Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
which decisions made by the state are primarily transmitted via impersonal
media or an orator to citizens below. 37
This relation between state and citizen was fully realized by Rodchenko’s later
photographic work for the Soviet government. The replacement of painting by
photography was another path to the rationalization of art, one that employed
an ideological signifier of objectivity, impersonality, and machine technology, the
camera, to achieve a rapprochement with the academic Realism that had gained
official favor. The move of Russian modernist artists to photography, propaganda,
and advertising was, in the words of one historian, “at once a symptom
and a cause of the decline of Constructivism” as an artistic program, “and of its
increasing compromise with existing, as opposed to projected, reality.” 38 While
art historians who see the Constructivists as tragically frustrated social revolutionaries
are loath to admit it, these artists were only submitting to the party
dictatorship to whose triumph their earlier work had meant to contribute. 39
Perhaps the most repulsive example of the photographic activity of Constructivism
is the series of photographs Rodchenko produced of the construction of
the White Sea Canal in 1931, an immense project carried out with the use of
forced labor from the Gulag and at the cost of perhaps a hundred thousand
deaths or more. 40 Speaking about these pictures five years later, Rodchenko set
his glorification of Stalinism into the context of the productivist critique of aesthetics:
“I photographed simply, giving no thought to formalism. I was staggered
by the acuity and wisdom with which people were being re-educated.” 41
Even in their new guise as utilitarian producers, however, the Russian “Futurists”
were not able to stand up to the political and aesthetic imperatives governing
a society whose very backwardness, by the standards of capitalist modernity,
had produced their devotion to technological forms. The economic planners
demanded old-fashioned designs to suit the tastes of Russian peasants, workers,
and bureaucrats, not modern, functionalist ones. In 1924 the Constructivist
37 V. Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1911–1946 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 17–19. Margolin relates Rodchenko’s project to “poet and
labor theorist” Alexei Gastev’s propaganda for Taylorism, a cause dear to the heart of V. I.
Lenin himself.
38 C. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 181.
39 The perspicacity of Victor Margolin’s analysis of Rodchenko’s kiosk project makes all the more
puzzling his “regret” that the USSR was unable “to become a viable model of economic and
social organization that could have fulfilled the hopes and expectations” of the avant-garde
artists; as Rodchenko’s design recognized, the “utopia” for which he struggled was structured by
dictatorship from the start (see The Struggle for Utopia, p. 213).
40 See the discussion in Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia, p. 186; Margolin is uncomfortable with
the phrase “forced labor” because, although “accurate,” it “bears the emotional overtones of a
society that is under totalitarian control.”
41 A. Rodchenko, “Perestroike khudozhnika,” Sovetskoe foto 5:6 (1936), p. 20, cit. Margolin, The
Struggle for Utopia, p. 187.
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