This exhibition was made in conjunction with the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution,
and it kind of covers the very flourishing period of the Avant-Garde from 1912 through
1935.
What we call the Russian Avant-Garde is a group of artists that includes visual artists,
poets, literary people, and of course, filmmakers who revolutionized the way in which we are
looking at art.
The Russian artists were looking at the European Avant-Garde—artists working especially in
Paris and Italy with Cubism and Futurism.
They took all of these ideas, but then they kind of transformed them into a much more
radical vocabulary that was nonrepresentational.
Malevich looked at the visual components as abstract components.
In fact, as forms that were in supremacy over nature.
Malevich was interested in flying.
He had studied, actually, aerial photography.
So you here have a composition that is gravity-less, that doesn’t present the usual perspectival
point of Western compositions, but rather sort of destabilizes the viewer from the usual
way that we are used to looking at works.
This “White on White” composition probably is one of the most iconoclastic works in the
history of the early Avant-Garde, and what you will notice here is an emphasis on the
materiality of the paint itself, on texture, on color, on the white-on-white and the different
nuances between them, on a kind of asymmetrical composition.
One of the main questions, in fact, that we had in putting this exhibition together was
how can revolution exist in an object, in an artistic process, in a new theorization
of art?
And it’s interesting how the Russian Avant-Garde, in fact, even before the Revolution, even
before 1917—they were so fed up with artistic tradition that they wanted to revolutionize
their society through their artistic production.
So they were kind of creating a tabula rasa.
Through Suprematism, Malevich was creating a zero degree form.
The Constructivists were less idealistic.
They were less about the supremacy of form and more about the materiality of form, more
about the objectivity of form.
And in fact, Rodchenko has done a “Black on Black” composition which was in direct
response to the “White on White” of Malevich.
And at this time, as I said, he works as a constructor, so he uses very simple materials
and very simple tools such as a compass and a ruler to create a series of drawings that
you see here.
And also he develops a theory of Linearism because “line” is basically a kind of
mathematical concept, so it’s very rooted in praxis.
Rodchenko here resists the idea of transcendence, of infinity, of the supremacy—of Suprematism—that
Malevich was developing, and so he introduces a non-color which is black in order to kind
of draw your attention more to what he called the “faktura”—the kind of material support
of the canvas, the very objective aspect of the materiality of paint itself.
Rodchenko was very proud to say that in 1921 he has given the deathblow to painting and
renounced it in favor of photography and film and design.
Rodchenko was not a photographer, not a professional photographer, but he was experimenting with
photography in the same way as before he experimented with painting and sculpture.
And you can see the extraordinary ability of Rodchenko, of using different types of
camera angles, extraordinarily dynamic camera angles.
From below with this pioneer girl, creating her as monumental.
Extreme close ups also.
Cinema was extraordinarily important, but not only cinema but different theories of
montage.
Here you are looking at Dziga Vertov who was an extraordinary film director, and the film
is called Man With a Movie Camera.
And it is a film that interestingly at moments juxtaposes again the kind of relationship
between filmmaking and the factory worker.
It is a film that makes use of absolutely all the devices available at the time, all
the experimental possibilities of film at the time including split-screen, including
extreme close ups, and different speeds of filming.
By the mid-1930s, Stalin imposes a new style which is Socialist Realism, as the only state-sanctioned
style for the arts because he considers all these experiments that the Avant-Garde have
done since the Revolution as becoming formalized, ossified arts forms of the bourgeoisie—a
new form of bourgeois art.
And so that brings us to the conclusion of that extraordinary moment of the Russian Avant-Garde
that, in fact, informs this exhibition.