The Total Art of Stalinism

Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond

Boris Groys, Charles Rougle

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677078
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689721
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Chapter One

THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE: THE LEAP OVER PROGRESS

IN RUSSIA as elsewhere, the art of the classical avant-garde is too complex a phenomenon to be wholly embraced by a single formula; but it does not seem an extreme simplification to define its basic spirit in terms of the demand that art move from representing to transforming the world. The readiness of European artists down through the centuries to lovingly copy external reality—their will to ever more perfect mimesis—was based on an adulation of Nature as the whole and consummate creation of the one and only God that the artist must imitate if his or her own artistic gift were to approximate the divine. The intrusion of technology into European life in the nineteenth century caused this picture of the world to disintegrate and gradually led to the perception that God was dead, or rather that he had been murdered by modern technologized humanity. As the world unity guaranteed by the creative will of God disappeared, the horizon of earthly existence opened, revealing beyond the variety of visible forms of this world a black chaos—an infinity of possibilities in which everything given, realized, and inherited might at any moment dissolve without a trace.

Of the Russian avant-garde, at least, we can state with certainty that its entire artistic practice was a reaction to this most momentous event of modern European history. Contrary to what is often maintained, the Russian avant-garde was far from enthusiastic about technology or inspired by a naive faith in progress. From the outset, it was on the defensive rather than the offensive. Its paramount task was not to destroy but to neutralize and compensate for the destructive effect of the technological invasion. Earlier unfriendly critics and many sympathetic modern observers who felt they must praise the avant-garde for its “demonism” were in error when they portrayed it as inspired by a destructive, nihilist spirit or burning with incomprehensible hostility toward everything “sacred” and “dear to the heart.” Avant-gardism differed from traditionalism not because it reveled in the ravages wrought by modern technological rationalism, but because it believed that this destruction could not be resisted by traditional methods. If the avant-garde followed Nietzsche’s maxim to the effect that what is falling should still be pushed, it was only because it was deeply convinced that the fall could not be broken. The avant-garde regarded the destruction of the divine work of art that had been the world as an accomplished and irreversible fact whose consequences had to be interpreted as radically as possible if any compensation were to be made for the loss.

WHITE HUMANITY

One good example of this avant-garde strategy is the artistic practice of Kazimir Malevich, who in his well-known work “On the New Systems in Art” (1919) wrote: “All creation, whether of nature or of the artist, or of creative man in general, is a question of constructing a device to overcome our endless progress.”¹ Thus Malevich’s avant-gardism is reflected least of all in a desire to be in the vanguard of progress, which he regards as leading nowhere and therefore as completely meaningless. At the same time, he considers that the only way to stop progress is, as it were, to outstrip it, finding ahead rather than behind it a point of support or line of defense offering an effective shield against it. In order to find something irreducible, extraspatial, extratemporal, and extrahistorical to hold on to, the process of destruction and reduction must be taken to the very end.

This irreducible something was, to Malevich, the “black square,” which for a long time became the most famous symbol of the Russian avant-garde. The Black Square is, so to speak, a transcendental painting—the result of the pictorial reduction of all possible concrete content. In other words, it is a sign for the pure form of contemplation, which presupposes a transcendental rather than an empirical subject. The object of this contemplation is to Malevich nothing (that nothing toward which he felt all progress was moving), which coincided with the primordial substance of the universe, or, in other words, with the pure potentiality of all possible existence that revealed itself beyond any given form. His suprematist paintings, which represent the differentiation of this primordial form of the Black Square according to purely logical, “unearthly” laws, describe the “nonobjective world” that exists on a different level than the world of sensual forms. The fundamental thesis of Malevich’s aesthetics is the conviction that the combination of these pure, nonobjective forms “subconsciously” determines both the relationship between the subject and all that is seen and the overall situation of the subject in the world.² Malevich assumes that in both nature and classical art the original suprematist elements were in “correct” harmonious relationships, although artists did not realize or consciously reflect this fact. The technological invasion destroyed this harmony, making it necessary to reveal these previously subconsciously operating mechanisms in order to learn to control them consciously and attain a new harmony in the new technological world by subjugating it to the single organizing and harmonizing will of the artist. The loss that technology caused the world was thus also to be compensated technologically, and the chaotic character of technological progress would be succeeded by the single total project of reorganizing the entire universe, in which God would be replaced by the artist-analyst. The goal of this total operation was to halt all further development, labor, and creation forever. Arising out of all this is a new “white humanity.” The consciousness of “white humanity” is nonobjective, free of all desire to move toward any ideal or concrete salvation. According to Malevich, the spectacle of the “nonobjective world,” that is, the vision of absolute nothingness as the ultimate reality of all things, would cause “the prayer to die on the lips of the saint and the sword to fall from the hand of the hero,”³ for this vision consummates history.

First of all, however, all art must cease. Malevich writes: “Every form of a spiritual world that is created should be built according to a general, single plan. There are no special rights and liberties for art, religion or civil life.”⁴ The loss of these rights and freedoms, however, is not a real loss, since man is originally unfree. He is a part of the universe, and his thought is directed by unconscious “stimuli” that give rise both to the illusion of “inner existence” and the illusion of “external reality.”⁵ All aspirations to knowledge are illusory and ridiculous, since they involve an attempt to use thoughts arising from hidden “stimuli” to study “things” that also arise from these stimuli, which in both cases necessarily remain hidden. “Investigating reality means investigating what does not exist and is incomprehensible.”⁶ Only the suprematist artist is capable of controlling, modifying, or harmonizing these hidden stimuli, since only he or she knows the laws of pure form.

Malevich repudiates religion and science, because they belong to the realm of the conscious rather than the subconscious. Significantly, in his late works he perceives the only rival of the artist to be the state, and here he evidently means a totalitarian state of the Soviet type. The state also appeals to the subconscious: “The state is an apparatus by which the nervous systems of its inhabitants are regulated.”⁷ He does not fear the competition of the state, however, because he trusts official Soviet ideology when it maintains that it is based on science and is striving for technological progress. In Malevich’s view, therefore, the Soviet ideologist falls into the same category as the priest and the scientist, whose successes, because they are oriented to consciousness and history, are always temporary and consequently inevitably generate a variety of religions and scientific theories. The artist, by contrast, is oriented toward the subconscious: “If it is true that all works of art come from the action of the subconscious center, then it may be stated that the center of the subconscious is more accurate than the center of consciousness.”⁸ Here Malevich is obviously incorrectly equating Soviet ideology with ordinary liberal rationalism. Soviet Marxism similarly assumes the subconscious determinacy of human thought, although it seeks it not in the visual but in the social organization of the world. Thus this ideology is a more serious competitor for influence on the “nervous system” than many had at first assumed.

Malevich’s approach to art, which I have presented above only in brief outline, is characteristic of his time and is merely expressed more radically by him than by others. Thus another leading representative of the Russian avant-garde, Velimir Khlebnikov, assumed that the ordinary forms of language concealed a purely phonetic “transrational” language that worked secretly and magically upon the listener or reader. He undertook to reconstruct this “language of the subconscious,” as Malevich would have called it, and to master it consciously.⁹ Like Malevich’s suprematism, Khlebnikov’s phonetic transrational language, which went farther than anything at the time (or perhaps at any time) in overcoming ordinary linguistic forms, claimed universality and the ability to organize the entire world on a new audial basis. Khlebnikov called himself “Chairman of the World” and the “King of Time,” since he thought he had discovered the laws that delimit time and separate the new from the old in the same way as such division is possible in space. Knowledge of these laws would grant the avant-garde power over time and allow it to subject the entire world to this power.¹⁰

Even outside avant-gardist circles, however, it is possible to find contemporary parallels to Malevich’s principal ideas. Thus his reductionism resembles Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, the logical reductionism of the Vienna Circle, and Lev Tolstoi’s call to simplification; all of these seek to find a minimal but real point of support, and all turn to the “ordinary,” the “folk” (Malevich arrived at suprematism by way of folk art, the icon, and the signboard),¹¹ and all share an “antiprogressionist” spirit. Malevich is even more reminiscent of the neognostic “theurgy” of Vladimir Solov’ev, who defined the meaning of art as “life-building” and believed that the artist is capable of discovering the latent harmony of all things that will not be universally revealed until after the apocalypse.¹² According to Solov’ev, people are in the power of cosmic forces and can be saved only together with the entire universe in a single apocastasis that will neither add to nor remove anything from the world, but will simply unveil the hidden harmonious relationship among all things within it. Here is one certain source of Malevich’s insistence that harmonizing “materials” and pure color sensations must be made “visible,” as if perceived from a different, apocalyptic, otherworldly, posthistorical perspective.

The novelty of the contribution made by avant-gardists such as Malevich and Khlebnikov, however, is not apparent from such parallels. Central here is the radical notion that the subconscious dominates human consciousness and can be logically and technically manipulated to construct a new world and a new individual. It is on this point that the early avant-garde of Malevich and Khlebnikov was radicalized by their followers, who considered that suprematism and transrational poetry were too contemplative, since, although they contemplated the inner “subconscious” construction of the world rather than its external image, they did not break completely with the cognitive functions of art. Rodchenko’s later constructivism reinterprets suprematist constructions as immediate expressions of the artist’s organizing, “engineering” will, and Boris Arvatov, a theorist of the later, productionist variant of constructivism, speaks of the engineering nature of Khlebnikov’s poetry.¹³ The line of defense constructed by Malevich and other early avant-gardists was thus rather easily overrun by technological progress, which readily availed itself of the radical technical apparatus that had been designed to engage it in a final and decisive struggle.

RED AGITATION

The absolute zero that was to mark the beginning of a new world in which the new “white humanity” would be cleansed of all previous images, leave its former dwellings, and resettle the suprematist Planits, was for Malevich still a matter of artistic imagination. After the October Revolution and two years of civil war, however, not only the Russian avant-garde but practically the entire population of the former Russian Empire correctly perceived that this zero point had actually been reached. The country was reduced to ashes, normal life was utterly disrupted, housing was uninhabitable, the economy had reverted almost to the primitive state, social relations had disintegrated, and life gradually began to resemble a war of everyone against everyone. In the famous phrase of Andrei Belyi, “the victory of materialism in Russia resulted in the complete disappearence of all matter.” Thus suprematism no longer needed to prove what had become an obvious truth, namely that matter as such is nothing. Since it seemed that the apocalypse had come and that things had been displaced to reveal themselves to the apocalyptic vision of all, the avant-gardist and formalist theory of the “shift” that lifted things from their normal contexts and “made them strange” by deautomatizing perception and rendering them “visible” in a special way was no longer merely the basis of avant-garde art but an explanation of the Russian citizen’s everyday experience.

In this unique historical situation the Russian avant-garde perceived not only an undeniable confirmation of its theoretical constructs and aesthetic intuition, but also a singular opportunity for translating them into reality. A majority of avant-garde artists and writers immediately declared their full support for the new Bolshevik state. Because the intelligentsia as a whole were hostile toward this state, representatives of the avant-garde occupied a number of key posts in the new centralized administration of Soviet cultural life. This rush for political power derived not merely from opportunism and the desire for personal success on the part of the avant-garde, but followed from the very essence of the avant-gardist artistic project.

Traditional artists who aspire to re-create various aspects of Nature can set themselves limited goals, since to them Nature is already a completed whole, and thus any fragment of it is also potentially complete and whole. Avant-garde artists, on the other hand, to whom the external world has become a black chaos, must create an entirely new world, so that their artistic projects are necessarily total and boundless. To realize this project, therefore, artists must have absolute power over the world—above all total political power that will allow them to enlist all humanity or at least the population of a single country in this task. To avant-gardists, reality itself is material for artistic construction, and they therefore naturally demand the same absolute right to dispose of this real material as in the use of materials to realize their artistic intent in a painting, sculpture, or poem. Since the world itself is regarded as material, the demand underlying the modern conception of art for power over the materials implicitly contains the demand for power over the world. This power does not recognize any limitations and cannot be challenged by any other, nonartistic authority, since humanity and all human thought, science, traditions, institutions, and so on are declared to be subconsciously (or, to put it differently, materially) determined and therefore subject to restructuring according to a unitary artistic plan. By its own internal logic, the artistic project becomes aesthetico-political. Because there are many artists and projects and only one can be realized, a choice must be made; this decision is in turn not merely artistic but political, since the entire organization of social life is dependent upon it. Consequently, in the early years of Soviet power the avant-garde not only aspired to the political realization of its artistic projects on the practical level, but also formulated a specific type of aesthetico-political discourse in which each decision bearing on the artistic construction of the work of art is interpreted as a political decision, and, conversely, each political decision is interpreted according to its aesthetic consequences. It was this type of discourse that subsequently became predominant and in fact led to the destruction of the avant-garde itself.

When Rodchenko and his group proposed the new program of constructivism¹⁴ in 1919, however, enthusiasm was still overwhelming, and the avant-garde was convinced that the future was in its hands. Thoroughly renouncing the contemplativeness that to some extent could still be found among the first generation of the avant-garde, Rodchenko, Tatlin, and other constructivists proclaimed the work of art to be a self-sufficient autonomous thing with no mimetic relationship to external reality. The model for the constructivist work of art became the machine, which moved according to its own laws. True, in contrast to the industrial machine, the “artistic machine” of the constructivists was, in the begin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Culture of the Stalin Era in Historical Perspective
• Chapter One: The Russian Avant-Garde: The Leap over Progress
• Chapter Two: The Stalinist Art of Living
• Chapter Three: Postutopian Art: From Myth to Mythology
• Chapter Four: Designers of the Unconscious and Their Audience
• Afterword
• Notes