Construct, In Russian, Doesn't Mean Carving Soap

on exhibit at Carpenter Center until Sunday.

TO THE Russians after 1913, construction meant more than building; it was building in a particular manner. To construct was not to carve a piece of Ivory soap (nor English Lavender, as one's taste might be), nor was it just to amass bricks into the shape of a building; rather, to construct was to put parts together emphasizing space, not mass; it was like making a match-stick house.

Possibly, the Russian Constructivists' preoccupation with space (and not with the resultant mass of carving or of modelling), enabled this group of artists to look at society in spatial terms. No longer did the Soviet society have to be a mass that could only be carved away or molded into massive forms, but instead, society was more than pliant; the artist could construct a society; he could create the gestalt rather than merely alter it; the Constructivist was concerned with a new metaphysics in terms of tectonics.

"CONSTRUCTION. Construction must be understood as the coordinating function of Constructivism. If the tectonic unites the ideological and formal, and as a result gives a unity of conception, and the factura is the condition of the material, then the construction discovers the actual process of putting together . . . the formation of conception through the use of worked material. All hail to the Communist expression of material building!" (from Constructivism by Alexci Gan, the first important publication of the Constructivist group's ideology, 1922).

The Constructivists embraced industry as a means to construction, as the Futurists had embraced the present by expression of energy, of motion and of the modern technology. The 1917 Revolution had signaled the end of the old order; the Constructivists embraced the new society based on industrialization. The Constructivist sense of space had broken with the old order or mass, and this Soviet "avant-garde" directed their efforts away from the pedestal arts to the reorganization of the artistic life through a promotion of the new politics and economics: "The streets shall be our brushes the squares our palettes. . . . " (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

Thus moving from the canvas to billboards, the Constructivists designed posters propagandizing the Bolshevik movement: "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" or "Man in the service of technology." Architectural construction, of workers' clubs or radio stations rang with the Constructivist cry, "Art into life!" (Vladimir Tatlin) an antecedent to the Bauhaus declaration, "That design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of life" (Walter Gropius). And growing from these ideas of incorporation of art in life, came "an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its form" (Gropius). Constructivist experiments in typography and layout led to Bauhaus block lettering. Non-objective paintings-Malevitch's Suprematist black squares on white backgrounds, and white on white, or black on black-led to Bauhaus organization and simplication with triangle, square and circle as primary constituents.

Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, the carriers of the Constructivist obsession with space, were the major proponents of Soviet ideas in the Bauhaus. From Russian stage design followed the Bauhausler Oskar Schlemmer, and from Tatlin's chess table and Rodchenko's functional chairs came Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair and Breuer's armchairs. Of course many of these developments ran parallel, and which derived from which is more a question of interaction than origination, such as Mies van der Rohe's model for a Monument to the Third International of 1919-1920.

Today, light is used by artists to make positive space out of void as the Constructivists used descriptive space, a making of positive from a previous void. In much of the optical and kinetic movements, one sees the Constructivist concern for space rather than for mass reiterated, especially in the French group, La Groupe de la Recherche Visuele, that includes such pioneers as La Parc and Agam. From Gabo and Pevsner's use of spatial structure comes spatial drawing as manifested in Alexander Calder's mobiles and stabiles, Anthony Caro's I Beams or even Picasso's wire sculptures.

This Constructivist landmark, in art and architectural development, is well exemplified in a show entitled "Search for Total Construction (U. S. S. R. 1917-1932)," on exhibit until February 14 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A rather flat show, consisting mostly of photographic and pictorial representations of architectural structures (which is unfortunate since this group has had such an influence in spatial concepts), but an important record in visual historical thought. Some of the best examples have come out of Harvard's own museums: the basements of the Busch-Reisinger, the Fogg, Carpenter Center, etc. (e.g., Malevitch, "Construction: Two Views" and Lissitsky, "Study for Booklet on Two Squares"). It is understandable that originals are scarce and not easily obtainable, yet with the emphasis on architecture, a limitation to a few models hardly covers the spatial innovations of Constructivism. A brick reproduction of Rodchenko's "Construction of Distance" (which is almost like a group of I beams constructed of single bricks) could have been simply set up. The show remains massive rather than spatial, but as an episode of history the show is valid.

The change from the Constructivist "avant-garde" back to Realism is dynamically shown in photos of the Competition for the Palace of Soviets in 1932. All Constructivist entries were rejected in preference to a "social realist" structure, not unlike a giant birthday cake with the crowning one candle to-grow-on in the shape of Stalin.

Alexander Rodchenko, whose works include a chess table (in the Carpenter Center show at Harvard) and a spatial structure not unlike Bohr's model of the atom, is currently in a small exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His were some of the first works constructed of actual movement; MOMA's show exhibits his later fascination with photography where he transformed even a simple stack of wood into a spatial statement.

The Soviet Constructivists exhibited some of the first attempts to deal with space, and they did this as artists of society, not as artists of isolated schools; their originality and bold idealism added a new spatial metaphysics to visual thought. Where artists had thought in terms of mass and birthday cakes, they could now think in terms of space and atoms.