The initial Soviet experiment was one of the most ambitious attempts at social engineering in recorded history, and the ‘new’ society it simultaneously planned and proclaimed demanded a ‘new’ architecture that would be both prescriptive and descriptive – in other words, an architecture that would reflect as well as effect change in people’s lives. The experiment failed, tragically, even horrifically, but the aesthetic freedom it inspired underwrote one of the most absorbing chapters in the story of European Modernism.

This fascinating period provides the materia prima for Building the Revolution: Art and Architecture in Russia, 1915–1935, but this exemplary exhibition uses its rich source material as a starting point, not an endpoint. By skilfully juxtaposing abundant archival material from the period with English photographer Richard Pare’s magnificent images of the same sites and buildings (taken for the most part in the early days of post-Communist Russia), Building the Revolution succeeds in generating a thrilling complexity among multiple pairs of players – architecture and photography, newness and ruin, idealism and the failure of idealism, ideology and the end of ideology – from which, ultimately, the compelling central protagonist emerges: the passage of time.

Pare’s photographs include more than a few tours de force, such as those of a huge industrial bakery built in Moscow in 1931, and his sensitivity to the poetics of the modernist architectural idiom is remarkable. But at the same time Pare’s own visual syntax is not only impeccable but also beautiful in itself – each photograph functions like a wise and well-constructed sentence, and like sentences, they combine stasis and movement in their narration of space. Indeed, the fluidity of Pare’s architectural studies – transversally across their compositions, and internally into the spaces they describe – is nothing less than exhilarating. (Curiously, Pare’s occasional videos of these same sites, while ostensibly more capable of conveying movement through space, in fact do not succeed in doing so, and their weakness only serves to highlight the photographs’ strength.)

In an interview published in the exhibition catalogue, Pare says that his intention was ‘to allow the accumulation of time to have part in

BUIlDIn

g

ThE

REvOlUTIO

n

Building the Revolution: Art and Architecture in Russia, 1915–1935Caixa Forum, Madrid24 May – 18 September

“Is it real? It’s exotic,” says one of the narrators in Keren Cytter’s video The Hottest Day of the Year (2010); such an exchange could easily work as an alternative title for this group show at Brand New Gallery (the tautological and self-ironising definition by which two young art historians, Chiara Badinella and Fabrizio Affronti, opened their large Milan space at the end of last year). Cytter’s video is constructed like a nonlinear, fictional documentary, revolving around a title with multiple readings. In the first half, The Hottest Day of the Year refers to an African myth, as told via the travelogue of an imaginary French nurse who died in South Africa in the 1950s; in the second half it refers to the day of enrolment for women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, thus mixing up different points of reference in time, personal geographies and historical conflicts. Cytter shuns naive categorisations, constantly evoking a sense of ‘other’ and ‘elsewhere’ without pinning them down, and her sources stretch from avant-garde cinema to the writings of Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin, whose treatise The Equality of the Human Races (1885) confuted the positivist, ‘scientific’ racism of the nineteenth century – way before Edward Said fought against all the biased, imperialist declinations of Orientalism.

The title chosen by the curator, Jane Neal, is instead East Ex East, as if rephrasing a popular British comedy film (East Is East, 1999) based on the generational/identity clashes within an Anglo-Pakistani family in the 1970s. The ambiguous

‘East’ it calls to mind is anyway a thing of the past: not only in terms of political scale (‘The ending of communism across Central and Eastern Europe, the growth of a new middle class across China, the rapid development of Asia, globalisation and mass air travel have all helped bring a new order into being,’ Neal writes in her essay, where she also mentions the recent revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East), but also of individual memories and histories of several artists who moved away from their countries, either because of diaspora or professional urge. Out of the 25 ‘Eastern’ participants, almost half now live in New York, a third in Berlin, London, Paris or Los Angeles, and only a few in Budapest, Kraków, Prague.

In tune with the current ostalgie trend, one of the cores of the show is a selection of (mostly

figurative) paintings from the area of the former Iron Curtain. The older generations are represented by Russian conceptualist Erik Bulatov, who shows a beautiful little oil, Dans le Train (2006), and a rare 1966 Untitled watercolour by Victor Ciato, who kept practising ‘subversive’ abstraction while teaching at the Cluj Fine Arts Institute, epicentre of the current Cluj school of painting. One of the latter’s stars, Serban Savu, with the oils Col Tempo (2009) and Still Time (2010), depicts the liturgies of old Communist societies in Romantic settings, while the Polish Marcin Maciejowski (cofounder of Grupa Ladnie with Wilhelm Sasnal) plays on the short-circuit between old-school pictorial clichés and present time, by portraying a trendy Ecologist (2009). The selection of artists from other, once more distant

‘ex-Easts’, such as Iran, India and China, is more miscellaneous. Among the strongest pieces are a refined ink and acrylic painting on paper by New York-based Rina Banerjee (The Two Were Misbehaving Rani and Rakhshasni Raving and Ranting…, 2011) and the installation Music Man (2009) by Tehran-born, New York-based Tala Madani: a small viewing theatre mounted on a tripod, featuring an animation obtained by recording subsequent stages of a painting, where a man is tortured and obliged to spit out musical notes, as if he was a caged bird forced to sing.

BARBARA CASAvECChIA

EAST

Ex EAST

East Ex EastBrand New Gallery, Milan9 June – 30 July

144 Exhibition Reviews

ArtReview 145

Ali Banisadr (see East Ex East)The Chase, 2011, oil on linen, 137 x 183 cm. Courtesy Brand New Gallery, Milan

the dialogue, to give depth and richness to the subject that it might not have had when it was built’. But as the combined complementary components of this show make clear, time giveth and time taketh away: an element of loss also forms part of this dialogue. And not only the potentially poetic loss of decay and dereliction – also outright destruction, often the result of misguided planning and run-amok real-estate development. In short: the 1931 bakery, still functioning when Pare photographed it so beautifully in 1999, has since been gutted in order to be transformed into condominiums. And while Russia has no monopoly on catastrophic urban policy towards its own architectural heritage (as a walk around New York or any number of other cities will prove), the combination of hopefulness and repeatedly dashed hopes is particularly poignant here.

As its complete title suggests, Building the Revolution (which travels to the Royal Academy in London at the end of October) also addresses the art of the period via a selection of drawings and paintings by Constructivists such as Rodchenko, Popova and El Lissitzky. The works are all quite pleasing in themselves and beautifully installed, and the attempt to establish a correspondence between the period’s art and architecture a sound and worthy one. But the thesis is not fully developed here, and perhaps it could not have been in this rather overwhelming context. It deserves a show of its own. gEORgE STOlz

liubov popova(see Building the Revolution)Space-Force Construction, 1921, oil on canvas. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloníki

146 Exhibition Reviews

Robin meier & Ali momeni The Tragedy of the Commons, 2011 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Fabrice Gousset. Courtesy the artists

Ceal Floyer Page 8680 of 8680, 2010, 8,680 pages of A4 paper, 125 x 21 x 30 cm, edition of 3 + 2 AP. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

ArtReview 147

Jaki IrvineBefore the Page Is TurnedPrintworks IV, 2011, HD DVD, 6 min 59 sec, edition 1 of 3 + 2 AP. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Boguslaw BachorczykKiss My Ring, 2011 (installation view). Photo: Rafal Sosin. Courtesy Galeria Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków

Copyright of Art Review is the property of Art Review, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to

multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users

may print, download, or email articles for individual use.