model for the future

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark



Page 81:
Tatlin's tower reveals a highly centralized vision of both government and propaganda and it typified the Russian avant-garde's naive enthusiasm for mass-media technology. Tatlin's friend, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), called the radio "the main tree of consciousness;" "The radio will forge the broken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind." In cinema, photography, and graphic design, techniques of montage were developed to high levels of sophistication in the 1920s by avant-garde film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and designers such as Gustav Klucis (1895-c.1944), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and the Stenberg brothers.

Page 82:
The avant-garde artists of the Russian Constructivist movement, of which Tatlin was a founding figure, viewed design practices linked to mass production as a means of integrating art with the reconstruction of society. With designs for communist clothing, textiles, furniture, architecture, and even entire cities, Constructivists sought the creation of a total design aesthetic for changing the behavioral habits of the Soviet population, or, as they called it, for "organizing the psyche of the masses." Because of the low levels of industrial technology and materials, few Constructivist designs went into production. By the late 1920s, the Constructivists' vision for their project veered between a radical utopianism and a sinister fantasy of social engineering. On the one hand, Tatlin's design for an "air-bicycle," a human-powered flying machine based on bird anatomy, was devised for the physcial and perceptual liberation of the travelling worker - unfortunately his prototype failed to fly. On the other, there were plans

Page 85:
in Consturctivist architecture to enforce communal living in vast housing blocks where private habits could be rigorously policed, children would be raised collectively, and, in one proposal, residents would carry out all activities (including sex) according to a twenty-four-hour timetable.

Between Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's rise to power some five years later, the Party leadership maintained its policy of permitting relative pluralism in the arts, but it became increasingly clear that realist approaches were officially favoured more than the avant-garde's experiments. Among the many artistic groups of the 1920s, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russai (AKhRR) had been the largest, and gained support for its realist art among influential trade union and Red Army officials. In 1928 the party launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the revolutionary process, and was expressed by a drive to "proletarianize" the arts.


Serafima Ryangina's Red Army Art Studio captures the mood of the artistic and literary groups which sought to train up a new generation of working-class artists. Some of the leaders of these groups, themselves often middle-class and too yong to have been involved in the original revolution and civil war, took to shaving their heads and wearing khaki fatigues to express their militant "class-war" spirit. This prepared the ground for the autocratic cultural policies of Stalinism.