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Breaking the rules
Breaking the rules
The printed face of the European avant-garde 1930-37
British Library, London
Until March 30 2008
Admission: free
Reviewed by Sarah Sachs-Eldridge
HOW CAN art communicate change? Can it effect
change? What is the relation of art and the artist to politics? Where
are art and design at today? Posing these questions and more, this
exhibition is both exciting and challenging.
With cubism, expressionism, futurism, Dadaism,
suprematism, constructivism, surrealism and other movements explored, my
enjoyment was matched by irritation with the curator’s comments. The
first few decades of the 20th century saw an enormous growth in
working-class empowerment. As mass parties of the working class grew, a
clash of ideas about how society should be run developed. Where the
existing order was not overthrown it was challenged. The art and design
of the avant-garde reflected the advances in technique, and much of it
sought to reflect the vanguard of political and social upheaval,
anti-capitalist and socialist ideas.
The curator, Stephen Bury, explains that the
avant-garde was killed off in 1937 by the combined forces of Stalinism
and fascism, hence the parameters of the exhibition. The exhibition ends
with images of Nazi book burning. There is a bias towards the
nonsensical aspects of the avant-garde, those which sought to confuse
and ridicule, such as ‘words without meanings’ and ‘poetry without
letters’. Art which overtly seeks to serve political purposes is
generally dull. But where artists are inspired to respond to situations
and attempt to participate in providing analysis and a way forward, they
can play a positive role. Trotsky contrasted this to the ‘socialist
realism’ of the Stalinist era. But this exhibition incorrectly equates
all socialist art with Joseph Stalin. Ideas and revolution – new ways,
not just of seeing, but of running society – impact on art and design.
Initially, the exhibition appears small. Don’t be
fooled! There is a vast amount of material – as the title suggests, much
of it printed. A wealth of books, pamphlets, manifestos, magazines and
posters will keep you going for hours. A myriad of audio, video,
painted, photographed and other materials supplement. Recordings range
from Gertrude Stein’s poem, If I told him: a completed portrait of
Picasso, whose repetition gives it a cubist quality, to Alexander
Mosolov’s, Iron Foundry, an orchestral episode from the ballet,
Steel, commissioned by the Bolshoi ballet in 1926.
There is much inventiveness. The period saw the
attempt at the ‘total work of art’ that would incorporate all of life
and the senses. The Hungarian composer, Alexander László, built a ‘soundchromatograph’,
a colour-organ projection system, which is described rather than
exhibited. There is humour. A manifesto of futurist cuisine aimed to
attack bourgeois cooking and proposed the abolition of pasta. Salvador
Dali gave a lecture at the first International Surrealist Exhibition in
Britain in a diving suit – and nearly passed out. There are challenges
to traditional printing methods including the white page. Vasily
Kamensky’s, Tango with Cows, is printed on flowered wallpaper of
primary colours. The French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, published
Calligrammes in 1918, poems whose shape is as important as the
words. Il pleut (it’s raining) seems to pour down the page.
A desire to provide social context is another theme.
British photographer, Bill Brandt, produced A night in London, in
1938, a book of images contrasting rich and poor in the city. Seventy
years later, the images, many of which were staged, are still relevant
as the wealth gap persists. Mass observation was a social research group
founded in 1937. It aimed to record everyday life in Britain through
volunteer observers who kept diaries or replied to open-ended
questionnaires.
Half of the exhibition is of material from different
cities, including Budapest and Belgrade, and the Baltic states, as well
as the more familiar artistic centres. Reaching beyond the normal limits
of the western Eurocentric realm of art history and its obsession with
the Paris-Vienna axis, the courage is undermined by the shallowness of
the overall approach.
Impatience made me visit the Moscow booth first,
anticipating a wealth of constructivist posters and designs. In the
blurb, Bury describes how artists and writers wanted to be known as
workers and started clubs to educate the masses. A couple of
constructivist posters and beautiful photographs by Alexander Rodchenko,
and points on the effects of technology on art – ie lightweight portable
cameras – are presented without any reference to the 1917 Russian
revolution.
Of course, one exhibition cannot make up for the
expunging of Marxism from art history departments and universities in
general – continuing as left-wing lecturers, Terry Eagleton and Sheila
Rowbotham, face the axe at Manchester University, where Tesco boss,
Terry Leahy, is co-chancellor. The William Morris gallery in
Walthamstow, east London, which exhibits his socialist art manifesto, is
also under threat of closure. In the first decades of the 20th century,
working-class people fought for the provision of education, and for a
say in how society is run. Now the clocks are being turned back.
Many of the books featured are bi- or multilingual.
Artists travelled and were influenced by movements in other countries.
Art magazines and international exhibitions aided this internationalist
exchange of political ideas.
Bury makes many references to Adolf Hitler’s
denunciation of the avant-garde as degenerate. But in one of the
recordings, Roland Penrose, one of the organisers of the London
International Surrealist exhibition in 1936, describes how the British
press reacted against the show, describing surrealism as ‘degenerate’,
and a painting of two women as a ‘disgusting display of sexuality’,
revealing homophobic and conservative attitudes to new art in Britain.
Many of the movements published their ideas on how
new art should be created, and what its scope should be: ideas on life
as art and art as life. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist
Manifesto is referred to, but its relevance to the social and
political movements of this period is not explained. André Breton is
quoted and referenced but, notable for its absence, is his 1938
Manifesto: Towards a free revolutionary art, which was published
above his and Diego Rivera’s signatures, and was based on discussions
with Trotsky. Trotsky, in contradistinction to Stalin, fought for
genuine democratic socialism and for the freedom of artists. The
manifesto ends with a declaration of intent:
"Our aims:
The independence of art – for the revolution.
The revolution – for the complete liberation of
art!"
Many of the artists grappled with the complex ideas
and debates of the time. The posters and pamphlets were not merely
created as works of art, but as communication, and bring to mind the
battle of the poster/proclamation on Petrograd’s walls in 1917.
Some reference is made to the various responses to
war: from the Dadaism of Tristan Tsara to the powerful paintings of
George Grosz and plays of Berthold Brecht. Filippo Marinetti is
described as glorifying war, calling it the "world’s only hygiene". In
response to the horror of war, Grosz insists that "drawing must once
again subordinate itself to a social purpose". Responses to the Spanish
civil war include a leaflet exhorting fellow artists to "intervene as
poets, artists and intellectuals by violent or subtle subversion and by
stimulating desire".
The Franz Ferdinand album, You Could Have It So
Much Better, demonstrates the legacy of this period with its
reference to Rodchenko’s 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik. This portrait is
plastered all over London advertising a Hayward gallery exhibition.
There seems to be a bit of interest in the art and design that came
about through the changes made by the Russian revolution: Battleship
Potemkin was free with The Guardian recently, and Vladimir Tatlin’s
tower features as the climax of the Russians exhibition at the Royal
Academy. This goes hand-in-hand with a growing interest in the ideas of
socialism and questions of how society can be changed.
This exhibition, while featuring artists and
movements and a period of history where new ground was broken, is
limited by a traditional art history approach. The title almost seems to
reference Trotsky when he wrote "art, like science, not only does not
seek orders but, by its very essence, cannot tolerate them… Truly
intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the
spirit of conformity". While I rail against the curator’s
conventionality, this is a fantastic exhibition. And it’s free!
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