THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

A geometric textile design by the Russian Constructivist Liubov' Popova appeared on the cover of an issue of Lef, the journal of the left literary and artistic avant-garde, in 1924 (fig. 1). The issue was dedicated to her; she had died suddenly of scarlet fever at the age of thirty-five in May of that year. In their dedication, the editors wrote,

Popova was a constructivist-productivist not only in words, but in deed. When she and Stepanova were invited to work at [the First State Cotton-Printing] factory, no one was happier than she was. Day and night she sat making her drawings for fabrics, attempting in one creative act to unite the demands of economics, the laws of exterior design and the mysterious taste of the peasant woman from Tula.1

See Also Svetlana Boym: On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov's Installations and Immigrant Homes (Winter 1998) Fredric Jameson: Culture and Finance Capitalism (Autumn 1997) Hiram W. Woodward, Jr.: Acquisition (Winter 1979)

But the language of the Lef dedication is instructive, because it suggests a previously unexamined Constructivist concern with the problem of forging a new form of socialist consumption as an alternative to the consumerism of capitalist modernity. The description of Popova's "creative act" offers in fact a highly economical explanation of a key term in the Constructivist lexicon: tselesoobraznost', which can be translated literally as "formed in relation to, or conforming to, a goal."2 According to the Lef editors, Constructivist tselesoobraznost' concerned itself with the material form of things not only in relation to technical problems of utilitarian form ("the laws of exterior design") but also in relation to the new socialist economy ("the demands of economics") and the need to appeal to consumer desire ("the mysterious taste of the peasant woman from Tula"). Constructivist theorists and artists, then, although famed for their commitment to technological production, also invented the concept of the everyday material object of socialist consumption as a socialist thing. This thing would be an active "co-worker" or "comrade" of the human subject rather than a mere commodity to be possessed.3 The very mundanity of cheap printed cotton fabric--its absolute usefulness in the "new everyday life" (novyi byt) being promoted by the Bolsheviks after the revolution--made it an exemplary Constructivist thing. But it is exemplary only if Constructivism is acknowledged as a practice that sees that the subject is formed as much through the process of using objects in everyday life as by making them in the sphere of production.

[...]

I emphasize Stepanova's conscious, if guarded, openness to exploring consumer desire in everyday life because Constructivism, and Leninism for that matter, are often criticized for replacing one harmful entity--the commodity fetish--with another one--the technological fetish--imposing a kind of enforced technological uniformity onto social life. I want to understand Constructivism, instead, as a practice that willingly adapted itself to the needs of everyday life, such as they were in the hybrid context of NEP Russia in the early 1920s, and I want to claim that this was a source of its strength as an avant-garde art-into-life practice rather than a sign of its failure. My argument is specifically meant to challenge Boris Groys's accusations that the Constructivists aimed for a "total work of art," a total restructuring of the lived environment according to avant-garde ideals of rationalization and utilitarianism, thus paving the way for the genocidal Stalinist Gesamtkunstwerk.47

1. The editors, "In Memory of L.S. Popova," Lef 2, no. 6 (1924): 4. The text refers to the factory as the "former Tsindel'," which was its prerevolutionary name.

2. Tselesoobraznost' is consistently translated as "expediency" in most English-language texts on Constructivism. But I offer my clunkier and more literal translation because current English usage favors the opportunistic or self-interested meaning of "expedient" rather than the primary and neutral meaning of "suitable for achieving a particular end."

3. The productivist theorist Boris Arvatov calls the object a "co-worker" in an important essay from 1925 (Boris Arvatov, "Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)," trans. Christina Kiaer, October, no. 81 [Summer 1997]: 124; hereafter abbreviated "EL"). Aleksandr Rodchenko calls the object a "comrade" in his letters home from Paris in 1925; see Aleksandr Rodchenko, "Rodchenko v Parizhe: Iz pisem domoi," Novyi lef, no. 2 (1927): 9Ð21. For an account of Constructivism that develops the model of production, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer (forthcoming).

47. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, N.J., 1992).

Christina Kiaer is an assistant professor in the department of art history and archaeology, Columbia University, where she teaches modern art. She has recently completed a book manuscript, Imagine No Possessions: The "Socialist Objects" of Russian Constructivism. She is currently researching a new project on the socialist realist painter Aleksandr Deineka. Her email is chk28@columbia.edu