moscow art critic andrey kovalev
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The tidal wave of surging enthusiasm for Russia's early Modernism has been provoked by a large number of reasons that substantially vary in the West as opposed to the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that the driving force behind this intense enthusiasm for the Russian Avant-garde art has political overtones and is emphasized by the West's current craze for things Russian and Soviet, a craze which in turn stems from the drastic changes under way in this country today. An esoteric (and not exactly safe) concern of a handful of buffs and devotees for a long time, the Avant-garde stimulates our interest by what we may call the "rediscovery of forlorn names" as well. Never before has our social awareness been so favourable towards artists who were once persecuted. Never before have we been so keen to rediscover this kind of historical and artistic process. It will prove difficult to examine the artistic importance of early Modernism's legacy. Today our inquiries into its origins are fundamentally different from those undertaken during Camilla Gray's time. The place held by an art which understood itself in heroic terms as "Moderne Art" has been taken over by Post-Modernism a name which is ambiguous in combining contradictory temporal attributes. The post-modernist attitude continues to engender new historical models and viewing itself as some kind of "perpetuum mobile". Modernism emerges as a self-contained and chronologically defined phenomenon just like other historical styles of the past. The never-ending marathon race of inventing ever new configurations set in motion in the early decades of the 20th century looks today like a historical episode. The scholar is offered an opportunity to detach himself, rather than yield to the temptation of taking over the symbolic torch from the worn-out marathon runners and continue the endless race. The scholar has yet to discover this opportunity. I am not quite sure that somebody will agree with me, but I can no longer accept in earnest the judgement that there is a future for the early Avant-garde.

To me it is a beautiful and very distant past like antiquity or the Renaissance. From this point of view the Avant-garde belongs to the past and to the future. The Avant-garde's unconditional and unreserved projection into the future appears to conceal some kind of time bomb, devised by its clever inventors - the Futurists and "Budetlyans". Nobody claims that Praxiteles and Caravaggio belong to the future whereas nobody hesitates to claim just that regarding Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko or Pavel Filonov (and to a much lesser degree regarding Picasso, Matisse and Klee). The latter judgement concerning the national figures of Russian Modernism heads to the conclusion that the ideology behind it strived to reach into the future and aimed at establishing the thousand-year-long reign of New Art. The Russians' unbending ambition to capture and dominate space and time was emphasized by Russia's traditional messianism which interfered with the Modernist perspective striving for never-ending invention and innovation. Any type of messianism is eschatologcal and eschatology is, by definition, a science that deals with the ultimate destiny of mankind. Moreover, the concept entails a fundamental unwilling-ness, or, perhaps, inability to see evolutionary, spontaneous changes for the future.

Therefore the resulting situation may be described as the Avant-gardist's paradox: as an inventor and visionary involved in building a mode] of our Future, the artist seems to be awed by its sublimity, while the fast-flowing Time continues to move inexorably, producing ever new configurations, regardless of what the artist does. The concept is "outpaced" by a sequence of fleeting phenomena and those who used to be in the forefront, or in the vanguard, find themselves lagging behind realities. Close to the Avant-gardists, Roman Jakobson wrote in 1921 that he never joined the Futurists, nor did he feel a need for this kind of art '. Jakobson, a friend of Mayakovsky and the author of the first scholarly study on Khiebnikov's art, distanced himself back in 1921 from the Futurists. Nine years later, in his famous book entitled O pokole nii, rasfrafivshem svoikh poetov (On the Generation That Has Wasted Its Poets, published 1930) he declares himself an adherent of Futurism. In describing the sort of Futurist trap he felt he had fallen into Jakobson relates the tragedy that befell "the generation that wasted...", i. e. the 30 to 45 year old. He said that "we were too keen and impatent in embracing our future,, to behold of our past. Time had gone out of joint. We had been living by, thinking about and believing in our future far too long and we no longer face the pressing needs of the day. We lost v.ie feel for the present. We have no fifture either. In a few decades we will be cruelly labelled people of the last millenium.

We used to sing exciting songs about our future, but all of a sudden, those songs became history and literature rather than a dynamic force of today. When the singers are killed and the song is locked into a museum pinned to yesterday, then this generation of people without property looks increasingly desolate, lonely and abandoned"2.

We have reached the point where we should examine the chronological limits of Russian Modernism, an issue that is of crucial importance for the historical fate of this particular Russian movement. Just like all "boundary" issues,— as e. g., who is a member of the Avant-garde movement at all,— this particular issue has been mirred by the movement itself and by the oral tradition that followed. Hence the prevailing view that the Avant-garde was destroyed by Stalin's repressive system. It should be pointed out that by the early thirties, at the time the reprisals were launched, Avant-garde as a movement in the arts was already on the wane. We should say that it was not the Avant-garde itself, but rather the avant-gardists who fell victim to those reprisals. Most of the avant-gardists ended up as social outcasts lapsing into official oblivion. Like any acts carried out by the totalitarian regime, these proceedings continued to have their effects until the most recent times sustaining the myth of the destroyed Avant-garde. This myth stems from the totalitarian system's objective to destroy all of its ideological opponents morally and psychologically. Another source is the desire of the followers and admirers to have us believe that their movement did not die of a natural death, replaced by one that took over but destroyed by horrible alien forces disrupting the self-fulfilment of the Great Utopia.

Even though we should rather point out those artistic movements that did not take over from where their predecessors left off. They were nipped in the bud and, after its brilliant Great Leap the Russian' culture stopped in its tracks and failed to pass a few necessary evolutionary stages. We are able to define some of the sanctions enacted by the government in the late 1920s and the early 1930s which forcibly discontinued the public functioning of "Leftist" art (the Moscow Art and Culture Institute and the Leningrad State Art and Culture institute were disbanded, P. Filonov's, how was banned, etc.) but we are quite unable to date more or less accurately the discontinuation of the Leftist Art movements. At the same time, the early formative and transformative stages of radical avant-gardist movements, such as Neoprimitivism, Cubo-Futurism and others, started within one month.

Moreover, just within one day the Great Break that shook the Moscow Art and Culture Institute in the winter of 1921—1922 took place, when "twenty five progressive leftist artists, pressured by today's revolutionary conditions, gave up their practice of "pure" art, declared self-sufficing easel art forms as outdated and their activities as painters only as useless"3. Originally so far from utilitarianism, the ideology of the Avant-garde was quick to transform itself by jumping on the bandwagon of absolute utilitarianism and by dropping art with no second thoughts, Russian style. These events bring to our mind Apollo's favorite hyperborean poets Plinius describes as jumping into the sea while intoxicated by an over-abundance of aesthetical sentiments. Compare what the Proletarian Culture poet Alexei Gastev said: "A thousand of the best poets will jump into the sea"4. The Great Leap beyond the limits of art occurred simultaneously with continuous efforts to differentiate between those with the will power to move ahead, towards the unknown, and those who refused to commit yet another act of destruction. For example, the Moscow Art and Culture Institute first expelled Vasily Kandinsky for opposing the ideology of the "self-sufficing object", and leftist artists such as Korolev, Klyun, Drevin and Udaltsova in fall 1922. It is worth mentioning how the careers of the artists who "dropped out" of the avant-garde attitude seemingly "slid back" or "forgot" the discoveries that were made. Typically, the quality of their works did not necessarily diminish. Eq., Alexander Drevin's non-objective art looks somewhat inferior to the landscapes he painted much later in his life.

Therefore, we are unable to establish a chronological sequence of the phenomena under consideration. It is next to impossible for us to compile a list of the protagonists who were engaged in the Avant-garde movement. While more traditional movements call for perseverance and skills in separating the leading artists from second-grade ones, the Avant-garde movement is more difficult to assess.

Every stage in the development of Avant-garde is certainly represented, by a small number of artists whose individual evolution shaped the movement's progress. Nevertheless, most of the protagonists are artists who moved in the sidelines of the movement for a short period only and gave it up for more traditional art-forms if not for extremely conservative ones later on, as was the case with some of the artists from the Knave of Diamonds' first show: Petr Konchalovsky, Ilya Mashkov and Aristarkh Lentulov who were part of the initial Neoprimitivist movement of Modernism, but who began to lag behind their more radical fellow artists during the 1910s. During the 1920s they could be found in such ultra-conservative organizations as AKhRR (Association of Revolutionary Russian Artists), as e. g. Mashkov. For artists like Konchalovsky it seemed natural to join (up to a point, of course) the controlling structures of Stalinist art in the thirties and forties. Well, the Russian art scene not only exhibits great spurts forward but also some highly unusual "backpedalling". Kazimir Malevich did exactly that in his later life, while being one of the staunchest champions of experimentalism. Incidentally, such turn-abouts were almost never preconceived, as was the case e. g., for Pab-lo Picasso' Neoclassicism or for the Italian metaphysicists thought-out Neo-traditionalism.

The drastic and spontaneous upheavals most of the protagonists of the Avant-garde experienced during their professional careers blur the overall picture and render it extremely difficult to assess the process impartially. The question "How did it happen?" should definitely entail the question "Why did it happen?". The integral process of artistic creativity appears to be split up into two parallel, separate streams, each of which evolves according to its own laws and at its own pace. The merging of the two is only possible if and when a given artist's individual path undergoes a radical change. In contrast with other historical situations these facts continue to engender situations which are anything but banal situations where each scholar is offered an opportunity to write his or her own non-controversial and fairly logical history by limiting the amount of the material in hand he wants to consider, abstracting himself or herself from the remaining information. As a result two very loosely coordinated histories were compiled and written, describing Russian art in the first third of the 20th century.

The apparent precariousness, ambiguity and inexplicable vacillations of the artistic process are certainly caused by its fast-paced passage through historical stages, as was pointed out by D. B. Sarabyanov, and result in highly confused and misleading terminologies. Therefore the terms "avant-garde" and "avant-gardism" were applied only by conventions. The same holds true of the term "Modernism" which appears a more accurate term describing this artistic phenomenon in general. As far as the names are concerned which the artist chose for themselves "Futurism" was the most popular, followed by "Leftist Art" after the revolution. "Leftist Art" gave way to the official name LEF, standing for "Left Front". Names the avant-gardists gave themselves were chosen as a way of self-identification for entire groups of artists. As one of the very few professional art critics connected with avant-gardist movements, Nikolai Punin who was writing for the mass-circulation magazine "Zhizn iskusstva" (Life of Art), described those who could be called "left" artists through a tautology: "In art "left" will include everything that the "left" artists will call "left". "This definition was invented only after avant-gardism was on the decline as a structured community and turned into a regular group of artists that only shared similar styles. At its earlier stage the avant-gardist community identified itself without any definition. It appears to have admitted any member without further formalities, any member willing to follow the rules of the game which, as a matter of fact, were undergoing continuous change. "One of the family" was anybody quick enough to behold the continuous change and understand what it meant. Those who were admitted to the avant-gardist community which looked like an esoteric clan to outsiders, were supposed to abide by the rituals followed by every community member; at the same time, the ideas generated by the ideologues and leaders of the community would become everybody's property in no time, a property without distinguishing marks of its origin. Short-lived, fast-generated ideas kept giving rise to concurrent and parallel techniques. It seems to me, that this is a way of explaining what Camilla Gray described as the rivalry between Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin suspecting each other of plagiarism. What is crucial to this system of concepts is that the overwhelming majority of leaders in the avant-gardist community are small-town folks of mediocre educational background, or "mongrels", outsiders and marginal people entering big-city cultural milieus. Their yellow sweaters and the "slaps in the face of public morals" were judged by outside observers as non-sensical fooling around. The upsetting of the humanistic civilization seemed nothing else than a ritual gesture seeking to elevate through humiliation. The Futurists' happenings meant to shock not so much the bourgeoisie as "cultured people".

This happens because it may disrupt or cancel the standards governing structural and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by unheard-of emotional experiences. The outdated institutionalized structure was rocking and creaking and the guardians of culture had enough reason to believe that the young rebels' wild and insulting gestures were the final blows to their vanishing culture and a precursor of the Time of Trouble.

I like Kazimir Malevich and Pavel Filonov best among the artists who practised the new art. They were odd and dark prophets who spoke some kind of awkward but ecstatically inspired language. Revealing truth and vested with charismatic power, they stood aloof of everybody, amongst flamboyant young people who felt so much joy in destroying what was old, obsolete and dying. Considerations of utmost importance to their fellow artists were but a fleeting episode for them. Strolling along Kuznetsky Most street in a to-phat and with a wooden spoon thrust into the lapel, Malevich looks very silly, but he is not in for silly pranks. What he does best is preaching, teaching and proclaiming. As the ideology of "analytical art" Suprematism is not just another "ism" in the endless series of 20th labels. Its prophecies and revelations go well beyond what we regard as art. The burning winds of Revelation elevate this fairly reserved person who rises above his fellow travelers; it is not by chance that Malevich retreats to the town of Vitebsk in the early 1920s as if he were an apostle visiting barbarians. There he is surrounded by his disciples who are faithful and loyal to him and who will heed all he utters. And it comes as no surprise that teaching and preaching overwhelmed the Futurists who shortly before would not

even think about doing similar things. Right after the revolution they put strenuous efforts into building up a new art education. But the schools set up by Malevich and Filonov were apparently situated on the margins of the artistic community, because the artists were not teaching skills but teachers communicating a "doctrine" to their students. The proof of it is the unusual reaction and appeal of these schools as well as the teacher-students dialogue.

There is no doubt in our minds that a possessive person like Malevich or Filonov, who in their own different way manipulated their students mind and planned to extend their influence ad infinitum, - covering entire mankind - must appear disagreable to people who are used to accepting pluralistic views in the late 20th century. But the ideas which took time to register with those artists, ideas, devoid of any coquetry and full of genuine greatness and meaning, continue to appeal. This is why, I presume, the message they convey is of lasting importance. But each time I look at Filonov's growing biological style of painting, I visualize the hecatombs that history mercilessly surrounded him with, while pictures of the world-famous 4th Chernobyl nuclear power station section produce lively recollections of the "future planets for earthlings" with Malevich's touching comment: "The planet system allows to keep him clean, he washes himself without any special washing devices".

Notes

1. Jakobson Roman. Raboty po poetike. Compiled and edited by M. L. Gas-parov. Moscow, 1987, p. 431.

2. Jakobson Roman. 0 pokolenii, ras-trativshem svoikh poetov. In his book Svyatopolk-Mirsky. Sniert Vladimir a Mayakovskogo. 1975, p. 33—34.

3. Art and Culture Institute. (Reports on the Institute's activities. 1923). In the book Sovetskoye iskusstvo га 15 let. Materialy i dokunientatsia. Edited by I. Matsa. Moscow — Leningrad, 1933, p. 143.4. Gastev A. Poezia rabochego udara. Moscow, 1926.

Andey Kovalev - [email protected], [email protected]