ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
productions, and the debates they occasioned, that provide the most
informative parallel with today’s participatory art. 29
This discussion, however, needs to be prefaced by the acknowledgement
that one of the main problems in summarising Russian artistic
developments of this period is the difficulty of isolating them from the
complexities of a political context in which internecine disagreements led
to appointments, conflicts and resignations almost on a monthly basis.
Even within avant- garde groups there were internal disagreements that
make it hard to generalise, and even harder to produce an intelligible chronology
of the period. The situation is exacerbated by the paucity of images
in relation to this material, and a lack of first- hand accounts to illuminate
what images we have. In what follows I shall focus on the themes of new
versus old culture, collective versus individual authorship, and equality
versus quality. These will be used as the steering ideas through a discussion
of the main theoretical positions immediately following the Revolution,
and contrasting accounts of the invention and spread of mass spectacle. I
will conclude with some reflections on the Soviet attempt to recalibrate
music along participatory lines.
The question of whether or not the Revolution should occasion an
entirely new form of culture produced by and for the proletariat, or should
retain its ties to cultural heritage despite its ideological flaws was a key
point of conflict between theorists immediately following 1917. The
Proletkult (an acronym for ‘proletarian cultural- educational organisations’)
was formed as a coalition of working- class interest groups shortly
before the Revolution, but by 1918 had become a national organisation
dedicated to defining new forms of proletarian culture in keeping with
collectivist doctrine. Its founding theorist, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–
1928), was an economist, philosopher, physician, sci- fi writer and activist,
who identified an important gap in Marxist thinking between the proletariat
as revolutionary force and as builder of a new society. For Bogdanov, this
hiatus had to be filled through education and training in a new political
culture, producing a workers’ intelligentsia in place of a party intelligentsia.
As such, he was the most outspoken advocate of suppressing bourgeois
culture of the past in favour of a new proletarian culture that made no
reference to cultural heritage. As Zenovia Sochor has argued, the Proletkult
sought to revolutionise culture on three fronts: in labour (by merging the
artist and the worker), in lifestyle (at home and at work), and in feeling and
sentiment (creating a revolutionary consciousness). 30 All of these had radical
consequences for culture, which Bogdanov viewed as ‘the most
powerful weapon for organising collective forces in a class society – class
forces’. 31 Art, literature, theatre and music were all subject to a reorganisation
that aimed to bring cultural production in line with collectivist ideals.
Bogdanov’s emphasis on the independence of working- class culture at
arm’s length from the Communist Party and the Soviet state meant that he
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