The Measures Taken

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery.

What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?



‘Art is Dead! shouted the Dadaists, with their hatred of galleries and museums. ‘From the easel to the machine’, was a slogan of the Constructivists. The ten years after 1918 marked a total war on the category of ‘art’, its networks of patrons and consumers, and its unique objects. This is something which hasn’t exactly been forgotten by history, but tends to be treated rather patronisingly – an eccentric extremism that art grew out of, a failed utopia, or a juvenile biting of the hand that feeds. Two current London exhibitions, From Russia and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography inadvertently help explain why art was slated for destruction, what it might have been replaced with, and why it survived.



Fine Art, although we think of it as something eternal and immutable, is actually a relatively recent idea. Of course, artists, craftsmen and architects have existed for thousands of years. However, with the occasional exception (the famous sculptors of ancient Athens, such as Praxitiles, maybe) art as we think of it – an individual work by a gifted individual, installed in a gallery – is modern. Art comes into existence along with the bourgeoisie, and the culture of the Renaissance ‘genius’ accompanied the birth of mercantile capitalism. Early galleries, as depicted in contemporary drawings, would have looked crass to our eyes, with their piling up of paintings as commodities. The more refined gallery as we know it, and the artist as we know him or her is a 19th century phenomenon, and funding and patronage works similarly today.



From Russia concentrates on the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. They were particularly enlightened patrons, commissioning from the finest artists of the 1900s. Henri Matisse’s ‘The Dance’ was painted for Shchukin’s stairwell, while he kept an entire room of Picassos, which if sold together now would easily equal the GDP of a small African country. The Royal Academy is filled with a panoply of masterpieces, and hundreds of spectators crowd the galleries, awed. Aptly, as the art of this period marks the real emergence of the artist as genius, as fearless experimenter and frequently tragic hero. With Van Gogh, Gaugin, Picasso, (all here) the artist’s works become even more about a totally irreplacable object, a truly priceless possession (occasionally opened up to the public) at which one must genuflect, radiating what Walter Benjamin regarded as a fetishistic ‘aura’.



Along with the cult of the individual artist, though, comes the emergence of the artistic avant-garde, determined to epater les bourgeois, to shock their patrons’ class and create a culture they wouldn’t recognise. In the first two decades of the 20th century this pushed art to what are still frequently stunning extremes. With ‘Cubo-Futurism’ the Russian avant-garde pushed at the limits of the canvas, using it to create images redolent of the giddy dynamism of the modern mediascape and its bustling streets, as in the paintings of Liubov Popova, or representations of the terrifying, incomprehensible chaos of mechanised slaughter like Pavel Filonov’s ‘The German War’, rather than the portraits, still lifes and so forth that make up most of the RA show.



By the late 1910s the Russian avant-garde were innovating at such a rapid rate that whole movements (kinetic art, minimalism) would emerge decades later on the basis of their discarded experiments. Given extra impetus by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the canvases of Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich and Mikhail Matyushin that close From Russia reach an extreme of abstraction that, they imagined, would end art altogether. Malevich called his ‘Black Square’ the ‘zero of form’, after which he would go ‘beyond zero’. Finally, we have a model of Tatlin’s ‘Third International Tower’, over which the Berlin Dadaists proclaimed ‘art is dead – long live Tatlin’s machine-art!’



Which brings us to Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography. In the early 1920s another art-obituarist wrote ‘art is dead, and Rodchenko is the executioner’. He would have resented being fingered as the sole culprit. Rodchenko was a member of LEF, a group of former painters and poets who attempted to realise an art without art – abandoning anything not technically reproducible (such as the oil painting or sculpture) as a remnant of the deposed bourgeoisie. LEF’s ‘art workers’ like Varvara Stepanova or Sergei Tretiakov theorised an art against spectacle. Rather than the individual fetishised object, whether painting or sculpture, they moved into book and magazine design, fashion, film, architecture, even advertising. Most of all they tried to engage themselves in everyday life, transforming the spaces of mundanity and drudgery. The Hayward exhibition has a fragmentary, but still impressive collection of what was to replace painting – the photomontage, the photograph, the covers of popular magazines.



In 1923 Sergei Tretiakov wrote in LEF’s journal that art, like capitalism, was something that held back innate human creativity, frightening off the non-expert, with its religiose rhetoric of magic, inspiration and dreams. ‘Recall that in childhood every person draws, dances, invents precise words, sings. So why does he then grow up to be extremely inexpressive? And only occasionally go to admire the artist’s ‘creation’? Doesn’t this originate within those conditions of capitalist labour which make work processes into a curse and within which people are always longing for moments of free time? Is it normal to be converted from a skilled producer into a spectator-consumer? And to thereby lose your active creative instinct?’ For LEF, a world without capitalism was necessarily a world without such an art.



In abolishing art as we know it, and with it the museum and the gallery, LEF hoped that ‘everyone should become an artist.’ If everything is artistic, then art as a separate category need exist no longer. Today, we find all this in fragments, walking round galleries and museums, confirming their failure. Although it may be in the form of installations as much as paintings, the culture of contemplation and spectacle still suffuses the art world, and millions are still made from artistic mystique. If we follow Tretiakov’s reasoning, then art survives because drudgery survives, because we still need escapism. Maybe, then, the would-be executioners of art deserve to be taken a little more seriously?