Art in Translation, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 119–151 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2009 Berg.

Under the Banner of Life-Building (An Attempt to Understand the Art of Today)Abstract

Nikolai Chuzhak’s article, first published in 1923 in the Russian avant-garde journal Lef, is a plea for a production art based on Marxist dialectics and a rejection of bourgeois aesthetics. The text traces the development of ideas of production art, providing a critique of the avant-garde’s attempts to link aesthetic ideals with the communist ideology of the Bolshevik Party. Chuzhak’s own viewpoint is at odds with the vague radicalism of Lef. His criticism of his fellow editor in Lef, Osip Brik, is an indication of tensions within the Lef camp. Chuzhak also draws attention to the provincial Cre-ation group and its contributions to discussions about Marxism and art.

N.F. Chuzhak [1]

Translated by Christina LodderOriginally published in Russian in Lef, no. 1 (1923): 12–39.

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KeywORds: Russia, avant-garde, Marxism, aesthetics, Futurism, Constructivism, Productivism.

Introduction by Christina LodderThis text appeared in 1923 in the very first number of the avant-garde journal Lef, which stood for Levyi front iskusstv or the Left Front of the Arts. Set up primarily by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lef sought to promote innovative creative ideals throughout the artistic sector despite the aesthetic conservatism of official Soviet cultural bodies. Its opening statement announced that Lef must “blow up the old junk,” “fight for the aesthetic construction of life,” and prove that its approach was “the true path to the impending future.”i

Nikolai Chuzhak’s article followed the opening program and acts on several levels. It is an impassioned plea for production art based on an application of Marxist dialectics to art and an emphatic rejection of bourgeois aesthetics. The text also traces the way in which ideas of production art emerged, providing an astute survey, analysis, and critique of the avant-garde’s attempts to link aesthetic ideals with the communist ideology of Bolshevik Party, following the October Revo-lution of 1917. Chuzhak, who had some knowledge of Marxism and had written about its relationship to art prior to 1917,ii had a decided viewpoint, at odds with the vague radicalism of Lef’s program. His criticism of his fellow editor in Lef, Osip Brik, is an early indication of those differences within the Lef camp that resulted in Chuzhak’s res-ignation from the editorial board in 1924 in disgust at Mayakovsky’s adherence to traditional poetic genres.iii Having been based in Vladi-vostok, Chuzhak was also eager to point out the contribution that the provincial Creation group had made to discussions about Marxism and art.

Chuzhak’s language is forceful and idiomatic, mixing philosophical and political terminology with poetic neologisms, archaic words, allusions to popular proverbs, and a wide range of cultural references. My transla-tion has tried to balance the need for comprehensibility with the desire to convey some flavor of this literary style. I hope that it has succeeded.

Notes on Introduction

i. “Za chto boretsya Lef?,” Lef, no. 1 (1923): 1–5. Translation as “What Does Lef Fight For?” in Anna Lawton (ed.), Russian Futur-ism Through Its Manifestos, 1912–1928 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 191–5.

ii. N. Chuzhak, “K estetike marksizma,” 1912.iii. N. Chuzhak, “Pis’mo v redaktsiyu,” Lef, no. 4 (1924): 213; and

Chuzhak, “Krivoe zerkalo. Lef v prelomlenii ‘Lefa,’ ” Oktyabr’ mysli, no. 2 (1924): 39–46. For a discussion of the differences that

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developed within Lef, see Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in So-viet Factography,” October, no. 118 (2006): 95–131.

Under the Banner of Life-Building (An Attempt to Understand the Art of Today)

N.F. Chuzhak

At present, all kinds of our Russian art, from poetry to painting and theater are at an unusual turning point. This is not just a routine crisis, after which there will be the inevitable flowering. No, this is a real “to be or not to be” situation, only free of theatrical flourishes. We have rejected so much these past years that now we are confronted by the serious question: What should we consider to be art in our day and what uncoordinated fragments of this art should we cultivate today, faced as we are by the dissolution of art into life?

The Facts

So-called applied art declares that art should embellish work (nobody still talks about art decorating life). The so-called Productivists stand on the recognition that art itself is work. People who look at art from the point of view of communist monism inevitably come to the conclusion that art is only a quantitatively individual, temporary, and predomi-nantly emotional method of life-building, and, as such, cannot remain isolated, or what is more, self-sustaining compared with other ap-proaches to life-building.

That is how art is presented in the light of tomorrow—and clearly, a real muddle arises when this idea, which previously informed views on art and its trends, works of art, and even the producers of this art, is applied to the art of today! Art will flow together with life; art will penetrate into life. And this means that art cannot be any sort of special occupation, even understood as “work,” nor can there be a “work of art” that is sep arate from the unified flow of art and life or especially made to be so.

All absolutes have gone to the Devil, and only little old men, trying to look younger, who are readers “of the great deceased,” still mumble about “eternal beauty,” and the theater as a refuge for “relaxation” and “dreams,” while clerks studying a rejected aesthetic at Proletcult [The Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations] [2] still dream about restoring Nadson [3] and Pushkin [4]—and what about “presence”?

The presence of Russian art conforms very weakly to the developing perspectives suggested by the communist idea.

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There [in theory] is the whole mass of objects, produced by an anony-mous collective of artist-creators as a result of the process of the dialectical development of material, and here [in actuality] making of an object and the production of items of value are like some hardly perceived, dreamed of ideal! There, there is the idea of overthrowing the creative artist, who is now fertilizing and dissolving into the masses, and here, the wood-worker is an ideal!—and a new step toward this—art as . . . engineering.

Art is only a shy apprentice in the face of the enormously developing life that is being created. And its childish exertions are its creation, in the name of a single lovingly fostered son (psychologically speaking) and approach by contemporaries to the contradictions of the future growing from the fragments of contradictions. Such, in its essential outlines, is the art of today.

Why talk about projected workplace painting or even about Produc-tivist Constructivism, when art is not producing the most elementary objects? Is it worth cultivating the theater as some kind of packaged biomechanics; music as some kind of condensed noise of barrel organs; and the art of the word, as some kind of laboratory of language-making, when real life beats out thousands of better and more genuine rhythms and sounds, and the dance of this life is immeasurably more intricate and complex than the plagiarisms of art?

This is precisely how the question now stands before that wing of Russian art most sensitive to the throb of life, and it is not difficult to see that some of its more blunt representatives have agreed, confused by life, that art is agitational work, ignoring the fact that agitation, however worthy, is only a temporary and therefore not an exclusive task for art, and that even art as propaganda is not identical to it. Others have become obsessed with nihilism, with the rejection of art, in the name of the death of sentiment, etc.

“What can you say?” and “is art worth cultivating?”Yes it is worth it insofar as …Insofar as the emotional element is still inseparable from the com-

mon intellect. Insofar as we do not intend to burn out this element by artificially castrating humanity, in the name of some theoretical “beauti-ful eyes”—alas, this is still too “engineering-like,” too distant, although categorically imperative …

Let us trace how the theory and practice of Russian art have de-veloped in recent years and how the conceptions of it have evolved—initially under the involuntary and instinctive attraction to the class advancing to social hegemony, then under its indirect influence, and finally under its direct pressure.

1. The Early Searches

In attempting to cover the most important achievements in the field of art, which are closely connected with the social victories of recent

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years, one inescapably comes up against curious yet extremely char-acteristic facts—indicating the unity and inevitability of the influences on art from the fundamental driving forces of life—these are: first, the solitary and partial discoveries concerning the general future position of art in the relatively early years; and second the fact that that there are noticeable parallels in the exploration of these positions by groups of people who embrace the epoch, but who are completely separate from one another geographically and not even always in agreement formally.

Manifestations of the first category include, among others, an early attempt by the writer of this article (“Toward an Aesthetic of Marx-ism,” Irkutsk, 1912) [5], to apply the dialectical method to questions concerning the theory and practice of art. The second category includes those almost simultaneous, isolated, and parallel attempts that were feeling their way toward a communist approach to aesthetics—in Petro-grad (Art of the Commune [Iskusstvo kommuny]), in the Far East (the Creation [Tvorchestvo] group) and to some extent in Berlin among the Soviet-Russian groups (Object [Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet]) [6].

Having set myself the question of what art is “from the point of view of the perspectives of the working class” (1912), the author of those lines turned for a solution of the problems troubling him both to the Marxist ideas concerning the fate of the working class (which has been firmly consolidated and has its own views) and to the dialectical con-structions of Marx and Engels. I took as my fundamental position, what Marx declared in 1873 (exactly fifty years ago)—i.e. that:

Dialectics, in its mysticized form, transforms and enlightens ex-istence. In its rational form, it encompasses not only a positive conception of existence, but also a conception of its negation, its necessary destruction, because it comprehends every existing form in motion, and as something that is transient [7].

Having turned to this methodological approach in order to clarify the structure of art, I came to certain essential and logical conclusions concerning:

First, what exactly is art? And second—what kind of art does the working class need?

If at the basis of everything, including artistic activity, there is some kind of material actuality (dialectical materialism), then this actuality is already “something transient,” i.e. it contains “not only a positive understanding of reality, but also an understanding of its negation.” From this it is clear that the task of art is not to record everyday life objectively, as many who call themselves Marxists have imagined up to now but by studying reality, to realize the imagined antithesis, the revelation of which is of interest to tomorrow, and to represent every synthesized (“realized”) form “in its development,” i.e. under the banner of the new and the new process that is perpetually revitalizing and developing material from within.

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“To reveal the ripening shoots of the future in visible reality”— I wrote of art in 1912, somewhat solemnly, but already it seems applying communist philosophy to art logically and consistently. “To reveal the new reality hidden in the depths of the present day, and to throw aside the moribund, which is temporarily predominant—that is the true aim of art, considered in the light of dialectics” (“Toward an Aesthetic of Marxism,” Irkutsk, 1912). And further, “the creation of new ideologi-cal and material values in the light of the future—this is the only reliable criterion in applying dialectics to art.”

We will see later what the most recent communist theories of art, fertilized by the recent social victories of the working class, have brought to this conception of art, which was issued comparatively early on and carelessly discarded.

Now to the question concerning what art is necessary to a class—precisely what kind of art does the working class need i.e. what formal means of expression correspond to its social mission and its feelings about the world?

In that same early article I wrote that: “Dialectical materialism, based on a conception of the relativity of objects, cannot give exclusive or absolute recognition to any one of the existing or potential artistic forms. The only unshakeable principle must be that of a correspondence between content and form. Everything else is in flux.”

Considering “every existing form” as “something transient” or fluc-tuating, in that same year of 1912, I tried to explain the correspondence between the experiences of the “rising class” and what formal realiza-tion was essential for it, although not native to it. Unlike the vulgarizers of materialism (the official Marxists) who directly and totally equate the productive condition of a given class with a given form of art, as the art of precisely that class and as a simple and static representation of it, I determined that there was a difference between the subjective role and the objective function of every trend in art, emphasizing the inner coherence of the form, notwithstanding the simultaneous influence on art of different social groups—from a subtle drawing of attention to their interests to a barely concealed dictatorship. Moreover, I mentioned only the correspondences in meaning (not equating them) but insisting on the dialectic nature of every art form, and that means its transforma-tion in relation to the subjective and direct interests of the ruling class.

I wrote that no class appearing on the stage of history immediately acquires a culture, and this applies particularly to art. Every culture, and particularly art, are gradually and painfully acquired by the rising class in the long process of its self-realization as a class and its advance to hegemony. Every new culture, and particularly every new art, grows out of and gives rise to “tomorrow” from the depths of the culture and art of the past. From the satirical songs of “the working class” to the anthems “of the proletariat” is a long and painful, but a completely inevitable and dialectically “necessary,” path.

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I was writing this, when so-called Symbolism was the latest achieve-ment and the last word in Russian art. Deliberately treating Symbolism conditionally as a formal structure of the ideas of tomorrow, which excluded (for us) the possibility of a real and spontaneous construction, we literally felt our way at an enforced “distance” from art to the forms needed by the working class.

At that time in 1912, I was not pleased with any of the current artis-tic trends, and almost like a sleepwalker concluded:

“The proletariat is a social group that is ambiguous by nature. On the one hand, it is only a class, with all the peculiarities of the situation of a class, i.e. with its narrow class struggle for existence, for an actual crust of bread, for the basic existence of the family, etc.—and with a definite and narrow class psychology. On the other hand, it is a class on whose banner is inscribed freedom from the class yoke, more accurately speak-ing, it is the last class, and as such cannot not possess its own particular psyche, possessing as it does a foretaste of future norms.”

Such an ambiguous position creates an ambiguous psychology. And the very tactic of Marxism, cultivating the class instinct, in order to lead to the destruction of the class structure, and being profoundly monist in its scientific and philosophical expressions, rests on premises that are clearly ambiguous.

Sociology is helpless to remove this fatal discrepancy and bring har-mony into this tragedy of the proletariat. The tasks of psychology, and more importantly its weapon, art, are to shed light on this.

But even art is powerless to represent this combined dynamism and the stasis of the worker in a single work. Moreover, since Symbolism (al-though conditionally) represents a form that already provides a hint about the future, a special and adequate form is needed to fully represent the “dynamic” and reveal the “static” principle, a form that most sharply reflects the position of the worker, who is doomed to live through the most agonizing of all conflicts—the collision between what is and what will be.

Such a form is available to us—ultrarealism—a term that does not express the necessary meaning precisely, is hackneyed, often used in a negative sense, and has nothing in common with realism except a con-ditional acceptance of reality as a basis. It is exactly conditional. Taking reality for what it is in all its deliberately cynical nakedness, the ultra-realist artist passes it through the prism of the dialectical revolution. Because of this, all creation possesses a passionate character, as if it were a taut bow string, a challenge, or a slap in someone’s face” [8].

And further (“Toward a Marxist Aesthetic,” Irkutsk, 1912):

Only a stern ultrarealism, without any shadow of lingering roman-ticism, ruthless and almost caricature-like, is able to reflect all the horror, all the tragedy of the working man, in whom brilliant minds with clear eyes have begun to see a messiah, called upon to plant heavenly gardens for mortals, and doomed to lead a swinish life, his

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children cursed by being old before their time, his wife and sisters bought by drunken scum, and often he does not even know himself for what great miracles he was born to be a soulless machine.

To transform reality in the long run, to realize it in all its desolation, to illuminate a distant world, and create a future reality—this is the path of art. Ultrarealism, representing the horror of the “static” worker, is like a threshold for art, whose task is all in the future.

It is interesting to note that at the very same time (1912) as I turned out those speculative lines, “It is in the air,” there appeared in distant Moscow an artistic trend that set itself the aim: to intensify and sharpen the contradictions of contemporary reality and by this means break into “the future consciousness” and into the future [9].

The chronic loss of contact with, and reference to, art, during the years of the civil war [10], the involuntary push to the seashore, the excessively delayed acquaintance with the full (uncensored) “Cloud” [Cloud in Trou-sers] of Mayakovsky [11], which with one stroke did more to clarify the sought-for art than all the ardent (but still too tied to aestheticism) Futur-ist agitation of his Far Eastern colleagues, meant that even seven years later (Vladivostok, 1919) in the article “What Kind of Art is Close to the Proletariat?” the present writer, in conducting a polemic with the oppo-nents of the new art, could only assert half, while half had to be sensed and guessed at. He had to deliberately approach the new trends condi-tionally, like early Symbolism, unceremoniously breaking in the boots of its structure, and, while discarding the survival of bourgeois aestheticism, welcoming the growth of a form that could be a fellow traveler to the proletariat, “nudging” and helping it to reorganize itself.

I wrote:

To speak about the abstract quality of Futurism, means to re-veal hopeless incomprehension, precisely because, despite all the complexities of artistic structure, it, more than any other trend, is fighting against naked oversimplification; it, more than any others, is fighting to make its images, notwithstanding their intimidating “monstrosity,” more “meaty” and more “tangible.” In this lies Futurism’s “contact with people,” in this lies its ability to “unite” people, in this lies its ability to knock them on the head with life, but with a life “enormously rushing by,” a life that is dialectically developing and forging its future from its own contractions.

And here is my thesis:Although complicated and symbolic, isn’t Futurism, in its present

form, nothing other than what we called, in the absence of any definite term that could reflect the sought for meaning, ultrarealism, meaning by it something cynical and relentless, alien to feelings of “regret,” a

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reflection of the contradictions of contemporary reality in the light of the future—“regret” like an elusive cobweb, twists around the legs of the creative person, preventing him from walking forward and upward?

And so what is Futurism from the dialectical point of view? How, to what extent and when can it accompany the experiences of the working class?

Let us turn to Futurism in its 1919 manifestation—the manifesta-tion [produced] by the writer of these lines personally, as well as by the active core of the Far Eastern group of artists, who had linked their fate with the fate of the working class.

Futurism, as it was discussed by the Far Eastern Creation [Tvorchestvo] group, arose on Russian soil as much as through the laws of art’s inner development, i.e. through the conflict of contradictions, as through social and psychological laws. With regard to its inner (immanent) de-velopment, it is strictly evolutionary i.e. “it derives from the father,” considering the “father” to be the sum total of all previous achievements, dictating the further development of art. With regard to its social and psychological roots, it is undoubtedly revolutionary, since it was gener-ated by a revolutionary psyche. Having developed immanently and for-mally, its “art” receives its ideal (in terms of content) fertilization from “life.”

Futurism, as a formal phenomenon, appeared in Russia at the begin-ning of the 1910s, having tried to absorb the formal language of Impres-sionism and Symbolism, and taking them to their logical conclusion. Russian Impressionism was a progressive literary trend on the threshold of birth in art, but weakly impregnated with life, so that in the end it died, like a class, through lack of movement. Futurism put dynamism at the head of its corner; it synthesized the entire dispersal of spots into an image-shout, and it launched this single shout like an arrow into the future. Russian Symbolism, having performed mass for a class, de-veloped into Acmeism [12], into a sculptural fossil—Futurism inspired art’s walking corpse with unprecedented sounds.

Fairness, however, demands that I mention that the blossoming forest of images of movement and sounds, synthesized rhythm, leaps, and intonation, which is so characteristic of Russian Futurism, did not immediately penetrate very far into the “art of the future” and if there had not been a sunny fertilization of life (and we know that in the end, this is a fertilization by one or another class), Futurism even now would have stagnated into stuffy, purely formal investigations, imperatively necessary and dictated from within, but an inert and powerless proposi-tion, like all artistic trends (in Symbolism this was particularly evident) that emerge without the presence of any demand from life. “The writer writes, the reader reads.” But it is vacuous when it does not inflame; it does not resonate. And Futurism would not have developed out of the refined wordplay of Severyanin [13], just as it would have suffocated in the scholastic trousers of D. Burliuk [14], if that creator, the crazy

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riot of enormously developing life, had not inspired it with the spirit of intoxication and fire, and waved it onto a swing, which made heads that were too tender began to whirl.

This is how Futurism was interpreted from a distance—cut off from RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic] and its most recent creative developments—to a significant extent in parallel with the most revolutionary and authentically creative Russian groups. Coming from the realization of the immensity of the achievements of the class base of the new art, the Far Eastern groups perceived the aspiration of Futurism to be just as immense.

In 1919, I wrote:

Here, in the Far East, where a mad seesaw of future art has been changed so often that nobody worries about the rhythm of the seesaw, where the soapy cord strangling the throat of the bourgeois-serf rabble did not allow Futurism to develop into a natural wave—here for a long time Futurism did not leave the boundary of “the room.” But there in distant Russia, where the rhythmic dance of the Revolution cleared the atmosphere and had an astounding effect on human susceptibility—there Futurism truly became the unprecedented marvel of the twentieth century.

“In fact,” as the Englishman V.Y. Good confirms in his lecture concern-ing art and culture in the new Russia, “this modernist(?) form of art, having appeared to be dead, is now more animated than ever before, and the exaggerated forms of its images alone reflect the colossal intel-lectual and spiritual cyclone stirred up by the Revolution.”

And further:

Objectively, the Russian proletariat in the forward march of its steps in history has been like Pygmalion [15], giving life to the Galatea of Futurism, turning the evolved tasks of art into the cre-ation of the Revolution.

Does it follow from this, however, that Futurism is the immutable and absolute form of art given to the working class, as the only one that can satisfy it now and for ever? No, of course not. “Everything is fine in its time,” said one Russian dialectician, and all artistic trends should definitely be approached with this good methodological measure.

The working class in Russia is not that young. There was a time when, objectively speaking, it was still a developing estate, when it was not hostile to but took to the alien culture of “realism,” because the latter took notice of Rasteraev Street, leading it out of a condition of social nonexistence, and presenting it as a social problem. And the working class (estate) itself still fed on “My Lord Silly” … Later, there was a time when Rasteraev Street developed into a town, when it took

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to trembling Impressionism, also from an alien culture, representing (in its first phase) and objectively corresponding to this period of the proletariat’s experience, and encouraging its disturbing ditties. Finally, there was a time when Symbolism (symbols)—in the sense of an art of new structures—didn’t simply correspond to, but was like air that was essential to a working class that was realizing itself, and beginning to demonstrate its historical mission, but not yet strong enough to infect its own artists with this conviction, and make them create in art a new and unseen life—in the image of the working class.

The position with Futurism is completely different. Futurism ap-peared when the pregnant future class was already prepared to give birth to the Revolution. This is why, organizationally as the consumer of tomorrow, and spiritually as the future ruler, the proletariat already subordinated itself, let us assume, not even to its own artist (but precisely as the revolutionary intelligentsia is not the revolutionary proletariat’s “own”) clearly having con-vinced him that he was an inevitable necessity.

This is Futurism.How did it develop further? And did the idea of Futurism develop in

the interpretations of the inhabitants of the Far East?The idea did develop further, and it inevitably had to develop in con-

nection with the continuous influence of the Russian social base on the consciousness, politics, and economics of the colonized periphery, even behind the backs of the barriers of the Ataman sheiks. Even there, in the Far East, already by the beginning of 1921, but still before the real intersection of our cultural-artistic paths, we became aware, together with the first two, of the third phase of Futurism, the Productivist, which is now being promoted by us further, as the natural result of the social fertilization of the new class.

1. The laboratory and formal phase—already with the first break through the limits of so-called graphic means.

2. The tribune and poster phase—the time of the first fertilization of the new art with a revolutionary, proletarian content. And

3. The stage of the fusion of art and production.

This is the evolution of Futurism between 1921 and 1922. Let us hope that just as it seems like this “from a distance,” that is how it is “in fact.”

Before us, there was not even a theory of this development—and it hardly exists even now—but there was an intensified engagement with propaganda images. We [in the Far East] lacked images, but it must be owned that we had more leisure time to think.

Among others, it was we, at a distance and as a result of the fertil-izing and healthy mutual approach of social activists and art-makers,

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who realized that Futurism is not a school, but a tendency to recon-struct human striving toward “a future consciousness”—and this alone explains why all those intentional or unintentional aesthetes gradually left Futurism and why it naturally attracted around itself all the young, willfully victorious and rebellious.

So, dotting the is and crossing the ts, by mid-1921 we had already written (introduction in Toward a Dialectics of Art) [16]:

The proletariat has already fertilized the new art with its life-giving breath—without waiting for the Pharisees and the bookworms to give it its “term.” And if the second phase of Futurism must not only be acknowledged to be necessary, but has become essential to the working class, coloring its basic aspirations and the creations of its most prominent and talented proletarian poets, then most recently Futurism has put forward, perhaps for the first time, a concept of art not as individual “expertise” and “decoration” of life, but as one of the forms of production, as a collective forging of new images from life itself—and Futurism has extended the limits of what was yester-day still a “school” into what is more real than reality: “philosophy.” Today, by rights, Futurism must be acknowledged to be proletarian art, in the literal, organizational, and spiritual sense of the word.

And further:

Futurism is fortunate in that it was born within the framework of the bourgeois art structure, and completed its development not as an obsolete “school,” like other artistic trends of recent de-cades, but directly in parallel with the opening of a new era of everyday life, and the increasing growth of man’s new commu-nist consciousness. Whatever were or weren’t even the outlines of the art closest to the working class and whatever new elements, new names, distinct moments, and intensifications it acquired—Futurism, especially the latest stage of Futurism, is part of it—just as “you can’t omit a word from a song” …

In Productivism—the third stage of Futurism, which has now been developed further by us—first territorially, then toward the end of 1922, our paths crossed and our individual strivings were artificially dissolved. Productivism is the last path, uniting us, and under its banner our group [i.e. Lef ] has been formed.

Its realization will help us to advance further.

2. Attempt at Analysis

If you look at left-wing literature on the theory of art published in the capital during the past five years (it is so little!), you will notice with

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curiosity how speculation in the field of art developed among our Rus-sian friends impetuously and by leaps and bounds, corresponding to the feverish onrush of the times, but (and it was the same with us [in the Far East]) in a clash of contradictions, with shy regrets as well as radicalism, along the path of an obvious eclecticism.

I am hardly mistaken when I say that the first attempts to realize art in the RSFSR appeared in the Petersburg newspaper, Art of the Commune, a most curious theoretical weekly, organized like a pam-phlet (December 1918–April 1919) [17]. This was the stormy period of the onslaught of the working class, a time of happy offensives on in-violable “cultural values” of all kinds, like “the constituent assembly,” “democracy,” “classless science and art,” and “the priesthood,” and it was understandable then that such atheistic fervor percolated the most conspicuous writings of the ringleaders of Art of the Commune, from Mayakovsky’s poetic “Order to the Army of Art” [18] and Brik’s [19] theoretical attacks, to the Komfut [Communist-Futurist] romanticism of Kushner [20] and even to Punin’s [21] relatively calm feuilletons, these were the heavy guns of the newspaper …

Into the streets—Futurists, Drummers and poets!

appealed the poet, supreme commander of the paper—and he was con-fident that:

We will greet the hundredth anniversary [22].

This was, of course, the minimum program of the Art of the Commune, in upper and lower case letters—i.e. the call for art to go into the streets1 still defined only the middle stage of Futurism, the stage of posters and tribunes. The poet, whose name decorated three-quarters of this first, revolutionary stage in both form and content—was wonderfully accom-panied by the newspaper’s fleet theoreticians, who were trying to take theory itself out onto the street.

Enthusiastic Brik, with all the weapons of revolutionary denial, in the name of some kind of new, as yet barely tangible truths, already in a frenzy, seizes hold of the beards of the “venerables,” under the sounds of the first revolutionary drums and drags them down from their “heav-enly” pulpits of so-called “free” art and the “priesthood.”

Quiet and dreamy Kushner is already loudly inspired, overthrowing everything that isn’t the music of drums, and openly asking the ques-tion: “Isn’t it better to throw what is most decrepitly mellifluous into the city’s sewers and to appear rumbling more powerfully and more in accord with the nature of our hearing?” [23].

It is repeated, undoubtedly sincerely, even by those who were carried away by the music of the epoch, who burnt their fingers further with guns, taken for good democratic pipes, and who later left the Art of the

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Commune and were struck down, some by safeguarding their grandfa-thers’ traditions in the museums and in IZO [Department of Fine Arts within the Commissariat for Enlightenment] [24], and others in the dry-ness of the apolitical emigration.

“Art is action and, as such, can only belong to the present; behind us we have the results of action, in front—the plans for action.” This is the slogan of the art of the epoch.

Mystery Bouffe [25], a satire and ode to the Revolution by Maya-kovsky, is one of the most characteristic signs of the times, a kind of studio for adapting the classics—and its best battering ram.

Nevertheless, this is only the minimum program. An extraordinary leap, splendidly effective, and sheer “direct action,” but—there was al-ready too great a running start, too many imperative organic tasks of the day, the tasks of construction—for a theory of art, even in those days, not to instinctively and feverishly break straight into construction.

And so, we see that—collectively they acted instinctively and sepa-rately, with whimsical eclecticism in comparison with the future line—even so all the most important words for the future were already issued in Art of the Commune.

Having just been employed on the streets by many-colored gleaming crowds and demonstrations, art is not lost, although it is sometimes in the pose of a timid drummer, not so much leading the people as nudg-ing them, and sometimes in the attitude of a brilliant dumbing-down [by limiting revolutionary aims to those intelligible to the masses] [26] inevitable in that loud and noisy time—but it strives to do precisely the opposite, to collect itself—from being dissipated in the crowd to con-densing its vernal energy—from the condition of a brilliant isolation to fusing with work.

And at that time, when the practice of art is still arrogantly con-vinced that “all the Soviet deputies cannot move the army if the musi-cians don’t play the march,” theory, already mistrustful, looks to the future, when with the possible intensification of real progress, [it would become] too separated from the base of the superstructure and even if it moved to the role of drum, it would be in danger of appearing po-etic, being cast aside and doomed to a silent death. Theory instinctively makes an attempt to touch the very basis of life—economics—not the conspicuous expression of it, in the form of politics, insurrection and demonstration, but—its very heart—production.

At the beginning, in an attempt to save art, the theory of art stumbled upon the question of “aims” and tried to base itself in this question.

“Aims! Here is a new point,” writes the mysterious Vydra [27]—who ambiguously fires up contemporary art. We will formulate once again the disagreement in question.

The aim of art is education, the ennoblement of humanity, and the destruction of its barbaric and bestial characteristics. Old

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artists say that the aim of art is to influence material in order to influence people.

No, the aim of art is to influence material in order to exercise power over it, for the aim of art lies in itself alone and does not depend on any kind of conventional conception concerning the state of humanity. The aim of art is the achievement of perfect forms [28].

Here there is already some indication of the disagreement that was not only felt then, but also in the future—in the sense of a dissatisfac-tion with the applied character of art, including agitational art, and a dissatisfaction with its narrow and applied agitational quality. But here there is also too much naive idealism, treating art as an aim in itself and enclosing it in “purity” and formal “perfection.”

Brik approached the question more tenaciously, although with opposite exaggerations and a simplified materialism.

“The Bourgeoisie,” he says, “thought that the single aim of art is to distort life. The proletariat thinks otherwise. Not to misrepresent life, but to create (as you see, at the end of 1918 this word was still used, to be replaced later by the word ‘to produce’—N. Ch.). And not the intoxi-cation of expressing ideas, but a material object. We supplied the idea of the object. we do not need your ideas. (! N. Ch.) We love our living, material, fleshy life. If you artists, if you can create, originate—create for us our human nature, our human objects. If you cannot create anything of your own, if all your art mangles living reality into different tunes, you are not needed by us, you are surplus to our requirements” [29].

Of course, here there is a lot more impassioned radicalism of the proselyte and naive quasi-materialistic writing in the style of Pisarev [30], but there are also healthy spurts of those future ideas that would color the third phase of Futurism:

“It is essential that we immediately organize an institute of mate-rial culture, where artists can be trained for work on the creation of new objects for proletarian use (later this idea went ‘into Constructiv-ism’ N. Ch.), where models of these objects, (that means once again “ideas”—N. Ch.) these future works of art, can be developed.”

“Everyone who loves living art, who understands that it is not an idea but a real object that is the aim of every true creative act, and who can create objects must take part in establishing these genuine proletarian centers of artistic culture. Reality and not a sign. This is the slogan of the future art of the commune” (O. Brik, Art of the Commune, 1918) [31].

In this way, the everyday concept of “the object” first appeared in art practice—that is if you don’t count Mayakovsky’s use of this word and idea in 1916 (“Man Object”) when in writing those lines he employed economic jargon to define art as “the creation of spiritual and material values” [32].

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Here I should point out that theory alone did not run ahead, seeking “a union” with material life, but art practice also, in the person of the most impulsive poet of the time, who is clearly already oppressed by the fatal isolation “of its idea,” and loudly declares:

The Gospels and the Koran have been written for us,A lost and returning paradise,And yet,And yetMore and more booksPromise every joy in life after death, intelligence and cunning.

Here—On earth we wantNot to live aboveNor beneathall these fir trees, houses, roads, horses and grass!We have had enough of the sweetness of heaven,—Give us rye bread to munch!We have had enough of paper passionGive us a living woman to live with [33].

This, however, does not prevent the poet going all the way— Mystery Bouffe is a picture of the future, precisely about “idea” and “invention.”

Art, as the straightforward, material creation of objects, is the first stone in the maximum program of Art of the Commune. O. Brik and N. Punin write simultaneously about “objectness”2 [34].

The next stone is the phrase mentioned in passing, “art like every other kind of production” (Brik) [35]. And its development by the edi-torial board “It is believed that the separate existence of art and pro-duction is an immutable law. We see in this distinction a survival of the bourgeois system” [36].

Developing this correct position, B. Kushner concludes with a new radical exaggeration in No. 7: “Inspiration is an empty and foolish fairy tale … inspiration is abolished absolutely (! N. Ch.), and without reprieve.” [37]. Yet, only a few lines earlier, in this same issue, the edi-tors, appearing adequately restrained, declared: “We consider the chief task of proletarian art to be the complete destruction of the concept of ‘free creativity’ and ‘mechanical work’ and their replacement with one concept—creative work” [38].

N. Punin already makes the first distinction between applied art and production. “The point” he says, “is not decoration, but the cre-ation of new artistic objects. Art for the proletariat is not a holy temple; where the lazy only contemplate, but work, a factory that produces artistic items for everyone” [39]. (What “artistic items” are is not

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explained; likewise, the idea “of Constructivism” has not yet entered anyone’s head—N. Ch.)

From the rejection of “lazy contemplation” to mastering material is one step. And this step is the last fugitive stone in the maximum program of Art of the Commune as it is ostensibly outlined in No. 15 (Vydra): “Art is mastery.” But here, instead of concentrating on this point, there is the unbalanced addition “perfection and movement for-ward” [40].

As I have already said, all the main words for the future platform of the third stage of Futurism were already tossed out in Art of the Commune. But they were tossed out half by chance as if dropped, and half lightly in passing, moreover, completely unmotivated and merely announced, like something that makes sense by itself. Not only the practice of the newspaper, but also the whole practice of Futurism at that time was almost entirely based on the agitational poster.

The distance between the second and third stages was very signifi-cant, and additionally deepened by the purely fellow-traveler coopera-tion. As much as the agitational poster was maintained precisely and aggressively, to that extent the line of materialization was eclectic and weak.

Nevertheless, despite the evident eclecticism, even despite the after-taste of the vulgarization of Marxism, in view of the complete move to the side of tangible objectism, Art of the Commune was not only the first in the RSFSR, and parallel with the Far Eastern group Creation, to sprint on to the last stage of Futurism, but up to the present it has not been surpassed, or even extended, and only very weakly continued.

Here—there are as many compliments for the theoreticians of the time of Art of the Commune as there are reproaches … concretely of course and nominally for the theoreticians of the production stage in general.

Let us turn to 1919. What is new in the life of future art? The Futur-ists in Petersburg are gaining a position in IZO and publish one issue of the art journal Fine Art [Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo] [41].

The celebrated capture of IZO clearly does not come cheaply for Futurism; at least, judging by Fine Art, Futurism itself falls into the hand-some captivity of IZO. The number of “fellow travelers” and their circle expands. Of course, eclecticism becomes stronger. Cleverly operating with Marxist phraseology although not thinking like a Marxist, N.N. Punin clearly drowns the unaffiliated but precise Brik. Spineless Shterenberg [42], the commissar of IZO, popularized through stylized lubki, steams to bursting point toward the objectism of Tatlin [43]. And all this is flavored with the emphatic nonobjective suprematism of Malevich [44].

As a whole, this is a big step backward in comparison with Art of the Commune. True, the main article of the journal, “The Proletariat and Art” by Punin, is dated April 1918 [45]. Perhaps the journal was prepared before Art of the Commune? …

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In it, not only is there no whiff of “Productivism,” but even the elementary idea of the object is missing. Evidently, they talked about it and then discarded it … The editorial, dated “Petersburg-Moscow, May 1918” based on a hopeless eclecticism, is a kind of official and benevolent declaration, equally tolerant toward all trends “if they can provide the elements for a new artistic culture” [46]. Brik’s article, “The Artist and the Commune,” somewhat destroys the generally indulgent tone of the journal, but it only makes one attack; Brik undermines the priesthood, but there is no sound or hint about the ills of Futurism’s rise [47].

N.N. Punin’s article is perhaps the clearest, most detailed and com-plete of all that was written, if not by the “Left Front,” then in the publications of the Left Front in the period 1918–21. But it is the most alien to the Left Front and the most conservative, despite the author’s greater dialectical advantage in comparison with the theoreticians of the Left Front [48].

Here there can be no talk about objectism in art. In this there are pluses and minuses. The pluses are the absences of any exaggerations and vulgar misrepresentations of dialectical materialism. The minuses are the absences of those first Productivist inclinations, on which Art of the Commune agreed and so too did N. Punin himself at the time.

Objectism is treated completely conventionally: art is a “method, thanks to which one or another artistic perception is given substance.” On top of this, the author persistently campaigns against so-called “aes-thetic emotion,” without even distinguishing between aims and means, but he also rejects “the spontaneous-utilitarian significance of art” (“Artistic creation differs from other kinds of creation in that it does not posses, like mathematics for example, a spontaneous-utilitarian sig-nificance”). And this means that he rejects the concept of art as the ma-terial construction of objects. There remain “ideas of objects,” which somewhat straightforwardly, but with healthy protestant laughter, O. Brik mocks in Art of the Commune.

This eclectic muddle, however, doesn’t end here. In his article, N. Punin stands firmly on the platform of art as a method of perception. This can be considered a healthy bourgeois achievement (bourgeois aes-thetics did not go beyond this), but even this proposition sounds fairly abstract in Punin’s writing. Namely: “Art doesn’t serve anyone or any-thing; it is an instrument that helps humanity to extend its horizons, its experience, and in this way its culture” [49]. This wouldn’t matter, if it were only Punin who held this spineless position, but no; the entire article of the editors’ introduction is not based on the theory of the construction of objects, but only on art as a “cognitive human ac-tivity” What were our friends in the capital thinking to publish such articles? [50]

I do not know what they were thinking at the time of Fine Art, but 1921 showed that the idea of the spontaneous production of objects

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through art had by no means died, fed by the strivings of the class that was not only continuing the greatest of all revolutions in the name of the destruction of the class structure, but was also flying the flag of the culture of the new structure of objects, the culture of the reconstruction of production. This idea ferments simultaneously in a fair number of Soviet heads: it occupies our Futurist comrades in IZO who had moved from Piter [Petrograd] to Moscow; it is being developed independently in Proletarian Culture [Proletarskaya kul’tura] by the Proletcult activ-ist, B. Arvatov [51]; the Far Eastern Futurists are thinking about it; I. Ehrenberg’s [52] group in Berlin is developing it, and in many re-spects their conclusions agree with ours; and V.E. Tatlin moves from the weak, halfhearted counter-reliefs of 1916 toward the idea of Construc-tivism. In that same year of 1921 the small collection, Art in Production [Isksstvo v proizvodstve], is published in Moscow, immediately becom-ing a focus for theory.

What does the editor of the collection suggest is the purpose of art?—“The introduction of artistic elements into the life of production in

general, the transformation of the form of the production process and the form of everyday life through art” [53].

It must be said that, in terms of concrete expression and precision, this definition is hardly the first in a series of attempts to realize the new tasks of art. But it must be noted that the study of the tasks men-tioned in the collection Art in Production does not go any further than the “introductory” definition. On the contrary, the future tasks of the new art seem to dissolve and even disappear completely into the “foggy distance.”

The resolution of these [tasks] is not helped by the venerable com-missar of IZO, D. Shterenberg, who opens the collection with his article “It Is Time to Understand,” from which one can only understand that Productivism differs in some way from applied art, but in what exactly, it is impossible to say. The most precise [statement] in the article is that “Art in production signifies the most expedient approach and the maximum qualifications.” But the term “art in production” itself is still confused with applied art [54].

In the article “On the Order of the Day,” O. Brik does not make the slightest attempt to expand his decree-like phraseology of 1918 [55]. Trying to discover what our comrades mean by “art in production,” we only stumble upon the explanation: “By artistic production we mean simply merely (‘simply merely’—indeed! N. Ch.) a conscious and cre-ative attitude (! N. Ch) to the production process” [56]. Attitude to production—instead of the advertised production!

“We must open everyone’s eyes and show that what is valuable is not a beautifully decorated object, but an object that is intelligently made” [57].

An intelligently made object, an intelligent attitude toward the pro-cess of making—this alone is new and a new cipher.

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Instead of expanding this, there is the usual decree: “We must prove to the workers that work in production is the greatest cultural power and help them to possess it creatively” [58].

That “prove to the workers” hardly follows. Perhaps it would have been more important to prove it to the following author in Art in Pro-duction. A. Fillipov is still not able to abandon “the joyful need to deco-rate life” and only dreams of a “constructive imagination” [59].

A. Fillipov actually deals with Marxist terminology, but his Marxism peacefully coexists with the most openly announced metaphysics. So, in talking about applied art, he explains the appearance of production art in the following way:

“But—in accordance with the idea of the laws of inevitability, which exist in the world (!) ideas and separate experiments with another con-cept of art and its embodiment appeared long ago” [60].

In this way art develops in isolation from the relations of pro-duction and real life … in accordance with “the idea of the laws of inevitability.”

And further—there is great “news”:“The aspirations of the new production art can be formulated by ap-

plying the ideas of K. Marx concerning learning to artists: in a certain way artists have only represented the world, but the task is to change it” [61].

I give up—isn’t this the same news about “the new” art that the pres-ent author, also proceeding from the position of Marx concerning the dialectical transformation of the world, already formulated in 1912?

So the idea of Productivism in art, emerging into the light in 1918, is hardly in the rank of the “the law of inevitability changing ideas”—and so the minds of the Futurist theoreticians remained hypothetical masks, struggling with practicalities in a series of distinct approaches, which were more or less of an “applied art” nature. More luck was had by the idea, fertilized by the process of work in art (and science)—in the area of the direct construction of objects through art. After fruitless mark-ing time on one spot around the terms issued, the idea of Productiv-ism crystallized into what is called Constructivism and there it gave off new growth.

Without one intelligent theoretician, studying more from life than from drawings, immersed completely at times in blind Russian nihilism (A. Gan) [62]—the Constructivists, the only theoreticians coming from practical work, from the machine, from the plough (the Productivists are not an example to them, having no philosophy, and trying to go from philosophy)—the Constructivists all the same were able to find some holds on life, and they were the first to present to the theoreticians from theory some hints about material objects, about which—as some-thing still pathetic, but tangible—it is already possible to speak.

Constructivism—having taken off from Productivism already in 1920 and having begun its fight for the future of the picture plane and

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the overthrow of easel painting; evolving under the imperative of work generated by the Revolution, from the first break with easel painting through texture [faktura] to the first experimental counter-reliefs; and finally to defined utilitarian objectives—with some success, tried to cap-ture the theater in 1922, and having established itself, broke into bud.

In the theater, Constructivism went under the flag of uniting a Con-structive set (decorations, properties, costumes)—calculated to show if not the objects then their models—with “constructive” gestures, move-ments, mime (the biomechanics of Vs. Meyerkhold) [63]—the rhyth-mically organized actor. The constructive biomechanical theater waged a struggle against psychologism—here paralleling the general Futurist struggle against psychology—cultivating movement and skill, essential for a person in production.

The theater as a place of intimate experiences and relaxation is banned. The theater is now the leader of proletarian culture, organiz-ing man’s will and all his psyche—directing it toward victory over the machine and full possession of it, on the plane of organizing the cre-ative collective, parallel to class social organization. Taylorization of the word, the elasticity of the taylorized gesture (here there is a parallel with the Scientific Institute of Labor) [64], the energetic structures, freed from all heavy bourgeois objects entangling man—this is the slogan of the new theater …

… Futurism gave birth to Productivism. Productivism (in rough out-line) gave birth to Constructivism. Constructivism gave birth to biome-chanics. Biomechanics—in accordance with the logic of inertia—gave birth to eccentrism, circus-ism, stunt-ism and all kinds of other similar small “isms,” apparently created merely to justify the proverb about the distance between the sublime and the ridiculous. Add agitational art, not yet obsolete, but now reduced to the cabaret and humorous ditties; add advertising art, created as if intentionally to vex the editorials of comrade Steklov [65]; finally add the so-called “red” cheap novel and similar output of fellow-travelers and non fellow-travelers in our hurly-burly—and you will understand the long-term difficulty for left art that this abundant flowering has caused—naturally, life demands a move from depth to width, but with such a flood of ink being dispatched—one can’t see the wood for the trees.

The difficulty is intensified by the fact that any unifying conception has been lost. Every pen pusher declares his own trend, every craftsman—is a wood. Along with tens of provincial philosophies that have disappeared, a philosophy of art has totally disappeared in literature. Along with tens of movements, methods, and little ideas that have sometime or other been lost to eternity—the idea of Futurism has also been lost.

Our efforts must be dedicated to the realization of the guiding phi-losophy of art, as one of the methods of life-building. All the steps of the ideologists of the front must be directed toward renewing the guiding idea of Futurism among those embracing applied art and similar ideas.

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3. Synthesis

The proletarian Revolution, not having yet completed its logical devel-opment and found its line of rest—already in 1921 followed the policy of contracting its extent, made necessary by coexisting with NEP [the New Economic Policy] [66].

The temporary setback of the Revolution, following the policy of general contraction, naturally reached art.

The maximum industrial words and calls for an immediate break-through into production, issued in 1918 and again now—also came under the pressure of the setback and, perhaps for this reason, flagged.

The Revolution was under two burdens. On the one hand—the incomplete development of capitalist industry and postwar, postrevo-lutionary economic devastation forced the Revolution into surrender. On the other hand, these very same conditions, plus the will to victory of the victorious class, categorically dictated to the working class the necessity (perhaps titanic)—but there was really no other way out—that precisely now, in these unrepeatable conditions, was the time for a breakthrough into creative production.

Art is also under these two burdens.Today art, i.e. Futurist art, cannot remain simply acquiescent in

the work of the Revolution, but it must inevitably follow the policy of breaking through into production; it must not wait for a new swing, but go now immediately into production and cultural construction. It must do this as much in the name of organic self-preservation as from fear that in the unknown developing fight between two industrial cultures, it will be thrown out on the threshold of construction for being com-pletely unnecessary to anyone.

Has old art thought of its role in this way?Certainly not.What in general distinguishes the old aesthetic, even in its best

examples, from the new science of art?The old aesthetic, even in its best examples, was based on a conception

of art as a definite method for acquiring a knowledge of life. However many adjustments theory made to this, the definition was very clearly the same—none of the theoreticians of the past advanced the statement further, by any kind of experiment (the accumulation of “human docu-ments”) or limp sermon, dried out into the bargain through the delight of perception. Even fatal and “accursed” moments arose, connected with art, and consisting of positions, such as “Art only asks questions, but never resolves them” (the classical heritage), or “We artists say we raise our hands against a crowd of scorpions, but they drop faded roses on them” (the realist Veresaev) [67]. These withered and inactive concep-tions about the function of art are like Hamlet’s entourage.

Not long ago, it was precisely this conception of art (as a means of cognition) that P. Kogan [68] exposed unintentionally in one of his

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articles for VTsIK News [Izvestiya VTsIK]. In 1919, our Moscow theo-reticians of Futurism based themselves on this compromise statement—it has to be said!—and through some strange play of eclecticism—mixed this concept with the bony idea of Productivism.

Using dialectics not at all badly, one of the theoreticians of the con-struction of objects, N.N. Punin, in the article “Art and the Proletariat” wrote (and this reasoning was repeated in the editors’ introduction for the journal Izo):

The cognitive character of artistic activity is evident in itself, inso-far as this activity is creative. Creation has no other aim than the aim of cognition. (!)

Art is created (!) by man and created by the force of an inner necessity to understand the world, through all the means at art’s disposal [69].

And in the conclusion there is that kind of dyed-in-the-wool idealism that isn’t even obligatory for bourgeois aesthetics:

Artistic activity is powerful by nature and vital in its importance. Cleansed of its class consciousness, it is self-sufficient and im-mutable (!) [70].

Artistic activity has existed and will (? N. Ch.) exist insofar as hu-manity will exist (! N. Ch.); but only when it is left to itself (? N. Ch.) will its conformity to its inner laws and its natural interests have a real and inevitable social importance, and art can become what it should be: a classless (! N. Ch.), highly organized, and social weapon of cognition.

Without touching on this barefaced idealistic blurb, we will focus particularly on what is emphasized throughout the whole article—and for which all the editors are responsible—the role of cognition: it is ines-capable. As you see, art has not only “existed” under the banner of cog-nition, and not only does it “exist” now (despite our declaration of the immediate construction of objects!) under this banner, but it “will exist” under this inert banner, which is clearly a result of the bourgeoisie’s fear of construction. Art will even be “cleansed of class consciousness”!

Cognition (what is cognition for?) is a fatal theory of the bourgeoi-sie and of our dear and “dialectical,” but typically academic, stay-at-homes.

From henceforth this theory must be brought to an end!We understand that the bourgeois is permanently frightened of the

ghost of the inevitable gravedigger behind him; everywhere he goes, in science and in art, even in politics, this fear is exposed when con-fronted by a real creative path, something typical, something sacred

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and principled—the irrational. So even in Symbolist art, for instance, the bourgeois had already tried to construct the world, i.e. his idea of the necessary structure that was needed, and didn’t dare to advance to uto-pianism and mysticism, these characteristically philosophical equivalents of fear. That is how it is. But we definitely do not understand why a class that would lose nothing in an active approach to life, except its chains, and gain the whole world, why the proletariat needs to drape itself in these old bourgeois rags which are no longer of any use to anybody.

Accepting the subsidiary quality of cognition—the working class, here, there, and everywhere, both in real, active science and in real, ac-tive artistic creation, and in the active physical fight for the necessary social structure—here, there, and everywhere, the proletariat moves the center of gravity from cognition to the immediate construction of ob-jects, including in this the idea [of cognition]—but only as a definite engineering model.

Naive utopianism (not to mention mysticism, which is the equivalent of fear) is alien to the working class precisely because it does not contain an intelligible or constructive model of reality—and reality is forged through the exposure and mistakes of contradictions—the basis for real construction. Only the idea, as the product of the dialectical realization of objects, deserves the intense attention of the proletariat. Only the idea of the dialectical “feeling” for the world through material is the productive, and real precondition for the construction of the material object. The same goes for “understanding.”

Art as a method of understanding life (from this arises passive contemplation)—is the most naive and at the same time the most detailed and insubstantial content of the old bourgeois aesthetic.

Art as a method for life-building (from this arises working with ma-terial) is the slogan under which the proletarian conception of the sci-ence of art advances.

Art is an original, mainly emotional (only mainly and it only differs from science in this advantage) dialectical approach to the construction of life. Here is a precise and clear watershed “aesthetic.” The new sci-ence of art advances under the banner of life-building—also overcom-ing. The stage of [art as] cognition of life retreats to the museum, and with it all kinds of Hamletism.

I wrote in the brochure of Over the Heads of the Critics (Chita, 1922):

Passivity of perception and the isolation of the perceiver from the process of creation (production) are the main evils of the old art. And these evils are so great that no kind of palliative can efface them. The old art does not merely suggest, but it also demands a passive, soft as beeswax, so-called perceptive psyche, essential for contemplation. The principle of anaesthetization is inherent in the very nature of the old art [71].

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Naturally, the proletariat has nothing to do with this “principle.”

Based on the industrial (creative) nature of the working class, the ideology of this class cannot remain indifferent to anything that destroys the proletariat’s will to victory, intentionally or uninten-tionally, or delays the moment of reconstructing the whole world. The issue of the victorious psyche is an issue of life and death. The struggle with the perceptive passivity of the past and with nine-tenths of available art is an important task that cannot be postponed.

A sharp and uncompromising stand must be taken on this point.

The working of material is not only the destiny of the artist. The masses are becoming keen on the process of creation. There are no more “temples” of art, or shrines, where the sacred absolutes of priests reside, shrouded in incense. There are workshops, fac-tories, mills, and streets where commodity values are created in the generally festive process of production.

Art is the business of everyone; art is in the very pores of life itself; life penetrates art, like a very prominent rhythm.

The rhythm of art is the rhythm of life—it is a single unity.

Absolutes will be dethroned and treated as ordinary commodi-ties, if, by that time, there are no outworn ideas, and the terminol-ogy itself is discarded.

No commodity “valuables” will be created by individuals if they “demand Apollo as a sacred priest,” but the new, still unknown constructions of worked material will be built by humanity in a unified monist process.

Art as a unified joyful process of rhythmically organized produc-tion of commodity values, conceived in the light of the future—this is the program of that trend that every communist should pursue.

The promotion of this revelation with all the means at one’s disposal, beginning with the thorough reconstruction of human society and ending with the effective support of every available artistic trend that is exercising the desire to overcome and is already striving toward the rhythmic and organized hammering out of objects—this is our approach to art-construction every day.

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Posing the question of what art is in the organized construction of the day, S. Tretyakov in parallel, in that very same year of 1922, (Chita, brochure about painting), wrote:

Art is a front, directly attacking its requirements and subjugating its theory and practice to the tasks of constructing life in solidar-ity [with the working class]. It is a front fighting to unify into one whole two opposing elements—the army of many millions given to passive contemplation and the small group of specialists and inventors in art—so that in unity and solidarity they can do the work of humanity, percolating through to everyone the same joy of a continually new vision of the world and a single inventive impression of the expressive construction of everything that man needs [72].

Some of these early ideas had already been put forward, as has been shown, by our Russian friends; others were suggested by us first. But the link between these attempts to define the task of the art of today, in the struggling life of the proletarian capital and in the distant provinces, isolated from that life, is characteristic. In connection with the real-ization, as I have already remarked, we made progress—in our leisure time—further, in connection with art practice, we were not aware of those comparatively modest images, organically bursting through into the reality of art, that were characteristic of the capital, stormily pulsat-ing under the banner of the new construction.

Returning to our earlier definition of art, already in 1912 we read (“Toward an Aesthetic of Marxism,” Irkutsk): “The creation of new ideological or material values—this is the only reliable criterion, from which dialectics can approach art.”

What have the latest theories brought to this approach to art?There are two different corrections to be made.First, not “creativity” but “production”—the correction is not es-

sential, but suggests the immediate task of today. And …Second, this is not a damned division about “form” and “content,”

now that we are talking only about the function of objects. This correc-tion is extraordinarily important.

But there are also inherent minuses.First, having burst into production, our theoreticians have not even

asked themselves the question how precisely is an object to be created (produced) through art? They do not possess a dialectical mode of thought.

Second, they have not even conceived, with the power of their non-dialectical method, so called ideological values (objects).

This has given rise to a crude vulgarization of materialism, a defi-nite applied art, a lack of esteem for it, and a kind of dumbing-down

Under the Banner of Life-Building 145

[limiting revolutionary aims to those intelligible to the backward masses].

It is our duty to discard the minuses and introduce the corrections.So: Art—insofar as we conceive it—is a temporary activity, which in

future will be fully dissolved into life; it is original, and constructed on the use of emotions; it is the production of values (objects) needed by the [working] class and humanity.

Insofar as we use the ideological (like material) values that are built on a dialectical understanding of the world, and only use them from the point of view of their function—there can be no talk of denying “the idea of objects.”

Not only the tangible object, but also the idea, the object as model, is the content of art today.

This is the assumption underlying every kind of experimental art—from biomechanics’ preparatory steps to the reconstruction of the world by dialectical modeling (Constructivism, symbolism).

Every kind of fantasy, utopianism and similar kinds of naked ideal-ism and metaphysical affectation not based on the dialectical develop-ment of reality are banished.

In this way, the shunning of “the perversion of reality” by the theo-reticians of 1918 is now considered a necessary stage of creativity, not just when exposing and solidifying contradictions.

The proletarian science of art goes under the banner of real life-building. Its attitude toward the progress of art-making is formed under the banner of overcoming, in opposition to banished, weak-willed per-ception. The art of day is conceived under the banner of a determined and focused apparatus striving toward communism.

There is not one school, nor even one example, that the proletariat needs in general. “Everything is fine in its own time,” everything is for the needs of the class advancing toward communism—corresponding to the necessary dialectic.

It is possible to conceive a moment when real life will be saturated with art to the point of rejecting the expulsion of art as unnecessary, and at that moment the Futurist artist will be blessed for his beautiful “release of today.”

Until that time, the artist is a soldier at the post of the social and socialist revolution—waiting for the great opening “stand.”

Futurism is not a school, but an aspiration. Dialectical Productivism is the immediate task of Futurism.

In art, it is essential to differentiate between the river and the little stream. One must never lose sight of the whole, while accepting the small constructive part. And most importantly …

It is essential to remember that this small article is only the first attempt to realize the art of the day within an interpretation of communist dialec-tics, and that its full and necessary realization for the working class will depend on a sincere and friendly cooperation with all of communism.

146 N.F. Chuzhak

Notes

See the original text of this article at http://ace.caad.ed.ac.uk/VARIE/files/ait_chuzhak.pdf

1. There is another curious coincidence. Even though the Far East was cut off by Kolchak territorially and morally from Soviet Russia, and had a factual knowledge of Mayakovsky’s works only from 1917 and the beginning of 1918, the Far Eastern journal Biryuch (Dilettante—“Proletariat and Art”) completely in parallel and al-most simultaneously (August 1919) made the appeal: “From the measured, balanced rocking chairs knock out drowsy art, from the buildings of the uezd treasuries chase creativity into the streets! To the noise, to the hubbub, to the mad round dances, to the crowds, to the flames!” It is unnecessary to confirm the simultaneousness of the response of the Left Front of the arts to the simultaneous imper-atives demanded by one and the same social foundation. Author.

2. At the same time, the Far Eastern journal Creation was writing about an earthly theory of Futurism, about Futurism as “already not art,” and about life as something greater than art. Author.

Translator’s Notes

1. Nikolai Fedorovich Chuzhak was the pseudonym of the writer and theorist Nikolai Fedorovich Nasimovich (1876–1939). The name Chuzhak is derived from the Russian adjective chuzoi, meaning “strange or alien.” Before the 1917 Revolution, Chuzhak lived in Irkutsk, but during the Civil War, he moved to the Far East, be-coming a member of the avant-garde Creation group, which was based in Vladivostok 1918–20. In 1922 he moved to Moscow and in 1923 joined the editorial board of Lef. He resigned in 1924, but maintained contact with the journal. In 1929 he edited the Lef collection, Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov Lefa, (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929) to which he also contributed.

2. Proletcult is the acronym of the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations, which were set up in 1917 in Petrograd and early 1918 in Moscow, in order to promote the cultural development of the working class, and the creation of a distinctly proletarian culture.

3. Semen Yakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887) was a Russian poet. 4. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837), a Romantic writer, is

considered to be the founder of modern Russian literature because he introduced vernacular speech into his poems and plays.

5. N.F. Chuzhak, “K estetike marksizma,” 1912. 6. Art of the Commune [Iskusstvo kommuny] was a weekly newspaper

published by the Department of Fine Arts within the Commissariat of Enlightenment in nineteen issues between December 7, 1918

Under the Banner of Life-Building 147

and April 13, 1919. It was devoted to debating the aesthetic issues raised by the Revolution. Creation [Tvorchestvo] was the journal that the artist David Burliuk and the writers Nikolai Chuzhak and Sergei Tretyakov published in Vladvostok in 1918, promoting Fu-turism. Object [Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet] was published in Berlin in 1922 (only two issues appeared) by the writer Ilya Erenburg and the artist El Lissitzky. As its title indicates, it was a trilingual pub-lication, which was as concerned to disseminate Russian ideas in Europe as to make Russians aware of developments in the West.

7. This is a shortened version of the famous paragraph that appeared in the afterword to the second edition of Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1873).

8. This is a reference to the famous declaration of the Russian Futur-ists, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 1912, signed by David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov, and published in a collection of the same name. For a translation, see Anna Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 1912–1928 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 51–2.

9. “Future consciousness” is my rendition of futurum, a neologism, created by Chuzhak from the imported word futur, meaning “the future,” and the Russian term um, which means “the mind” or “rea-son.” In this instance, it evokes the notion of the new man, with an enhanced intellect and worldview.

10. The Civil War began in spring 1918 when the regrouped Tsarist and right-wing forces, supported by Western regimes, sought to wrest power from the Bolsheviks. The fighting between these Whites, as they were called, and the Reds (the Bolsheviks together with other revolutionary activists) lasted until mid to late 1920, causing wide-spread destruction and devastation.

11. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a leading Futurist poet. “A Cloud in Trousers” (1915) was his first major poem. Written from the point of view of a spurned lover, it chal-lenged idealistic views of love and conventional notions of poetic language by using street slang.

12. Acmeism was a literary reaction to Symbolism and included poets such as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, and Nikolai Gumilev.

13. Igor Vasilevich Severyanin was the pseudonym of Igor Vasilevich Lotarev (1887–1941), who led the literary group of Ego-Futurists, founded in 1911.

14. David Davidovich Burliuk (1882–1967) was a poet and painter who was an active leader of avant-garde theory and practice during the early 1910s.

15. According to Greek myth, Pygmalion was a Greek artist who fell in love with his perfect female sculpture, Galatea, whom Aphrodite brought to life.

148 N.F. Chuzhak

16. N.F. Chuzhak, “Predislovie,” K dialetike iskusstva. Ot realizma do iskusstva kak odnai iz proizvodstvennykh form. Teoreticheskie-polemicheskie stat’i (Chita: Dal’pechat’, 1921).

17. Chuzhak, like many artistic and literary figures of the time, refers to the former capital of Russia as Petersburg (sometimes simply Peter), although the city had been renamed Petrograd at the begin-ning of the First World War.

18. Vl. Mayakovsky, “Prikaz po armii iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1 (December 7, 1918): 1.

19. Osip Maksimovich Brik (1888–1945) was a writer and theoreti-cian, who was also on the editorial board of Lef.

20. Boris Anisimovich Kushner (1888–1937) was a poet, writer, and the theorist-founder of Komfut [Communists’ and Futurists’ group] in 1919, which, as its name suggests, promoted Futurism as the art of communism. For Komfut’s declaration, see Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, ed. and trans. John. E. Bowlt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 164–6. Kushner also belonged to the editorial board of Lef.

21. Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin (1888–1953) was an art historian, critic, and theoretician. He wrote extensively on avant-garde art, including a brochure on Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Interna-tional (1920), a monograph Tatlin (Protiv kubizma) of 1921, and a Cycle of Lectures (1920). For translations, see Larissa A. Zha-dova (ed.), Tatlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 344–7 (Monument); and 347–8 and 389–93 (Tatlin); and for extracts of the Cycle, see Bowlt, Russian Art, pp. 170–6.

22. Vl. Mayakovsky, “Prikaz po armii iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1 (December 7, 1918): 1.

23. Boris Kushner, “Nam muzyka,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (February 16, 1919): 2.

24. IZO is the acronym for the Department of Fine Arts within the Com-missariat of Enlightenment, in which avant-garde figures played a dominant role during the years of the Civil War, i.e. 1918–20. In 1921, IZO was purged of all avant-garde personnel.

25. In Mayakovsky’s revolutionary verse play Mystery Bouffe (1918), written in the language of the street, using political slogans and journalese, the “Unclean” working class defeat the “Clean” upper class and create a paradise of ease and plenty on Earth.

26. The Russian term tailism (literally “tailism” in English) is translated as “dumbing down.” In the 1920s the term was used to describe the policy, when communicating revolutionary aims to the masses, of limiting it to those aims that would be intelligible to them.

27. Vydra, “Svoboda i diktatura v iskusstve,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (February 16, 1919): 2.

28. Vydra, “Svoboda i diktatura v iskusstve”: 2.29. O.M. Brik, “Drenazh iskusstvu,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1

(December 7, 1918): 1.

Under the Banner of Life-Building 149

30. Dimitrii Ivanovich Pisarev (1840–68) was a revolutionary writer who argued that art should be used as a weapon to highlight abuses, and promote social and political reform in Russia.

31. Brik, “Drenazh iskusstvu”: 1.32. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Chelovek veshch’,” 1916.33. Mayakovsky, “Chelovek veshch’.”34. The Russian term is veshch’nost, which emphasizes that the work

of art is just another type of object, which merely happens to be artistically made.

35. O.M. Brik, “Khudozhnik-proletarii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2 (December 15, 1918): 1.

36. “Primechanie redaktsii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 7 (January 19, 1919): 2.

37. Boris Kushner, “Burzhuaznye golvolomki,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 7 (January 19, 1919): 2–3.

38. “Primechanie redaktsii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 7 (January 19, 1919): 2.

39. N. Punin cited in M.L. “Miting ob iskusstve,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1 (December 7, 1918): 3.

40. Vydra, “Pervyi itog,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 15 (March 16, 1919): 2–3.

41. Only one issue of the journal Fine Art [Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo] ever appeared. It was a substantial and richly illustrated issue.

42. David Petrovich Shterenberg (1881–1948) was a painter who was also head of IZO. He was sympathetic to avant-garde ideas, although his own experiments were fairly moderate; he used simpli-fied forms and spatial dislocations, without adopting the extremes of Cubism or abstraction.

43. Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin (1885–1953) was head of the Moscow branch of IZO. A leading avant-garde painter, in 1914 he initi-ated Russian experiments with constructed sculpture. His Model for a Monument to the Third International, exhibited in Novem-ber 1920, stimulated the development of Constructivism in early 1921.

44. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879–1935) pioneered non-objective painting in Russia in 1915. He called his new style of colored forms on white grounds Suprematism, and exhibited it for the first time in December 1915 (old style), or January 1916 (according to the Western calendar).

45. N. Punin, “Iskusstvo i proletariat,” Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, no. 1 (1919): 8–24.

46. “Ot redaktsii,” Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, no. 1 (1919): 6.47. Osip M. Brik, “Khudozhnik i kommuna,” Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo,

no. 1 (1919): 25–6.48. Punin, “Iskusstvo i proletariat”: 26.49. Punin, “Iskusstvo i proletariat”: 24.50. “Ot redaktsii”: 5

150 N.F. Chuzhak

51. Boris Ignatevich Arvatov (1896–1940) was a theorist, a member of the Communist Party, and an active member of Proletcult. He was also a member of Lef’s editorial board.

52. Ilya Grigorevich Ehrenburg (Erenburg) (1891–1967) was an ex-tremely successful journalist and novelist, who lived in Berlin in the early 1920s, but eventually returned to Russia.

53. Iskusstvo v proizvodstve (Moscow, 1921), p. 4.54. D. Shterenberg, “Pora ponyat’,” Iskusstvo v proizvodstve, pp. 4–6.55. O. Brik, “V poryadke dnya,” Iskusstvo v proizvodstve, pp. 7–8.56. Brik, “V poryadke dnya,” p. 8.57. Brik, “V poryadke dnya,” p. 8.58. Brik, “V poryadke dnya,” p. 8.59. A. Fillipov, “Proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo v proizvod-

stve, pp. 9–12.60. Fillipov, “Proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo,” p. 10.61. Fillipov, “Proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo,” p. 11.62. Aleksei Mikhailovich Gan (1889–1942), playwright and graphic

artist, worked in the theatrical department (TEO) of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment during the Civil War. He was a founding member of the Working Group of Constructivists in March 1921, wrote its program, and was its leading theoretician.

63. Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (1874–1940) was an avant-garde theater director, who was responsible for developing Constructivist theater. The first Constructivist production was The Magnanimous Cuckold of April 1922, with decorations and costumes by Lyubov Popova.

64. The ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor concerning efficient indus-trial processes (published as Shop Management of 1905 and The Principles of Scientific Management of 1911) were extremely pop-ular in early Soviet Russia. The Scientific Organization of Work (Nauchnaya Organizatsia Truda) was set up to introduce his prin-ciples of time and motion into everyday life.

65. Yurii Mikhailovich Steklov was editor of Izvestiya.66. Lenin introduced the NEP [New Economic Policy] at the beginning

of 1921 in a pragmatic attempt to resuscitate the economy, which had been devastated by the Civil War. The NEP allowed small-scale private enterprises to exist alongside state-controlled heavy indus-tries. It represented a retreat from War Communism and a compro-mise with communist ideals of collective ownership. Ultimately, it endangered the Revolution by allowing an entrepreneurial class to develop.

67. Vikenty Viktentevich Veresaev was the nom de plume of Vikenty Vikentevich Smidovich (1867–1945), a doctor who wrote so-cial realism and was connected with Marxism even before the Revolution.

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68. Petr Semenovich Kogan (1872–1932) was a Marxist critic who became president of the Soviet Academy of Literary Sciences.

69. Punin, “Iskusstvo i proletariat”: 24.70. Punin, “Iskusstvo i proletariat”: 26.71. N. Chuzhak, Cherez golovy kritikov (Chita, 1922).72. S.M. Tretyakov, O zhivopisi (Chita, 1922).