Kristin Romberg. Gan's Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 312 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-29853-8.
Reviewed by Stephen Tyler Urchick (Yale University)
Published on H-SHERA (August, 2019)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)
Kristin Romberg delivers an earth-shattering reevaluation of the Russian constructivist discipline of tectonics in her new biography of the art movement’s leading agit-man, Aleksei Gan. In a deft double gesture, Romberg excavates a most marginalized figure who we today might identify as the group’s own audience-engaged arts administrator while also recoding constructivism’s least understood subfield—with its obscurantist overtones of vulcanism and continental drift—as a kind of practice for co-authored creative world building. Romberg undertakes to retell from Gan’s perspective, a perspective occluded by Stalinist character assassinations toward the end of his life, the seminal story behind the 1921 meetings of the First Working Group of Constructivists. Engaging contemporary left-feminist philosophers such as Donna Haraway and geologists like Alfred Wegener in flights of feral interdisciplinarity, Romberg explains how Gan used “art to create relationships between people without letting it be the tool to create islands of power and privilege” through what she terms an “aesthetics of embeddedness” (pp. 68-69, 2).
Consistent with a historiography that treats constructivism as the dress rehearsal for the movement’s “productivist” shift into the applied arts, the book cleaves into these two parts (Gan’s constructivism and Gan’s productivism) after a lucid introduction and summary of Gan’s foundational work organizing mass theatrical performances in the revolution’s first and headiest years (chapter 1). Romberg’s introduction sets out the case for how Gan’s strategy to cultivate the new consumers capable of appreciating the constructivist object was not a universalizing, totalitarian gesture to fashion New Soviet Men and Women. Rather, she maintains that it was Gan’s humble admission that art—and the artist—could no longer remain autonomous. Art for Gan was inextricably interdependent on other people as patrons in a highly socialized, messy working-class culture, there to collectively affirm the world’s first attempt at a truly egalitarian society.
Indeed, chapter 1’s prehistory of Gan’s early career with various Soviet departments for cultural enlightenment reveals how the plan to replace the old subject-object relations of art with the new communist subject-subject relationships of politics resulted and reveled in the “low theory” of the revolution’s “tumultuous havoc” (p. 23). Romberg takes here for her chief example a comparison between Nikolai Evreinov’s more well-remembered reenactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) and Gan’s (ultimately scrubbed) program for the official 1920 May Day parade. Recalling how Russia’s prerevolutionary avant-garde tried so petulantly to get free of reality in a narrow rebellion of the individual against society, Gan chose instead to make his parade into something of a socialist surround—a concurrent performance “the spatial specifications” of which “made it physically impossible to view ... as a spectator” apart (p. 46).
Unlike Evreinov’s scripted Storming of the Winter Palace, spotlit from below as if from the footlamps of a theater, Romberg shows how Gan agitated from the start for an art where the only possible relationship with the work was to be enmeshed within it. He marshaled new audiences to define a “we” that could physically embody, if only for the duration of a planned parade, the communist city of tomorrow. In the first of what will become a characteristic series of self-admittedly Saussurean digressions into the genealogies of Russian words, Romberg demonstrates how Gan’s artistic acts of creation as a community theater organizer—his so-called tvorchestvo (creativity)—was no seductive, artificial delusion (in other words, the near Russian synonym, iskusstvo [art]). It was instead contingent on enlisting a broad base of citizens whom he could think with (coznanie [consciousness]), who would perform the revolution en masse, and who would dissolve the former capitalist reality and replace it with one of their own making.
The book’s singular brilliance resides in how it subsequently draws comparisons between Gan’s practical attempts to think with these audiences rather than for, or upon, them and constructivism’s quintessential attention to working with materials as a whole, or responding to site-specific conditions of display. Romberg herein translates what Gan termed a “tectonic style” into her “embedded aesthetics,” making it arguably more legible for what it is to scholars of modernism today. Chapter 2 focuses on the mythologized meeting of minds that defined constructivism’s structuring disciplines of “construction,” these tectonics, and faktura—the latter a term that levitates between the mere facture of a painting and an entirely new definition for art that emerges from the sheer stuff of its making. Romberg here demonstrates how the caucus of such acclaimed artists as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Karl Ioganson was just “one more agit-job” for Gan in his new role as an ideological commissioner at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) that hosted them (p. 65). In Romberg’s retelling, Gan attended the debates of the Working Group so as to infiltrate the inner front of intelligentsia it represented, shaping the artists’ practice and pushing them to “integrate communism”—in other words, community, with both people and media—into their aesthetic agenda.
Romberg is admittedly light on specific anecdotes for how Gan exactly exerted his influence over these artists, adopting instead a forensic tack. She dusts over the fingerprints of Gan’s way of thinking—as it is now known to readers from the previous chapter and as further elaborated from the text of Gan’s titular manifesto Constructivism (1922)—wherever they seem to stick to the Working Group’s final conclusions. Gan’s sense of being inexorably reliant on other people—herding crowds into Soviet flash mobs or holding office hours for curious lay visitors to INKhUK—led him to militate for precisely that relational notion of medium celebrated by researchers like Selim Magomedov, Christina Lodder, or Maria Gough but ever with little credit to Gan himself. Gan was the one, per Romberg, who argued that the constructivists ought to incorporate those “wicked problems” of design customarily treated as factors “external to the creative process” back into their making, egging them on to work with “material that pushes back” (p. 72). If “Constructivism without tectonics”—that is, a dependence on real, external, contingent factors—“is like painting without color,” Romberg’s unspoken implication is that the historiography that leaves out Gan is all drab and grey and in need of her new coat of paint (p. 74).
The highlight of Romberg’s book comes in chapter 4’s profoundly connoisseurial analysis of the typesetting for Gan’s Constructivism, taking what has historically been recognized as “more of a normal book than an artist’s book” quite seriously as an art object itself and to great effect (p. 108). The chapter does not only pull out and wonkishly organize the booklet’s “four typefaces, whose different sizes and weights add up to a total of ten sets of type,” ultimately condensing this ekphrasis into a beautifully concise summary graphic where readers can see what she says at a glance (pp. 110-12). It furthermore digs quite deeply into the pragmatic circumstances of the linotype printmaking process. Romberg draws a series of downright heroic metaphors between the machine’s ability to cast blocks of molten liquid type on the shop floor to the revolutionary imageries of eruption and smelting and forging, and then links this to Gan’s now-familiar refrains of embeddedness. “The economies of scale necessary to purchase a linotype machine,” Romberg writes, “produced a larger system of interconnected makers,” instead of a gaggle of alienated artisans manually setting letters for pay (p. 119, emphasis added). She convincingly maintains that the form of Gan’s Constructivism followed its ideological function.
The success of Romberg’s chapter on these “typographic and tectonic conditions” behind the booklet is in large part due to her ability—much like a talented lecturer—to keep reminding her audience of all that she has taught it before (p. 107). Chapter 3, for instance, first introduces the volcanic frame of reference needed to later link tectonics to lava and to glowing metal letters, scaffolding one understanding onto another. The book’s most interdisciplinary chapter by far, chapter 3, skips from Greek mythology, to labor theory, to geology, and to the history of architecture. It weaves together a critically minded and, one might say, tectonically intertangled cat’s cradle called straight from Haraway’s own Chthulucene (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).[1] Yet, unlike chapter 4, it does not ever “stay with the trouble,” so to speak, as it keeps picking up and quickly discarding its various art objects—for example, Boris Kustodiev’s 1920 oil painting Bolshevik (pp. 86-87).
These two chapters dramatize two radically different ways of working with art objects, and it is arguably the first of the book’s two main limitations that the “distant” approach of chapter 3 prevails as a whole. Romberg repeatedly demonstrates a reluctance to make like Gan and “think with” objects other than Constructivism itself. While the monograph is more than willing to imaginatively stitch together big concepts with clever analogies and constantly reward readers with that pleasant frisson of recognition, it is hesitant to tease out those same sensuous similarities at the microscale, within an image. For instance, Romberg mentions lava flows and plate tectonics in the same paragraph as she does Kustodiev’s Bolshevik. Yet she is unwilling, however, to go so far as say something like: the black-coated crowds that snake beneath the titular, larger-than-life Bolshevik break up the Haussmannesque housing blocks of Moscow like the fissures from an earthquake, or as if they were the hot tendrils of a dark pyroclastic flow, slaloming downhill.
This reticence recurs enough that it bears mention. In her later discussion of Gan’s film projects (chapter 7), Romberg draws a comparison between a still from director Esfir Shub of reindeer dragging logs and the nineteenth-century painter Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga (1872-73). Romberg uses the comparison to emphasize the backbreaking nature of labor under both tsardom and socialism but also to point out the latter’s promise of new, lighter-than-air modes of dirigible transportation, a near Soviet future teased by Shub in his movie’s next frame. Yet the argument moves so swiftly ahead that Romberg does not stop to notice that the tsarist and the socialist moment are similar in more than the sweat of their brows: that Repin matches Shub’s filmic juxtaposition of reindeer and futuristic dirigible with his own high-tech steamboat floating past the plodding boatmen in the canvas’s far distance. Simply itemizing the painting’s content—like the typefaces of Gan’s Constructivism—could have offered new insights. It could have suggested, for instance, how Shub’s blimp is not “the bright future at the end of a long muddy road” but the history of Russia’s uneven industrial revolution repeating itself: another engineering solution to a social problem that guarantees relief for the masses but delivers just another labor efficiency which keeps the old oppressions in place (p. 199).
These are each individually small and counterfactual complaints but taken together they might very well represent the peril of the pleasure of Romberg’s fearless interdisciplinarity. Citing art historians like Heinrich Wölfflin and Gottfried Semper and Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (1860-62) back in chapter 3 does not always make the monograph particularly art historical in its approach. Would a geologist be similarly skeptical of the book’s application of Wegener’s “revolutionary” theory of plate tectonics to the Soviet moment? While this brisk tempo might simply be a question of focus (the book is, after all, about Gan’s Constructivism, demanding distance elsewhere), it remains a concern worth raising broadly. It warrants a word of caution as regards the increasingly popular practice of sliding through subfields to produce prescient general syntheses, opposed to embedding oneself in one single approach.
The second of the book’s two main limitations resides in its later chapters, and specifically in how they talk about Gan’s legacy. They treat Gan’s cinematic and magazine projects—producing several sumptuous full-color spreads of the entire print runs to Kino-Fot (1922-23) and Contemporary Architecture (1926-30) along the way—and ultimately end on a rather dour note. If Gan tended to win his battles, Romberg concludes, “it was only to lose his war” (p. 223). And Romberg is ever quick to point out that even these tactical successes were always ambivalent at best. His May Day mass action was a “nonevent” (p. 41). He was excluded from the circle of artists who published Lef—a magazine “which achieved a celebrity that [Gan’s] Kino-Fot never” did (p. 176). Gan’s movie Island of the Young Pioneers (1924) “did not demonstrate authentic everyday life, as much as authentic life during an experience of film production” (p. 227).
Despite all her deft attempts to square the circle of why we should study Gan—as another Great Man, a figurehead, who ironically was committed to leveling class distinctions and creating an egalitarian art—Romberg never offers a line as to why we ought to study a failure. The book masterfully contextualizes but does not completely dispel the miasma of hostile press coverage that first biographized the agit-man, at best, as a “hooli-Gan” (p. 213). Rodchenko’s quote that Gan “doesn’t know anything about art” looms large over the text (p. 55). (Literally—it’s the epigraph to chapter 2.) The book leaves Rodchenko’s claim mostly unchallenged, marking a distinction between Gan and “Gan’s artist colleagues” who were “sick and tired” of his propagandizing (p. 56). It is a distinction that might baffle a dramaturg, since Gan also authored the action of his performances and did not just herd extras, and perhaps even the scholars of modern and contemporary art—as there has since emerged a whole cadre of artists in the United States today still committed to what is loosely termed a “social practice.”
This latter observation—that Gan is the bearer of a sensibility far ahead of his time, that the most exciting modernisms of our day began in Russia—should live on, however, as the most bracing contribution of Romberg’s Constructivism. The monograph vigorously indexes the linkages between Gan’s modernism and the definitions of European futurists or America’s Clement Greenberg, even if Romberg’s choices of examples tend to be very white and male and strange for a book so buttressed with feminist theory in its introduction. Far better would have been, say, a comparison between Gan’s May Day “performance demonstrations” and the “seeing difficulties” produced by Yvonne Rainer’s Connecticut Composite (1969) than a comparison of Rodchenko’s Two Circles (1920) and Frank Stella’s Getty Tomb (1959).[2] The monograph needs only to graft some of the heady language of its introduction into a brief, if uplifting conclusion so as to double-down on the relevance of Gan not as the rebel without a cause but as a man ahead of his time.
For like the Soviets, we too will soon have to build a new everyday life to replace our carbon-fueled contemporaneity, dissolve the supposedly eternal truths that make the realistic seem impossible, and undo 150 years of industrialization in 5. The reemergence of an idealistic, progressive socialism in the very heart of socialism’s historic geopolitical rival attests to the timeliness of Romberg’s Constructivism. We will likely not be saved by any technologized silver bullets—Shub’s dirigible or Repin’s steamboat—but cultural technologies. (A paradigm shift!) Accordingly, scholars in the humanities—folks who, perhaps like Gan, probably also know something about art—would do well to take a linotyped page from Gan’s Constructivism and find ways to help creatively co-author this new “social, economic, political, [and] intellectual” reality for our own moment (p. 5). Romberg might well stand in the front ranks of such an avant-garde, as she has written such a tectonically textured testament to Gan—a book that attempts to synthetically respond to the demands of other fields external to history or Slavic studies—as might have made its protagonist proud.
Notes
[1]. Although Romberg is more granular in her citations of Haraway, for example, see “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99.
[2]. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Performance Demonstration,” in Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 199-253.
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Citation:
Stephen Tyler Urchick. Review of Romberg, Kristin, Gan's Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism.
H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54367
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