The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution

by Maria Gough

The Artist as Producer reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s—the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow—Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of artists to call themselves Constructivists. Her lively narrative ranges from famous figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko to others who are much less well known, such as Karl Ioganson, a key member of the state-funded INKhUK whose work paved the way for an eventual dematerialization of the integral art object.

Through the mining of untapped archives and collections in Russia and Latvia and a close reading of key Constructivist works, Gough highlights fundamental differences among the Moscow group in their handling of the experimental new sculptural form—the spatial construction—and of their subsequent shift to industrial production. The Artist as Producer upends the standard view that the Moscow group's formalism and abstraction were incompatible with the sociopolitical imperatives of the new Communist state. It challenges the common equation of Constructivism with functionalism and utilitarianism by delineating a contrary tendency toward non-determinism and an alternate orientation to process rather than product. Finally, the book counters the popular perception that Constructivism failed in its ambition to enter production by presenting the first-ever case study of how a Constructivist could, and in fact did, operate within an industrial environment. The Artist as Producer offers provocative new perspectives on three critical issues—formalism, functionalism, and failure—that are of central importance to our understanding not only of the Soviet phenomenon but also of the European vanguards more generally.

Genres: Art, History, Art History

268 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2005

Reviews

[Philip Cherny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating topic in terms of the subject matter, but unfortunately it could use some better editing. I found the first chapter to be perhaps the most poorly written part of the book, as stupid errors kept distracting me from fully enjoying it. The author makes some intriguing arguments, some less compelling than others. At times Gough pushes a case too hard to drive home a few select points that really do not seem very cogent, but conveniently fit within her broader agenda. The publisher really could have been more sensitive to displaying the correct images with the corresponding text (this is an art-history book after all!). I had to go online and look up a few images that were described at length in the text but for whatever reason not included. Other times they displayed unnecessary superfluous images that had little to do with the text. But the book overall seems pretty inconsistent in terms of poor or excellent writing and editing. But my complaints with this book are *primarily* issues with the editing. I still felt I learned something from the read, and the book offers a fresh take on an intriguing and still relatively understudied period in early modern art history.