, if not from the RKP, 15 must one learn these brilliant practical dialectics which are shaping the new ethics—the prize and the victory at any cost, in the name of the utmost of achievements, as durable as the North Star! Now, in the period of the NEP 16 one must conduct the struggle for class conscious- ness more sharply than ever. NEP from the socioeconomic point of view is a silent fight for mastery between proletarian and bourgeois production. NEP from the cultural point of view is the smelting of the primordial pathos of the first years of the revolution into a trained practical eff ort that will succeed not by dint of emo- tions and flights of the imagination, but because of organization and self-control. “Bookkeeper’s pathos,” strict control and assessment of every penny of construc- tive action, the “Americanization” of the personality, parallel with the electrifica- tion of industry, demand the smelting of the passionate tribune, who was able to tear through the elemental fault line with a sharp explosion, into a deliberate and businesslike control-mechanic of the new period of the revolution. And this new type of worker must feel a fundamental hatred toward all things unorganized, inert, chaotic, sedentary, and provincially backward. He finds it diff icult to love nature the way the landscape painter, the tourist or the pantheist once did. He is repelled by thick pine forests, untilled steppes, unutilized waterfalls which tumble not according to our order, rain and snow, avalanches, caves and mountains. He finds beauty in those things upon which one can see the mark of the organizing human hand; he finds greatness in every object of human production designed to overcome, subject and master the elements and inert matter. Alongside the man of science, the art worker must become a psychoengineer, a psychoconstructor. NEP, and with it the entire today’s reality within the RSFSR, 17
dency toward the good old way of life, and mysticism (the hallmark of organiza- tional helplessness). Every movement, every step of the people, their inability to achieve harmony in work, even their inability to walk in the street in a sensible way, to get on a streetcar, to get out of an auditorium without crushing each oth- er, is a sign of the counterrevolutionary action of tongue-tiedness, blindness and lack of training. These are all frightening factors requiring large-scale eff orts. And it’s a pleasure to feel that even in the ranks of the proletarian poets there is at least a Gastev
18 whose propaganda for production training is worth a brilliant poem. People do not know how to talk, they waste an endless amount of time grunting out simple things, but ask them about language as a phenomenon subject to conscious organized action and at once they let out a cry about “the great, the free, the beautiful,” etc., Russian language (mostly smoke-dried, we might add). And the question of a rational suit—is it possible to encroach upon the fashion magazine which dictates to the masses the will of the capitalist manufacturers! We are not going to go any further—the question of the form of sociopsychologi- cal inertia is a rather broad theme not only for the encyclopedia and the system, but also for a good declaration. Recognizing this fact precisely, and taking up a sharply tendentious orientation toward the communist task, futurism must delineate the objects of its sympathy and its antipathy, the materials to be processed and those to be discarded. And if the maximal program of the futurists is the integration of art and life, the conscious reorganization of language according to the new forms of life, and the struggle for the emotional training of the producer-consumer’s psyche, then the minimal program of futurist-speech-producers is to place their linguistic mastery at the service of the practical tasks of the day. Until art is dethroned from its self- made pedestal, futurism must use it, opposing it in its own arena: agit-action as opposed to daily-life representation; energetic work treatment as opposed to lyric poetry; the inventive adventure novella as opposed to the psychologism of belles lettres; the newspaper feuilleton and the agitka as opposed to pure art; the oratorical tribune as opposed to poetic declamation; tragedy and farce as opposed to petit-bourgeois drama; productivist movement as opposed to emo- tional experiences. The task of the futurists must remain agit-work against the old, enervated aesthet- ics, to the same degree as before, since for the futurists art can be eff ective only within a militant movement. Where is the foundation of this work? Where is that society of new consumers which could replace the obtuse clay wall on which fu- turism knocked in the year 1913? Such a society exists—it is the workers’ audience which is swiftly growing in its self-awareness, and especially the working youth who, to a greater degree than the middle-aged worker, are not aff licted by that bourgeois-daily-life scab of lazy, cautious habitualness characteristic of the older worker, who has been under the petit-bourgeois influence of the village and the urban tradesmanship and handicraft. And for sure, it is to this youth—and not to intellectual audiences—that the semaphores of futurism are leading. Only in everyday work with the working masses and with youth is it possible to propel futurism forward as the world-sense of inextinguishable youth, mocking courage, and stubborn persistence. futurism has proved to be just such move- ment by each one of its stone-cutting lines, leaving its imprint on all the other (not entirely poorhouse) literature of its decade. The work of futurism is parallel with and identical to the work of communism; futurism is fighting for that dynamic organization of the personality without which movement toward the commune is impossible. And since communism, in its gi- gantic superhuman eff ort of rooting out the old socioeconomic system, has not yet established and defined its line on the issue of the organization of the indi- vidual and the social world-sense to a satisfactory degree, futurism remains a separate movement with a separate name. Only one other name may in the final analysis replace the name “futurism”—that is: “communist world-sense, commu- nist art.” Dialectical materialism applied to the problem of organization of the hu- man psyche through the emotions must inevitably lead to that moment when fu- turism as a movement, as one of the sociorevolutionary fighting divisions, will be absorbed and assimilated into the world-organizing communist front; it will become a communist world-sense. Setting up the mileposts of each advancement, futurism will very shortly feel that it has become something more than a working group which is replacing—con- tinually replacing—the old aesthetic tastes by its new constructions. Futurism, in its fight against everyday life, cannot limit itself to words, wishes, and slogans. It must feel itself in the midst of everyday life as a demolition squad, indefatigable and joyful. The new human being in reality, in his everyday actions, in the construction of his material and mental life—this is what futurism must be able to demonstrate. And, if it does not get swamped by the waves of the literary establishment, futurism will do that, because futurism is the religion of eternal youth and renewal in persistent work on the appointed task. Sergei Tret’iakov (1892–1939) was one of the key members of Lef’s editorial staff alongside Mayakovsky, Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Nikolai Chuzak and Viktor Shklovskii. Further articles by Tret’iakov appear as German translations: Sergei Tretyakov, Die Arbeit des Schrifstellers, Aufsätze, Reportage, Porträts [A Writer’s Work, Essays, Reports, Por- traits], published by Heiner Boehncke, trans. Karla Hielscher (Reinbek nr. Hamburg, 1972) (see also the instructive afterword by Heiner Boehncke, 188–219); for the literary work also see Sergei M. Tretyakov, Lyrik, Dramatik, Prosa [Verse, Dramatic Art, Prose] (Leipzig, 1972); Sergei Tretyakov, Gesichter der Avantgarde. Porträts -Essays - Briefe [Faces of the Avant- Garde. Portraits - Essays - Letters] (Berlin, Weimar, 1985). A clearly structured overview of the literary political and aesthetic positions of the early Soviet era continues to be available in the collection of annotated texts by Hubertus Gas- sner/Eckart Gillen, Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischem Realismus. Dokumente und Kommentare: Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917–1934 [Between Revolutio- nary Art and Socialist Realism. Documents and Comments: Art Debates in the Soviet Union from 1917–1934] (Cologne, 1979); see also Von der Revolution zum Schriftstellerkongress [From the Revolution to the Writers’ Congress], ed. G. Erler et al.; an extensive discussion of the constructivist program is also given in: R. G. Grübel, Russicher Konstruktivismus [Russian Constructivism]; and finally, S. O. Chan-Magomedov, Konstruktivizm (comprehensive rep- resentation of constructivism while simultaneously almost completely fading out supre- matism).
Despite Sergei Tret’iakov being one of the most radical representatives of an “applied avant-garde” or “production art,” and even wanting to allow creative work in “production” to emanate from basic commodities and factories, he continued to see himself as a con- sistent representative of avant-garde art. He therefore focused his polemics—as did most of the other constructivists and productionists—on the one hand against an atavistic dis- tinction between “form” and “content,” which could be found in ideologically-embellished realism in the same way as one of the Proletkul’t verses which followed neo-romantic and symbolist patterns. On the other hand, Tret’iakov and the Left Front of the Arts wanted to distance themselves from the representatives of “pure art,” which they suspected of the Fundación Juan March Russian formalists as well as the suprematists (particularly Malevich and his followers) and the advocates of “panel painting” with oil and canvas. Instead of the former aesthetics, separated from social and technical production life, Tret’iakov called for a left avant-garde art that off set the contradiction between aesthetic subject and practical object in a type of utopian anticipation (for more details on the dis- cussion between Tret’iakov or the production art followers and the Russian f ormalists, see A. Hansen-Löve, Der russische Formalismus [Russian Formalism], 478–509). — AH-L 1. Quotation from the poem “From Street to Street” (1913); Mystery-Bouff e (1918), a parody of a medieval mystery play; “
III International” (1912) [Trans.]. 2. Imaginism was born in Moscow in 1919, its leader the former futurist Vadim Shershenevich. Among its members were S. Esenin, A. Mariengof, R. Ivnev, A. Kusikov and I. Gruzinov. The Severianinists were not a group; here, Tret’iakov refers to the epigones of ego-futurism. The Nichevoki was a group; originally from Rostov-on-the-Don, they published their first manifesto in the collection of poetry To You (Moscow, 1920). Their most prominent fig- ure was the poet Riurik Rok. Vladimir Friche (1870–1929), a literature and art critic, was the editor of the journals Literature and Marxism (1928–29) and Press and Revolution (1929) [Trans.]. 3. Semen Nadson (1862–1887) was the idol of a frustrated generation of young idealists. His sentimental verses full of pathos, melancholy and foreboding had a populist slant fashionable in those years. His tragic fate and untimely death contributed to his popularity [Trans.]. 4.
A Cloud in Trousers (1915), War and the World (1915–16), Man (1916–17). Ladomir (1912) was a manuscript book [Trans.]. 5. The “
[Trans.]. 6. A monument to Pushkin stands in Pushkin Square, formerly Tverskoi Boulevard [Trans.]. 7. Not a literary quotation, this is probably a reference to the common popular suggestion that one “should do something useful” [Trans.]. 8. This appears to be a sarcastic reference to some laxative advertisement (“ slabit’ legko i nezhno”) [Trans.]. 9. Allusion to the imaginists; see “Whom does Lef Wrangle With?” n. 3 [Trans.]. 10. This refers to the “production art” movement or the “productionists” (proizvodstvenniki) [note from Groys and Hansen-Löve.]. 11. The term byt translates to mean “everyday life”; for the Russian avant-garde, this was generally a negatively- viewed conventionality, the automated, demised life and art forms of the old world which are overcome in the authentic, technical and practical social life of the society of cultural revolution (for the analysis of the literary “everyday life” as the subject of a new literary sociology as part of Russian formalism see A. Hansen-Löve, Der
russische Formalismus (Russian Formalism), 397ff .) [note from AH-L]. 12. The word poshlost’ denotes a life devoid of spiritual values, a state of self-satisfied mediocrity, pettiness and bigotry. The etymology of the word suggested by Tret’iakov is “ poshlo est’,” literally “the vulgar is” [Trans.]. 13. YMCA = Abbreviation of Young Men’s Christian Association, a global association for young Christian men [note from Groys and Hansen-Löve.]. 14. In contrast to byt, i.e. to mundane everyday life and its static nature, bytie, meaning “being,” belongs to the sphere of “becoming” and an authentic life dynamic. Exactly in this way, Mikhail Bakhtin—just like the representatives of Russian formalism—understood the artistic as becoming (conscious), as a process directed against everything that has become and is fossilized. See Rainer Grübel, “On the Aesthetics of the Word for Michail Bachtin,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes [The Aesthetics of the Word] (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 59ff [note from Groys and Hansen-Löve.]. 15. RKP = Russian Communist Party [note from Groys and Hansen-Löve.]. 16. During the period of “New Economic Policy” (NEP), the early communist society and economy were recapitalized and partially privatized on Lenin’s orders, something much criticized by LEF. This was to make it possible for the Soviet system to survive at all. The mechanization and economization of work processes were also seen to be huge “Americanizations,” which in those times were considered to be positive for all intents and purposes. In any case, for all ideological perspectives, the American or capitalist economism and the enthusiasm for technology of the “modern times” fitted very well into the early Soviet image of a fully-rationalized factory culture. Positive indicators of “Taylorism” (see A. Ebbingshaus, “Taylor in Russia,” in Autonomie: Materialien gegen die Fabrikge- sellschaft [Autonomy: Materials against Factory Society] (Munich, Edition 1, n.d.) and the enthusiasm for a formal- ization of work processes were eff ective as far as Meierkhol’d’s theatrical art (one thinks of his “biomechanics,” i.e. the mechanization of the actor’s body) [note from Groys and Hansen-Löve.]. 17. Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic [Trans.]. 18. Aleksei Gastev (1882–1941) was one of the main representatives of Proletkul’t symbolism in verse. His technical verse was a huge success; nonetheless, he turned away from art and worked intensively with labor organizations (for example, the Institute for the Scientific Organization of Labor, NOT). As a postulate, on the paper of the manifestos and declarations, this conscious leveling of the diff erences between the terms of making and generat- ing and those of establishing and creating, between engineer and genius, developed a completely metaphoric potential. In any case, the avant-garde eff ect of this reduction aimed to result in freeing art from the superstructure exis- tence and its being brought down to earth as a work and production technology. The individual artist ego was replaced by the commune collective, instead of self demonstration there was the “objective demonstration of things, the mechanized masses” (Alexander Bogdanov, “Puti proletarskogo tvorchestva” [Methods of Proletarian Creation], in Literaturnye manifesty [Literary Manifestos], Munich, Edition 1, 1969), 136; finally, on Gastev’s ma- chine cult and early Soviet context: Rolf Hellebust, Flesh to Metal, Soviet Literature & the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca, London, 2003, 32ff .). The “trust in the machine, the equipment, the instruments . . .” (Aleksei Gastev, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul’tury” [On Tendencies of Proletarian Culture], in N. L. Brodskii, Literaturnye manifes- ty, 130–35; here 132) went so far that he saw an act of liberation and not of alienation in the “mechanization” of ev- eryday life, of gestures, in the standardization of the proletarian’s psyche and its supranational “social construct.” For productionists and proletarian cult alike, human omnipotence peaked in a technical omni-productability. Malevich’s concept of the “factory” originated from these omnipotent fantasies of “factory assembly” as produc- tion plants and the producers as “social machines,” which Gastev praised as mechanics of a life technical center (Gastev, ibid., 134). The equalization of technical and artistic, mechanical-physical and poetic-verbal or textual “assembly” is one of the most productive concept fields of the left art utopias. If everything is assembly, everything else is the raw material and the passive available mass of a universal feasibility, a permanent “reworking” (pererabotka). For all mechanical world views, the matter, the material is always a passive object for processing: The more activist the producer is, the more passive the recipient, the more complete the procedural technique, the more complete the mastery of the material as “massa confuse,” organizing, standardizing and regulating it. Elias Ca- netti’s totalitarianism-critical formula, “Mass and power” here achieves a literal dimension as empowerment of the (feminine-creative) “materia prima” by a masculine-macho regime of technical organizational violence. This but all too close consequence of constructionism and productionism—its one-dimensional reduction to feasibil- ity and the totalitarianism of utility—in the development phase of suprematism increasingly did not fit in with a world view, which, in Malevich’s case never had been based on authority and possession, on aff inity with objects and incorporation. The monism present in all left utopias, i.e. the reduction of complex functions of culture, episteme and society into identical monofunctions may have had an avant-garde alienation eff ect in the early stages, but with the increasing self-organization of these concepts into schools and institutions their maximalism did not seem any less threatening than the minimalism of real socialism which exhibited the old bourgeois view of humanity and the world shamelessly and enormously augmented in an orchestration of the state. [note from Groys and Hansen- Löve.]. Originally published in Russian as Sergei Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda? (Perspektivy futurizma),” Lef 1 (1923), 192–203. It is reprinted in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei [Literary Manifestos from Symbolism to the Present Day], comp. Stanislav Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 383–91. For a German translation see Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 267–76. The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “From Where to Where?” in Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912–1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2005), 204 –16, originally published as Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes 1912–1928 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). The notes credited to Groys and Hansen-Löve have been translated by Andrew Davison from the original German in Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 273–76. From the Easel to the Machine 1923
D21 Nikolai Tarabukin I. The Diagnosis The entire artistic life of Europe for the past ten years has unfolded in an atmo- sphere of “a crisis of art.” The first stone was removed from the foundation of painting when Manet’s canvases first appeared about sixty years ago at exhibi- tions in Paris and inspired a complete revolution in the Parisian art world of the time. Until recently, we were still inclined to see the whole subsequent develop- ment of painterly forms as a progressive process towards the perfection of those forms. In the light of most recent developments, we now regard it, on the one hand, as the steady disintegration of the integrity of the painterly organism into its constituent elements, and, on the other, as the gradual degeneration of paint- ing as a distinctive art form.
Download 4.48 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|