Emotions for the dictatorship of the proletariat – Weekend

At the heart of avant-garde architecture is the idea that form affects the psyche of people in the same way – this is physiology – so this is art for the masses, and not for one person. Show the ball to the masses – they will feel harmony, show the vertical – they will feel aspiration, add one to the other – you will get the Ivan Leonidov Lenin Institute, a desire for world harmony, which has not yet come.

The understanding of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde as a utopia was reinforced by the Great Utopia exhibition organized by the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery in 1992-1993. To a certain extent, this was a convenient compromise – there is the Great October Revolution, this is a completely tragic reality, which claimed the lives of more than ten million people along with the Civil War, and there is the Great Utopia, a bright dream that is parallel to this catastrophe, that is, it has no intersections with it. The problem is that if there are no intersections, then there is no utopia.

To search in the Russian revolutionary avant-garde for ideas of the organization of society and the state, different from the party and the government, is an exercise of little meaning. A simple example. The Tower of the Third International of Vladimir Tatlin, a structure designed to house the main institutions of the world government, has three levels. The first, cubic, houses the legislature, the second, pyramidal, the executive, and the third, cylindrical, world radio. Can it be said that Tatlin rejected John Locke’s idea of ​​the separation of powers and considered the judiciary superfluous? But at the same time he received Edmund Burke and considered the press the “fourth estate”? This is absurd – he did not mean either one or the other, he hardly knew Locke and Burke, and he had no ideas about the structure of the state. And what kind of utopia is this, in which the very question of how power will be arranged is absurd?

No, of course, in the idea of ​​a social city consisting of communal houses, workers’ clubs and theaters of mass action – and this is exactly what the city of the Russian architectural avant-garde looks like – there are recognizable features of utopia. But they are precisely what is recognized – this is a warehouse of utopias that happened before him. Analyze the social city and you will find: the industrial city is the factory city of Tony Garnier; the house-commune is the phalanster of Charles Fourier; the worker’s club is the temple of Campanella’s City of the Sun; the theater of mass action is Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Bolshevism is revising the utopian economy and taking what is suitable for its cause. The garden city, for example, did not pass the censorship and was discarded – individual cottages turned out to be petty-bourgeois. The communal meals that are found in all utopias since Plato, on the contrary, have gone and turned into kitchen factories. But what is the Great Utopia’s own utopian ideas?

Another problem is that there are no great utopians in the Great Utopia. Among the masters of the Russian architectural avant-garde there is not a single one who would claim to create an author’s utopia. When you look at hundreds of unrealized projects, then the utopia as a whole seems to be obvious. But each of them individually falls short of utopia, remains at the level of an interesting formal-compositional construction that has not been implemented. It’s not about the weakness of creativity or ambition – this is just more than enough. But this time, which considered individual creative expression as something illegitimate, it was right to work in teams, brigades, associations. Hence the endless creative groupings—the struggle of time against bourgeois individualism. And within the framework of this struggle, the idea that Moses Ginzburg is remaking the world looked wrong. It is correct if ASNOVA (Association of New Architects, where Ginzburg was a member) does it.

Utopia is the author’s philosophical vision of an ideal society, which is not expected to be literally realized. Here there is no ideal society and there is no author. There is a Great Utopia, and to consider the history of utopia without it is as strange as to consider it without Plato. Then you have to answer the question, what is it, and it is difficult.

I am still inclined to believe that we are dealing with a utopia of helping the party and the government to build a new world. This occupation does not in any way indicate that the masters of this business were deprived of artistic talent – rather, on the contrary, it indicates that collaboration with the regime that has usurped power is not at all destructive for talent, but even helps it to flourish. Moreover, there really was something to help – the old world was destroyed and left behind a lot of dead bodies.

And here the question arises, from what to build.

The specificity of this time is such that avant-garde artists invent ideas more or less from themselves, on their own. What distinguishes them decisively from today is the belief that they are ahead of the entire globe, and what they have in common with us is their isolation from the globe. Not that they have no idea what is happening abroad, but the time when European education for the artistic elite was the norm is gone. Those who were educated emigrated, the new ones were more talented than literate. In a sense, this simplifies things. If we talk about architects, then the diversity of world artistic experience, perhaps due to the desire to throw him off the ship of modernity, perhaps due to poor familiarity with the subject, was reduced for most of the participants in the process to three figures – Malevich, Tatlin and Kandinsky.

Malevich considered the primary forms of Platonic figures – a circle, a square, a triangle. However, I am not sure that he was aware of them as Platonic, I do not think that Plato could be close to him, rather he came to his discovery himself. Further logic is that from these figures it is possible and must reassemble the world. Malevich transforms the elementary geometry of his abstract painting into architecture in “earthlings’ planites” (drawings designed to show the possibilities of building an architectural form of the future) and architectons (sculptural compositions that do the same) in 1923-1925. If we add to this the artistic development of the theme in the PROUNs (projects for the approval of the new) by El Lissitzky and the architectural projects of Lazar Khidekel – both of them were students and direct collaborators of Malevich during his stay in Vitebsk – we get almost the entire range of architectural techniques used by the architectural vanguard. Considering any modernist architectural composition, up to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, you will with difficulty and with a magnifying glass look for solutions that Malevich, Lissitzky and Khidekel did not have. They did it brilliantly and by historical standards with lightning speed.

Tatlin considered the engineering form to be the primary element of modernity. Not a geometric figure, but a mechanism. True, he understood the mechanisms themselves as the embryos of future works of art, similar to his own counter-reliefs, but, one way or another, for him the set of primary forms is not geometry, but a catalog of structures and engineering units, and his main works are like the same Tower of the III International or “Letatlin” – these are machines (which, however, do not work, but simply exist). This direction of the architectural avant-garde (constructivism in the narrow sense of the word) has a better fate in terms of its reflection – Moses Ginzburg quickly appeared here, a man with great abilities in the theory of architecture and a good education. He clearly defined the machine as a new principle of shaping. There are also many very talented craftsmen here – first of all, Alexander Vesnin and Ivan Leonidov.

As the chief researcher of the Russian architectural avant-garde Selim Khan-Magomedov rightly pointed out, in practice both of these lines intersected, and, say, in the work of Ilya Golosov or Konstantin Melnikov, we will find features of both Malevich’s first figures and Tatlin’s engineering form. The possibility of their hybridization (unthinkable for Malevich and Tatlin themselves) is important because it demonstrates their kinship.

Both geometric and engineering primitive forms are understood through the psychophysiology of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s not that these were only Kandinsky’s ideas, this is a fairly widespread doctrine of art form in general – we will find the same in early formal art history, in the Bauhaus, with Piet Mondrian – but the Russian architectural avant-garde took these ideas from Kandinsky at the time of his teaching at VKhUTEMAS . The point is to postulate a direct connection between the art form and human physiology. Colors, figures, lines and their combinations (as well as notes and choreographic movements) evoke certain emotions. The artist draws a line as the convolutions of his brain passed, the work is a psychogram of his experience, the viewer reads the psychogram and reproduces the corresponding experiences within himself. Art affects a person directly, like acupuncture, it excites the necessary nerve centers and creates the necessary states.

It is something scientific in perspective, and something shamanic, magical in retrospect. Vanguard hangs in the middle here. For architecture, this opens up the prospect of mind control. For example, in contact with cubic buildings, people are imbued with a sense of stability, in contact with spherical buildings – harmony, pyramidal ones make them strive somewhere, and the sharper the angle of convergence of the faces, the more intense the desire. I would say that there is little utopia in the projects of the architectural avant-garde – they can be built. Utopian is the idea of ​​controlling consciousness through architectural form.

Avant-garde compositions strive to take off, settle down in the air (Malevich’s earthlings’ planets were conceived in space) – this is a trace of Velimir Khlebnikov’s utopia. For the most part, they are open-minded, tend to expand, to aggressively seize space. They build orders of subordination, mechanical connections as if a building, a district, a city is a plant for the production of novelty, and people work at this plant, wound up with a shamanistic program inserted into their perception.

But these properties of the utopia of the Russian architectural avant-garde are minor details. The right direction in which it leads is communism. Art is a service tool for asserting a political idea. The idea of ​​communism was shattered in Russia, the game may have been worth the candle, but certainly not tens of millions of lives. It remains a question how long after this the magical practices of helping to build communism will last as a Great Utopia. So far, there is no evidence of a decline in their authority.

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