Forging the link between art and revolution

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Modern Art, Oxford. Rodchenko was a leading member of the Constructivist/Productivist movement in the decade following the Bolshevik revolution. The exhibition covers his paintings, drawings, photographs, furniture design and posters and street art. It includes work never exhibited before, including paintings held by the Rodchenko family in Moscow. It will stay in Oxford until March 25 Rodchenko wearing a worker's suit he designed. Photograph of October 1917 turned upside down not just the property relations of Czarist Russia but its social fabric in every sphere.

In art, no less than in politics and the family the revolution led directly to an explosion of development in which Soviet artists no longer took as their point of development the artistic revolution of Picasso and the Cubists but the proletarian revolution of the Bolsheviks.

The most conscious of these artists attempted to forge a direct unity between the new Soviet power and their work..

To do this it was necessary to destroy the old idealism, the sanctity and humbug of the art gallery-to demystify the artist and his/her subjectivism and to assert the functional nature of the artist/designer.

Cosy decoration

Rodchenko wrote in 1920:

"The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48 storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless, aeronautics, submarines which will be transformed into The development from painter to anti-painter covered a span of no more than five years from the revolution-a period of rapid and revolutionary change.

Rodchenko had been influenced first by Aubrey Beardsley and Gauguin and from 1915 onwards by the Futurists. But the group of artists, designers and architects-of which it must be remembered Rodchenko was oniy a part-rejected each of these in turn.

First edition Ossip Brik, critic and writer, writing in the first edition of LEF in 1923 (the quarterly periodical: Left Front of the Arts) attacked those who adopted the title 'constructivist' but rejected its disciplines:

'Instead of 'composition' they say "construction', instead of 'to write' they say 'to shape' instead of _to "create' _ to institutions which make life practical reality"

The manifesto also formulated slogans, the first two of which were: "Down with art, long live technical science' and "Religion is a lie. Art is a lie" Mayakovsky The dangers of proclaiming proletarian art by decree have been pointed to by Trotsky. He attacked the Oktiabr and Kuznitsa as seeking to become monopolistic representatives of the artistic interests of the proletariat. He refused to condemn artistic creation to the dustbin and make do with political generalities about artistic creation when that creation was not taking place.

"Of course it would be splendid if we had, to supplement our Communist political writing, the Bolshevik world outlook expressed in artistic form. But we haven't and that is not accidental. The heart of the matter is that artistic creativity, by its very nature, lags behind the other modes of expressions of a man's spirit, and still more of the spirit of a class.

"It is one thing to understand something and express it logically, and quite another thing to assimilate it organically, reconstructing the whole find a new kind of artistic expression for this new entity.

"The latter process is more organic; slower, more difficult to subject to conscious influence-and in the end it will always lag behind.

"The political writing of a class hastens ahead on stilts, while its artistic creativity hobbles along behind on crutches."

Clearly the attempt to dump painting was futile and the 'raising of photography over painting one sided and distorted but the drive of the productivists to break from bourgeois art justifies itself as a movement by the fact that artistic creation did take place under its A manifesto is not art, yet the manifesto did not remain, in the case of Rodchenko, a banner without creation.

Rodchenko became abstract artist who then rejected the mysticism of the abstracts. rein's film, Battleship Potemkin, His painting developed towards the principles of construction. He declared that only line in art reflected reality.

"Line has bid a red farewell to painting"

Next he sought retreat from 'painterliness' in canvasses of plain colour.

Finally he broke with painting altogether and turned to photography, opening up a dazzling era of work in which photomontage predominated.

Productivist Art flowered in the 20s. Even as the bureaucracy of Stalin was eating its way into the heart of the Soviet system, so was the art of that Soviet system beginning to find an authentic voice.

Trained designers

Rodchenko went Vkhutemas-an engineering workshop which trained designers not to become famous artists but to work in industry.

In 1923 he began a long and fruitful collaboration with the poet Mayakovsky-starting with Ene cover design for Mayakovsky's poem 'Pro Eto'1925 In 1930 Mayakovsky committed suicide and Rodchenko's photograph The Pioneer' was officially criticised.

The following year he was expelled from the Oktiabr on grounds of formalism. Stalin's Social Realism had arrived.

In one sense the Constructivist-Productivists, by denying any independent role for the artist, had reduced their ability to fight this direct subservience of art to serve the bureaucracy.

Continued work

Although Rodchenko fell into disfavour he continued to work and during the early 1930s photographed the construction of the White Sea Canal.

Capitulation would be the wrong woro. Rather, the revolutionary political expression which gave the Productive artists their impetus was on the retreat and Rodchenko-not a Trotskyist and without a political comprehension of the reaction that beset his workforced back with it.

He took up painting again and continued to produce quantities of vivid photography. But his art could not help construct a communist society because communist society was no longer on the agenda. When he died in 1956 (three years after Stalin) his best work was more than 30 years behind him.

There are signs that Rodchenko is being rehabilitated in the Soviet Union.

Allowing his family to release pictures for the Oxford exhibition was an oblique mark of bureaucratic approval.

But the productivists will never be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union until political revolution is on the agenda there.

The Constructivists and Productivists expressed revolutionary optimism and the hope of ending the isolation of artistic creation from the masses. That is a revolutionary goal • incompatible with

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system of one's feelings, and to THELLO Rodchenko's poster for Eist

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