In the Fading Light of Communism : Alexander Rodchenko Worked to Replace “Useless, Bourgeois” Art with Tools for the Masses

In the early 1920s, Soviet artist Alexander Rodchenko proclaimed, “Death to Art!” He wasn’t trying to do himself out of a job, exactly. Rather, he and other avant-garde artists believed that traditional art was incompatible with the new world order created by the Russian Revolution.

Instead of producing “useless” objects to be hung in a museum, he and his fellow Constructivists henceforth would view labor, technology and organization as innately creative activities. In place of paintings and sculpture, artists would produce such useful things as industrial designs, posters, logos, stage sets, textiles and photographs.

Rodchenko’s photography was the topic of a lecture Wednesday night at Orange Coast College by John E. Bowlt, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at USC and author of several books including “Russian Avant-Garde Theory and Criticism, 1902-34” and “Scenic Innovation: Russian Stage Design 1900-1930.” (Rodchenko’s photographs, loaned by a collector who purchased them from the archives of SovFoto magazine, are on view in the college’s Photo Gallery through Nov. 8).

Read somewhat haltingly from a text, Bowlt’s dry lecture was leavened only occasionally with personal asides. When someone asked him what impact the collapse of the Soviet Union had on Rodchenko scholarship, he said it had become much easier. “But every cloud has a silver lining--no, a dark lining,” he added.

“The mystique has been lost. In the old days, studying the (Russian) avant-garde was forbidden fruit (in the Soviet Union). Now it’s readily available, like going to a supermarket, and it’s somehow less exciting.”

Born in 1891 in St. Petersberg, Rodchenko initially was influenced by Art Nouveau and the Japanese-derived aesthetic of the turn-of-the-century. In 1915--the same year his compatriot Kasimir Malevich was showing his first Suprematist paintings of pure geometrical forms--Rodchenko made his first abstract designs. But Malevich’s work was both a challenge and a dead-end. What could an artist do after someone painted a “Black Square” or “White on White”?

As Bowlt remarked, the possibilities included returning to figurative painting, integrating abstract painting with other “radical” media (such as avant-garde poetry), or moving on to new and different disciplines.

Rodchenko’s many talents extended to making witty posters and logos for government products (beer, cigarettes) and designing a workers’ bar and a theater in the round. By embracing photography and the human figure, Bowlt said, Rodchenko “helped restore readable content to the avant-garde.”

At first, he used “found” photographs (on post cards) along with such printed materials as tickets and cigarette packages as elements in his collages. These objects all served as little fragments of reality that could be undermined by the disjointed structure of the collage.

When he finally turned to documentary photography in 1923, his eye had been trained by composing abstract designs in other media. The diagonal lines he favored in paintings translated into dynamic, angled views--whether of a fir tree, a building or a radio tower. Typically, he treated both natural and artificial objects in the same way.

“When I present a tree taken from below like an industrial object, like a chimney, I’m expanding the concept of ordinary objects,” he said.

In the past, as Bowlt related, Rodchenko believed artists viewed the world “from the belly button outward.” Even in literature, objects would be described at eye level, or seen from the middle distance, he protested. Instead, he wanted people see the world from new viewpoints--generally either from above looking down (often, views from an upper story to the movement of people in the street), or from below looking up.

Color, he believed, was merely conditional, superficial, decorative--”bourgeois,” he said, where “black-and-white is proletarian.” Like X-rays--also black-and-white, also linear--his photographs would reveal “the skeletons that held things together,” Bowlt said.

The other great thing about photographs as far as Rodchenko was concerned was their infinite reproducibility, which made them easy and inexpensive to disseminate.

But the golden experiment of the post-revolutionary period eventually gave way to the heavy-footed ideologies of the Stalinist period--a time when photographs, ironically, were frequently doctored to create false versions of the past.

Critics wanted to know why Rodchenko’s photograph of a “Pioneer Girl” showed the youngster looking upward, her head silhouetted against the sky. “A Pioneer Girl should look forward, “ they told him.

Yet Rodchenko remained adept at showing the “new human beings” supposedly created by communism: streamlined, disciplined, optimistic creatures shown as marching band members, or athletes swimming, posing in or grouping themselves into pyramids or (Soviet) stars. Prisoners working on Stalin’s construction projects, strong-profiled women, healthy looking children--all were apparently equal grist for the mill.

Bowlt admitted that, like the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Rodchenko was fascinated by pageantry and spectacle. But Bowlt seemed unwilling to criticize the artist--who died in 1956, and enjoyed the government largess of a pleasant private apartment--for failing to distinguish in his art between the bright early vision of a new Soviet society and the subsequent nightmare of totalitarian rule.

Still, in his shining moment--the 1920s--Rodchenko was part of an extraordinary ferment of forward-looking culture. Only in such a brilliantly tumultuous world could he rant so charmingly, “Art has no place in modern life. . . . Every cultured modern man must wage war against art, as against opium. Photograph and be photographed!”

* An exhibition of black and white photography by Alexander Rodchenko continues through Nov. 8 in the Photo Gallery at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Free. (714) 432--5629.