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TENDENCIES
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Echoes of constructivism
in current art
Posterwork
Pablo Lafuente
The words on the printed
sheet are learnt by sight, not by hearing.
Ideas are communicated
through conventional words, the idea should be given form through
the letters.
Economy of expression –
optics instead of phonetics.
The design of the book-space
through the material of the type, according to the laws of typographical
mechanics, must correspond to the strains and stresses of the content.
The design of the book
space through the material of the illustrative process blocks, which
give reality to the new optics.
The supernaturalistic reality
of the perfected eye.
The continuous page-sequence
– the bioscopic book.
The new book demands the
new writer. Inkstand and goose-quill are dead.
The printed sheet transcends
space and time. The printed sheet, the infinity of the book, must
be transcended.
THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY
El Lissiztky published ‘Topography of Typography’ in the
fourth issue of Merz in 1923. The set of eight rules, a program
defining the relationship between words and ideas in a printed format,
appeared shortly after the publication of For the Voice, a book
which constituted the perfect embodiment of that relationship. A
collaboration with poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, For the Voice was a
collection of revolutionary poems that Lissitzky organised through
physical structure, typographic design and colour. A thumb-index
allowed readers to find the poems, while signs and symbols created
an accompanying visual ‘conversation’ as the texts were
read aloud. As Lissitzky himself said, For the Voice was ‘a
unity of acoustics and optics’ – it couldn’t just
be read, it needed also be seen, listened to and felt.
As a constructivist creation,
For the Voice was part of a programme intended to generate objective
methods for the rational ordering of materials, in order to create
practical, economical and mass-produced objects for everyday use.
There were three guiding principles: material integrity, functional
expediency and social purpose. In the case of the printed materials
(mainly books and posters) this could be achieved through a standardised
visual vocabulary that, together with the rest of cultural forms
and functional objects, aimed at the reorganisation of a collective
sensibility and the creation of a new man – the owner of the
‘perfected eye’.
El Lissitzky also provided
what is probably the best example of constructivist poster design.
His Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) showed a sharp red
triangle, symbolising the unified power of the Bolsheviks, thrusting
into the scattered units of White Russians. The conceptual format
of the work didn’t interfere with the effectiveness of the
message, which relied on the evocative nature of the forms: the
active character of the sharp, triangular wedge disrupting the passive
white circle.
Lissitzky’s visual
language in For the Voice and Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
didn’t just refer to emancipation, it was itself emancipatory.
That conviction was shared by the artists that practised Constructivism
(Lissitzky, Mayakovsky, Malevich, Rodchenko…), and was essential
to its development long before it was adopted by the Soviet regime
that emerged form the 1917 Revolution.
Mayakovsky and Aleksei
Kruchenykh, as part of the Russian Futurist movement, had been working
for years on the creation of a new poetry, based on the notion of
‘zaum’. Translated as ‘transrational’ or ‘beyonsense’,
it designated a poetic form that resulted from the elimination of
logic, the extraction of words from their normal context, the isolation
of word fragments and the exploitation of the graphic identity of
letters in search of potential new meaning. These experiments, close
to Dada’s emphasis on chance through the juxtaposition of random
materials, could be traced back to the formal compositions of Guillaume
Apollinaire or Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolism and functionalism,
Dada and Constructivism, despite their differences, all had in common
a continuous search for types – or simplified forms of expression
– and a belief in the possibility of a certain community of
sensibility. Underneath Mallarmé’s symbolist poems and
Peter Behrens’s functionalist designs lay the idea that when
there is adequation between objects and their function, and symbols
and their nature, there is a possibility to create a community under
a shared spiritual principle, as ‘the forms of the poem, like
the forms of the object, are also the forms of life.’ [Jacques
Rancière, ‘La surface du design’, in Le destin
des images, 2003].
*****
In recent
times, a series of artworks using constructivist and futurist techniques
have been shown in London, in several exhibitions and publications.
Collage, photomontage and/or text, on a two-dimensional support
(unique or editioned as posters), the works are not afraid to reveal
the origin of their inspiration, but, almost a century on, what
are the aspirations of this vocabulary? And how does it relate to
wider social and political considerations?
The two-dimensional
works of Robert Elfgen (seen in ‘Supra Caput Esse – Enthronement
Gifts’ at Corvi-Mora last spring) and Kevin Hutcheson (at Hotel
this summer) relate to a Dada tradition, or what Aleksei Kruchenykh
called ‘pictorial zaum’. A combination of abstract and
figurative elements, collaged onto a pictorial surface with extreme
compositional simplicity, they present themselves as hermetic visual
poems. The juxtaposition of forms and colours suggests a meaning
but, as with Kruchenykh’s Universal War (1916) – a series
of collages of brightly coloured abstract shapes with titles like
Military State, Betrayal, Heavy Artillery and India’s Battle
with Europe – that meaning may only be guessed at by reading
accompanying texts or, in Hutcheson’s case, the titles, or
in Elfgen’s, the fictional story that is the base of the whole
exhibition.
But, while
Kruchenykh’s pictorial strategy suggested confrontation, in
Elfgen and Hutcheson’s work it connotes nostalgia. At the beginning
of the twentieth century the new language was an attempt to break
with the established rules of culture – which were also the
rules of tsarism – in conjunction with a technological revolution;
a century later the same language seems to be regarded with relative
aesthetic respect but, at the same time, certain a disregard for
its political aspirations, as if the artists had realised that when
art was promising political accomplishment, it was promising something
it could never fulfil.
Confronted
by the ambiguity of this situation, Elfgen and Hutcheson’s
melancholy is just one of the three possible responses. The second,
as identified by Rancière, is an attitude of play towards
that ambiguity. Lucy McKenzie’s recent poster works –
shown as part of her show ‘Brian Eno’ at the Neue Aachener
Kunstverein in February 2003, and included in the limited edition
box-set that accompanied the exhibition – are a good example.
Of the four
Flourish Nights posters, two are text-based and another combines
text and image. As with El Lissitzky’s designs for Mayakovsky’s
poems, the integration of pictorial and textual elements is absolute.
One poster, a white surface occupied by three lines of text, ‘Mmm!/Ahhh!/Ohhh!’
(first yellow, second green and third blue), perfectly accords with
how Kruchenykh and Klebnikov defined their own practice in 1914:
‘to give verbal art complete freedom, we use arbitrary words
to liberate ourselves from the subject and study the colour, the
music of the word, syllables, sounds.’
McKenzie adopts
the once revolutionary language, but is aware of the problematic
character of any possible revolutionary agenda, as proves her discussion
of Brian Eno: Eno represents the ideal independent cultural producer
in a capitalist market. But at the same time, he was, together with
Peter Schmidt, the creator of the Oblique Strategies, a set of rules
that, in a spirit that mixed the playfulness of Dada with
the rigour of Constructivism, offered a credible and sustainable
model for artistic creation. That ability to include both perspectives,
awareness and irreverence, pretentiousness and play, keeps melancholy
out from McKenzie’s work, and allows her to play on –
and play well – with the ambiguity of art’s political
predicament.
Finally, a
third attitude is that of the artist who, despite being aware of
the limited capacities of art, is pushed toward a new political
commitment by the weakening of politics itself. In a world with
a narrowing public sphere and stale political activity, the artist
is compelled to create work that has the capacity of framing scenes
of dissensus. Jakob Kolding’s Posters – published by Centre
d’édition contemporaine in Gèneve to accompany
his 2003 show – fall in this category. Formally, they belong
to the tradition of photomontage that substituted Russian abstraction
in the mid-1920s, in the search for a less esoteric language, more
suitable for mass consumption. As Gustav Klutsis wrote in an essay
published in 1924 in LEF (Left Front for the Arts, a magazine edited
by Mayakovsky) ‘the combination of isolated photographs is
to be substituted for the composition of graphic images. …Photography
is the exact retention of visible facts and not their illustration.
For the viewer, this precision and documentary fidelity endow the
photograph with such a force of persuasion that no type of graphic
representation can ever equal it.’
Images of
housing estates, detached suburban housing, skaters and football
players are combined with text addressing the viewer, posing questions
about his or her living conditions (‘Have there been any attempts,
through planning, to either discourage or promote certain patterns
of behaviour in your neighbourhood? (which/how?)’), denouncing
modernist planning’s inability to include other voices or create
a fair space to inhabit.
Originally
flyposted in the streets and handed out for free at exhibitions,
the posters use language adapted to the particularities of where
they were first displayed. They were meant to be understood by those
affected by the conditions they denounced – or at least Kolding
plays with the idea of reaching that audience. Here, not only is
Modernism criticising itself – its architecture and urbanism
questioned by means of photomontage and constructivist poster techniques
– but also maintaining its emancipatory aspiration, the belief
in modernist culture as a political tool, which was deeply inherent
within Lissitzky’s ‘Topography of Typography’. But
in a situation like today’s, with so few platforms for dissent
left, whether this type of practices can contribute to the reconstruction
of a political space instead of working as mere substitutes remains
to be seen.
Pablo Lafuente is an art critic based
in London, whose writing has been published in Art Monthly,
Flash Art and Untitled.
He is Editor-at-Large for ArtReview and occasionally curates.
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