ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
came into conflict with Lenin’s idea of revolutionary change, although this
difference was as much political as it was artistic. Lenin, to the extent that he
was even concerned with art and culture, wished them to proceed on the basis
of existing bourgeois standards, rather than wiping the slate clean for the
Proletkult vision of workers’ culture. This was motivated not solely by an
attachment to traditional art, but by a political scepticism concerning the naive
utopianism of Bogdanov’s schematic plans for a ‘new proletarian culture’
when over 150 million Russians were not even literate and the country needed
basic modernisation; this, in his view, was the ‘real dirty work’ to be achieved
by the party. 32 Lenin’s objection to the Proletkult was also based on a longstanding
rivalry with Bogdanov, who for many years had been second to
Lenin in his influence on the Bolsheviks. These differences led to Lenin writing
a resolution against the Proletkult in 1920, in which he argued that Marxism
was historically significant precisely because it did not reject the cultural
achievements of preceding ages, but instead ‘assimilated and refashioned
everything of value in the more than 2000 years of the development of human
thought and culture’. 33 The Proletkult was henceforth turned into a subsection
of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), with severely reduced
funds and correspondingly decreased influence. In 1921 Bogdanov was
removed from the Central Committee of the Proletkult altogether.
One of the main arguments for the rejection of previous culture was the
fact that it was produced and consumed by individuals, rather than exemplifying
the new model of collective authorship. For Bogdanov, cultural
production should be rationalised as if it were an industry, leading to a
redefinition of authorship in which originality was no longer understood to
be an independent expression of the artistic subject, but rather ‘the expression
of his own active participation in the creation and development of the
collective’s life’. 34 Creativity was detached from its Romantic heritage of
individual seclusion and ‘indeterminate and unconscious methods (“inspiration”,
etc.)’, and redirected towards rationally organised production. 35
Bogdanov’s refusal of art’s autonomy led him to maintain the position that
‘there is not and cannot be a strict delineation between creation and ordinary
labour’: art can and should be re- imagined as an organised,
industrialised process like any other, since ‘(artistic) creation is the highest,
most complex form of labour’ and ‘its methods derive from the methods of
labour’. 36 From now on, to be creative meant to surmount contradictions,
to combine materials in new ways, and to generate systemic new solutions
(such as the collective authorship of newspapers). Art as a category was to
be subordinated to the instrumental ends of ‘socially directed artistic work’,
as Alexei Gan, author of Constructivism (1922), argued:
A time of social expediency has begun. An object of only utilitarian
significance will be introduced in a form acceptable to all . . . Let us tear
ourselves away from our speculative activity [i.e. art] and find the way to
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