Revelation, Revolution in Washington State : Russian constructivism, 1914-32, in Seattle; contemporary Soviet art in Tacoma

This crisp and lovely city has revolution in the air.

It celebrated American Independence Day last Wednesday by opening an exhibition about the art of the Russian Revolution. Called “Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932,” this landmark show will be on view at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery through Sept. 2 before traveling to other cities. (Los Angeles is not among them.)

Meantime, the art museum in nearby Tacoma hosts another revelatory traveling show, “Between Spring and Summer” (to Sept. 9). It concerns contemporary Soviet art, until recently officially suppressed, reminding us that a tumultuous second revolution is afoot in the U.S.S.R. and has the world on the edge of its seat with the hope of freedom and the fear of chaos.

Both shows are cogs in a larger wheel hereabouts--an arts festival that started July 2 and focuses on Soviet culture among others and an athletic extravaganza called the Friendship Games that begins later this month.

It’s an essentially benign and well-intended celebration, but such events do bristle with mixed motives all the way from commercial promotion to artistic aggrandizement and civic boosterism.

This sense of layered meaning extends to both exhibitions. They seem to act as punctuation signaling the beginning and end of the modernist era. Their catalogue essays raise timely and complex questions that get well beyond the already contentious and tangled philosophy that fueled the art. They sound troubling warnings about what can happen when aesthetics become enmeshed in the politics and economics of the real world. It is impossible to read the catalogues and not come away thinking about the ominous controversy currently swirling about our National Endowment for the Arts. Can there be some cruel symmetry that demands our culture become more intolerant as the giant bear grows more liberal? So it would appear.

In the early days of the Bolshevik triumph avant-garde artists in their teens and ‘20s passionately glued themselves to the collectivist goals of communism. Their motives certainly combined idealism with opportunism--a chance to ride their aesthetic revolution to fame on the wave of political upheaval. Lenin’s men surely looked at them and shrugged. Sure, why not? We need the legitimacy provided by the support of the intelligentsia. They’ll be useful for a time to agitate and propagandize. Agitprop.

The “Art Into Life” exhibition looks at those artists most fervently committed to first removing the class barriers between various art forms then to turning art literally into life by putting the combined strengths of painting, poetry, theater, film, architecture, design and crafts at the service of the people. They called themselves the Constructivists, and this is the first comprehensive look at their political tragedy and artistic victory.

Nearly all works are from Soviet repositories, and many have never been shown publicly.

As alienated and drunk with ideas as Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the artists issued manifestoes proclaiming: “Art is finished! It has no place in the human labor apparatus. Labor, technology, organization!”

Their ranks included Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova and Vavara Stepanova. About 50 others appear in the exhibition. They joined progressively more bureaucratic art groups with exotic acronyms like INKhUK and VKhUTEMAS in which they swore solidarity and jockeyed for power.

They were utterly engaged with the collectivist drill, but every time they tried to turn art toward everyday utility, bureaucrats turned them down. No kulak’s wife wanted a dress with op art patterns when she could have nice duckies. No comrade wanted to sit in Rodchenko’s austere 1925 workers’ club if he could find a nice sofa somewhere. The room is reproduced here. There is a chess table that doesn’t allow you to get up until the game is over. The club was a big artistic hit at a Paris Expo in 1925. Somehow, however, the people just didn’t want the people’s art as decreed by some egghead. Somehow, they never do.

By 1932 the aims of the radical artists and the aims of Stalin’s government had split and there was talk of a new official style called “Socialist Realism.” To survive, some--like Rodchenko--”reeducated” themselves to acceptability. Others like Alexandra Exter emigrated to Paris. Less fortunate pioneers such as Alexi Gan, Boris Kushner, Gustav Klukis and Nikolai Chuzhak died in Stalin’s labor camps. The Gulag.

For the rest, there was silence for more than a half-century. For artists the message would seem to be summed up in the old army recruit’s dictum, “Don’t let the sergeant know your name.” Make your art and keep your

head down. But what are you going to do? If you follow the Soviet pattern and make art with a message it gets suppressed. If you dance to the tune of the Free World, your work gets turned into an impotent cash commodity.

Or so it would seem from reading the polemical prose surrounding both shows. Looking at them is another matter. There are more than 400 works in “Art Into Life,” and virtually all of it throbs with the same bracing visionary spirit. The Soviets were tough. Everything has the look of art trying to lend a hand to reality. Works are geometric and strident. They combine theory and practicality like “Das Kapital.” Maybe Lenin was the original concept artist. Heady as they were, the members of this gang were not sickly with pale thought. They were intense and portentous. In 1921 Rodchenko painted solid yellow, red and blue canvases that predicted American Minimalism by decades, but he threw the whole thing over as decadent.

After a period of learning about form from European Cubists and Purists these artists launched into their optimistic revolutionary period. A wall of Agitprop posters includes graphics by Elena Semenova, a figure just emerging from the shadows of long suppression. Her work, like the rest, is not really that different from the Socialist Realism that would supplant it. Both trumpet the virtues of the worker and the latest five-year plan. The difference is that the Constructivists were dynamic and inventive, qualities that tyrants apparently can’t stand. Good thing too. Think how different the history of art would be if Stalin had embraced the Constructivists and Hitler the Expressionists. Our heroes would be the bad guys.

While the revolution was still upbeat, Tatlin designed his legendary spiral tower, “Monument to the Third International.” It was supposed to be twice the height of today’s Seattle Space Needle. There isn’t even a model of it here. There is, however, another Tatlin that must be counted among the wonders of modernism.

As disillusionment set in after Lenin’s death, Tatlin started work on a Da Vinci-esque flying machine he called “Letatlin.” Intended as a kind of one-man glider, it never flew more than a few yards but stands as an artistic symbol of Tatlin’s rekindled longing for individuality and freedom. Pieces of three original versions that long languished in a Soviet air and space museum were rediscovered and reassembled for this show. Looks a little like a pterodactyl skeleton.

As the mood of gloom deepened in the ‘30s the artists bravely became even more ambitious and visionary. The spirit shows especially in Constructivist architecture. El Lissitsky produced a particularly wonderful design for a building whose title tells all we need to know about these artists’ inventiveness and wry sense of paradox. It’s called “Horizontal Skyscraper.”

What a shame it all failed. But of course it didn’t. The Russian avant-garde left us what all superior art gives to posterity--the inescapable distilled visual essence of the times. We simply can’t think of the revolution without seeing them.

Whether the work of 20 contemporary Soviet conceptualists on view down in Tacoma will come to stand for the great Gorbachev thaw remains an open question. It is certain, however, these artist have much to teach us about grace under pressure.

This work was conceived during the last two decades as underground art under grim conditions. Nobody expected it to ever see general daylight. We could give it full sympathy if it spoke of oppressed depression. Instead it is a marvelous combination of sophisticated iconoclasm, peasant humor and flinty hope.

Much of it reflects memories of the original revolutionaries. Andre Filopov’s “Last Supper” is a red-cloaked table set with 13 white plates and eating tools that are black hammers and sickles. Sergei Mironenko’s “Room for a Hero” uses the standard black-white-red scheme on a hospital bed over which is emblazoned the slogan, “Imperialism is the source of military danger.” Surely, both artists remember Rodchenko’s workers’ club.

Some artists seem to have regressed into childhood lyricism. A collaborative group called Medical Hermeneutics celebrated “Christmas 1990” with three traditional trees ringed with stuffed animals. Its implications are extraordinarily touching.

Underdog poetry wafts from the best of this work. The emigre team of Komar and Melamid get at it in “Rock Garden”--three potted plants decorated with rusty machine parts. Ilya Kabakov evokes the weird, tangled life of tatty Russian flats in “Sixteen Strings”--a room hung with shoulder-high clotheslines dangling myriad insignificant objects. It’s all about the endless complications of poverty and, if we miss the point, recorded sounds of domestic bickering are provided.

Only one of these artists--called Africa--has attained to Western slickness. Most still have the endearing feel of inspired amateurs. Some, such as Andre Roiter, have said they are worried about what will happen to their work now that they are free to exhibit and sell openly. You can’t blame them. The work has an unforced personal authenticity that may suffer without a fatherly oppressor to be the eternal, protective enemy.

“Art into Life” was co-curated by Richard Andrews and Milena Kalinovska. It will be at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center Oct. 7-Dec. 30 and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery next spring.

“Between Spring and Summer” was organized by David Ross, director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, where the show will apprear Nov. 1-Jan. 6. It then move to the Des Moines Art Center, Feb. 16-Mar. 31.