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Review: The Ruins of The Bolshevik Avant Garde : On Preservation of the works of Russian Modernism. Gerry Fitzpatrick 3 February 2012 Walking towards London’s Piccadilly you will notice a very odd thing this month. For there in the Royal Academy courtyard is a realization of a piece of avant-garde architecture from just before the civil war in Russia. It is Tatlin’s tower, better known as the Monument to the Third International. The tower symbolizes most of the artistic aims and political ambitions of the Bolshevik artistic avant-garde from around 1920-1922: https://picasaweb.google.com/102237103663068882935/January302012#5703393361249447362 This exhibition, Building The Revolution and its predecessors at number of European centre’s plus a special study exhibition in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, have been staged to make a specific case for the preservation of what remains of the early works of Soviet architecture which although scattered and ruined are still extant. The current exhibition shows how the development of pre revolutionary and post revolutionary ideas informed the practice of Soviet modern architecture it contains a number of photographs of the state of the buildings today: http://arttattler.com/architecturevanguard.html The bourgeois case for their preservation that is presented in the catalogue goes something like this: Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 Russian modernism and the avant-garde were able to reach the commanding heights of social influence. However, following the rise of Stalin this vision of the future was cut short and the artists of the avant-garde fell from influence some going into exile or the gulag. Now following the fall of Stalinism in 1991 the opportunity exists to preserve this artistic and architectural heritage. The word “heritage” is used in the catalogue and by the organizers of the exhibitions and its predecessor in New York at The Museum of Modern Art. Both exhibitions and the related museum talks see no contradiction or irony in using that term to refer to these works that aimed to attack and replace the 19th century bourgeois forms of architecture and meaning with an architectural regime of the machine, the factory and an unrestrained dynamic geometry. All these elements that were once in flux during the revolutionary period have now settled on one meaning: the bourgeois heritage of architectural modernism known as the International Style: https://picasaweb.google.com/102237103663068882935/January172012#5698671845579947234 Here Le Corbusier’s ideal of the functional
car with its stream lined body and windows are echoed in the structure
of the building with its concrete mass, through which there runs a ribbon
of windows. Le Corbusier like the later avant-garde took up Taylorist ideas
of mass factory line production. Ginsburg and Le Corbusier worked together
on the first significant building of the International Style in Russia:
Some eighty years later the ribbon window
of Le Corbusier-Ginsburg’s ground scraper was to prove to be the buildings
undoing. The thin “curtain” wall and the slender windows and window frames
set into it meant that there was in effect no damp course to protect the
interior living space:
Most traditional buildings had two outer
walls with a space between them, a cavity with a damp course to stop damp
and water penetration of the inner wall. That was not a matter of style
but the substance of practical experience. The other long-standing problem
was one of how the austere functionalism of these units played its role
in socially controlling workers, where the cell like uniformity of these
and other vast modernist anti-urban developments shaped and defined the
space where the working class would be placed and exiled to. The working
class in the new workers housing estates would still be workers of the
state where what they did would define what they were and what they would
always be. No matter how much education or how high a few would gain rise
through the bureaucracy; the place of the working class within the Stalinist
system would be the same. And that place would be purely functional; their
political role would be subordinated to Stalin’s rule and bureaucratic
control. However, the residents of this GOSPROM approved building and of
Le Corbusier’s buildings never shared their architect’s ideal of how they
should live the functional life or Le Corbusier’s fervor for the Purist
ideals of modernist art and culture. Residents did however use paintings
and individual touches to counter act the overbearing uniformity of the
small cell like living spaces as this photograph from the catalogue shows:
The Legacy of GOSPROM http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_pictures/807/??????????????????
As far the ideological legacy of this work is concerned there a number of approaches. The first is to see the history and development of the Russian modernist avant-garde in heroic terms in the face of bureaucratic Stalinism (the dominant approach). The American academic Alfred Barr Jr first promoted this view in the late 1920s in his lecturers which he later developed and promoted as the director of the Museum of Modern Art New York in its many books. The second is to see the practices and theories of the avant-garde as precursors of Stalinism itself. This view has recently been advanced by Boris Groys in his book The Total Art of Stalinism (1988). The third approach is to see the rise of modernist state planning as having the functional dynamics of modern technocracy. James Burnham in his influential book The Managerial Revolution saw Stalinist development in non-ideological terms where the question of political ethics is no longer relevant. More recently the filmmaker Adam Curtis’ in his documentary The Engineer’s Plot (1992) showed how Stalinist development and modernization also meant that the illusion of economic development as social development was also accompanied by brutal repression. The fourth position is to see the Bolshevik revolutionary culture and practice as the moment were the idealist contradictions of the modernist avant-garde would be worked through in the context of the revolution itself, a minority view but held and promoted in the work of Trotsky and Benjamin (see below). One of the consequences of the left sharing
the heroic view of the Russian avant-garde and of western modernism with
the liberal bourgeoisie is that it is unable to confront how western modernism
was successfully taken up by Russian architects through-out the Stalinist
period and beyond. We can admire and defend the pre-Stalinist worker poets
of the Proleclut movement, (as Ian Birchill of the swp has been doing for
over twenty five years). We can also celebrate the sear explosive experimental
joy and rightness of Mayakovski, the madness of Malevich and his followers
El Lissitzsky and Popova as well as the Picasso influenced Tatlin. But
when it comes to architecture it is a different matter. To adopt the heroic
or celebratory mode here is to side step the expediency of the Stalinist
state’s rush to modernize – to “catch up and outstrip” the West .The new
ideology of GOSPROM - the five-year plan became an integral part of the
Stalinist state:
Recently the heroic mode of history has
made something of a come back. Here is assistant professor Stephan Kotin
of Princeton University, description of how work was organized at Magnitogorsk
the new industrial city built in the early 1930s:
Here the tyranny of the great helmsman’s
evaporates leaving only the achievements of ‘actually existing socialism.’
Mr Kotin appears to have forgotten that Magnitogorsk to be a showpiece
of modernization also had to have its show trials. First of the bourgeois
“specialists” who helped build it and later the engineers who took over
its running (for details of Curtis film the Engineers Plot see below).
Modernist project opened by Mussolini in 1938: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-iGvC0uIeI&feature=related The Life And Death of Future Cities One of the reasons that Modernist urbanism has retained the radical label is due to the fact that the NAZI’s suppressed it. However, as the radical architectural critic Charles Jenks has pointed out it is a myth that the NAZI’s completely suppressed modernism as they used modernist designs for airports, motorways and factories. The architecture of the death camps was purely functional and had no need for 19th century ornament. Indeed by the late 1930s no NAZI building had ornament of the traditional type, the only real adornment required, was the swastika. However it was after the Second World War
that the development of the state via modernist plan fully took off. Very
few countries or regimes did not employ the modernist plan and planners
to develop state power, whether that was through (racist) “urban renewal”
as in the US and France in the 1950s and 1960s, Communist “new towns” in
Russia and Eastern Europe. There, as in Brasilia and in Chandigarh in India,
the city of the “white plan” lived and died. The white plan city was the
city with no social fabric of streets that were connected to buildings
with a mix of social functions on a human scale within reasonable walking
distance. There replacement with the city of the blank grid of highways
on which were placed isolated monumental sculptural “super blocks”:
By the early 1980s the fall of modernist
planning as a ruling class strategy was taken by liberal’s and some Marxists
(most notably by the swp in Britain) as a consequence of the rise of conservatism
and neo-liberalism. When in fact the fall of modernist planning began two
decades earlier in 1968 with the collapse of Ronan Point in the East End
of London. However, it was only a matter of time before the alienation
inherent in modernist planning would manifest itself. Modernist modernization’s
failure was in fact due to the existing long-standing political problem
of where to put the mass of workers that modern city requires. Le Corbusier
in his books and propaganda and through his design for The Place of The
Soviets: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/ummu2ic/x-ls017337/ls017337
By the late 1970s the negative verdict on Modernist planning was summed up by Marshal Berman one of modernism’s Marxist defenders, “The urbanism of the past two decades has conceptualized and consolidated its hold.[ …]the urban spaces created by modernism are physically clean and orderly, but socially and spiritually dead.” (Berman All That is Solid p.170). Berman took this outcome to be “ironic” when it was what should have been expected after sixty years of modernist ideology of the negation of urbanism and the action of modern finance capital on the major conurbations of the world. The rise of capital means and meant the fall of ordinary everyday humanity and the abolition of urbanity. The concentration and separation of space – it’s functional zoning and shaping by capital was and is part of the reality of a capitalist modernity. If it was missed, the point has now been brutally illustrated: there is no modernist city without the failure of Brasilia, the desolation of Chandigarh, the reformist ‘social housing’ of London without Broadwater Farm, and the organization of the banlieues of Paris without Le Haine. The intention of the Royal Academy exhibition
and the others in the series is to draw attention to the early works of
Russian modernism with the aim to preserving its buildings as part of world
heritage. This regime is one in which Meinikov’s house, along with other
early works of the Russian avant-garde can be safely ideologically white
washed, so as to enable them to become another luxury emblem of western
fashion and design: http://modern-atlanta.org/ma_09_design_is_human/the-lost-vanguard-soviet-modernist-architecture-1922-–-32/
The Royal Academy exhibition is also an
attempt to reinterpret and use the Russian avant-garde and its relationship
to the Bolshevik revolution to re-invigorate and legitimize the current
work of modernist planners and architects who sponsor this and other exhibitions.
The work of this elite group is manifest and is only realizable, as part
of the despotism of the Saudi states:
However, things don’t always go to plan: https://picasaweb.google.com/102237103663068882935/January30201203#5703419563348389186 With the support of international agencies and American foundations the Russian sites of early architectural modernism will no doubt be added to the listed building tourist trail, earning much needed foreign currency for the debt bound Russian economy. Yet the inherent problems of modernist urbanism will persist. The international showpieces of the modern movement and its current elite ‘signature’ buildings may well benefit from funds and developer investment. However, as the economic crisis continues the outlook for those trapped in the vast anonymous estates that populate Russia and the world is much bleaker. The solution devised by the ruling class in the West for the failure of Modernist urbanism has now shifted from agreeing to demolish and re-house some tenants in more expensive private estates, to one where the state and capital have become more directly punitive against the majority of the population. The end of the boom has seen a rise in evictions and of unfinished, unoccupied “ghost” housing estates. The Occupy movement to be worth its salt should now take the next logical step and occupy the “ghost” estates. Further Reading and Viewing Dealing with the consequences of modernist planning is to deal with an approach that excluded history, memory and culture and the working class very few thinkers on the left even addressed the question. Trotsky was impressed by Tatlin’s monument-tower
about which he also had his doubts. But he indicated that the working out
would not be for him but between Tatlin and the revolution:
“At present we are beginning to repair the pavements a little, to re-lay the sewage pipes, to finish the unfinished houses left to us as a heritage – but we are only beginning. We made the buildings of our Agricultural Exhibition out of wood. We must still put off all large-scale construction. The originators of gigantic projects, men like Tatlin, are given involuntarily a respite for more thought, for revision, and for radical re-examination. But one must not imagine that we are planning to repair old pavements and houses for decades to come. In this process, as in all other processes, there are periods of repair, of slow preparation and accumulation of forces, and periods of rapid development. As soon as a surplus will come after the most urgent and acute needs of life are covered, the Soviet state will take up the problem of gigantic constructions that will suitably express the monumental spirit of our epoch. Tatlin is undoubtedly right in discarding from his project national styles, allegorical sculpture, modeled monograms, flourishes and tails, and attempting to subordinate the entire design to a correct constructive use of material. This has been the way that machines, bridges and covered markets have been built, for a long time. But Tatlin has still to prove that he is right in what seems to be his own personal invention, a rotating cube, a pyramid and a cylinder all of glass. For good or bad, circumstances are going to give him plenty of time to find arguments for his side.” Trotsky Revolutionary and Socialist Art 1924.More at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm Benjamin in his works made an important stand against Stalinism in the arts in the Author as Producer (1934) where he observed that a work with the right political “tendency” must have “every other quality”. Ginsburg public housing project was built for a communist purpose but it as architecture it simply failed to keep the damp out. Benjamin also was the only Marxist historian to write about what he called “architectural consciousness” how architecture gives a sense of place to humans. “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that – in the space between the building fronts – experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls.” He noted Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris would abolish this and replace it with streets made for just cars, see The Arcades Project, Beknap, 1999 p.423 The art historian Robert Hughes noted that Le Corbusier would not only abolish, “the human street” but also, “the human foot”. His raucous account of modernist planning in his television history The Sock Of The New (1980) is a useful guide. It dates from a time when skepticism about the effect of modernist planning was at its peak, his film is called Trouble in Utopia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnYUJyjTieU Also of interest is his film about politics
and art from the same series which shows how the effect of War and revolution
on the visual culture of the German avant garde of 1920s meant that its
artists were less celebratory than the Russian avant-garde of modernity
and did not yearn for a society dominated by the machine mass production:
The film is called The Powers That Be:
The fiction film that became the manifesto for American architectural modernists was Ayn Rand’s the Fountain Head (1949) which depicts the modernist architect as a genius-outsider in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-2yKY9-bVA&feature=related The first to produce fiction films to answer this ideology were the filmmakers of the 1960s free cinema and the nouvelle vague respectively Lindsay Anderson in Britain and Goddard in France. Anderson short film is influenced by Goddard but uses gentle humor to make its point about modernist planning’s role in changing the working class cities of the north, its called The White Bus (1967) and stars Arthur Lowe as the mayor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90M_oKso3yA Goddard’s film Two or Three Things I Know About Her (also 1967) presents two arguments about Paris and Parisians one visual one ideological. The visual thesis he presents is the unknowing nature of how bourgeoisie cannot see how alienating the new Gaullist Paris is. The best ideas we hear from Goddard himself in voice over: “I conclude that the Gaullist government under the mask of modernization and reform is merely regularizing the natural tendencies of capitalism. Also that, in systemizing planning and centralization, the government is further disrupting the nations economy not to mention its basic moral fiber.” Recently cultural critic Jonathan Meades in his television series on France took up this theme. Although he thought that the resulting alienation was unintended result of modernist planning, he significantly acknowledged that modernist buildings can work for the bourgeoisie who were located at the centre of France’s cities where they were their structures “congenially situated and efficiently managed.” However he also observed that: “The desperation of the burbs [banlieues] is due to the state having created ghettos. Ghettos which are hardly hidden, yet they are off the map. They are stigmatized and they are feared and not without reason. It is planning that is culpable. Planning that has meant extinguishing ambiguity, creating pens, pigeon holing the populace. The less you have the more distant your place of banishment.” Jonathan Meades on France BBC4 2012Colin Ward, for over fifty years this libertarian writer campaigned, lectured and wrote against modernist planning solutions to housing. His books include Thinner City (reissued1989) and When We Build Again (reissued by Pluto 1985). The French philosopher and campaigner Henri
Lefebvre was the first to try to break the consensus of left wing thought
on social planning by developing an analysis of how late capitalism’s social
control of urban space was essential to capitalism’s survival. His books
include The Social Production of Space, re-published in English as The
Production of Space:
Today Marxist’s are split between those
who think that the modernist historical culture, west and east, can still
be used as an example for revolutionaries, see Alex Callinicos Against
Postmodernism (1990) and Ian Birchall Black Bread and Poetry:
The study that attempts to fully reassess
the Bolshevik avant-garde and its relationship to revolutionary politics
is God is Not Cast Down by T.J. Clark in Farewell to an Idea (1999). Clark
explores the hyper idealism of Malevich’s and El Lissitzsky’s approach
to art in and through the moment of contradictory and creative dissonance
of their revolutionary artists’ party UNOVIS. However, Clark also makes
the point that in the gray bleak dynamic architectural forms of El Lissitzsky’s
work during the time of War Communism and can be seen, “the state shouting
through the avant-garde’s mouth”:
Adam Curtis shows the brutality and failure
of GOSPOM and the five-year plan in the Engineers Plot (1992) and gives
a harrowing account of Magnitogorsk one of the first Stalinist New Town’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ6t5JA7OBA
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