In what ways has art or design responded to the changing social and cultural forces from 1917-1927 in Russia?

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During this decade in Russia there was a lot of upheaval and change socially and politically. The country had just been through its century late industrial revolution and was trying to catch up with the western world. Many groups arose from this change, such as the avant-garde of Russia, who wanted to create a new aesthetic that ignored the traditional and bourgeois ideals that previously existed. The communists wanted to reinvent Russia to show it as a superpower, modern and better than the rest of the world, all the while hiding the oppression of its people, famine and general bad working conditions. Artists and designers responded to this social and cultural change by creating work that reflected the ideals of the new communist society and sought to persuade the opposition and uneducated peasants that it was the future of society throughout the world. They used their artwork especially in propaganda pieces as a tool to spread the message of Bolshevism.

As Mikhail Guerman writes ‘True artists had long expected the revolution ... The revolution; when it came, lent a new meaning to their work. There were of course no more rich customers, no more well-born patrons.’ (Guerman, 1979, pg.5) The revolution gave meaning to the artists, during and post-revolution. There had finally come a time where for once besides creating for the bourgeoisie, they now instead were creating art nobly, for the people. ‘Art continued to have an audience: people who sought answers in art, who used art as a means of understanding what was going on around them’ (Guerman, 1979, pg.5) Art had done a full u-turn, it was now full of emotion and meaning and it was now serving the common people instead of hanging on the walls of the bourgeois. There was a language developing within the art. Red became the colour of the people, the revolutionaries lost the pent up anger and oppression of the past. ‘True artists had been brimming over with anger, anxiety, and expectation long before 1917. They were learning how to look reality straight in the face, to see the conflicts of the time and the tragedy in the world around them.’ (Guerman, 1979, pg.5) This pent up anger wasn’t just sudden of course, it was built up, however with the revolution they were able to steer the direction and emotion in their art and they couldn’t have had a better time to take advantage of it through artistic means. This ‘compassion for their oppressed, overtaxed and poorly run country united artists of all generations and all styles’. (Guerman, 1979, pg.6) The revolution helped finally unify the people to overthrow the bourgeois regime that was oppressing them; the artists came together, the young and the old to form the avant-garde. They did away with the traditions of the past, for some however it wasn’t about that. ‘Their country served only as the backdrop for their artistic experiments.’ (Guerman, 1979, pg.8) The revolution was just the perfect backdrop for them to go wild as possible in their artistic endeavours in the hope that it would be accepted by the people as the next new thing. These people couldn’t bear the burdens of their new found life, post-revolution, they moved away to different countries where they didn’t have to keep track with what was happening back at home. The revolution happened so fast and changed so much for many people that it was too much, artists such as these used Russia as a means of expression. They used it as a means of being more radical and experimental without having to keep up with the pulsing pace of events. ‘Lenin furthermore, proposed something entirely new: monumental propaganda.’ (Guerman, 1979, pg.12) The proposed monumental propaganda by Lenin was revolutionary in itself; it was to combine the past, present and future, in commemoration of the heroic freedom-fighters. This creation of gigantic monuments brought all the artists together and gave them a reason to create work for the new social order. The artists didn’t know what to build; they were exhausted building them and had no clear conception of what the ‘new world sculptures ‘were, all they knew was that they had to be different to what had been created in the past. Instead of creating monuments of freedom fighters many created the sculptures using their emotions in memory of the men and women. Their built up emotion decorated the streets with sixty-seven sculptures around Moscow and the rest of Russia.

The destruction and removal of all that was left of the Tsarist reign took away their influence and essentially wiped them out of the capital, putting new communist statues in the old monuments’ places. This epitomises the communist regime: out with the old, in with the new. ‘This was Lenin’s view of how art could most directly serve the masses and the new social order.’ (Lodder, 1980, pg. 53) One such statue was the Marx and Engels statue (fig.1) built from ephemeral materials, One of these materials was cement which was celebrated with the new found modernity. It was a revolutionary material in itself, but at the time it was of low quality. The statues were rushed and cheaply made just in time for the October Revolution’s anniversary, Lenin wasn’t looking for innovation or artistic quality, and he was just hoping the names in the inscriptions would suffice. Yet they didn’t because the statue (fig.1) was laughed at by the public, it was neither liked nor disliked. The testament to the monumental propaganda was the same as the material it was constructed from, it all crumbled in the following winter, the materials were of such low quality they just fell apart. One such critic of the work that was produced was Vladimir Tatlin who was worried Lenin would have monuments created that would be more un-revolutionary, as Figure 1 illustrates. In the hope of pulling forth new and talented sculptures to commemorate the true efforts of the communist regime, ‘the State, as it is now, cannot and must not be the initiator of bad taste.’ (Lodder, 1980, pg. 53) If the regime was to taint its image now with its first big undertaking, it wouldn’t do much justice to its reputation and lasting image of being revolutionary like the rest of the country. What it needed was something that truly celebrated modernity as well as the state. ‘Post-revolutionary monuments should demonstrate “a synthesis of the different types of art” and employ the geometrical forms modernity called for.’ (Lynton, 2009, pg. 55) One such art style and movement that came from the revolution was what came to be called ‘Constructivism’, a movement that did away with the notion of art for art’s sake, in keeping with the ideals of socialism. Constructivists worked with materials, celebrating modernity in its purest form. While they did create artwork as such, it wasn’t to be considered as artwork and it wasn’t work to be sold as they were creating work for the people in mind. ’In reality it was something much wider: an approach to working with materials, within a certain conception of their potential as active participants in the process of social and political transformation.’ (Lodder, 1980, pg. 1) They became part of the avant-garde which took part in the transformation of Russia’s image. Tatlin, as a constructivist, had a big part within the monumental propaganda taskforce, bringing together the power of the revolution and the people. The constructivists created abstract monuments using many geometric forms to symbolise the events and people of the revolution. The iconography of the Red wedge and White rectangle was born out of this, and was first seen as part as one of the monumental propaganda pieces by Nikolai Kolli and later made famous by El Lizzitzky’s ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.’ The constructivists talked to the people using this imagery, and iconography such as this became common place with the constructivists, it was a language people could read – despite being abstract - even if they were illiterate. Red was the colour that summed up the oppression of the people. White was the colour of the bourgeois and the Tsar, and anyone who opposed the Bolshevik regime.

"Constructivism is not, as one might believe, an artistic trend but an ideology born in proletarian Russia during the existence of the Revolution ... The aim of constructivism is to organize communist existence by shaping constructive Man." (Barris) The constructivists wanted to use their work to convince more people to think in the same way as them: as proletarian socialists. This was the objective of the movement, to influence and create likeminded workers who would contribute to the state through the use of new and revolutionary methods of thinking. ‘Go into the factory, where the real body of life is made.’ (Lodder, 1980, pg. 2) The constructivists wanted to make work just they like factory workers would. They weren’t concerned with creating works of beauty, and favoured functional objects that made use of materials according to their capabilities. Their works were to be demonstrations of material behaviour; it was never dictated by the artist transforming a material into something it is not. Instead, the material dictated the construction itself and the meaning and ideas of the artist came second to the functionality. One such example of this is The Monument to the Third International (fig.2) constructed by Vladimir Tatlin, but never built as a fully realised building due to lack of funds. The frame work of the tower was to be built of steel while the inner geometric shapes where to be made from glass which would revolve at different periods of time. The use of material here adheres to these principles and the materials’ behaviour, the use of steel demonstrates its strength while the extensive use of glass is a modern technique, allowing the shapes to act as rooms that the people inside can look out from. The glass shapes were functional, as most things that were Constructivist were. The lowest block was to be a conference room; the triangle above would house the International’s executive committee while the top cylinder would act as the information bureau. “Modern technical apparatuses promoting agitation and propaganda." (Vladimir Tatlin) The tower was to be the agitation and propaganda central where it would all be produced to then be spread across the rest of the state and the rest of the world. It wasn’t just going to stand as a monument as the name suggests, but to serve a very important service in the communist agenda of spreading the message to the people. Tatlin knew a monument to the revolution would have to be a tower because it would create a silhouette in the skyline aimed to be taller than the Eiffel tower, it was truly a show of the power of the people, and the supreme new country that it represented and was built in. A structure influenced by the Tower of Babel, it would speak to the people internationally telling them what communism can offer them and eventually unite the people through the use of the agitation and propaganda made within the Monument of the Third International. Therefore, the use of new materials show the advancements of Russian society catching up with the west, and tried to prove it was better with structures grander and taller than those celebrated in Europe. They also had a purpose in trying to spread Communism internationally and were not art for art’s sake, which is a radical modernist principle.

The Constructivists’ end goal was something that could be mass produced for the people and serve a political purpose, which was radically different to the traditional take on art that everything is a one off sold at a high price to the rich. ‘Art as such had no place in the new society. In its stead ‘intellectual production’ would serve the new communist collective by fusing the formal experience gained from making abstract constructions in three dimensions with the ideology of Marxism and the constraints of industrial production’ (Lodder, 1980, pg. 3) This was the Constructivists’ thinking, that what they were creating was seen as ‘intellectual production’ because the new regime had no need for ‘art’ as it once was. The old art would be against the ideology of Marxist anti-capitalism that Russia was trying to build its new society on. What they were trying to achieve was an art form suited to the goals which came about as a result of the Russian Revolution. The constructivists were to create this new society through their analysis and developed solutions to modern problems faced within the regime, such as the illiteracy of the peasants and the task of persuading them to embrace the new socialist thinking. Aleksandr Rodchenko designed a lot of work that would be seen publicly, such as advertising and the poster ‘Books’ (fig.3) for example, created for the board of the Leningrad branch of state publishing to persuade people to read more books due to the illiteracy problem in Russia. The new medium and technique of photography is used, which came about in the explosion of modernity and was seen as a very easy way to show meaning to the illiterate and to get across a similar message that would be otherwise done using typography. Figure 3 uses type and image effectively, with the type rising to represent the fact that the woman is shouting. Hopefully the word books wouldn’t be too hard to understand so the common people would understand that she is telling them to read books. It is a work created to represent the communist cause, with the symbol of the triangle penetrating the circle which represents the moment of revolution. Women in Russia at this time became a lot more culturally equal with men and were a lot more prominent than before within the media, the Bolshevik regime favoured women in propaganda to express views held for hundreds of years. ‘The November Revolution of 1917 proclaimed women's complete economic, political, and sexual equality to men for the first time. Lenin especially was an ardent supporter of women's rights, and asserted that the Communists work to achieve total emancipation of women.’ (Lee, 2008) This then had an effect on the art and design that the new world ideology of the Bolsheviks was to be supported by. Women began to take prominent roles within society, but they were often still discriminated within the workplace. The participation of women during the revolution was seen as part of its success and the propaganda created was to try and keep them just as encouraged to keep on supporting, which made them more prominent. However, the problem with the women in Russia at the time was that many of them remained illiterate, so posters such as Figure 3 with a woman shouting ‘Books’ it’s tried to persuade women to educate themselves. Then, they could get more involved within society so they could serve a bigger part within political and social matters. If more women were educated, then the theory was that they could help the rest of the family and pass on their knowledge to the next generations. This meant that women had the hard task of trying to balance work with looking after the family in this new ideology.

In conclusion Russia society and culture in this period changed dramatically due to the Civil war and Revolution which radically altered the way in which the country was run. In a time of modernity this meant that the people had new ideas on how bring about international change in perception of Russia. Rodchenko illustrates this: "We had visions of a new world, industry, technology and science. We simultaneously invented and changed the world around us. We authored new notions of beauty and redefined art itself." (Alexander Rodchenko) The changes in Russian society meant that art and design had to respond in a new way that was revolutionary. This brought about a new found appreciation for the functionality of materials, and a visual language that spoke to the people and for them within art and design.

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Bibliography:

Guerman.M (1979) ‘Art of the October Revolution’, Aurora Art Publishers, Finland, First Edition

Lodder.C (1983) ‘Russian Constructivism’, Yale University Press, America

King.D (2010) ‘Red star over Russia’, Tate Publishing, England

Wye.D (2002) ‘The Russian Avant-Garde Book’ Museum of Modern Art, First Edition, America

Lynton.N (2009) ‘Tatlin’s Tower, Monument to Revolution’ Yale University Press, First Edition

Hatherley.O (2011) ‘The constructivists and the Russian revolution in art and architecture’ (Online) Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/04/russian-avant-garde-constructivists (Accessed: 14th January 2013)

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'http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art428/constructivism%20introduction.html (Accessed at: 17th January 2013)

(2011) ‘Constructivism’ (Online) Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-constructivism.htm (Accessed at: 17thJanuary 2013)

(2011) ‘Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko’ (Online) Available at http://www.theartstory.org/artist-rodchenko-alexander.htm (Accessed at: 17thJanuary 2013)

Lee.S (2008) ‘Women in Communist Russia 1917-1945’ (Online) Available at: http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0910/lse/lse1.html#ii (Accessed at: 19thJanuary 2013)

Liddell.C.B (2010) ‘Rodchenko & Stepanova: Visions of Constructivism’ (Online) Available at: http://metropolis.co.jp/arts/art-reviews/rodchenko-stepanova-visions-of-constructivism/ (Accessed at: 19thJanuary 2013)

Phiz (2003) ‘In what ways was Vladimir Tatlin’s Model to the 3^rd International of 1920 revolutionary?’ (Online) Available at: http://everything2.com/title/Vladimir+Tatlin%2527s+Monument+to+the+3rd+International (Accessed at: 20thJanuary 2013)

Hatherly.O (2009) ‘A beardless monument’ (Online) Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=593 (Accessed at: 20thJanuary 2013)