Let us move back in time to the Moscow of the 1920s. Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish philosopher and Essayist who visited Moscow at the time, gives us a graphic account of what we can encounter: vast amounts of people in the streets, their shocking proximity in the street cars, communal apartments, and everyone is absorbed in political work. People are no longer tied to domestic pursuits; the private life is withering away. Every aspect of life is ruled by limitless experimentation:
Each thought, each day, each life lies here as on a laboratory table. And as if it were a metal from which an unknown substance is by every means to be extracted, it must endure experimentation to the point of exhaustion. No organism, no organization, can escape this process. (W. Benjamin)
Constructivism formed in the middle of this all-encompassing laboratory. The constructivists’ motivation to experiment was at least to a certain degree an existential one: the conception of the artist as an individual devoted to the expression of self deemed the artist essentially bourgeois and undermined their position in the new society. Constructivists, as the New Artists, actively searched for answers to the question what the role of the artists in and after the revolutionary period should be. Not only did they begin to understand art as primarily a mode of production instead of a mode of expression, some of them also decided to abandon such inquiries into the nature of art altogether and enter the industrial production itself, as artists-constructors. The making of forms of art —such as the “bourgeois individualist” arts of painting, sculpture, and, also, the spatial construction—is pejoratively labelled as “easelism” (stankovizm). (Gough, 2005)
The leading characters of Constructivism include Alexandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, together with other young Moscow artists Karl Ioganson, Konstantin Medunetskii, the Stenberg brothers as well as the theoretician Aleksei Gan, who formed the Working Group of Constructivists in March 1921, soon to be joined by many others, such as the Marxist cultural theoretician Boris Arvatov or the literary critic Osip Brik. In the early 20s, all of these people are members of a state-funded research centre, the Institute of Artistic Culture or INKhUK under the direction of Vasily Kandinsky. As soon as after November 1921, these Moscow Constructivists abandon easelism altogether, shifting from the realm of the aesthetic to the realm of the real. The Constructivists set out to reject all “experimental activity divorced from life”’ and choose to shape not the materials of art but rather the “very stuff with which people live their everyday lives,” (Gan, 1921) in (Gough, 2005)
Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova.
The focus on the objects of everyday life became one of the central issues of the Constructivists. It arose from the discourse on the so-called Novyi Byt, or the New Everyday Life, concerned with how people live their lives on the most basic, everyday level: regarding their “living arrangements, family and sexual relationships, friendships, personal appearance, leisure activities or consumer practices” (Trotsky in Kim, 2013). The constructivist position towards the new everyday life followed from the Bolshevik position, but differed from it in several crucial aspects. The Bolshevik position has been documented in Leon Trotsky’s book The Questions of Everyday Life (1923).
Two stances towards 'byt': the Bolshevik one on the left, the Constructivist one on the right.
Bolsheviks saw byt as the domestic sphere most heavily associated with women – problems of byt, such as domestic slavery, childcare or the connection of marriage and private property relations, were seen essentially as women’s problems and would be solved by removing material life from the control of the individual and the family entirely, and by creating a multitude of collective institutions: collective kitchens, laundry facilities, childcare institutions and many others (Kiaer, 2009). Similarly to the scientific organisation of labor, scientific organization of life was sought, according to Trotsky (Kim, 2013). The poster I found that illustrates the bolshevik stance towards byt is the one in the picture above on the left: we see a woman doing the washing in a dark room, while another one opens the window wide to show her companion what awaits her once she is free from her domestic sphere, calling “Down with domestic drudgery”.
Constructivists, on the other hand, sought to change byt not “from the outside”, through collective institutions, but from within, through the construction of new everyday objects such as stoves, pots or clothing. These New Objects, or the socialist objects, as Boris Arvatov termed them in his 1925 essay, would create proletarian culture not by transcending material life but by organically and flexibly transforming it from within (Kiaer, 2009). The newspaper cutout Novyi Byt in the picture above depicts this approach: central to it is the “socialist object” itself, in this case a coat designed by the Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, implying that the new everyday life can come to existence through the use of such objects.
The socialist objects: Popova's flapper dress vs. Tatlins utilitarian coat.
The socialist object became the desired product of some of the Constructivists’ creative efforts. They would see it as the object-as-comrade, as “an active, almost animate participant in social life” (Arvatov in Kim, 2009). As a result, it would not be a mere passive commodity but could be used in socially meaningful ways. However, only very few Constructivists actually entered production in order to give these objects life and even among the few of them who did, we can find several different approaches to constructing the socialist object. Vladimir Tatlin, as we saw on the previous slide, abandoned his artistic path completely and started designing mundane stoves, pots and coats (Kiaer, 2009). They were completely utilitarian in their nature and bare of any decorative elements. The coat, for example, was designed to be worn during all seasons, with removable lining and with the lower part much narrower than the shoulders so that heat cannot escape. Tatlin was convinced that what the new Russian society needed was “things as simple and primitive as our simple and primitive byt.” - the time for more “advanced” objects has not yet arrived (Rodchenko in Kiaer, 2009). In contrast to that, the Constructivist Lyubov Popova, did not insist on the purely utilitarian character of her objects but engaged with the consumer culture of the early Soviet Union. Her flapper dress on the right does not completely dismiss the consumer taste, but rather appeals to it in a systematic, sophisticated way, and aspires to transform it so that it is no longer ruled by commodity fetishism. In the context of the New Economic policy, it can be seen as a “transitional object”: one that is half way between the capitalist object and the socialist object, bridging the gap from the former to the latter. The Constructivists presumed that eventually, a point would be reached when the consumers would turn their desire solely towards the socialist objects. As Boris Arvatov put it: “it’s Utopia, but we have to say it … It’s true that the situation is tragic … but it isn’t a dead-end situation. This is the situation of a man on a riverbank who needs to cross over to the other side. You have to lay a foundation and build a bridge”(Arvatov in Kiaer, 2009).
I would now like to turn my attention fully towards the artist Lyubov Popova and examine her efforts in this metaphorical “bridge-building”, in raising the consumer taste and bringing the consumer into the active fight for rational products. Lyubov Popova was born in 1889 to a wealthy family of textile merchants, artists and philosophers. She was interested and trained in art already since her childhood, and in her early 20s, she even travelled to Paris to attend studios of prominent local Cubist painters. Upon her return to Moscow, she started working in Tatlin’s studio, where she became acquainted with the soon-to-be-called Constructivists. (Sarabianov, 1990) Although she was not among the founding members of the Working Group of Constructivists that was established in March 1921, she identified with their positions and as early as in 1923, she became one of the few artists who managed to fulfill their desire to work in production – she and Varvara Stepanova joined the First State Textile Factory and authored a large amount of textile patterns. (Gough, 2005). I would like to investigate the continuities of her earlier artistic work and of her Productivist work in textile designs and demonstrate that her textile designs can be viewed as an end point of her conscious move away from painting, making Popova a unique example of the Artist-Constructor.
Evolution of Popova's style towards non-objective art: examples of her work of Cubo-Futurism (Objects from a Dyer's Shop, 1914), post-Cubism (Painterly Architectonics: Still Life - Instruments, 1918), Suprematism (Untitled, 1917), and Constructivism (Space-Force Constructions, 1921)
Popova herself described her artistic path that resulted in moving towards non-objective art with the following words: “The Cubist period (the problem of form) is followed by the Futurist period (the problem of motion and color); the principle of the abstraction of the parts of an object is followed with logical inevitability by the abstraction of the object itself. This is the road to nonobjectiveness. The representational problem is followed by the problem of the construction of color and line (Post-Cubism) and of color (Suprematism).” (Popova in Sarabianov, 1990) We can see this move towards nonobjective art clearly in her works: the early cubist and cubo-futurist works from 1913-1914, the post-cubist work in the series she labelled “painterly architectonics”,and her suprematist work from the period of her involvement with the Supremus group, of which Kazimir Malevich was also a member. When she became involved with the Constructivists in 1921, she produced the Spatial force compositions – they were presented alongside works by Rodchenko and other artists at an exhibition that was meant to be the last exhibition of the traditional art of painting (Gough, 2005).
For Popova, though not so for the others, the exhibited spatial force compositions really were the last painting series she produced. In 1923, she and another artist Varvara Stepanova are invited to work at the First State Textile Factory. They accepted the offer, following Lef (Left Front of the Arts) comment on the situation within the production, that ‘Unfortunately, our industry is still far from being ready to welcome the input of our creative power. For the time being young artist-producers must try their strength wherever they can.’ (Lef in Lodder, 2010) The textile industry was one of the most developed and important industries of pre-revolutionary Russia, but the links with Paris from where most patterns were sourced had been disrupted after the revolution and the civil war, and the industry was in need of artists that could supplement these. Nevertheless, since Popova and Stepanova were aware of the possible limitation of their work to simple handicraft, they submitted a memo to the factory management, which expressed their desire to be involved also in the organisational and technical aspects of the manufacturing and marketing process (Lodder, 2010). Most importantly, they wanted to participate in the work of the production organs, be able to influence the production plans and models, and have access to the chemistry laboratory. With these requirements, Popova and Stepanova clearly tried to set themselves apart from applied artists or craftsmen and suggested transdisciplinary cooperation between the departments.
Various fabric patterns and dress designs by Popova.
But it was not only the production process that was supposed to set the Productivists apart from the applied artists. Central to Popova's textile design was relating the decoration of cloth not only to the type of material used, but also to the exact purposes for which that material was intended. As such, it should not only be regarded in static state, but also as an object which will be in perpetual motion in the performance of a specific task. She broke away from the traditional plant and flower patterns and fully exploited the potential of simple geometrical forms and a restricted color range that the industrial production allowed for. Similarly to her paintings from the time, the fundamental components of her textile designs were simple (lines, circles, triangles), while the resulting patterns were often very complex, built up of repetitions, developments, and permutations of the simplest and most easily reproducible shapes. (Lodder, 2010)
Popova's flapper dress vs. conventional flapper dresses of the time.
Popova’s also produced dress designs that illustrated the application of her cloth designs. These dresses can be related to Arvatov’s “socialist objects”: “connected like a co-worker with human practice”, they would produce new relations of consumption, new experiences of everyday life, and new human subjects of modernity (Kiaer, 2009). In comparison with the foreign fashion patterns and dress designs from the time, they strikingly challenge fashions conventional production of feminity. The massive collar broadens the shoulders and obliterates the chest which adds notes of androgyny to the dress. The bold, repetitive pattern itself makes the flowy dress seem futuristic. Constructed under the conservative New Economic Policy, however, we can still recognize that the dress is in some ways oriented towards consumer taste. It acknowledges the desires of the female consumer but simultaneously steers the owner of the dress in a more feminist and collectivist direction, and thus changes their experience of the everyday life. (Kiaer, 2009)
Even though Popova faced some obstacles pursuing her work as an artist-constructor in the Textile Printing Factory, her artistic path culminating in her production work resulted in developing a unique, coherent design method for the production of textile prints. Her fellow Constructivists regarded her work in art as well as in production highly. In the second issue of the journal Lef, which was dedicated to Popova after her premature death at age 35, the Lef editors wrote,
"Popova was a Constructivist-Productivist not only in words, but in deed. When she and Stepanova were invited to work at [the First State Cotton-Printing] factory, no one was happier than she was. Day and night she sat making her drawings for fabrics, attempting in one creative act to unite the demands of economics, the laws of exterior design and the mysterious taste of the peasant woman from Tula." (Lef in Kiaer, 2009)
Christina Kiaer explains this commentary with the following words: "According to the Lef editors, Popova aimed to not only solve technical problems of utilitarian form ('the laws of exterior design'), but also to contribute to the new socialist economy ('the demands of economics') and appeal to consumer desire ('the mysterious taste of the peasant woman from Tula')" (Kiaer, 2009).
Constructivism saw its end in the 1930s: the focus solely on the act of self-affirmation of the new Soviet order under a growing threat of European fascism and Japanese aggression caused the avant-garde radical spirit to wither away and make way for social realism (Kim, 2013). The artists who once aspired to transform everyday life by constructing socialist objects turned their focus towards photography or objective art, faced accusations of formalism or even persecutions. Lyubov Popova did not live to see this end of the ideas she was so passionate about: she died at the peak of her artistic career in 1924. Her work and her persona remains encapsulated in the 1920s, and I think it is fair to say it embodies the ideals of the Constructivist movement.
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References:
Gough, Maria. (2005). The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. University of California Press.
Kiaer, Christina. (March 2009). “Into Production!”: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. https://transversal.at/transversal/0910/kiaer/en
Kiaer, C. (1997). Boris Arvatov's Socialist Objects. October, 81, 105-118. doi:10.2307/779021
Kim, S. (2013). Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. Retrieved April 16, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt32b5jt
Lodder, Christina. (2010). Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-design
Sarabianov, Dmitri, and Adaskina, Natalia. (1990). Popova. Harry N Abrams Inc.
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