The exhibition covers the period from about
1912 to 1934.
And more or less, it’s the period that we
consider to be kind of the high point of the
Russian Avant-Garde in terms of artistic practice,
but what’s really interesting about this
moment is the way that art and societal change,
governmental change, history, are all so inextricably
intertwined.
So, when people ask about the Revolution,
the historical event that they’re really
talking about happens in 1917.
And so what we’re talking about is a moment
in which the long-ruling dynastic family of
Russia—they’ve been in power for three
hundred years at this point—is seen by the
people as occupying this kind of elevated
position, this position of luxury and control,
where the people of Russia are really struggling,
a lot of them.
And so there is this kind of groundswell that
comes from the population, a sort of desire
for a new government—a government that’s
going to be by them and for them.
Artists are really starting to think about
how they can make positive contributions to
the goals of the Revolution.
How can they really contribute to society?
They decide maybe it’s no longer really
about being in the studio and making easel
paintings, and in fact, easel painting would
really come to be phased out by some of these
artists in the not-too-distant future.
But in the meantime, they’re thinking about
what’s the way in which we’re going to
communicate with people?
And there is a kind of decision among artists
like Rodchenko, whose work we see here, that
it’s going to be a language of abstraction.
But it has to be something that’s clear,
something that’s understandable.
So in drawings like these, what Rodchenko
does is he goes to these kind of objective
tools.
He uses a ruler.
He uses a compass.
He’s able to almost scientifically map out
his drawing.
It’s not about kind of his imagination in
the studio, a kind of daydreaming and invention.
It’s about a kind of concrete, real world,
kind of constructed way of thinking.
And that in a way is where this term “constructivism”
comes from.
It’s the idea of making a type of work that
has a kind of concrete place in the world
using this kind of abstract language.
One of my favorite works in this gallery is
this group of six drawings by the artist Aleksandra
Ekster.
And they’re actually plans for stage sets
that she was thinking about or designing.
So you see them here in beautiful color—sets
for The Merchant of Venice, for Romeo and
Juliet.
When you kind of start to peel the excess
away and look at just kind of the bones of
these drawings, you realize that this is,
in fact, that abstract language.
Those kind of repeating parallel lines, or
those kind of even cross-hatchings, those
diagonals that move across compositions, just
kind of expanded out to live, possibly, in
the real world—in this case the world of
the theater.
So we find ourselves now in the only monographic
gallery in this exhibition, and what that
really means is the only gallery devoted to
the work of a single artist.
That artist is El Lissitzky.
Lissitzky was such a critical figure, not
only in the Russian Avant-Garde, but in the
Western Avant-Garde as well.
And it was because he had such a kind of multifaceted
way of thinking about and looking at the world.
The project here behind me is perhaps one
of the projects that he’s best known for,
and it was the creation of something that
he invented called the “Proun.”
So “Proun” is actually an invented term,
and it’s an acronym.
It stands for “project for the affirmation
of the new,” and it really comes out of
Lissitzky’s philosophical thinking.
It’s not something that’s so easily grasped
quite honestly.
One of the great things about this project
is that Lissitzky actually included with it
a manifesto of Proun.
Trying to kind of explicate for people, and
probably also for himself, what its parameters
were and what its real meaning was.
So you see here the Russian version of this
manifesto which he then translates, just the
first part of, into German.
German was another one of his primary languages.
But I think as you can see, it’s something
that isn’t necessarily a one-line concept.
It’s something that could have philosophical
implications, it’s something that could
have theoretical implications, it’s something
that could have real world implications.
So it’s a very kind of interesting three-dimensional,
360 way of Lissitzky theorizing about the
world.
If you look at a Proun like this one—this
is Proun 6B—you see that Lissitzky has annotated
the composition here at the bottom right suggesting
that this is how you can see the image.
But then you notice that there’s also a
similar marking on this corner suggesting
that you could in fact rotate this and see
it as a vertical composition.
And even more interesting, in this Proun—Proun
1—you see that it actually has at least
four possible orientations.
And for me that suggests that not only can
you see them only in the round, but you could
start to see them rotating through space.
It was about shaping reality and they were
looking beyond just the single pair of eyes
on something to how could I get more people
to see this and understand this.
So in the case of Lissitzky’s Proun, the
idea of making a lithography portfolio—he
didn’t end up making very many of them—but
even twelve could go out into the world.
He could send them to colleagues at other
university campuses, at other art institutes
in cities beyond the one where he was based
and in that way try to create a kind of ripple
effect, really send these ideas out, let them
reverberate, let much larger audiences have
access to them.
