What Am I Doing Here? (20 page)

The ideas of the artists conflicted. At one extreme was Kandinsky, who for some years had been painting the private landscapes of his mind. He believed in painting as a healing ritual to cure mental anguish and wean men from materialism. ‘Painting', he wrote, ‘shall free me from my fears.' But men like Tatlin and Rodchenko insisted that materialism was the only value that counted. All the artists, however, agreed to hate the image. The art of the new man must suppress all representation of man. Malevich, an eloquent if erratic propagandist, thundered against the Venus de Milo (‘not a woman but a parody') and against the ‛rubbish-filled pool of Academic art' with its female hams, depraved cupids and congealed legacy from Greece. His tone is that of Isaiah on the subject of idols and I think the comparison apt. For beneath the Russians' obvious devotion to human images lurks an impulse to smash them to bits. The ugly riches of late Tsardom, it is true, were an open invitation to the wreckers, but iconoclasm in Russia has a longer history.

As ‘Third Rome' and guardian of an orthodoxy denied by the renegade West, Russia inherited from Byzantium her peculiar attitude towards the image. The statue of an emperor or icon of a saint proved the legitimacy of a political or religious idea. The saying ‘He who delights in the Emperor's statue delights in the Emperor' applies as well to Justinian as to Tsar Nicholas II. Authoritarian societies love images because they reinforce the chain of command at all levels of the hierarchy. But an abstract art of pure form and colour, if it is serious and not merely decorative, mocks the pretensions of secular power because it transcends the limits of this world and attempts to penetrate a hidden world of universal law.

Anarchic peoples, like desert nomads, hate and destroy images, and a similar image-breaking streak runs through Russian history. The apparent endlessness of the country encourages the search for inner freedom, and Revolutionary Russia seethed with levelling movements - with mystics of all kinds, the
Brodiagi
or perpetual pilgrims, flagellants, Adventists, people in search of the Seventh Dimension and the famous
Molokany
, or Milk Drinkers, who influenced Tolstoy.

Malevich was touched by mystical yearnings. In his hands the non-objective canvas became an icon of anarchy and inner freedom: this is what made it dangerous to Marxist materialism. Of his painting
Black Square
he said he had felt ‘black nights within' and a ‘timidity bordering on fear', but as he decided to break with reality and abandon the image: ‘a blissful sensation of being drawn into a “desert” where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life'. Now this is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart – or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich's
Black Square,
his ‘absolute symbol of modernity', is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka‘aba at Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God. And if this seems far-fetched, I quote the judgment of Andrei Burov, an architect who left the Constructivist Movement: ‘There was a strong Muslim influence and orthodox Mohammedanism at that; by way of decoration only clocks and letters were allowed.'

With militant enthusiasm the artists of the Left set about demolishing class barriers and imposing the art of equality on the people. They then asked the Government to suppress the Society of Easel Painters and abolish all traditional forms of painting. The very fact of the Revolution demanded a complete break with the Academic tradition, which was alien and Western. The cry went out to jettison the relics of the past to prevent the new man being ‘weighed down like an overloaded camel'. In Bogdanov's opinion, the art of the past was not a treasury but an arsenal of weapons against the former age. ‘We will smash the old world wildly,' announced Mayakovsky, who then suggested everything from Adam to Mayakovsky be consigned to the dustbin.

To many officials, the Leftists were to the ‘left of common sense'.

What had caused the hysteria? One suspects they were overcompensating for not having fought alongside the Bolsheviks. But more important, the mystique of the machine seems to have gone to their heads. As John Reed, an American Communist, wrote: ‘The devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer . . . ' That kingdom was the kingdom of the machine. The backwardness of Russian industry before the First War is, I am told, often underestimated. The machine-age came late to Russia, but when it did, it came with startling abruptness. The growth-rate was phenomenal. Industrial units were few, but were the largest in the world, and Texas oilmen would visit Baku to witness the latest techniques of oil-extraction. With the Revolution, the means of production had devolved on the workers themselves and in their hands the man-made machine would transform humanity. Such was the hope. ‘We are masters of the machine,' said Mayakovsky, ‘therefore we need not fear it.' The machine was going to introduce true Socialism. Experts said it would take six months.

Now Lenin's mechanical materialism was tempered by his sense of the practical. The Leftists did not know his restraint. Most of them hated nature, or pretended to. Man had a Promethean mission to hack up the earth and fashion it to his taste. The position of mountains and other inconvenient geographic features was ‘far from final'. Malevich, whose mysticism was aroused by machinery, called for man to ‘seize the world of nature, and build a new world belonging to himself. Other artists described themselves as ‘Saints in the Church of the Machine'. In Vsevolod Meyerhold's ‘biomechanical' theatre the actors suppressed any life-like emotion and behaved as though they were stage-machinery. Pavlov's dogs salivated mechanically to stimuli. The concept of the house as a ‘machine for living' probably originates in Russia and not with Le Corbusier. There was an infatuation with an imaginary America with calls to ‘Chicago-ise the soul' and ‘do our work like a chronometer!' to ‘desoul' art and reduce painting to the scientific application of colour.

Once they had ‘desouled' painting, painters could dispose with it altogether. The monochrome canvas, in effect, declared its extinction as an art form. Malevich exhibited his
White on White
canvases, which were his ultimate expression of non-objective bliss. Tatlin painted a plain pink board. At an exhibition at the Vkhutemas School in 1921 called ‘The Last Picture Has Been Painted', Alexander Rodchenko showed three plain canvases in the primary colours. His sketchbooks which lead up to the ‘suicide of painting' still belong to his daughter in Moscow and reveal him as a conceptual genius on the level of Marcel Duchamp. In two years he tried out and discarded almost every experiment the New York abstract painters tried in the Fifties and Sixties before reaching the present impasse.

But in 1920 the Russian avant-garde was undismayed by the impasse. A useful art and architecture of iron, glass and concrete would, in one opinion, replace the old culture of wood, ‘itself a bourgeois counter-revolutionary material'. The man-made thing became the object of a minor cult, the factory a shrine to the dignity of labour. Tatlin designed stoves and casseroles, though one cynical observer noticed that if all artists went into the factories they would be reduced to designing labels. Nevertheless, when today we talk of the dehumanising effects of the machine, it's strange to hear Malevich's adulation of the ‘big city's metallic culture, the culture of the new humanised nature'.

And the kingdom of the machine was not confined to earth. Air travel had also gone to their heads. In 1892 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who taught physics and mathematics at a girls' school in Ryazan province, had said: ‘This planet is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend one's life in a cradle.' So, being a genius, the Father of the Russian Space Programme invented the first wind-tunnel and outlined the principle of the reactor rocket. A less-talented visionary, who had the grace to call himself Kreisky ‘the Extreme', pioneered the concept of stellar engineering. ‘We shall arrange the stars in rows . . . We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the Palace of World Freedom.'

Tatlin's projected iron and glass
Monument to the Third International,
which was to have spanned the Neva, appealed to the yearning for the infinite. Its spiral form (which certainly has Islamic ancestry) combines the idea of cyclic renewal with limitless upward progression. Later ‘the great fool' retreated up the tower of the Novodyeviche Monastery to design an articulated glider called
Letatlin,
but it never flew. One critic described Malevich's
White on White
as a ‘rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence'. The artist then passed from easel painting to a search for perfect architectural form, and made a series of plaster models. The fact that he called them
Planetes
suggests he intended his buildings to orbit.

Bad living-conditions inflate the life of the fantastic. Berthold Lubetkin, the architect, who was a student at the Vkhutemas School, recalled for me the winter of 1918. He shared a room with sixteen other students behind the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. They ate hyacinths from window boxes; slept between the joists wrapped in newspaper because they had burned the floorboards, had no blankets and no source of warmth other than a flat iron which they heated in the porter's stove. A fellow student called Kalesnikov was unable to find a room and bored a hole in Lissitzky's street monument
The Red Wedge Invades the White Square,
where he installed himself for the winter. The same Kalesnikov submitted to the school a project (recalling conceptual art of 1794 or a story by Borges) for converting the earth into its own terrestrial globe by attaching a steel arc from pole to pole, on which the artist could hop off for a day and a night.

This brand of proletarian thought might, at a pinch, get through to the industrial worker – albeit with negative results. But there was no room for the peasant, the wronged peasant chained to the black soil and the seasons of ice and mud and sunflowers and dust. The Leftists preferred not to think about the peasant, and hoped that his condition was transitory. There was, it was true, a strain in Russian intellectual life which regretted the passing of old Russia and idolised the peasant, from afar, as the incarnation of Russian virtue. But this peasant-consciousness had become tainted with middle-class longing for the primitive. Peasant smocks had arrived in the literary salons of St Petersburg, peasant themes and peasant colours in the Diaghilev Ballet. The painter Mikhail Larionov evoked peasant lechery, yet continued to wear wing collars. There was, however, one real poet of the earth, Serge Esenin, a blonde innocent who awoke the tenderest emotions in both sexes. But he failed to master the contradiction of his roots and assumed Bohemianism (which included marriage to Isadora Duncan). He destroyed himself with drink, then cut his wrists.

The Leftists may have ignored the peasant. Lenin and the Party did not. Peasants accounted for eighty per cent of the population. Without their help the country would now starve. And in 1921 the government, prostrated by Civil War, granted an unknown freedom of action to the peasant in the New Economic Policy. Lenin believed that peasant solidarity was the course of true Russian Communism. ‘We are, in a sense, pupils of the peasant,' he once said. Now the peasant might be illiterate, but his visual acuity was exceptional. For centuries he had ‘read' the Bible story on the iconostasis of his church; he had ‘read' folk-tales and news on woodcuts, called
lubok,
which he pinned up in his cottage; and now he wanted to ‘read' the message of Revolution and the discomfort of his old tormentors.

Today we recognise the artists and architects of the Left as great original geniuses. We marvel at early Soviet photomontage posters by Rodchenko or Lissitzky, which pack on to a sheet of paper all the enthusiasm of the Red Revolution. But their original message did not get home to its intended audience, the whole people of Russia. They did not pass this tricky barrier of communication. By their own admission they decided what the people should want, not what it did want. And, it must be said, the people wanted to possess the monumental architecture, opulent decoration, and gilt-framed pictures with which the old rulers of Russia had encrusted their lives. Lunacharsky was correct when he said: ‘The People too have a right to colonnades.'

The Society of Easel Painters revived itself and vigorously denied that the last picture had been painted. Architects began again to load buildings with ornaments. And the dispute between the ‘formalists' and the ‘realists' degenerated from an acceptable dialogue to mud-slinging and worse. Tatlin, speaking for the Constructivists, used to say: ‘The material is the carrier of a work's content'; that is, an object of arresting form in steel and glass could express the vitality of the machine-age. The ‘realists' would say, this is nonsense: it will convey messages only to people who are first primed to receive them. So why bother? The one way an artist can encourage workers in a steel factory or in the harvest field is to paint their heroic struggle realistically; and the only way to beat the camera at this game is to make the figures more heroic-looking than they really are. Such was the rationale of the Socialist Realist Style which replaced the abstraction of the Left.

In any case, ‘urban life enriched by a sense of speed' rapidly disenchanted the Leftists. They began to see the machine as an enemy. Mayakovsky – the gentle giant with fountain-pens in his top pocket to prove his modernity – visited America, said it was fine for machines but not for men, and granted amnesty to Rembrandt before putting a bullet through his brain. With his death in 1930 it was obvious that the Leftist Movement had failed. The Party did squash it. But it also died of fatigue.