El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky in Germany 1922-1925, by Matthew Drutt


[page 9, paragraph 1]
Whatever the reasons, what resulted from his initial sojourn -- which lasted barely two years and was characterized b frequent travel to various German cities and neighboring countries -- was a series of collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that drew upon his explorations of painting, graphic design, and architecture combined with a burgeoning interest in photography, catapulting him into the limelight of the international avant-garde and transforming him into something of an ambassador for activities emerging both at home and abroad.


An exemplary figure.

from FIGURATION to GEOMETRIC ABSTRCTION.

under the tutelage of the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich.


[page 9, paragraph 2]
In an essay written in 1920, Lissitzky proclaimed: "The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything in the world -- it is a symbol of the new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of the people." Lissitzky carried Suprematism beyond Malevich's orginal formulation of pure painting imbued with a spiritul aura. With their multiple references to real and abstract space, the Prouns became a system through which Lissitzky not only ruminated upon formal properties of transparency, opacity, color, shape, and line but began to dwell upon the deployment of these forms into socialized space, placing him into the path of the emergence of Constructivism, which, using a similarly reductive visual vocabulary, sought to merge art and life through mass production and industry.


Russia, VKhUTEMAS (the Higher State Artistic-Techinical Workshops)
Germany, Bauhaus.


[page 9, paragraph 3]
Its interdisciplinary environment, where painting, design, architecture, photography, and handcrafts were taught under a single roof, was radically opposed to the traditions of the academy and reflected the new persona of the artist as worker or engineer as it was evolving amid the rhetoric of Soviet culture. The collision between art for art's sake and art with a utilitarian purpose was settling there by the time Lissitzky arrived.


OBMOKhU (the brother Stenberg Medunestky, Ioganson, and others)
UNOVIS (Senkin, Klutsis, Ermolaeva, and others led by Malevich and Lissitzky)


[page 10, paragraph 2]
Thus, for Lissitzky constructive art could be successful as art only if its aesthetic program remained dominant to technological considerations, a sentiment he would continue to assert in the ensuing years.
我以為所謂的審美標準，就是指作品能夠為大眾讀懂，不因為概念而局限觀眾和藝術家之間的溝通。Lissitzky之所以注重字體的設計和運用，因為在抽象構成中，文字可以幫助觀眾理解符號，總結大意。Lissitzky是藝術家，也是設計師。我想設計師是有政治經濟頭腦的藝術家。藝術家的專職還是在於追求提升自我的技術和表達個人情感。


[page 10, paragraph 4]
In the tradition of modernist journals procaliming the arrival of new art forms to a broader audience, such as L'Esprit Nouveau, de Stijl, and Valori Plastici, Ehrenburg and Lissitzky published the periodical Veshch-Gegenstand-Object, which appeared only twice in 1922 but whose objective was to act as an international hournal of contemporary culture, hence its trilingual title and content. It provided both a window to the West for artists back in Russia and a vew for Western readers into the various cultural activities in the Soviet Union. The inaugural issue included notices of forth coming exhibitions, artist' congresses, and announcements for other avant-garde periodicals, as well as interview with such artists as Fernand Leger and Gino Severini, articals by le Corbusier and Theo van Doesberg, and one by Nikolai Punin celebrating Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, which was fast becoming the symbol in Germany for Russia's artistic revolution.
內容豐富。


[page 11, paragraph 1]
"From now on, art, while preserving all local characteristics and symptoms is international. ... We consider the triumph of the constructive method to be essential for our present. 'Object' will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life but to organize it."
藝術家已經表示，我們將不止被“物件”美化，還將被“物件”管理。藝術家从上個世紀就開始認真地推進這個[人]被[物化]的項目。


[page 12, paragraph 1]
What is different about Lissitzky's converntion is the implication that the incorporation of a photograph into an abstract space would have for his impending deployment of abstract space into real space. Again, theorizing these issues through the Proun, his primary preoccupation at the time, he wrote: "Proun begins as a level surface, turns into a model of three dimensional space, and goes on to construct all the objects of everyday life."
Lissitzky解釋何謂Proun，這個概念輿達達有分別，比較重要，請記。Lissitzky是一個考慮3維空間的人。可能因此他的平面構成會很精簡，他在做疊影的時候，不止看到了平面上色彩的滲透，還看到的是對3維空間的可能性。



很想把這篇文章盡快讀完。但是心緒又有些煩亂。找到一個網站，有很多關於藝術的短片。甚好。






This website reminds me a female artist Bridget Riley. Would be helpful for the lesson of female artists.