A senseof thefutureFoundations For aMass Media Avant-Garde

Omer Krieger

MA Fine art ReportSlade School of Fine art7 September 2005

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Contents

1. Introduction

2. The Historical Avant-garde

a. Concepts, characteristics and problems

b. Avant-garde and politics

3. Russian avant-garde

a. Constructivism

b. Agit-prop

c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk

‘Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda’

4. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing?

a. Deferred action

b. The new media avant-garde

c. TV CHANNEL (2004-)

5. Appendix: Tomorrow’s Television

6. Bibliography

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1. Introduction

This composition stems from a simple question: what does an avant-garde art practice

mean today, and is it possible?

In this essay I will explore the concept of avant-garde art, specifically its relation to

politics and political change, in an attempt to provide foundations for a contemporary

mass media avant-garde.

First, I will present concepts and characteristics of the avant-garde, along the

positions and insights of Renato Poggioli, Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen. This

will be followed by a discussion of Poggioli’s pessimist views on the relations

between avant-garde and politics. Then I will approach the question of a mass media

avant-garde, through the discussion of Russian avant-garde, which will include

Constructivism and agit-prop, and the case of Gustav Klucis’ Propaganda kiosk

(1922). I will proceed, evaluating possibilities of a contemporary avant-garde: First,

Hal Foster’s optimistic writing on neo-avant-garde as creative critique and the model

of deferred action. I will then argue with Lev Manovich and his notion of ‘avant-

garde as software’, which suggests new digital media as the avant-garde of the 21st

century, and conclude in a brief overview of my project ‘TV CHANNEL’ (2004-), as

a sounding board for these issues and concerns.

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2. The Historical Avant-garde

a. Concepts, characteristics and problems

In the beginning of ‘The Theory of The Avant-Garde’, Renato Poggioli states a main

characteristic feature of the phenomenon of modern culture called ‘avant-garde’. This

feature regards the relationship of art and politics in the concept of avant-garde.

According to Poggioli, the historical phenomena of the avant-garde contained the

subordination of ‘the avant-garde image…to the ideals of a radicalism which was not

cultural but political’.1 Quoting a 19 th century French scholar, Poggioli stresses and

anchors historically the connection that is constituted in this term between art and

politics: ‘Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most

advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to know

whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of

the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of

the human race is’.2

Poggioli marks four general aspects, or moments of avant-garde movements. The first

is activism. It implies an existence towards a positive result, a concrete end. ‘The

ultimate hope is…the affirmation of the avant-garde spirit in all cultural fields’.3

Nevertheless, claims Poggioli, this activistic moment can be manifest in an existence

‘for no other end but its own self, out of the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action,

1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, 1968. p. 9.2 Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, “De la Mission de l’art et du rôle de artistes’, 1845, in Poggioli, ibid.3 Poggioli, p. 25.

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a sportive enthusiasm, and the emotional fascination of adventure’.4 The antagonistic

moment is a second aspect: A spirit of hostility and opposition, which is revealed

when we see avant gardists agitating people or institutions of cultural power and

tradition. Activism and antagonism can be transcended, says Poggioli, by two extreme

attitudes that derive from them: nihilism and agonism. The activistic dynamism

inherent in every movement can become nihilism when social controls and moral

conventions are abandoned. The urge to destroy the status quo and ‘the febrile anxiety

to go always further’ can lead to a self-destructive attitude, defined by Poggioli as the

agonistic moment. 5

These two sets of attitudes enable us to start looking at the phenomenon of the avant-

garde as a site of tension, rather than a coherent movement or a consistent political

idea. Much of the theoretical writing that tries to understand and explain 20th century

avant-garde art includes pairs of clashing concepts or seemingly contradictory

tendencies that characterize this phenomenon. Poggioli, as we’ve seen, argued that

while avant-garde art has been articulating itself as an agent of progress and

positivity, it also contains seeds of destruction and negation.

Andreas Huyssen focuses in the link between culture and anarchy, from which derive

a number of contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of avant-garde.

1. the eminently aristocratic nature of avant-gardism and its displays of the

plebian spirit

4 Ibid.5 Poggioli, p.26.

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2. Alienation as the situation of the artist in modern society and the particular

fascination with the Communist experiment, even though it is totalitarian and

antilibertarian, hostile to any individual exception or idiosyncracy.

3. The desire to see realized a destructive impulse and the opposite desire for the

latter to serve future construction. The extension of antagonistic and nihilistic

tendencies into the political field, to be turned against the whole of bourgeois

society rather than against culture alone.

4. The activist impulse leads to militate in a party of action and agitation, while

the agonistic and Futurist impulses induce to sacrificing one’s own person,

movement and mission to the social palingenesis of the future. Avant-garde

Communism is the fruit of a simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic state of

mind.

5. As a result – a morbid condition of mystical ecstasy, which contradicts self-

criticism and self-knowledge, prevents from realizing that the artist would

have neither the reason nor the chance to exist in a Communistic society.

6. (Avant-garde) art can only live in pluralism, which only bourgeois

democracies provide, but chooses to promote communism, which is inevitably

totalitarian. Communist sympathies can favor the avant-garde spirit only

within a bourgeois and capitalist society.6

6 Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-garde-Technology-Mass Culture’, in The Myths ofInformation: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, Kathleen Woodward, Ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, Londonand Henley.

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Peter Bürger deduced from the historical avant-garde a logic, according to which we

can formulate a problem that is at the core of this essay.7 On the one hand, the

ambitions of avant-garde art were intrinsically placed in and targeted towards the

public sphere, informed, encouraged and enthralled by new technologies, in the

attempt to reach a high level of popularity, and thus become a new mass culture. On

the other hand, it is often too new to be understood by its public.

If indeed the new cannot be recognized as such (categorically, like Boris Groys

argues, following Kierkegaard)8, then maybe innovation is an intrinsic quality of the

avant-garde, which explains the failure of the avant-garde’s ambition to be popular.

The plot thickens, or the problem develops when we add to this equation [new = -

(popular)] another factor – the state. The power of the Bolshevik revolution was

exercised in order to enforce (or at least massively propagate) innovation on the

population. What happens when avant-garde’s ethos of negation meets the power of

the state? In the case of revolutionary Russia, is it transformed by the appropriation

of the state to a position of an affirmative agent in culture, and thus dies? Or does it

maintain its soul of resistance even as official art of the state?9 There are several

possible histories of the rise and dominance of Russian avant-garde after 1917, and of

its decline.

7 This is a good point to join Hal Foster’s doubts about the attempt to theorize avant-garde while using so fewconcrete practices. One cannot go on writing too many general statements about this phenomenon without askingoneself what practices are included under this title, and is such a unified discussion helpful at all, given thedifferences between the different avant-garde parctices. It seems a new category, or new sub-categoies would behelpful. 8 Boris Groys, ‘On the New’, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html9 The latter dynamic can be elicited from TJ Clark‘s ‘Farewell to an Idea’. Maybe it is the case that traces of doubtand difference from Futurism, and especially Suprematism have found their way to agitprop practices.Nevertheless, this kind of reading would be influenced by what we believe agitprop’s value as art is.

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The question of innovation is indeed central to the notion and artistic legacy of the

historical avant-garde. ‘The New’ is a recurring concept in its artworks and art

writing. Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, in Moscow: ‘to create means to live,

forever creating newer and newer things’.10 The relation of the idea of artistic

innovation and radical politics in the Russian avant-garde is evident in the term

‘Futurism’ which was attributed to and adopted by artists creating new forms and

wishing to abandon ‘old’ forms of expression, as part of the creation of a new culture,

for a new society. Gradually, with the growing support and participation of avant-

garde artists in the Bolshevik party and Revolution, the term ‘Futurist’ became a

signifier of a leftist artist, committed to a political and artistic Revolution and to

Bolshevism as a progressive political power in Russia and the whole world.

Nathan Altman discusses in 1918 the question of the Russian avant-garde’s relation to

the Revolution. In his note to the title of the text ‘”Futurism” and Proletarian Art’

(1918), Altman indicates ‘I am using “futurism” in its everyday meaning, i.e., all

leftist tendencies in art’.11 Altman asks ‘Why did only revolutionary futurism march

in step with the October Revolution? Is it just a question of outward revolutionary

fervor, just a mutual aversion to the old forms, that joins futurism with the

proletariat?’12

10 Kazimir Malevich, ‘From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism’,1915, in RussianArt of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, Ed. And Trans. John E. Bowlt, The Viking Press, NewYork 1976, p. 122.11 Editors’ note, Nathan Altman, ‘“Futurism” and Proletarian Art” (1918), in Russian Art of the Avant-garde:Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, Ed. And Trans. John E. Bowlt, The Viking Press, New York 1976, p. 161.Altman’s text was originally published in Iskusstvo kommuny [Art of the Commune], no.2, December 15, 1918, inPetrograd. This publication was the weekly journal of IZO Narkompros- the Department of Fine Arts in thePeople’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.12 Altman, p. 162

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Altman’s response to this question is based on several assumptions: First, ‘futurism is

a revolutionary art that is breaking all the old bonds and in this sense is bringing art

closer to the proletariat’.‘Proletarian art will be collective’, just like anything made in

the new society. The collectivity in question is not about making art as a group, but

about the construction of an art work whose parts are indivisible, in what can be seen

as an allegorical relation to the principle of proletarian solidarity. ‘..each part of a

futurist picture acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other

parts…A futurist picture lives a collective life: By the same principle on which the

proletariat’s whole creation is constructed. Try to distinguish an individual face in a

proletarian procession. Try to understand it as individual persons – absurd’.13 The

quality of syntactic unity in a picture is equated to the revolutionary power of unity

and the collective consciousness of the proletariat.

b. Avant-garde and politics

What, then, is the relation of avant-garde and politics? To what extent does the term

‘avant-garde’ define an artistic practice as political? What kind of politics does it

stand for?

On the question of the relationship of avant-garde and politics, Renato Poggioli is

quite clear: it is not a true love story, but rather a short-term affair, opportunistic on

13 Ibid, p. 163

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the part of artists, and destructive on the part of the state. Poggioli talks about the

‘myth of a parallel artistic and political revolution’:14 Politics do not make avant-

garde happen. It has an influence, but usually a negative one: ‘a regime or society can

easily destroy the cultural or artistic condition which it cannot, of itself, bring to

life’.15 Poggioli is deterred by theories linking necessarily political radicalism to

artistic radicalism. He would rather see the perceived relation explained as ‘often

merely a necessary and opportunistic affair’ in ‘prosecuting’ or authoritarian regimes,

a following of fashion or a cultural survival instinct. While in ‘libertarian regimes’, he

will consider the existence of ‘genuine sentiments’ as the root of artists’ affiliation to

political causes. This affiliation, though, this sentiment, is seen by Poggioli to be just

‘wishful thinking or caprice’. Thus ‘the hypothesis…that aesthetic radicalism and

social radicalism, revolutionaries in art and revolutionaries in politics, are allied,

which empirically seems valid, is theoretically and historically erroneous’.16

According to Poggioli, the conjunction between avant-garde movements and radical

political change is actually a result of coincidence and ‘spiritual analogue’. This

coinciding is fleeting and contingent, given that the motivation for the temporary

bond is a ’love of adventure’ or ‘attraction to the nihilist elements’ that revolutionary

politics provide and not, presumably, a profound ideological commitment.17 ‘The

identification of artistic revolution with social revolution is now no more than purely

rhetorical, an empty commonplace’.18 Thus proclamations like calling the new art in

Russia to express “the music of the revolution” is considered by Poggioli to be

sincere, but ‘a sentimental illusion’, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s declaration

of himself as being ‘on the left of the “Left Front”’ is an ‘extremist pose or fashion’. 14 Renato Poggioli, ‘Avant-garde and Politics’, Yale French Studies, No. 39, Literature and Revolution (1967), p.182.15 Ibid, p. 180.16 Ibid, p.181.17 Ibid, p.182.18 Ibid.

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The Russian avant-garde contributed greatly to what Poggioli terms ‘the modern

concept of culture as spiritual civil war’. From such concepts, borne in pose, argues

Poggioli, stems the ‘typical psyche of the modern artist, his position and attitude of

disdain: rebel and revolutionary, outcast and outlaw, bohemian and déraciné,

expatriate and émigré, fugitive or poète maudit and (why not?) beatnik’.19

Moreover, Poggioli understands the Russian case of avant-garde art, and especially its

decline, as proving an essential and crucial connection between avant-garde and

democracy. ‘The avant-garde, like any culture, can only flower in a climate where

political liberty triumphs…avant-garde art is by its nature incapable of surviving

prosecution, protection, or patronage of a totalitarian state and a collective society.

The hostility of public opinion can be useful to it’.20 He reminds us that although

Russian avant-garde is identified with the October revolution, ‘Lenin always showed

an unreserved antipathy to extremism in art’.21 Still, it should be stressed here that

what Poggioli tells here is not the commonplace story in which the Soviet

beaurocratic, oppressive, authoritarian and totlitarian monster is strangling the

innocent, honest, well-wishing and genuinely radical avant-garde artist. The story is

more complex. The nihilist energy of the avant-garde is needed in the first stages of a

revolution on all its levels, and the Russian avant-garde had contributed to the cultural

front by negating the pre-revolutionary order, the conventions and traditions of

bourgeois culture. Their role, though, seems to fade as the regime is stabilized, and

their independence diminished. Nevertheless, since the declared mission of Russian

avant-garde -indeed, any avant-garde- is the demolition of the institution of art and its

autonomy, the decline of avant-garde art as an autonomous realm and its merger with

19 Ibid, p. 183.20 Ibid, p.181.21 Ibid, p.180.

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the state can be seen as a success, indeed a fulfillment of its goal. Then, the

authoritarian regime subsumes the avant-garde’s function as the art of the new state.

Nobody left to criticize and negate the new order. Mission accomplished? Not sure.

Taking a broader look at the concept of avant-garde and its historical constituents,

Poggioli’s surprising conclusion is that libertarianism and anarchism are, after all, the

only recurring political ideologies within the avant-garde. these ideologies, he then

goes to argue, are actually antipolitical.

2. Russian Avant-Garde

a. Constructivism

‘Russian avant-garde art of the early twenties (futurism, constructivism) not only

zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial

man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but

the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated

industrial machine....a thorough depsychologisation...what was perceived in the West

as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism...was in Russia hailed as the utopian

prospect of liberation’.22

22 Slavoj Zizek, ‘A Plea for Leninist Intolerance’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No.2 (Winter 2002), p. 536

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An account of the group of practices called ‘The Russian avant-garde’ should include

several considerations. We should look at a wide variety of practices, dwell upon the

question of political motivation and commitment, have an idea of the historical

conditions and the forces that are at play in the works, and look for the writer’s

attitude toward the October revolution and the legacies of Marxism and socialism.

Constructivism, writes Christina Lodder, was not merely an art movement, but

‘something much wider: an approach to working with materials, within a certain

conception of their potential as active participants in the process of social and political

transformation’.23 The group of practices called ‘Constructivism’ consists of a rich

texture of practices. We are concerned here with the strand of Constructivism that

opposed a purely artistic activity, and regarded its own as a functional aesthetic. The

variety of attitudes and the distinctions between each of them can be approached

through A.J. Greimas’ semiotic map.24 It is based on two crossing axes over the field

‘Constructivism’. One axis is stretching from ‘Art’ as works in an autonomous

institution, created and received individually, to ‘Not-art’,negating those principles as

bourgeois and anti-revolutionary, and another axis, whose poles are ‘Production’ -as

utilitarian and collective artistic-industrial practice- and Not-production.

Another way to look at Constructivism and to arrive to the Kiosk is through an

important agent in this field –The Journal ‘Lef’. Abbreviating ‘Left front of the Arts’,

Lef was a journal for literature, history and visual art, which published 7 issues

between 1923-1925. LEF provided a forum for Constructivists, Futurists and

23 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism, Yale University Press,New Haven and London, 1983. p. 1.24 Quoted and explained in Hal Foster, ‘Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism’, Art into Life: RussianConstructivism 1914-1932, Rizzoli, New York. P. 242-3.

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Formalists, and was edited by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. particiapants included

Osip Brik, Aleksander Rodchenko, Boris Arvatov, and Gustav Klucis.

The initial expression of Lef’s aims was made in the first issue. Commencing by

“This is addressed to us. Comrades in Lef!”, the manifesto-editorial ‘Whom is LEF

Alerting?’ calls artists to reassemble their efforts and regroup around the now stable,

post-revolutionary Communist Soviet Union: ‘Sweeping away the old with the

revolution we cleared the field for the new structures of art at the same time. The

earthquake is over…It is time to start big things.’25 Lef’s dedication to the Bolsheviks

was then proclaimed: “Futurists! Your service for art are great. But…Show by your

work today that your outburst is not the desperate wailing of the wounded

intelligentsia, but a struggle, laboring shoulder to shoulder with all those who are

straining toward the victory of the commune…’ The ambitions were fashionably

elevated: ‘Contsructivists!…Constructivism must become the supreme formal

engineering of the whole of life”. The text calls for an artistic practice that is based on

craftsmanship, technical skill, but that insists on social involvement and political

commitment, with more than a hint of grandeur. ’The most skillful forms will remain

black threads in blackest night, will evoke merely the annoyance and irritation of

those who stumble over them if we do not apply them to the shaping of the present

day, the day of revolution’. Lef’s first issue, published in March 1923, includes 252

pages of politics, prose, poetry and theory, and only four non-textual pages. The

images are characterized by a programmatic tendency to engage in technologies and

media of mass production and dissemination. Included are two drawings (schemes)

25 All quotes from ‘Whom is LEF Alerting?’, LEF, Moscow, 1923, p.10-11. trans. Richard Sherwood, in Art inTheory 1900-1990, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Eds., Blackwell, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA, 1992,p.321-2.

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for radio masts, And a double spread with works by Rodchenko, who also designed

Lef’s covers. Rodchenko’s contribution included one page showing four book covers

designed for Aseev, Mayakovski, and Alexei Gan’s book ‘Constructivism’, and a

second page with drawings-plans for kino-automobiles (cinema-trucks), a sketch for

an agit-prop vehicle.

b. Agit-Prop

‘Landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation’.26 This

sentence opened the ‘Decree on Land’, published on the first day of Lenin’s regime

,26 October 1917. The decree announced the nationalization of all land, taken from

former rulers of the land: the Tsar, the aristocracy and the church, to the hands of the

state. The peasants were to gain control and ownership over the lands they had been

cultivating for centuries, in a political move that is considered by the historian Peter

Kenez to be Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ ‘trump card’ in the ongoing struggle for

power. The Bolsheviks needed to mobilize support from the Russian peasant

population, which was viewed as the most needed base of support for the Revolution.

The Party’s activities on this issue developed with the recognition of the need to

communicate information to many people, in a vast country. This need brought about

the practice knows as agitational propaganda, which derives its name from the

Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which was part of the Central and regional

committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In short, agit-prop. By July

1918, approximately 50,000 people are said to have been participating in agitation

26 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm

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and propaganda for the new regime, still struggling to gain popular support in the

country. The first and most valuable item in a propaganda package agitators were

carrying was the land law. Along with it, the latest newspapers were sent. The

agitator’s role was to inform people in remote places about the latest political

developments, but also to create, through various tactics, a new political reality. The

party’s venture in this area was to encourage participation and support in the

Bolshevik Revolution, and it took upon it the role of an educator as well. An activist

who was sent to the countryside was expected to acquaint people with Leninist land

policies, to establish Soviet power in the villages by agitating and organizing political

debates, but also to make sure the ‘right decisions’ are made by local assemblies, in

favor of the ‘Reds’.

A carriage of the Agit Train The October Revolution, 1919

Another method for mobilizing support for the Bolsheviks was in the form of trains

and ships, sent into the countryside. At that time, trains were still considered symbols

of the new age, and the arrival of a decorated agit-prop train to remote areas of the

country was received with enthusiasm and festivity, as a kind of attraction similar to a

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traveling circus or fair. In august 1918, the Military Section of the Executive

Committee of the Soviets decided to equip trains with agitators. The first agitational

train was named V.I. Lenin, and was sent to various fronts of the civil war, where

crucial battles were taking place, as well as visiting little towns and villages in

Belorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine.27 Following the success of V.I. Lenin, more

trains were converted to agit-trains, and agitational stations (agitpunkty) were

established in major railroad stations. These agitation points contained libraries of

propaganda material, lecture halls, and film theatres. The commander of each train

was a political commissar, which was in charge of the main function of the train – the

political section, responsible for agitation and liaison with local authorities.

According to Kenez, the most famous train was the “October Revolution”, in which

some of the chief figures of the Bolshevik Party traveled around the country to get

acquainted with problems and challenges first handedly, and make decisions on the

spot. Agit-trains also included a bureau of complaints, which accepted complaints

and petitions from citizens. The information section organized lectures and distributed

brochures, and controlled the ‘most important piece of equipment carried on the train’

– the film projector. Screening on the trains included short propaganda films that were

produced for the agit-trains, newsreels and films for children. For most of the peasants

in the villages an agit-train stopped in, it had offered the first ever experience of

moving image. The success of this medium as a tool of propaganda encouraged Lenin

to spend precious foreign currency on the acquisition of film material and projectors

abroad.28 Each train also carried a printing press, which made each train a traveling

newspapers and leaflets publishing house, and a radio station, which enabled it to

keep in touch with the capital. There were about 16-18 carriages in every agit-prop

27 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, England, 1985. P. 59.28 Ibid, p.60.

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train, one of which was a garage for small automobiles and motorcycles, allowing

activists to visit villages far from the railroad line. The decoration of the trains started

with modernist paintings, but as Kenez states, ‘this was clearly a mistake, for the

peasants did not care for abstract art’.29 The trains were therefore repainted, this time

with pictures of heroic soldiers, peasants, and workers, and with bright slogans. For

many peasants, as Kenez remarks, agit-prop trains often were the first representation

of Soviet power they had encountered.30

29 Ibid.30 Another agit-prop traveling innovation was the agit-ship. Krasnaia Zvezda [Red Star] was an agit-ship sailing onrivers. Since its destinations included large minority population, and there were not enough agitators who couldaddress those people in their native languages, film became an especially important tool. Krasnaia Zvezda shouldforever be remembered for the barge she pulled, which was a floating cinema capable of accommodating 600-800people.Cf. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, Thames and Hudson, London, 1962. P.225

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c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk

‘Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda’

Gustav Klucis

Design for Propaganda Kiosk

1922

Ink and gouache on paper, 26.3 x 17.4 cm.

The George Costakis Collection

Why am I fascinated with Klucis’ Kiosk?

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First of all, it is the bold inscription ‘Down with art, long live agitational propaganda’.

It is wild and insolent. It is also quite unfashionable. How can one feel sympathy with

this image, knowing what we know today about the horrors of the Soviet regime?

How can an aspiration for justice be encouraged and inspired by a drawing serving an

authoritarian regime? Is agitational propaganda worth revisiting at all?

One has to admit that something of this attraction is a feeling of solidarity with an

artist who wants to take part in a massive shift in his society, a move towards what he

sees as a better place. if we’re not among the cynics, we’ll always be among the

Klucises of the world. Yes, it is the uncomplicated manner in which the clarity of the

mission is set in front of an artist, it is the articulated, common dream that one takes

part in, that I long for and envy. It is also a childish urge, an inclination to what

Poggioli named ‘the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action, a sportive enthusiasm,

and the emotional fascination of adventure’. Suddnely it doesn’t sound so bad. It

sounds like youth. I’m thirty. Should I know better?

It is also an attraction to power. This kiosk represents state power, and the alliance of

artists and rulers. ‘Down with art’ was not sprayed on a downtown wall or sticky-

vinyled on a gallery wall. It was legitimized and validated by a concrete political

reality. It was commissioned by the future of the world, sole representatives: The

Dictatorship of the Proletariat, c/o Lenin. In a way, the author of this kiosk is not a

rebel artist, but an emerging new social order. Is it the teenager shouting, or his dad

giving him the car keys? To a certain extent, Klucis is empowered here by an idea, an

aspiration and a voice of an emerging culture, a developing society. Along with the

annihilation of the bourgeois institution art, this image wants to abolish the romantic

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myth of the artist as a solitary, tormented, marginal figure in society. it is strong, full

of the joy of creation, saturated with the erotic of the new, celebrated in common.

This is very attractive, don’t you think?

In the essay ‘God Is Not Cast Down’,T.J. Clark points out the difficulty for a

contemporary mind to imagine the historical situation in the early years of the

October Revolution, in which a social imaginary coalesced with an abstract artistic

practice.31 In a way, both the abstract forms of the Russian futurists and the political

aims of the Bolsheviks were difficult to perceive and comprehend, and required a kind

of education (philosophical, political or artistic) that had to be transferred from an

elite to the masses. Lenin and Malevich, although their apparent mutual dislike, were

functioning similarly in their respective fields. The revolution in art that Malevich

was teaching and writing about and Lenin’s Socialist revolution went together, but

only so far. After all, there was an incommensurability of the totalities that each of the

two men stood for in the unified field of art and politics that emerged in Russia in the

second and third decades of the 20th century. It is a conflict that ended in the withering

of the ‘purity’ of Suprematism, towards the usage of its forms by the state. Political

power has prevailed in the battle that seems to always have the same results. What

complicates this narrative of ‘State wins, art loses’ or ‘Politicians make reality, artists

make art’, is the immanence of the spirit and forms of Russian futurism in the further

development of revolutionary avant-garde art in Russia, and the practices that

appeared, stretching the boundaries of traditional art.

31 TJ Clark, Farewell to an Idea, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999.

22

Euphoria and desperation. These are the two emotions that TJ Clark uses to describe

the mood of Modernism in 1920. Clark posits Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky as

two elements in Modernism, that are in a struggle. The two recurring images in the

essay are a propaganda board in a Vitbesk street, by Lissitzky, and Malevich’s Black

Square. The text on the propaganda board reads ‘The Workbenches of the Depots and

Factories are Waiting for you. Let Us Move Production Forward’.32 I join Clark in

his insistence that work of propaganda and suprematist paintings belong to the same

discussion, and complicate each other and our overall articulation of the concept of art

emanating from that period in history. He maintains, importantly, that it is not clear

what each of them stands for: ‘Which of the two men is the materialist, and which is

the idealist or idealizer? Whose art is more revolutionary, or even the more

extreme?...whose art is the more inward-turning?’ I would ask who’s more inward-

looking. ‘who comes across as focused the hardest on sheer procedure, or the

calculation of effects? Which set of images is most open to contingency – to the

unknown and predictable, the ebb and flow of circumstance, the vagaries of politics?

Which art most confidnetly “refers”’?33 These questions are unanswerable, Clark

says, ‘because the distinctions they rest on are what art practice puts in doubt’34. Clark

acknowledges the high artistic value of Lissitzky’s propaganda Board, or, as he says,

‘the board goes on (and will go on, I think) having aesthetic life’. This valuation

results from its perception as ‘fiercely’ juxtaposing, causing and manifesting a clash

between the two organizing ideas Clark finds in the art of revolutionary Russia:

Nihilism and answerability. ‘Red Square versus Black Circle, Stanki depo35 versus the

crackling of the movement of non-objectivity’. Joining the two is a third element, the

32 Clark, p. 229.33 Ibid, p.288-9.34 Ibid, p.289.35 ‘The factory benches’, a part of the text on Lissitzky’s propaganda board.

23

state, argues Clark. Thus, in a Mayakovsky-like sentence, Clark expresses the

importance and the legacy, both political and aesthetic, of Lissitzky’s propaganda

board and of the ‘agit-propical’ dangers every avant-garde faces. ‘It shows us the state

shouting (as it usually does) through the revolution’s mouth’.36 Clark complicates the

discussion to the benefit of the important, multi-faceted work that we are talking

about, to the detriment of a bi-polar ethical debate that seems to be taking place in art

historical discourse over the Russian avant-garde. Christina Kiaer provides a rough

outline of this kind of debate: ‘many Russians cannot dissociate the avant-garde from

its collaboration with the violent Bolshevik state. many Westerners, on the other hand,

are more willing to imagine a genuine socialist sincerity in the avant-garde that did

not consciously or willingly participate in the violent aspects of the regime’.37

Clark’s important problematization of the ethical reading of the Russian avant-garde,

and especially agit-prop practices is what I’d like the readers to take with them while

we move to look at Klucis’ Kiosk.

Gustav Klucis was born in Latvia in 1895. After 5 years of artistic training, he fought

in crucial battles leading to the October revolution as rifleman and a machine-gunner.

He studied with Malevich, and showed work in an exhibition together with Gabo.

Klucis made non-objective paintings (probably influenced by Malevich’s

Suprematism), reliefs and constructions (considering materials, space and volume)

,and later moved to utilitarian work. He made significant experiments with

photomontage and developed this technique considerably. My interest is in the series

36 Ibid, p. 297.37 Christina Kiaer, ‘Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects’, October, Vol. 81 (Summer 1997), p. 117.

24

of designs for agit-constructions he made in 1922 .As Vasilii Raitkin says, it was then

he ‘felt that once and for all art had advanced into the street’.38 A year later, in

Vkhutemas he proposed the organization of the ‘Workshop of the Revolution’,

replacing traditional art departments with a studio of experimental agitational art, for

train artists, agitators and Productivists.

Raitkin shows a special affection to Klucis (and we know he had catalogued Klucis’

many works in the George Costakis collection). He writes: ‘a confirmed

revolutionary, Klucis lived honestly and openly. For him world revolution was a

concrete reality, not a dream. He believed that an Americanized socialism, a kingdom

of technology, science, and reason would come to peasant Russia.....he paid no

attention to actual contradiction and, consequently, he was a happy man...revolution is

the style of life, the means of action is experiment’.

The intersting remark on the ‘Americanized socialism’ sheds a special light on my

pursuit of the contemporary relevance of this work, and on Russian mass-media-

avant-garde. It complicates the reading of Klutsis’ work, of Productionist

Constructivism and of agit prop practices. It is important to challange the prevalent

perception, that is attributed almost automatically to any Russian avant-garde,

specifically agit-prop, according to which it feeds of a monolithic, Soviet ideological

ground. There is another statement Klucis made, which we should bear in mind in

preparation for a productive and prejudice-confusing new look at the legacy of

38 Vasilii Raitkin, ‘Gustav Klucis: Between the Non-Objective World and World Revolution’, in The Avant-Gardein Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Jeanne D’Andrea and Stephan West, Eds., Los Angeles County Museumof Art, Los angeles 1980. p. 60.

25

Russian avant-garde: ‘We need Marxism+Americanism’.39 Here we should read

further in Christina Kiaer’s important research on Boris Arvatov. In her essay on the

utilitarian productionist Arvatov, who was one of the founders of the ‘Lef’ group

(with whom Klucis was associated), Kiaer proposes a new look on his ideology and

ideas, which may have been more radical than thought before.

Kiaer argues that Arvatov ‘imagines a socialist form of modernity that would equal

the West in technology and consumer abundance, but without the harmful effects of

the commodity form. Retrieving his model of an alternative socialist modernity today

will contribute, I hope’, she writes, ‘to contesting the current triumphalist claims that

the demise of the Soviet Union has definitively proved the failure of the socialist

idea’.40

Raitkin encourages us to follow that path, and to trust Klucis to be more than a

Bolshevik advertizer: ‘like any artist, even in the most confining situation, Klucis

retained his artistic independence. This was not the independence of the jester at a

medieval court, but a fanatical belief in the necessity and strength of the new art’.41

And again, let us be very suspicious of the equation of good art with liberal political

values.

39 Written by Nikolai Bukharin, this was one of the mottos in Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klucis’ project for a‘Studio of the Revolution’, the aforementioned studio of experminetal agitational art (agit-art or propaganda art),presented in “Masterskaia Revoliutsii”, Lef, Moscow, No. 1, p. 5. Quote from Raitkin, p.60.40 Kiaer, p.106.41 Raitkin, p.63.

26

‘Revolution demands from art forms that are absolutely new, forms that have not

existed before’.42

The agit-constructions series was designed for the streets and squares of Moscow, that

was about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, and to host the

Fourth Congress of the Comintern. It included ‘radio-orators’,‘radio-tribunes’ and

‘cinema-photo stands’ –constructions functioning as supports for loudspeakers,

screen, and/or a rostrum for public speakers- and ‘Kiosks’ -constructions made to

function as a covered stand or small pavillion for books, newspapers, or flyers. The

agit-constructions also served, as Christina Lodder notes, to give ‘a spatial and audio-

visual presence to revolutionary slogans’.43 Lodder also comments on the color of the

wooden structures (only two of the designs were built): ‘to emphasise the active and

passive elements of the structures, loudspeakers were red, stands were often black’.44

The structures stem from a function-oriented planning, resulting in light, collapsible

piece of street furniture, which nevertheless bears a heavy semiotic weight.

They are bursting with the energy of several, compressed functions. They were meant

to be installed in the street as sculptures/furniture/public media outlets, and should

have functioned even when they were silent, when they exuded no information. The

stands were made of wood, canvas and cable, materials which were available in

Russia at that time of great material poverty. Made of minimal strips of wood,

economic contraints seem to have determined their form and material. Fragile,

unopressive, not monumental, built on a human scale, I could almost call them

‘democratic’. Klucis’ agit-constructions seem to be as far from an armoured cash

42 Gustav Klutsis, from rough notes for his Autobiography, 1930s. Quoted in Raitkin, p. 62.43 Lodder, p. 163.44 Ibid.

27

machine or an anti-terror police unit as they are far from easle paintings. I wouldn’t

attribute them to state power, but rather to education and the attempt to contribute in

good faith to the proliferation of the great message of their epoch: the message of

communism. Maybe this is already uncritical of me. But this is only one aspect.

What does Klucis want from me? Why am I looking at a propaganda kiosk from The

Soviet Union? Can I not see how horrifyingly similar it is to the US army recruitment

center in Times Square, NY? Why don’t I reject it and detest it on account of its

precedential status in relation to marketing stalls in shopping malls that propagate the

use of make-up to women interested in beauty? Yes, its contemporary equivalents

might be an Ikea wallbracket, or a giant video monitor in Piccadili showing only

McDonald’s ads, or the Evening Standard Stall near your tube station, shouting

headlines.

28

So Why do I bother? Why am I still in front of the kiosk?

Because still, something is not clear. Interestingly, for an artistic construction

designed for mass communication, there is something undeciferable about it. How

should it function? It is a double x-shaped structure, on its center axis an octagonal

drum which might be revolving, with words and patterns on it. at the top end of the

two x-structures we see something like two propellers, also carrying words. the words

compose the text ‘Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda’.45 Suddenly it

emerges as a self-referential agit-prop device. An obejct whose purpose is bluntly and

openly expressed generates a moment when it transcends its proclaimed function,

silences the rattle and hum of the city streets, and starts radiating a certain

purposelessness. This is not to say that Gustav Klucis did not want to make objects

for the streets, supporting and promoting the revolution. This is only to emphasise a

complexity that is revealed in this specific object/design. Remember: the street-object

we’re looking at is a design. A drawing, Ink and gouache on paper. It is 26.3x17.4

cm. On something like an A4 sheet, Klucis was dreaming, living a future, a dream

that coincided with a collective dream emerging in the society he lived in. There is an

author, and there is a mystery. And when I look again at this specific design I see in it

both functionality and oddity, both sheer praise of the regime and commitment to its

methods for gaining power - and an artist’s idiosyncracy, hallucination, disgust and

contempt for ‘art’. It appears like a bird that cannot fly. An engine without a car.46

Raw power and only words. a movement devoid of space.

45 Margit Rowell and Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the GeorgeCostakis Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1981. P. 268, fig. 226.46 Somehow I think now of The Atlas Group’s work ‘My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair’ (ongoing), in which anengine of a Fiat 127 car is hovering, suspended in the air, 15 meters above the car. In both works I read a trauma,an hysterical public sphere and an artist, an authorial autonomy trying to generate a change.

29

‘a slogan is a theme, but it must become a fact of art if it is to “work”’.47

Back to TJ Clark, for a reality check. Clark demonstrates the importance of a wide

historical and social background to the judgment and reading of a work of art. He

explains the elaboration of historical and political context in the need to ‘catch the

tone’, to understand a work from the perspective it was made from and through the

situation that is enabling and conditioning it. In the case of the Soviet Union and the

propaganda board, we are asked by the image to ‘build into our reading of it a sense

not just of absence and abstention, but of actual violent disagreement about who could

speak to, or for, the people no longer at the factory benches – speak in what language?

Speak in whose name?’48 Clark wants to emphasize the bad faith and tensions that

surrounded artists’ speaking in the name of a collective, to that collective. The

Bolshevik policy of ‘accelerated self-organization’ – Bukharin’s term- meant at the

time hunger, unemployment, inflation, and prosecution of political rivals. It would be

easy to claim that in the mix of euphoria and desperation that characterized that

moment, artists were on the side of euphoria.

‘Will you ever understand that to write of a storm from newspaper knowledge – Is not

to write about a storm?’49

47 Raitkin, p.62.48 Clark, p. 290.49 ‘Whom is LEF Alerting?’, p.321-2.

30

3. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing?

a.Deferred action

Hal Foster introduces his book ‘The Return of the Real’ by emphasising the

contemporary relevance of the construct of the avant-garde, and the need to revisit it.

He warns against the premature dismissal of the avant-garde, arguing that ‘The avant-

garde is obviously problematic (it can be hermetic, elitist, and so on); yet, recoded in

terms of resistant and/or alternative articulations of the artistic and the political, it

remains a construct that the left surrenders at its own loss’. 50 Foster, like many of the

writers on avant-garde art, especially those who value the political and critical

potential of its legacy, seems to be coming from a leftist point of view.51

Nevertheless, Foster keeps a critical distance from the primordial leftist political art,

and points out The ‘familiar’ problems of the avant-garde.52 Sounds like a poem to

me:

‘

The ideology of progress,

The presumption of originality,

The elitist hermeticism,

The historical exclusivity,

The appropriation by the culture industry,

50 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. And Lonon, 1996. p. xvi.51 It does become difficult to avoid arguing the logical relation of leftist politics to the avant-garde. True, the bigexception is Italian Fururism with its relation to Fascism and technocracy, but the legacy of the avant-garde seemsto draw its contemporary political meaning mostly from Revolutionary Russia. For a shrewd account of acontemporary neoliberal-corporate appropriation of the historical avant-garde, Cf. Matthew Jesse Jackson,‘Managing The Avant-garde’, New Left Review 32, March-April 2005.http://www.newleftreview.net/issue32.asp?article=0452 ‘familiar problems’ could mean ‘problems in the family’, which makes sense given Foster’s admitted partialityon the subject.

31

And so on.

’53

Looking at this list of problems -read not as problems in the philosophical sense of

aporia, (as Enzensberger put it)54, but as hindrance- one wonders which of the listed

notions is the worst sin or faux pas in contemporary art discourse, and what can be

most easily forgiven, for the sake of being, having, or supporting a contemporary

avant-garde art. This list can be a useful key, or index to the conventional sensitivities

active in this discourse, it seems.

For Foster, the avant-garde ‘remains a crucial coarticulation of artistic and political

forms’. Thus, he sets off to suggest ‘new genealogies of the avant-garde that

complicate its past and support its future’.55

Looking for new genealogies, Foster criticizes what is indeed a central text on the

subject, Peter Bürger’s ‘Theory of the avant-garde’. He finds it pessimistic and

limiting (if not annihilating) the potential of avant-garde to be an active, relevant

political vector in culture. Foster names several of Bürger’s shortcomings and faults,

such as the lacking selection of referred work and the presumption that one theory can

encompass such variety of practices. Nevertheless, according to Foster, Bürger’s

theory is most problematic in its ‘dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as merely neo,

as so much repetition in bad faith that cancels the prewar critique of the institution of

53 Foster, p. 554 In 1973 Hans Magnus Enzensberger published ‘The aporias of the avant-garde’, in which he argues that theavant-garde was coopted by the culture industry and that the historical avant-garde had failed to deliver what it hadalways promised: to sever political, social and aesthetic chains, explode cultural reifications, throw off traditionalforms of domination, liberate repressed energies.55 Foster, p.5.

32

art’.56 Foster objects the categorization of the historical avant-garde as ‘an absolute

origin whose aesthetic transformations are fully significant and historically effective

in the first instance’.57 According to Bürger, writes Foster, to repeat the historical

avant-garde is to cancel its critique of the institution of autonomous art: ‘for Bürger

the repetition of the historical avant-garde by the neo-avant-garde can only turn the

anti-aesthetic into the artistic, the transgressive into the institutional’. Bürger ‘can

only see the neo-avant-garde in toto as futile and degenerate in romantic relation to

the historical avant-garde, onto which he projects not only a magical effectivity but a

pristine authenticity’.58 When Bürger says ‘no movement in the arts today can

legitimately claim to be more advanced as art than any other’59, Foster replies ‘this

conclusion is mistaken historically, politically, and ethically’.60

Foster proposes a different look on the issue. He advocates the importance and

political relevance of the neo avant-garde, while insisting on ‘the deferred temporality

of artistic signification’61. Based on Freud and Laplanche, Foster suggests the notion

of deferred action, borrowed from the psychoanalytical discourse, as the historical-

cultural dynamic of the neo avant-garde. Instead of the unequivocal failure of the

avant-garde, and the triumph of the culture industry that Foster is reading in Bürger’s

story, Foster wants to establish a ‘complex relation of anticipation and reconstruction’

between the historical and neo avant-garde. He claims that neo-avant-garde has

extended the historical avant-garde’s critique of the institution of art, and created new

aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections, and political interventions. He askes:

Might the neo-avant-garde comprehend the historical avant-garde for the first time, 56 Ibid, p. 8.57 Ibid.58 Ibid, p. 11.59 Bürger, p. 63.60 Foster, p. 16.61 Foster, p.11

33

not cancel its project? The neo avant-garde, or for that matter any avant-gardist

contemporary work is an act of creative critique, says Foster. Creative critique is

interminable (stated positively), which posits avant-garde as political art that is an

ongoing endeavor, rather that a distant and irrelevant historical phenomenon. The

relation of historical and neo-avant-garde is one of ‘anticipated futures and

reconstructed pasts…in a deferred action that throws over any simple scheme of

before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition’.62 What was not understood

or is considered to have failed historically functions traumatically, as a hole in the

symbolic order. This traumatic element that was repressed institutionally appears

again, either hysterically –as anarchistic bursts of resistance- or worked through more

laboriously, as an attempt to revisit modernist political concerns in art through a

critique of the institution rather than the conventions of art. Describing the avant-

garde’s function as aiming to destroy the autonomy of art in order to reconnect art and

life is actually predisposing it to failure, says Foster, ‘with the sole exception of

movements set in the midst of revolutions’. In a remark that is received by the writer

of this essay as addressed to him, Foster adds that ‘this is the reason why Russian

Constructivism is so often privileged by artists and critics on the left’.63

In Foster’s view, an avant-garde’s strategy that is still worth employing is the attack

on the degraded world of capitalist modernity that contains a mimetic dimension –

showing how ugly it is- and a utopian dimension, focusing on what cannot be as a

critique of what is. ‘For the most acute avant-garde artists’, concludes Foster, ‘[their]

practice is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life

but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both…Sustaining a tension between

62 Foster, p. 2963 Foster, p. 15

34

them. At its best avant-garde is contradictory, mobile and otherwise diabolical, rather

than false, circular and otherwise affirmative’.64

b. The new media avant-garde

A self-proclaimed contender for the title of ‘The 21st Century avant-garde’ is what

artist and writer Lev Manovich calls ‘a new avant-garde for the information society’.

In his essay ‘Avant-garde as Software’, Manovich argues that the development of new

digital technologies in the 1990s (‘the new media revolution’) is comparable with the

development of new media in the 1910-20s, but he does not compare the usage of

new media in both historical cases on the basis of their potential for political change.

‘The avant-garde becomes software’ is Manovich’s conclusion, meaning that the

formal techniques of the historical avant-garde are today codified and naturalized by

software, and that the new software techniques of working with media ‘represent the

new avant-garde of the meta-media society’. The latter claim is, I think, the more

substantial and therefore presumptuous of the two. This kind of comparison of new

media with historical avant-garde disregards or at least marginalizes the political

context and impetus lying in the foundations of historical avant-garde practices,

especially those in revolutionary Russia, which are Manovich’s main reference when

writing about the 1920s’ avant-garde. Moreover, this equation between the two

movements or cultural phenomena reduces the concept of ‘avant-garde’ to its

technological and formal elements and implications, and seems to abandon the social

aspirations and the political program involved in the project of Russian avant-garde.

64 ibid

35

In a footnote, Manovich does mention the political question involved in a discussion

on avant-garde. He acknowledges the relation between ‘a new socio-economic regime

and a new cultural language’, and admits that no revolution in aesthetic forms was

prompted by the new ‘information age’. The conclusion of this argument accentuates

the abandonment of the political aspects in such a ‘digital avant-garde’: ‘Despite

pronouncements about the new net economy from Wired magazine, we may still be

living in the same economic period that gave rise to Human Comedy and Gone With

the Wind. In short, net.capitalism may still be the same old capitalism as before’.65

Manovich does somehow manage to prove that radical techniques and avant-garde

strategies of the 1920s became ‘materialized in a computer’, and are now standard

computer technology. One example is the collage, which evolved to the prevalent ‘cut

and paste’ procedure of data that one can easily perform on any computer nowadays.

Indeed, the diminishing shock value and dissent-factor of early avant-garde

techniques and strategies have already been diagnosed (and lamented) by many. But

the question remains, in face of the technological and cultural phenomena of the

digital age: how can new media technologies contribute to the making of art that is

politically conducive of change?

According to Manovich, ‘post-modernism naturalizes the avant-garde; it gets rid of

the avant-garde’s original politics and, through repeated use, makes avant-garde

techniques appear totally natural’. Although not put in the most precise of terms (it is

not a naturalization but rather a trivialization), Manovich’s impression seems to be

correct. One of the problems in the legacy of Russian avant-garde –however diverse

its articulations and the lessons this legacy can teach us may be- is the uses made of

65 Lev Manovich, ‘Avant-garde as Software’ (2002)http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002.html

36

its forms, disregarding their political content or context. It is the problem of the

repetition of a form that is devoid of its content, and specifically the appropriation of

avant-garde forms and strategies by a capitalist consumer culture.66 Manovich’s

position on the political implications of these appropriations is not clear, but he claims

that ‘…post-modern culture..does not only replay, sample, comment on and echo old

avant-garde techniques; it also advances them further, intensifying them and

overlaying them on top of one another’. He gives a few examples for this

advancement of the techniques: ‘A few photographic fragments brought together in a

Rodchenko photo-collage become hundreds of image layers in a digitally composited

video; the quick film cutting of the 1920s is similarly speeded up to the extreme, with

limits set by the temporal resolution of our visual system simply to register individual

images…the images which originally belonged to the incompatible aesthetic systems

of constructivism and surrealism are brought together in the space of a single music

video’.67 In an absolutely striking disregard of the political meaning of the term

‘avant-garde’ as resistance, Manovich goes on, maintaining that ‘hypermedia,

databases. Search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, simulation’

are the techniques of the new media avant-garde which ‘is about new ways of

accessing and manipulating information’. He succeeds in providing an analysis of

new media technology in the information age, but fails in explaining his choice of the

term ‘avant-garde’, and seems to be complacent with the postmodernist rendering of

the term as part of an affirmative culture.

Furthermore, Manovich seems to disregard the political potential that does exist in

new digital communication mechanisms. An attempt to estimate the potential for new 66 Cf. Hal Foster, ‘Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism’, Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism1914-1931, Rizzoli, New York.67 Manovich, ibid

37

means of resistance in the digital age of information would lead us to projects like

www.indymedia.org, a global network of local and independent news organizations.

Using the WWW, based on the notion of the net, which stems from post-structuralist

theories and anarchist philosophy, Marxist theory and left-wing political strategies,

this organization produces news that are supposedly free from the constraints and

limitations of corporate and state Media organizations, and provide the news one does

not hear, in a language that is uninhibitedly (leftist) ideological. Its de-centralized

structure is enabled by the popular availability and access of new media technologies

like the Internet and portable word-processing, digital video and communication. This

leads to the existence of an independent, low-budget, voluntary news operation that is

freely accessible online and its potential contributors are non-professional users of

these technologies, which are committed to a truth they do not find in the mainstream

media, and to an idea of progress.

38

c. TV CHANNEL (2004-)

TV CHANNEL was born from a desire to combine artistic, political and media

practices. In February 2005 It proclaimed itself:

‘TV CHANNEL aspires to function as a conglomeration of the following forms: A

producer and distributor of public television; A laboratory for experimental television;

A permanent media installation; A curatorial space propagating the making of

television as art; A cultural center organizing presentations and discussions. The

proclaimed horizon of its current activities is a digital television channel that will be

broadcast to homes, public areas and galleries around the world’.68

From September 2004 to June 2005, TV CHANNEL was transmitting at least one

new image a day, on a short-range transmission system. Based in a studio at the Slade

School of Fine art, TV CHANNEL was received in monitors installed in public areas

of the school. The broadcasts included video, audio, photography, performance,

discussions, text, and live events and non-events.

TV CHANNEL is evaluating and performing the possibilities of television’s function

as art/medium/political device today. Several visions, dreams and ideologies from

different avant-garde moments have left their mark on it. TV CHANNEL is

comprised to some extent of signs and strategies of avant-garde art from different

68 TV CHANNEL, Norwich Gallery, 2005

39

moments in the 20th century. Articulated with contemporary media conventions, those

signs now demand the viewer a subjective evaluation of the meaning and potential of

such practices in today’s reality. TV CHANNEL is a media hope which broadcasts a

contemporary melancholic self-nullification of an artwork wanting to make a political

change, while facing the dropping rate of the currency Utopia. Its structure implies a

complex relation of hope and despair, and this complexity does not cancel itself as a

contradiction, but is articulated as an attempt to soberly generate a future. It is a

nostalgic fantasy and a concrete plan. It heats up a think tank with the energy is

wishes to produce out of the failure of its precedents. Like petrol is made of ossified

life, TV CHANNEL is made of failed avant-gardes.

Rather than a ‘factory of dreams’, as Boris Groys calls the art of Socialist Realism,

which developed from the Russian avant-garde, TV CHANNEL is a factory of

questions. ‘Socialist Realism was the attempt to create dreamers who would dream

socialist dreams’.69 It would be exaggerated (although somewhat true) to say that TV

CHANNEL ultimately sees as its aim a new socialist culture. It does, nevertheless,

demand its viewers to examine their own convictions, attitudes and practices in

relation to the social and political status quo.

How does one read a sequence of video images that calls itself ‘television’? the

utopian impulse is a major force in this work. Reality can be different. Art is a place

to negotiate that change. If a red square with white margins is broadcast from a studio

and thus appears on several, distant TV monitrs, something happens. this pre-

revolutionary moment, Malevich’s Red Square (pictorial realism of a peasant

69 Boris Groys, ‘Utopian Mass Culture’, in Boris Groys, Max Hollein, Eds., Dream Factory Communism, SchirnKunsthalle Frankfurt, Hatje Cantz, 2003. p. 24

40

woman), wishes to appear as an omen, an icon (similar to the way it was hung in the

last futurist exhibition, 0.1., in 1915 – on the top corner of a room, like Christian-

orthodox icons typical of Russian homes). It is the re-revelation of TV as a means for

change. It is a means to look inwards. A meditational device, like a blank spot in the

wall in front of you, or like a church by Mark Rothco. If the TV set is the apsis of the

house, if it is the cornerstone of our public life, then let it be.

One of the TV CHANNEL works is ‘France’. It is a Final Cut Pro animation piece:

along the duration of a minute three moving rectangles colored red, white, and blue

enter the black frame and organize themselves vertically prallell, as a tricolor. Then

appears at the center of the screen three consecutive expressions, each of them

replaces the previous one after a short break. ‘Temporary Autonomy’, ‘Distributive

Justice’, and ‘Sorority’.

TV CHANNEL is motivated by the construtivist call ‘to the factory!’ Like agit prop,

It is interested in public places where consciousness is constructed and its factory is

the world of mass media. Avant-garde artists began investigating mass-reproduction

techniques, and the dissemination of new ideas in the public sphere, ideas that oppose

the existing social order. ‘A visit to the museum’ is a video piece documenting an

intervention in the space and time of the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, as

the first episode in a TV series. Planned as a series of coin throws in museums, it is a

pocket-poem, a dance, a sound installation, an act of personal empowerment in face of

powerful meaning-generating mechanisms. A situation constructed by little means, an

attempt to hijack an institutional art environment, ends with a silent retreat to the exit.

Micro-utopia, anyone?

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4. Appendix: Tommorrow’s Television

A producer and distributor of public television;

A laboratory for experimental television;

A permanent media installation;

A curatorial space;

A cultural center;

A model for a digital television channel that will be received in

homes, public areas and galleries around the world.

TV CHANNEL produces live television, video works, public actions,

music, prints, discussions and documents.

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TV CHANNEL invents, appropriates, creates, reclaims, remixes,

authors and authorizes public images and sounds that construct

collective consciousnesses.

TV CHANNEL appears as a daily experience, journalism of a kind

1.Television is a video monitor connected to the world.

2.Television constitutes a public sphere

3. Whatever can happen in art can happen in television

3.1 there is an animosity between the artworld and the Media,

especially television.

4.1.Television educates people

4.2. Art entertains people

5.1. Television’s authority is something to study and learn from

5.2. Ideology is everywhere.

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5. If ‘art’ can be everywhere, it can be on TV.

6. ‘art’ is one of the places in which progressive thinking about

society has got to take place.

6.1. in a barbaric world, art has no meaning

6.2. we produce meaning

6.3. Am I one of you or one of them?

6.4. The production of meaning and its implementation in culture is

related to mechanisms of validation and dissemination.

6.5. Power is in the eye of the beholder.

7. TV is a tool, a platform

7.1 Who’s tool? Who’s platform?

8.1 From the standpoint of (-)no political power, conflict is always

better than consensus

8.2. From the standpoint of (+)political power, consensus is always

better than conflict.

9. The concept of progress still has meaning.

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10. Political television

10.1 do you have an opinion?

10.2 don’t just tolerate me, argue with me

11. Abstract television

11.1 Abstraction is an extreme way of looking at the world.

11.2. it enables a close examination of things and their materiality.

11.3. it makes space for people

11.4. it slows things

12. Slow television

12.1 machines create speed

12.2 slower, please

12.3. inhale

12.4. exhale

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5. Bibliography

1. Bowlt, John E. (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-

1934, New York, The Viking Press, 1976.

2.Clark,T.J., Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London, Yale University Press,

1999..

3.D’Andrea, Jeanne, and West, Stephan (Eds.), The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-

1930: New Perspectives, Los angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980.

4.Fer, Briony, Russian Art and the Revolution, Milton Keynes, The Open University

Press, 1983.

5.Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press,

1996.

.

6.Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Dream Factory Communism, Hatje Cantz,

2003.

7.Gray, Camilla, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, London, Thames and

Hudson, 1962.

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8.Groys, Boris, ‘On the New’,

http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html

9.Harrison, Charles, and Wood, Paul (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Oxford UK and

Cambridge USA, Blackwell, 1992

10. Jackson, Matthew Jesse, ‘Managing The Avant-garde’, New Left Review 32,

March-April 2005. http://www.newleftreview.net/issue32.asp?article=04

11.Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass

Mobilization, 1917-1929, Cambridge, England,Cambridge University Press, 1985.

12.Kiaer, Christina, ‘Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects’, October, Vol. 81, Summer

1997.

13. Lef, No. 1-2, Moscow, 1923,

14.Lodder, Christina, Russian Constructivism, New Haven and London, Yale

University Press, 1983.

15. Manovich, Lev, ‘Avant-garde as Software’ (2002)

http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002.html

16.Norwich, Norwich Gallery, TV CHANNEL, 2005.

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17.Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald,

Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1968.

18.Poggioli, Renato, ‘Avant-garde and Politics’, Yale French Studies, No. 39

(Literature and Revolution), 1967.

19.Rowell, Margit and Zander Rudenstine, Angelica, Art of the Avant-Garde in

Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection, New York, The Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, 1981.

20.Washington, Seattle, Henry art Gallery, Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism

1914-1931, New York,Rizzoli,1990.

21.Woodward, Kathleen (ed.), The Myths of Information: Technology and

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22. Zizek, Slavoj, ‘A Plea for Leninist Intolerance’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No.2,

Winter 2002.

Websites:

23.http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm