The death of an idea
by Diva Gujral This seventh of November marked a century since Russia’s revolutionary Bolsheviks’ turbulent seizure of power, ousting their moderate Menshevik rivals to achieve, in their own view, the promised final stage of the proletarian revolution. A century ago- amidst reports in the New York Times that the Bolsheviks had no “constructive power” but “enormous power for destruction” [1], and the more general panic that the October revolution triggered across Europe- it would be hard to imagine that the centenary of Russia’s political tumult would be so widely commemorated. London alone, in the course of the year, has seen some three exhibitions charting the years of the Soviet Union. Where the Royal Academy of Arts’ Revolution: Russian Art, timed for the February Revolution, was particularly concerned with painting and film, the latest exhibition Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture at Tate Modern, took a decidedly radical and vernacular turn with its almost-exclusive curatorial interest in posters, photographs, and magazines, tracing their way from 1905’s Bloody Sunday well into the desolate days of the Stalinist purge. The display consists in its entirety of images amassed by graphic designer David King, whose prolific collection of Soviet posters and magazines was acquired by Tate before his death in 2016.
Entering the exhibition, one encounters the now-familiar vivid, almost-bloody red on its title walls; a shade undoubtedly out of stock at the paint suppliers’ after a long year of revolution-related displays across the city. But the economy of the Red Star Over Russia, its almost clinical constraint, sets it apart from rival shows. As it unfolds, briefly dwelling on the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 before whirring into the glorious early years of the Leninist state, the posters and photographs celebrate the angular specificity of Soviet Russia’s public visual culture. To wander through King’s collection is to witness the inception and maturation of Soviet visual theory. The disorienting geometry propounded in the works of state-sponsored artists from the Russian art school VkhUTEMAS, such as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, is quick to spread into the work of countless others: appearing in propaganda posters, hoardings, magazines such as USSR In Construction, and advertisements for theatre groups among other objects. The exhibition reveals little about the dissemination about these images except for seemingly incidental inclusions: here a photograph of an Agitprop train (painted with revolutionary murals) to be driven into the countryside, there an excerpted page from a Hungarian book showing a series of young men painting banners for a public march. But what is confirmed, unambiguously, is the camera’s centrality in revolutionary Russia. It is the photograph in general and the photomontage in particular, with its wild multiple perspectives and rapid industrial motion, that captured the aspirations of the revolutionary nation. In the case of posters based on photographs- such as Gustav Klutsis’s Under the Banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, the photographic image bestowed an immediacy and an urgency upon the image, pushing its viewers on the path to Soviet progress.
The deft curation of the show strikes a balance between revolutionary Russia’s best-known photographers and printmakers, and material that is refreshingly unfamiliar. Even an atheist political establishment can have its icons: on the walls of Red Star Over Russia, a dizzying artistic pantheon is resurrected in the form of Kustodiev, Deni, Deineka, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Lissitzky, Lissitzky-Küppers, Vatolina, and Khaldei. Some more famous photographs, including Rodchenko’s oblong photographic experiments, and posters, such as Viktor Deni’s Capitalists of the World, Unite, and Boris Kustodiev’s Moscow I: Entry, showing the image of death as it hurtled through the streets of St. Petersburg on Bloody Sunday, were like popular sites on a pilgrimage route. These first few rooms betray a popular confidence in the unconquerability of this visual mode, a faith in its efficacy and power in the new Communist state. The foundations of Russian visual literacy were built upon jaunty angles, powerful line, stark colour, and sharp text.
But the presence of Stalinist censorship becomes more and more evident in the images as the exhibition progresses. From political photographs with faces that have been scratched or inked out, to army generals cut out of the photographic reproduction of a Klutsis military poster, to a group photograph where one man’s face has been rendered unrecognisable by the words ‘enemy of the people’ now scrawled across him: the exhibition takes an uncomfortable and difficult turn, far from the general triumph of Leninist imagery. Red Star Over Russia reserves its sombre mugshots of claimed traitors and dissenters for the end of the exhibition- here, in its penultimate room, is where we encounter these remains of Stalin’s Great Purge, encased in glass on a white table, accompanied by their alleged crimes and the details of their executions in two badly-printed brochures. Gustav Klutsis, whose dynamic postcards of the 1928 All-Union Olympiad and iconic posters of Lenin adorn the walls in other rooms, belongs on this table: he was executed by the Stalin government in 1938, only a year after his participation in the World Paris Exhibition. It is into the contents of this particular display that the visual culture of Soviet Russia must inevitably descend, as we are expelled from the intoxicated optimism of Rodchenko, Lissitzky and their swarms of anonymous imitators, downwards into the sobering simplicity, the cruel flatness, of the criminal portrait. The next room, the last; although it proves to be an interesting look at the re-use of a number of propaganda motifs, does little to sway the sense that the exhibition has already ended: we cannot rise to the occasion of Nina Vatolina’s Fascism: the Most Evil Enemy of Women, nor the poster’s Azerbaijani cousin. The very last display is the print Osia and His Friends by Ilya Kabakov, no doubt to tease the audience towards Tate Modern’s other, more playful exhibition Ilya and Emilia Kabokov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future, but I found the thought of relocating to a cheerier display difficult to act upon. A regime’s worth of images is best left unclouded by the work of those who survived and surpassed it.
Reflecting on Red Star Over Russia, we realise that it is as much an exhibition about revolution as it is about the printed image itself. It begins with demonstrations of the photographic image’s infinite reproducibility, as photographs by the VkhUTEMAS artists were blown up or sized down for posters,books,andmagazinesfordisplayacrosstheyoungnation.Thedisplay titled ‘Ordinary Citizens’ (designed as a sort of procession through two rows of everyday possessions from the Soviet Union) presents the political photograph as part of a more intimate family archive. Here the display of the quotidian possessions of anonymous citizens reveals the sheer horizontal spread of Soviet constructivism in such items as exercise books and travel magazines. Finally, in the more explicitly Stalinist rooms, one is witness to the infinite manipulation of the photograph’s materiality, as ‘enemies of the state’ are forcibly eliminated from the image, both by the state and by the citizen anxious to perform his patriotism. But perhaps most overwhelmingly, the yellowed paper, the small tears and folds that appear frequently across the exhibition allow us to meditate on the printed image’s own materiality: the posters are rich with time, their current appearance exudes the weight of the century that has passed since their creation.
What is it that permits us to commemorate what we know to have been a regime built upon its own ruthlessness, allowing itself countless executions and mass arrests in the name of a German text? What is it to purchase a ticket on what is inevitably a cold London day, granting oneself an afternoon to be briefly bound up in the triumphs and failures of a nation; to peep, as a voyeur, into the temptations of its jagged posters- maybe to be taken in, agape, as its original viewers were? Much of the memorialisation of Soviet culture in London over the past year is only permitted by the fact that the Union today exclusively inhabits the pages of history- its stint as a totalitarian regime, at least in Communist form, was done away with in December 1991. One could not, for example, expect similar curatorial and academic treatment bestowed upon North Korea in 2048, should its current mode of governance persist. That it is no longer a military threat is precisely why we can revel innocently in the Soviet Union’s aesthetic achievements- its belatedness bestows a distance upon Red Star Over Russia, rendering it intriguing, certainly, but not affecting. We are invited to witness the death of an idea, but are we its mourners?
Notes:
[1] Harold Williams “Explains Russian Parley”, NYT 26/11/1917:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9507E6D6113AE433A25755C2A9679D946696D6CF&legacy=true