by Pyzik, Agata
Historically the first avant-garde was trying to bring art back to the everyday, and its practices were eventually to transform political and social reality. In every respect, ‘avant-garde’ is a retrospective, synoptic term, used by critics such as Clement Greenberg (late 1930s), Harold Rosenberg, Peter Burger (since the 1950s), to describe more than just art itself, often conflated with modernism, but also its political context. ‘Avant-garde’ artists were in fact calling themselves the Neues Bauen, Neue Sachlichkeit, Futurists, Constructivists, Expressionists or Dadaists. Later, with the consolidation of Stalinism in the late 1920s USSR, a new style, ‘socialist realism’, was the expression of the spirit of ‘socialism in one country’. Art was supposed to be ‘national in form, socialist in content’.
In recent years, some historians and critics have started to re-examine Sotsrealist artists like Alexander Deineka or Yuri Pimenov, both of whom had participated in the experimental period of Soviet art during the NEP era, before turning back to the style of the nineteenth-century Society of Easel Painters. In their work it was possible both to fulfil the rules of sotsrealism and still retain an ambivalent, uncanny avant-gardism. In Pimenov’s painting New Moscow we see for instance a New York-like landscape of skyscrapers, and a girl in the car riding through this uncanny atmosphere, with the allure of emancipation from the usual feminine fate of kitchen and family. In the example of Sotsrealist artists who managed to retain and entangle the new demands with their previous personality, like Deineka, we can see a continuation of avant-garde stylistics taken into new territory. In many 1930s paintings we can still see the remnants of other, pre Sotsrealist styles, before they were banned, especially Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, with their montage-like, overtly industrial, half abstract compositions experimenting with perspective. But while their earlier works genuinely tried to work out the contradictions within the socialist reality of the 1920s, after that they presented too easy a pictoriality, and a problem-free vision of collective life.
Presently the viewpoint that the Sotsrealist doctrine was simply “imposed” on artists is being actively challenged by art historians. As Christina Kiaer writes in her essay Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour? The case of Aleksandr Deineka, artists were not only victims but also necessarily helped in constituting the predominant ideology. The opening of their art to the widest possible public by the state might have just as well freed the artists from the market necessities. Yet their pictures of the “collective laboring body” create all sorts of negative as much as positive images of the meaning of communism in Russia. As Sotsrealist paintings are both realistic and heavy on metaphor, they are in their idea not dissimilar to the avant-garde, Constructivist idea of a work of art which would use both modernity (photomontage, abstraction) and a literal socialist message (slogans, lettering). Technology meets abstraction, and a photorealism of depiction meets a crass yet optimistic message.
The replacement of the precious collective genius by the sole leader must’ve meant a readjustment - hence the endless production of ‘heroes’. All Soviet art, regardless, was characterized by a positive take on materiality, and extreme juxtapositions. At the same time, Deineka produces the complete vision of the New Person, accentuating physical strength as beauty, which was at the same time, a realisation of Meyerhold’s avant-garde ambitions: ‘the biomechanical actor partook of the discipline of the dance’, through linking the dancer to a good laborer. A distrust in Freudianism was shared both by the avant-garde and sotsrealism, with their biomechanics and focus on materiality. As art historian Hannah Proctor writes, “the oft-repeated Soviet injunction to make sacrifices in the present in order to reap the eventual benefits of the bright Communist future corresponds to Freud’s reality principle, which he defines as the ‘temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.” If we take up this distinction between the critical and automated consciousness, we’ll have the avant-garde and Sotsrealism described quite adequately.
The Russian formalists and constructivists saw the new art movement in terms of how it displayed its modes and devices of operation, art being its own undoing, a defamiliarizing, critical negativity. In sotsrealism the consciousness of an audience was automated, in the Pavlovian sense. Yet sotsrealism was far from simple. It wasn’t only a state, total art, creating a whole with the state apparatus, it was also intended to act dialectically. The dialectical act was constituted when a person was seeing not what is but what should be. Sotsrealism, though claiming realism, was never realistic in the veristic sense. It was projecting the reality that didn’t exist, but was to be created as the final goal of Soviet history. We were anticipating the future of socialism that never came. Also, Sotsrealism is devoted to depicting a time and space richly filled – quite contrary to the stagnant, eventless, empty and wasted time of the reality of socialism. Sotsrealism represses eventlessness, in theory precisely to liquidate the gap between life and art apparently created by formalism. The relation Sotsrealism had with reality was schizophrenic, with its tension between what ‘should be’ and what really is.
4.7 The New Man. A mosaic in the Moscow Metro by Aleksandr Deineka - the unobviousness of Socialist Realism.
Sotsrealism’s main theoretician Maxim Gorky criticized constructivism for being distant from the workers movement, for fetishizing technology, for being too Western and ‘decadent’. This work was now dubbed ‘formalism’, in Germany it was called Degenerate art, and in Anglo-Saxon world, USA and the UK – modernism. In the recent discussions of the legacy of the counter-cultural movement and conceptualism, especially in the post-communist countries, like Poland, it’s is largely referred to as the “avant-garde” and continued to be after the war, as documented in Piotr Piotrowski’s useful compendium on Polish conceptualism of the 1970s, The Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. The so-called second avant-garde after the war was an aesthetic effect of the development of capitalism: on one hand, in America, pop art was a partly critical/fascinated result of the progression of the capitalist market. On the other, it was a result of the invention of the youth in the 50s, the growing independence of the younger generation, developing a critique of society, aesthetic emancipation, anti-market alienation and creating a counterculture against the “establishment”.
The role of art changed: before the war it was mostly a ‘national’ question and, in the case of Poland and many other underdeveloped countries from outside Western Europe, also a ticket to (understood more or less in a Western way) modernity. After the war, art radically changed its meaning, being still nationalistic in form, but in a unified, Soviet way and presiding over its own Soviet version of modernity – at least officially.
The fundamental difference was that whereas the avant-garde found the only confirmation of its existence in a constant, methodical erasure of its own methods, a constant self-erasure, Socialist Realism was searching for what is eternal. Boris Groys’ book was written exactly when the communist construction was falling into ruins. The avant-garde was supposed to create a New Man, to create not only the visual environment, but to change the world itself, and this, as Groys suggests, “destroyed them”. After 1917, with liberalism discredited after wars and pogroms, progressive workers and intelligentsia took the side of socialism and communism as internationalist, emancipatory movements, which made them the front guard of humanity, heirs to the progressive leftists from Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to be Done? American historian Marci Shore calls their engagement in the communist regime a ‘loss of innocence’. Yet what was the alternative, and what innocence can we speak of in the case of those who had just gone through the experience of war, mass killing, revolution and great crisis? Isaiah Berlin writes in Russian Thinkers on their ‘fanatical devotion to ideas’. Perhaps this was the case with Herzen, Chernyshevsky or Trotsky, but not of the white intelligentsia, who didn’t risk nearly enough. Groys’ thesis is that we cannot make the distinction between the early avant-garde and the later sotsrealism, as the generat
ion engaged in Bolshevism was the same who later helped create the total state apparatus and so had a distant role in the crimes of Stalinism.
Let’s remember about the breaks within the avant-garde itself – dada detested utopianism, yet it supported the communist movement in Berlin, and the constructivists in Russia were looked at skeptically by the revolutionary establishment in the 1920s. They were naïve, says Groys, as it is obviously the Party who were really controlling the changes that were taking place, not artists. Groys argues that the same generation of educated elites conceived sotsrealism, and that this realism was brought about by the same kind of future-oriented thinking. Yet, as the ruling class of Stalinism recruited mostly from the generation born in the nineteenth century, they endorsed art with which they were familiar, i.e. the grand scale naturalism and realism of the Tsarist nineteenth and early twentieth century. The problem was that realism became the official, state art not only in Russia, but also in Nazi Germany; that it helped not only to cover a reality of political barbarity, mass murders and famines, but it helped to stabilize and consolidate this power.
Socialist realism was very much connected with the personality of Stalin – and it quickly disintegrated after his demise. After that Russian art (and art within the Bloc in general) went two ways: it copies Western, partly abstract, modern art, which is with time incorporated within the state; or by pursuing conceptual ways, it continues with a realist mode, which in Russia created ‘Sots Art’, a sarcastic version of Western Pop Art, which instead of symbols of consumerism, inverts it and takes up the symbols of real socialism: images of the first secretaries, Soviet rituals and state control expressed at every step of life.
Sots Art mocked the facadism of an unbearable, ritualised Soviet life. On some of the most recognized Sots Art works Western symbols appear, like Coca-cola, next to the rough symbols of Soviet life, predicting already at this point, not only how easy it will be for Western capital to infiltrate and take over the weakened, demoralized structure of late Soviet reality; it also puts them where they belong. All, Lenin, Mao and Coke, belong to the same order of images, the same degraded realm. Nowadays, this naïve juxtaposition of ideologies doesn’t flatter these works, when we’re far more aware of the political value of the real complexities between the capitalist transition and the role that the East played within the post-communist reality in the West.
4.8 Attempting normal life among the ruins of the old world. Wolfgang Staudte, The Murderers are Among Us.
The reason Sots Art was among the most instantly popular exports from the East to the West was the easiness and instant understandability of their communiqués. Similarly, the work of many of the Moscow conceptualists, including the sophisticated installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov or the scornful duo Komar & Melamid, were initially read simplistically, as gestures of resistance to the oppressive Russian reality. We see now that they didn’t simply refer critically to the Soviet reality, but saw already the traps of what is beyond it, of all the capitalist world, and that there’s nothing really oppositional between the myths of Uncle Joe and Uncle Sam.
Inside the Socialist Reality
I should be compelled to abolish reality!
Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities
Yet the critique of avant-garde methods wasn’t always drably primitive obscurantism. The reason we can still consider it today is largely due to György Lukács’ insightful criticisms of so-called bourgeois modernism, in works like The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957). Lukács deeply admired much early modernism, especially Thomas Mann’s bourgeois grand novels. Early on Lukács saw the predicament of modernism as precisely its malaise: it wanted to present the disintegration of a certain world, but at the same time, it indulges itself with the same decadence it’s trying to describe.
What he called the “modernist ideology” underlying modern literature was the contradictory attempt at a rejection of narrative objectivity and the surrender to subjectivity, whose results may vary from Joyce’s stream of consciousness to the studied objective passivity of Musil, or Gide’s ‘action gratuite’. The problem is Lukács doesn’t accept the positive sense of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ found in its negativity. For him, realism ‘aiming at truthful reflection of reality must demonstrate both the concrete and abstract potential of human beings in extreme situations’. Actions then must reveal themselves dialectically, in their becoming. The ‘critical realism’ he proposes was not far off Brecht or the Frankfurt school’s idea of the partial, potential unveiling of an artwork’s reality, by which they expected to inspire and activate the reader to become the part of the story.
For Lukács, modernism didn’t have enough of an educational, parable-like quality. He didn’t reject experimentalism per se, as we can see in his lucid words on Musil. The latter is quoted saying that although one could tell without doubt that his Man Without Qualities takes place between 1912-1914, he ‘has not, [he] insists, written a historical novel. I am not concerned with actual events. Events, anyhow, are interchangeable. I am interested in what is typical, in what one might call the ghostly aspect of reality.” The problems with Lukács’ doctrine start with his criticism of Western ‘degenerate’ modernist art. In his critique ‘Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann’, pointing out the former’s decadence, isn’t he merely repeating the arguments of the brown-uniformed gentlemen from two decades earlier? Lukács is of course too sophisticated for that. Yet his idea of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, where a socialist realist work is the one speaking of socialism from the inside, is deeply dubious.
Lukács was no Zhdanov and saw the great tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet, but, as with Musil, treated this as an advance rather than a difficulty. What Lukács was rejecting in modernism was dictated by his sensing how easily modernist devices can be transformed basically into an aestheticization of politics. This must be in the end a failure, because the recognition of art’s value must lose set against the necessity of art and literature to have a proper effect on reality - and such effects cannot be planned. In theory, these works would be playful, when in practice, Sotsrealist literature was anything but: rigid ‘production’ novels replaced any expression of art which didn’t have the desired direct meaning. Yet Lukács did understand the doubly contradictory nature of the avant-garde (self creation and self-destruction), and wanted the new socialist art to avoid its negative effects. According to Lukács, the work of art must represent totality as well as legibility. He objected to the avant-garde idea of the aesthetic of fragments (practiced by the Russian avant-garde of Constructivist provenance and Objectivist circles in Germany), which will be only made legible within the dialectical process of understanding by the audience, actively participating in the constitution of meaning, a so-called “critical realism”.
His theories were recognized in the DDR especially, where they became a part of official national aesthetics. The “anti-modernist” programme of Lukács was taken up and discussed by the academics and literary critics, since this ‘pre-modernism as realism’ became an obligatory art in socialist republics until the mid-1950s at least. In cinema, this expressed itself in thousands of films, whose sole purpose was to be screened for the workers in the factory cinemas. In socialist realist films, like novels, you had the epics about Production and Construction (Aufbauroman) and depicting the development/arrival into socialism on a mass scale. Yet these were the Nachgeboren, to quote the famous poem by Brecht, ‘To Those Born Later’. Was it really too late?
With cinematic sotsrealism, the problem is that the actual examples of this cinema are often unwatchable today apart from as curiosities of the era. Let’s take as an example 1940’s First Horse - Breakthrough on the Polish Front 1920, which was recently shown as part of the Panslavisms festival in Warsaw, where it was to be an antidote to the anti-Bolshevik contemporary superproductions. Its astounding schematism, boredom and systematic lying about history (with the sudden insertion of Tova
risch Stalin into events in which he didn’t participate) made it very difficult to watch. On the other hand, it could produce films that are quite fascinating. Take for instance several works by the Polish-Jewish director Aleksander Ford, who in the 50s became the omnipowerful boss of Polish cinematography, like Border Street, about Jews in wartime Warsaw, saving themselves throughout the war, or Five from Barska Street, about a gang of petty criminals that turn into Stakhanovites. The first of these especially presents an interesting counter-narrative to the typical Holocaust film, where Jews are always powerless victims. Socialist realist film didn’t always mean the same thing, and largely depended on the talents of its creators. You had also many liminal cases: such is Generation, the first full length Andrzej Wajda film (1954), which opens in many ways The Polish Film School, in which the young director is trying to “cheat” his bosses (with Ford as the leader) that he’s making a sotsrealist film, while smuggling a new, more neorealistic, psychological style and also a less propagandized version of history. The film tells the story of the last few years of the war in Warsaw, with the group of young friends, who fight and try to survive. While characters still have “proper” proletarian backgrounds and there’s no mention of the Home Army, the sheer style, authenticity and lack of pomposity of the film made it a breakthrough of Polish cinema.