ART REVIEW : ‘Theatre’: Cautionary Tale at Hammer

When an audience of newly liberated workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals showed up on April 25, 1922, to see the premiere of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of “The Magnanimous Cuckold” at the Actor’s Theatre in Moscow, they couldn’t have expected this.

Instead of a raised platform, a proscenium arch and a series of painted backdrops, Liubov Popova’s set consisted of a free-standing arrangement of wooden platforms, raw scaffolding, revolving doors and spinning wheels. Instead of gesticulating in elaborate, fur-trimmed costumes, actors garbed in identical work uniforms moved up, down and around the skeletal structure with geometric, if asynchronous, precision.

Here was the whirring, pumping, rotating language of industrial machinery translated into the three-dimensional language of form. Unmoored from representation, scornful of illusionism, liberated from history, this was the revolutionary language of a future, here and now.

A scale model of Popova’s startling theatrical vision and pencil sketches of her costumes are among 260 drawings, stage and costume designs, posters, maquettes and documentary photographs included in a magnificent exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, “Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design, 1913--1935.” Organized by Nancy Van Norman Baer of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with the majority of works on loan from the Bakhrushin State Central Theatrical Museum in Moscow, this show celebrates a time when art served the revolution and, however fleetingly, the revolution served art.

“Agitation and propaganda acquire particular acuity and effectiveness when they are clothed in the attractive and mighty forms of art,” Anatolii Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, remarked in 1920. Indeed, in the early years of the 1917 revolution, the state fostered an unusual atmosphere of artistic experimentation and freedom. Artists of the burgeoning avant-garde were encouraged to work on behalf of Communist party principles, to proselytize for the New Russia of optimism, industrialization and utilitarianism.

Since vast numbers of the population were still illiterate, theater provided the ideal setting for the melding of aesthetics and ideology. By 1923, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were regularly attending innovative stage productions and more than 3,000 theatrical organizations were flourishing--thanks, in no small part, to the free tickets provided to soldiers and workers.

For artists like Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kazimir Malevich, the theater was also ideal, for it provided a three-dimensional laboratory in which to test the difficult propositions underlying the avant-garde movements of the period: Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism. Here, at last, the possibility of shattering two-dimensional pictorial space, undermining the linear movement of time and sabotaging the static quality of the art object seemed real.

Striving toward these perhaps quixotic ends, Popova and Meyerhold engineered the triumph of theatrical Constructivism, while Alexandra Exter’s stage and costume designs for Alexander Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre defined the Cubo-futurist aesthetic. Cubist in their attention to volume and space and Futurist in their concern with color and movement, Exter’s relentlessly beautiful designs--particularly those for a 1921 production of “Romeo and Juliet”--are among the highlights of the exhibition.

In one pencil and gouache sketch, Exter envisions a town square in Verona as a tangle of multiple, intersecting planes, made dynamic by staircases, platforms and spiraling towers. In another, a woman’s costume dissolves into rhythmic swirls of high-keyed color, behind which the body is barely articulated.

In the language of her contemporaries, however, Exter remained a dreaded “artist-painter.” Her work typified what one critic of the time called the incomplete passage from “composition (an aesthetic symptom) to construction (a productional principle).” More interested in creating a setting for the play’s action than in making a three-dimensional “stage environment,” and more attuned to the decorative, painterly aspects of costumes than to their functional attributes, Exter’s designs were at odds with the newly ascendant, technological aesthetic championed by Meyerhold and Popova.

By contrast, the latters’ presentation of “The Magnanimous Cuckold” was deemed exemplary. Here, all elements of the production were subordinated to a single principle: From the body of the actor to the interactive set, everything must function mechanically.

A fascinating series of gelatin silver-print photographs documents Meyerhold’s concept of “bio-mechanics,” a new system of training actors wherein the body was conceived as a living machine, perpetually in need of fine-tuning. Valentin Parnakh’s “machine dances,” in which performers re-created the inner workings of industrial mechanisms to the accompaniment of jazz music, offered another way to extend the constructivist aesthetic into performance.

In Nikolai Foregger’s version of the machine dance, a chain of linked girls circling around two men mimicked the motion of a transmission. To imitate a train, they would stamp their feet and wave burning cigarettes, so that sparks flew as if from a locomotive’s smokestack. Especially wonderful are Boris Erdman’s rigorously symmetrical, black-and-white drawings after Foregger’s machine dances; with their quirky, proto-computer graphic look, they illustrate just how elastic a Constructivist or nonobjective aesthetic can be.

Toward the end of the 1920s, however, Popova wrote, “I don’t think that nonobjective form is the final form. It is a revolutionary state of the form.” For her, as for Meyerhold, Constructivism was less a style that would thrive in perpetuity than a transitory force that might pave the way for the “truly” new. Whether or not the warm breath of Josef Stalin inspired such sentiments, it is clear that the artists of the great Russian avant-garde were well aware that their experiment would inevitably come to an end.

For us, the failure of the experiment has particular resonance. The revolutionary potential of technology shrinks daily, while visions of a utopian future retreat further and further into the distance. But, more immediately, the position of American artists circa 1992 is uncannily similar to that of the Russian avant-garde, circa 1934.

Where they were faced with a government that proclaimed that anything other than the official style of Socialist Realism would be suppressed or destroyed, we are faced with a governmental body--the National Endowment for the Arts--which has turned its back on more than 20 years of support in an attempt to gain control over artistic expression. “Theatre in Revolution” serves not only as a celebration of a short period of immense artistic flowering, but as a cautionary tale. Viewed through the lens of the collapsed Soviet Union, it is an important, immensely thought-provoking exhibition.

Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 443-7000, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.