Art in Revolution 3 - newleafdesign.me.uk

enhance these forms it occured to him that he could shine lights on the silvermetallic surfaces to increase the spatial effects as well as giving a sense ofmovement. These were prescient to the Surreal mobile sculptures of AlexanderCalde and could be flat-packed, moved and reassembled elsewhere. .Shortly before the October revolution Tatlin had asked Rodchenko to help himwork on the interior design of the Café Pittoresque in Moscow, andRodchenko came up with lamps and mouldings which were a complexarrangement of spatial planes. The Café Pittoresque was a Russian-Futuristhangout and one of a number of bohemian café theatres which were at thecentre of a wild pre-revolution artistic café culture, contemporaneous and inmany respects similar to the activities of the Dada group in Zurich. Eccentricdress and faces painted with hieroglyphs were de rigeur. Mayakovsky wasoften seen in a bright yellow shirt with a wooden spoon or a radish in hisbutton hole. He would perform exclamatory nonsense poetry from a crowdedstage, hurling rhymed abuse at the audience in his deep and powerful voice.The press reported many ‘scandals’ from these evenings and sometimes fightsbetween the performing artists and the members of the audience would breakout. Police intervention would be a fairly typical end to one of theseentertainments. Not suprisingly Lenin with his experience of Zurich Dada wasvery suspicious of the Russian Futurists and thought their total rejection of thepast was nonsense. It made more sense to him to keep and develop the bestof the existing culture saving the immense trouble of having to invent acompletely new one. After a good deal of soul-searching the frivolity came toan end as Narkompros and IZO had much more serious aims in mind.Malevich and Tatlin, as the two most influential figures of the Russianavant-garde, had the most influence in shaping post revolution art. Malevichtheorised that both Cubism and Futurism had been revolutionary forms of artand as such had foreshadowed the social and political reforms of therevolution. Similarily the commited Tatlin thought that the art of ‘material,volume and construction’ that he had been working on since 1914 was anartistic forerunner to the revolution. ‘To accept or not accept the OctoberRevolution, there was no such question for me as I merged into an activecreative social and pedagogogical life’. So he and Rodchenko, anotherenthusiastic supporter of the revolution, turned their attention to cultivatingan artistic role in this new socialist world. Any thoughts of the ‘Art for art’ssake’ of their predecessors were now dead and buried in the distant past.The roots of a socially based art were already in place. ‘Prolekult’(Proletarian Organisation for Culture and Education) had been founded in1906 and although effective was given a boost by the October revolution. Itsprimary concern to unite art and industry would eventually lead toConstructivism in its broadest sense. One of its leading members, the Futuristwriter Osip Brik, argued that the ideal of art should be based on a socialproduct and that the proletariat should have its own type of art to help in thestruggle for socialism. With this kind of political credibility it was even allowedto retain its pre-revolutionary automony, the only cultural organisation thatwasn't controlled by Lunacharsky. Despite Lenin’s belief that Prolekult shouldcome under the central administration of the Party it remained anindependent branch of culture until 1932 when it was eventually broughtunder state control with the officially sanctioned art of Socialist Realism.162 ART IN REVOLUTION