Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
image, expression of a feeling, aesthetics.” 30 A painting required no more than
the application of paint to a support, sculpture nothing beyond the assembly of
elements capable of maintaining a determinate three-dimensional relation to
each other. The artists’ watchword “construction” was typically explained in
terms of a contrast with “composition,” which was regulated by “taste” rather
than by “scientific laws” of art. As Varvara Stepanova put it in 1921, “Only construction
demands the absence of both excess materials and excess elements, in
composition it is just the reverse—there everything is based precisely on the
excessive.” 31 Construction, objective rather than subjective, was supposed to dispense
with everything ornamental, expressive, or otherwise unnecessary.
Such a doctrine, however, raises the second question: what is the “pictorial
purpose” that remains when the aesthetic elements of figuration, expression, and
taste are subtracted? One answer is suggested by the “Credo” written for the
INKhUK (the Institute for Artistic Culture, which operated within the People’s
Commissariat of Enlightenment, the Soviet ministry of culture, between 1920
and 1924) in 1922 by the Constructivist architect Alexander Vesnin. Just as the
“modern engineer has created works of genius: the bridge, the steam locomotive,
the aircraft, the crane,” so the “modern artist must produce objects equal to
them in strength, tension, and potential, as organizing principles in terms of their
psychophysiological impact on human consciousness.” 32 In comparison to this
reworking of the conception of art as an emotionally powerful means of communication,
Rodchenko’s explanation is radically formalist: “The purpose” of one of
his own works “is to create two shapes with distinct colors on a flat surface.” 33 In
this way the language of rationalization was mobilized in defense of the autonomy
of art. The content of a work was identified with the handling of materials
to produce the work, and its “function” with its very production.
In Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting, Black on Black of 1918 (Museum of
Modern Art, New York), for example, the restriction of color to variants of black
suggests the attempt (however unsuccessful) to eliminate both imagery and
expression in the usual sense, so that what remains is simply the application of
paint. The negation of customary properties of painting here signifies productive
efficiency, as the use of black embodies the rejection as superfluous of the pleasures
of color. Rodchenko’s work of two years later was even more simplified,
30 Ibid.
31 Varvara Stepanova, “Protokol zasedaniya INKhUKa,” January 28, 1921, MS, cit. C. Lodder,
Russian Constructivism, p. 88. This may be compared with Karel Teige’s critique of Le Corbusier,
which contrasted the latter’s insistence on an aesthetic, emotional content in architecture with
the Constructivist elimination of “ideological-metaphysical-aesthetic intentions”; see J.-L.
Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR, p. 32.
32 Alexander Vesnin, “Kredo,” in Mikhail Barkhin and Yuri Yaralov (eds), Mastera Sovetskoi arkhitektury
ob arkhitekture (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), vol. 2, p. 14, cit. J.-L. Cohen, Le Corbusier and the
Mystique of the USSR, p. 32.
33 Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko, p. 87.
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