Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution

Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. University of California Press, 2005.

Russian constructivism was a reaction to the Russian revolution in the respect that constructivists tried to identify their place in the new world by challenging (already debated) concept of the artist “as an individual committed to the expression of self.” (8)

Tensions between form as expression of subjectivism (Kandinsky) and of objectivism (formalists). Rodchenko and C – attempts to replace subjective expression with objective analysis. Preoccupation with form, color and faktura. “faktura means ‘texture’ or ‘facture’ – that is, a property of painting, sculpture, and many other arts, including verse. More significantly, for our purposes, it refers to the overall handling or working of the material constituents of a given medium, and thus to the process of production in general… In this sense, faktura is an integral term in the Russian vanguard’s broadly modernist conception of art as a mode of production rather than expression.” (12)

But “what prevents the work of art from slipping into a merely arbitrary arrangement of random pictorial elements?” (34) – formalists go into studies of “composition, construction and rhythm” (ibid). Studying modernists, formalists discover that art progressed from depiction of forms resembling objects – something a priori illusionary – to depiction of color, etc., that is, more ‘real’ objects. Therefore, form of material is used to represent non-illusionary forms of the real world. This, however, poses a problem for them: “to institutionalize the modernist problem of the motivation of the arbitrary that, as Yve-Alain Bois argues, runs through the history of late-nineteenth0century and early-twentieth-century art, particularly abstraction. As noted at the outset, if the non-objective painter’s initial task was to get rid of the referent in painting, his or her next task is to determine the logic or principle by which this new ‘painterly content’ will be organized.” (27) – hence preoccupation with composition, montage, etc.

Vision is illusionary, and therefore appeal to form (to its very faktura, materiality) can help people to see new things – those that old art will never teach them see. Constructivists believed that their spatial experiments would spur socialist industrialization. They saw, therefore, a danger in the fact that many Communists, while staying on radical positions in economic or political questions, would be disappointingly retrograde in regards to art. New social relations could not be expressed through old cultural forms. Constructivism promised to supply these new “cultural forms that are capable of expressing the dynamism of communism itself…” (70).

Karl Ioganson’s experiments with structural constructions as a direct expression of his search for ‘pure’ forms, those that would not be burdened by old ideological constructions. The construction of objects is driven by a rational desire of the greatest possible economy of material and energy; this minimalist agenda determines his aesthetic program. In the end, the rejection of aestheticism for functionalism. Ioganson’s attempt to enter the actual production process in one of Moscow’s factories as an ultimate logical development of the constructivist rejection of art.