ART006: Week 6 Readings

Trotsky, “Literature and revolution”

• Art does not necessarily need to be brought into life
• Historical vision is necessary
• Lathe-like art will be the instrument of the artistic and social development of the asses and their aesthetic enjoyment for years to come
• Rejecting art as abstract takes away the power of art as a social tool
• Photography and film are important educational instruments
• The deeper literature is, the ore significantly and dynamically it will be able to “picture” life
• Futurism rescued literature from the banal
• The LEF should be canonized as Communist Art
• The Party cannot have pre-determined positions on Art without taking the time to investigate and establish its position
• The Party has sufficient insight into the political use of art but no more
• The Futurists are a necessary link to the future uses of art by the Party
• Futurism is still trapped by the little world that spawned it
• Art cannot live and cannot develop without a flexible atmosphere of sympathy around it
• Psychology is the result of social conditions
• Evolution is dialectical
• The new tendency in art negates the preceding one

Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto

• Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
• It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
• The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
• In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.
• it has simplified class antagonisms
• Society moving toward the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat
• The manufacturing system took over the feudal system
• Mechanization and Modern Industry took over the manufacturing system
• Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.
• The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

Rius, Marx for Beginners

• The Manifesto is a direct appeal to the working class
• The working class must emancipate itself
• Modern Industry has established the world market
• Naked self-interest as the culmination of the bourgeoisie
• Free trade has supplanted all other freedoms
• The output of production is inversely proportional to the repulsiveness of the work
• As the need for skilled labor decreases, the role of women in production increases
• All workers are instruments of labor
• With the development of industry, the greater the numbers of the proletariat
• The incessant improvement of machinery makes the wages of the proletariat precarious
• The union of the workers is the fruit of the class struggle
• The proletariat is the only real revolutionary class
• The distinguishing characteristic of the Communism is not the abolition of property per se but the abolition of bourgeoisie property
• Private property is only for 1/10^th of the population
• Capital needs workers but workers don’t need capital
• Women are consumed just like other forms of capital
• Public and private prostitution must be abolished
• The wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.
• The proletariat woman cannot fully engage in social production since domestic duties would suffer
• The modern individual family is based on the enslavement of the woman
• In the family, the an represents the bourgeoisie and the woman the proletariat
• The first step in revolution is to raise the proletariat to the ruling class
• Capitalism is incapable of resolving the problems of humanity
• All systems that carry the seeds of class war will eventually disappear

Tatlin, “Report”

• “production is splintered into chance productive units”
• Seeking to produce new materials the are inspired by and produced from the worker class
• Color as coating material
• Specific color fields in various cultural epochs
• Form as a result of material volume
• The development of spatial perceptions from recent tendencies in art to the counter-relief
• The shaping of materials in the conditions of contemporary everyday life

Punin, “The Monument to the Third International”

• the monument was to be purely creative form wed to a purely utilitarian form
• the structure contains 3 large glass structures rotating at different speeds: the lower structure as a cube rotating once a year containing the legislature, the middle structure as a pyramid rotating once per month used for executive functions and the top structure as a cylinder rotating once per day used as a resource center
• “A social revolution by itself does not change artistic forms, but it does provide a basis for their gradual transformation.”
• Past art styles only appear modern in the their economic contexts
• The communist state will initially use classic art and forms as a means of propaganda but the classical forms emphasize the heroics of the individual
• “A monument must live the social and political life of the city and the city must live in it.”
• 3 unities of contemporary plastic consciousness: material, construction and volume
• Tatlin has produced a new monumental form
• The monument to the Third International indicates a break with the past, decadent art and is an international event
• The structure is analogous to the workers’ struggle
• The square is the place for agitation, games and for festivals.
• Utility of form is nothing other than the organization of its content.
• “An art devoid of creative idealism which is the content of intuition, is an art of impure rhythm.”

Rodchenko, “Slogans”

• Construction = organization of elements, is a modern concept
• Art is a branch of science
• Art must serve a practical as well as aesthetic purpose

Rodchenko and Stepanova, “Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists”

• the Constructivists seek the communistic expression of material structures
• scientific communism based on historical materialism
• works must be grounded in reality
• 3 disciplines: tectonics, faktura and Constructivism
• The realization of design through the use of worked material

LEF, “Whom is LEF Alerting?”

• The LEF is alerting the members of the LEF, the supposed “true” artists of the Revolution
• The production of the LEF was superior in all ways but could not be realized in the bourgeoisie or the war
• The calls to the Futurists, Constructivists, production artists, Formalists, students and masters to put their talents toward colossal things.
• The LEF is to guide and protect the efforts of the “true” artists of the Revolution

Osborne, Philosophy for Beginners

• A dialectic starts with a thesis and an antithesis to create a synthesis of both
• The synthesis has a another antithesis and a new synthesis is created
• This process is repeated until the absolute idea is reached