FASTER THAN A SPEEDING TIMEPIECE (TIME TRAVEL AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM)

"Time... is only something we have invented for ourselves. It's a trap. I wanted to destroy that trap."
- Nicholas Roeg

“Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.” 
- Marx

(A sort of sequel to this, though the order you read them doesn’t really matter.)

Chronic Argonauts 

There must have been a first time travel story. Even time travel has to have a starting point.

And that’s because the passage of time was originally held to be illusory, a trick caused by restricted perspective. Time isn’t really time at all, but just another dimension in space. “Second sight”, prophesying and all the rest wasn’t a form of travel but an enhanced ability to see. Another term for a shaman or a soothsayer is a seer. And the seer has an elevated viewpoint to see from, which allows him or her to see across time. It’s like we all live down in a deep valley, but they inhabit a tower. They can simply see further.

People can confuse this with predestination. But it’s not the same. Predestination presumes linear time, as if all is scripted in advance, your fate lying inexorably in wait for you like the station awaits the train. Here both time and space are part of the web of wyrd, where tugging on one part will cause waves across the rest. This is how Brian Bates had his sorcerer character Wulf explain it, in his novel ’The Way of Wyrd’ (1983):

“It is a mistake to assume that events far apart in time are thereby separate. All things are connected as in the finest web of a spider. The slightest movement on any thread can be discerned from all points in the web…

“Omens frighten the ordinary person because they believe them to be predictions of events that are bound to happen: warnings from the realm of destiny. But this is to mistake the true nature of omens. A sorcerer can read omens as pattern-pointers, from which the weaving of wyrd can be admired and from which connections between different parts of patterns can be assumed…

“There are no laws. The pattern of wyrd is like the grain in wood, or the flow of a stream; it is never repeated in exactly the same way. But the threads of wyrd pass through all things and we can open ourselves to its ripples as it passes by. When you see ripples in a pool, you know that something has dropped into the water.” 

Linear time, causal events, all arose later. Along with notions of social progress. Time travel, relying on linear time like a train needs tracks, became conceivable as a consequence of this. But whenever it was, it’s long since been lost to time. So let’s ask a more precise question – when was the first time machine story?

With time travel we’re time’s passengers, susceptible to its whims. If people crossed time it was often not through their own doing but by the whim of fate, by supernatural or just plain mysterious means. In Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle (1819) time literally runs away with him, he’s beguiled to discover years have passed in what to him was a night. In what’s become his signifying feature, even his beard has grown long. But that’s a more extreme version of an experience we all have. You have it every time you see a clock and say “what, quarter to five already?”

Which places Irving’s story in a strange interchange. It happens to Van Winkle essentially because he drinks magic mead. But he doesn’t just reappear in a later iteration of his home town, small children now adults and so on. In a much-forgotten feature, the American revolution happens in his absence. Time hasn’t just advanced, society has changed.

Things developed from there. But development is never even. Buck Rogers’ 1928 origin, for example, effectively rips off Rip Van Winkle to get its hero into the world of the future where the action is. Nevertheless, the time machine dictates to time, just as the car engine lets us dictate to space. If we have never invented an actual time machine, their fictional existence has always been linked to real contemporary levels of technology. Wells' 'The Time Machine' (1895) claimed to feature “the first of all Time Machines”, and this has since become a widespread belief. But though with ’Time Machine’ he may have coined the term, Wells himself had already written the shorter, lesser-known 'The Chronic Argonauts' (1888). And more timely still was Edward Page Mitchell, with 'The Clock That Went Backward' (1881).

As with Irving, Mitchell’s story inhabits an interchange. It’s based around a predestination paradox which enables the revolt of the Netherlands, which it strongly suggests was a precondition of American Independence – the path of progress being paved. It strongly links time travel with clocks, to the point of suggesting it could only be possible after clocks were invented.

Yet it only portrays time travel working backwards, through a clock whose two operatives are themselves elderly. (It’s said of the Aunt owner: “The old lady was surrounded by old-fashioned things. She seemed to live altogether in the past.”) And while time is only portrayed as linear, as if it has a reverse to be added to forward gear, there are also verbal hints of wyrd time: “Past, present, and future are woven together in one inextricable mesh.” Ultimately, though some pseudo-scientific explanations are offered up, it’s really a piece of weird fiction.

But it’s central feature, up there in the title, is a piece of magical thinking about technology - as if the thing that measures time could somehow also control it.

Unlike Mitchell’s august Aunt, Wells made his protagonists respectively a brilliant but remote inventor and a Victorian explorer. But there’s the same emphasis on time travel as if it were another direction in space. In ’The Time Machine’ the original working model is even described as the size of a clock. All of which reflects the increased prevalence of clocks in our lives by that point. Its controls are literally a forward and a reverse gear.

The globe had become increasingly demarcated and colonised. So, after space, time was next to fall under human dominion. The shift from agricultural to industrial work brought with it the imposition of clock time onto the working day, to a degree not previously conceived. Standardised 'railway time', co-ordinated between towns, was introduced between 1840 and 1855. The first commercial telegraph arrived in 1837, with early lines often running beside railways. By 1861 the coasts of America had been connected. But there’s more...

Eadward Muybridge's photographic motion studies had started in 1878, just before Mitchell’s story. Previously, anything moving too fast for the human eye was simply ungraspable. Cameras still couldn’t snap in such rapid succession. But by setting them up in series, triggered to click seconds apart, he found he could break actions down into analysable steps. For the first time, we could for example figure out how a horse actually ran (see above). And it turned out artistic depictions had been doing it wrong all along. The essence of time had been that it passed, a succession of moments which slipped inexorably through your fingers. Now it could be grasped, could be scrutinised.

The Royal Academy’s ‘Degas And the Ballet’ exhibition associated Impressionist art with photography, and in particular with Muybridge. This movement gained its name from Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (1874, above). Which was itself named because, in the early morning haze, so little of the topography of the harbour could be discerned. It wasn’t a mapping of a place, but an impression of a scene. The sun didn’t light the subject, like a spotlight on a stage or table lamp above a writing desk. The sunrise and the light effects it produced, these were the subject of the work.

Colours were sometimes placed adjacently on the canvas, to mix together in the viewer’s eye, duplicating the way we perceive the real world. As said another time Monet often painted the same subject in series, at different times and under different conditions, purely to capture the changes.

This fed from twin developments. Modernism was about developing the subjective view of the artist, art’s job no longer to reflect a supposedly objective reality. But at the same time, scientific enquiry had become increasingly interested in the effect of light upon vision. Griselda Murray Brown argued:”Many of the artistic movements of the early Twentieth century were in essence an attempt to open visual art up to the dimension of time.” (’Music to the Eyes’, Art Quarterly, Summer ‘15). True, but too late. This was something which started in the late Nineteenth.

Nature had previously been thought of as timeless. Yes of course seasons passed, but as part of the eternal round. Time was circular, it simply served up more of the same. Whereas Impressionism was described as “the discovery of the present moment.” The world was no longer set, endlessly reiterating according to custom and precedent, but transitory.

Think of time as people passing you on a crowded street, a succession of moments, each with its unique character, swiftly replaced by the next. Once our activities just seemed to reproduce what had already happened, like adding another sedimentary layer to the weight of history. Now everything was happening fleetingly, for the first time, and soon to be replaced by something else. To misquote Dylan, whatever you needed to paint, you’d better paint it fast.

And Impressionism spread quickly. Pissarro recalled feeling encouraged when he first encountered Monet’s work, but always maintained he’d already been entertaining the same notions. So it may not be co-incidental that, much like Muybridge, this new approach relied on technical innovations. Earlier generations of painters had made at most preparatory sketches in situ, then knocked the painting up back in the safe confines of the studio. Now, newly built trains took the Impressionists to newly accessible country locations. And the technology that took them there also gave them new tools to depict what they saw, such as paint in portable metal tubes. Containing new manufactured paints, literally brighter than before. Those vibrant colours we all exalt in, partly they just can out of a can.

Gombrich, in ’The Story of Art’, commented “the painter was a man who could defeat the transitory nature of things, and preserve… any object for posterity”. Abandoning that to try and capture the moment was like relinquishing your main power. 

Yet it’s analogous to the way that, pre-Romanticism, few saw anything aesthetic in nature. When crossing the Alps, it was common to draw the shutters on your carriage, to keep out the awful sights. It was human technological developments which made nature seem comparatively less threatening, to the point it could be framed as a scenic view. A similar thing is true of transience. Before it could be captured, it was best not thought of. Now Monet could talk of “the instability of a universe that changes constantly under our very eyes”, not from fear but relish for the challenge.

And what happens when we apply this new concentrated sight not to nature but human society? Scientific enquiry was no longer broad in scope, like mapping a new continent, but acute – aiming to home in on something. Producers of goods had originally been independent craftsmen. Merchants were essentially their customers, even if their intent was to sell on what they bought to other customers further down the line. 

But by increments the craftsmen would fall under the employment of the merchants. Who would now supply their raw materials, own their premises and pay them at guaranteed fixed rates. In this way the relationship of worker to capitalist, which now seems so inherent to production, was first founded.

Yet there’s a twist to this. The early capitalist’s motive was to regularise supply, to maintain profits. But, lacking the producer’s craft skills, he could at most stand and watch the worker work. His control was really only over input and output. How the worker worked still lay under his own control. Gradually, mechanisation changed that.

Marx referred to this as the formal subsumption of labour by capital yielding to the actual. He wrote: “Through the subordination of humanity to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives.”

Ever prescient, he was writing in 1863. But it reached it’s apogee with Taylorism, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of ‘scientific management’, which effectively began in 1882. What Muybridge did to the horse, break a previously unanalysable blur of activity down into a discrete set of measurable steps, just a few years later Taylor was doing to the craft worker. The gestation of the production line is here. And with it time and money became inextricably entwined. Phrases like “I can’t spare the time” became common parlance. As EP Thompson said of the era: “Time is now currency, not passed but spent.” (‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, 1967.)

Time On Tracks

George Pal's film adaption of Wells' 'The Time Machine' (well, sort of) came out in 1960. Let’s focus here on the time travel scene itself. (Elaborated from a much briefer sequence in the novella.) The machine itself (barely described by Wells) is of course made to look deliberately quaint and Victorian, essentially an easy chair with a clock, calendar and gears attached to it. The brass plate with the manufacturer’s name is a particularly nice touch. (Even if it raises the question how an extended warranty would work.)

But it all accentuates the notion of the time machine being stationary in space, sitting still in the basement as all changes around it. Like the machine, time only has a forward and reverse gear. Time’s a direction, just a different kind of forward to the one space has. Imagine instead of reading down a page of a book you pressed through it. You’d come out at the same point on another page, further along. And where the time machine will take you is just as pre-set as skipping ahead in a book.

An earlier post looked at how the Hartnell era of ‘Doctor Who’ butted against the limits of Fordist time. What was there accentuated is here assumed.

But there’s another element… look less at the chief barometer of his travel – the shop front mannequin, with her raising and lowering hemline – than how it’s shown. Its double framed, first through his own window and then the shop window across the street. These devices are used to convey the passing of time, they happen to a character in the film. 

Yet at those points he's not really within the film at all. He's an observer. He's like a member of the audience who managed to get the most front of front row seats, but screens still separates him from the action. Pretty much every member of the 1960 audience would have seen fast-froward and time-lapse film. But pretty much all would have witnessed it passively, something that wouldn’t change until the first video recorders two decades later.

Which encounters and over-rides the most obvious objection. Of course the time travel section is simply built around the technical possibilities of the day. Fast forward film and time lapse photography was what they had. How else could they have done it? They filmed it not to convey any kind of temporal philosophy they may have conceived of, but simply in a way they could.

But the framing shows that’s the point. It’s not that these kind of technical developments constrain our perceptions. In many ways they do the opposite, enable us to see things in a new way. But by enabling they restrict them to what’s thinkable. It’s like building a road network. You can drive places you couldn’t before. But the places you can’t drive, you’re less liable to think about.

To quote Marx again: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.” 

And that one direction was now… well, directional. It had a forward and back. We’ve seen in the previous instalment how that related to working life. But it was equally true of our leisure pursuits. TV, for example, then had just one channel to choose from.

A Remote Control For Reality

But if linear time was a conception of the Fordist era, of a job-for-life endured on a production line, how do we tell time today? A more recent development is bullet time. Defined by Wikipedia as “a visual effect or visual impression of detaching the time and space of a camera (or viewer) from that of its visible subject.” In general, it’s used to describe two film effects at once - slow motion combined with camera pan, so we traverse moving objects as if they were effectively still.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be captured on film. Take Cornelia Parker’s 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View' (1991), of which she said “it’s not the explosion, it’s more the contemplation, you know, the quiet contemplation of these things in the air.” It’s hard to think of anything more reactive than an explosion. Yet here we can stand in a gallery and mull it over, even wander around it.

It could theoretically have been made at any time, all you really need are debris and string. (Plus, presumably, enough patience to assemble it.) She genuinely tried to recreate a moment from the explosion, presumably captured from some hi-res photograph. True the artwork doesn’t rely on this, just as galloping horses could be painted before Muybridge. But the work comes from a culture which has absorbed those technologies.

A more popular example would be the Centre Parcs ad which recited the WH Davies poem ’Leisure’, (1916) (“What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare”) as squirrels’ leaps and swans' wing-flaps are soothingly slowed down. The poem is of course a cod-Romantic chill pill, not worth examination. Its conceit is that we live a “poor life”, but the poem itself can act as medicine for this, allowing us “to stand and stare”. But what’s significant about it here is the context, it’s combination with a technical innovation. What if you could hold a remote up to life and press freeze frame, every time life gets too hectic?

However, in general use bullet time has another element. In what’s almost a reversal of Pal’s film sequence its most used to insert a character into the drama, who has the same slo-mo perspective as the viewer. A character so likely to be found dodging bullets that it became named after such a thing.

You can see an early use in the video to Roni Size and Reprazent's 1997 track 'Brown Paper Bag'. With its payphones and box TVs it may now look of its era. But then the first Matrix film was only two years later. It lacks the whiplash pan and most of the time just ‘scratches’ time back and forth like a DJ cueing vinyl, a kind of 'budget bullet time'.

But the basis is here. It sets up a busy bustling city-time, which is buffered for everyone but our hero. And he manages this by technology, by possessing a kind of remote control for reality. Which looks like a cosmic version of a Kinder egg. The key image comes and is gone in a few seconds, of a car hurtling by a traffic queue.

Imagine chronokinesis (power over time) and time travel have become distinct things. Time was once seen as the ultimate levelling measure. Exam contestants needed to be allocated the same amount of it wherever they sat, and so on. But now we have the notion that time can somehow work for you differently to the way it works on others. Time is not universally speeded or slowed, like a record played at different speeds. Time has become subjective. Yet the irony is that these impossibly fast reflexes are also those of us, the passive viewer. The protagonist is identified with us not just from their character or actions, but in a material way.

It’s the Matrix films with which bullet time is most associated. And instead of a power-granting device Neo evolves the ability to see in bullet time - just as he sees past the consensus-reality world of illusory slumber he's been in. And this becomes more literal still with Quicksilver in the X-Men films. Time constrains others, while allowing you to pass idly through it, picking its fruits. Which is underlined by his slacker character (a break from previous depictions), his ability to mix work and leisure by goofing off mid-mission. His role in the film even works like this, he’s not a full-time worker like a regular team member but a hired contractor. He's analogous to Kevin Bacon’s superior mobile connection allowing him to avoid “buffer face”, while others freeze-frame in the street.

Perhaps what’s bizarre is that a form of viewing, which is of course shared by the whole cinema audience, in this way becomes individualised. The remote control is of course not a device you have in the cinema, it’s confined to the home. This is achieved by its becoming associated with the perspective of a single character – in fact it becomes a super-power of the hero. As TV Tropes put it: “It is a convenient way to depict Super Reflexes, by allowing the audience to experience the same powers of enhanced perception that the protagonist is using.”

The Time Machine’s fast-forward worked by a lever. Yes, it took a genius inventor to create it, but now it’s built anyone could pull that lever. Davies’ poem is predicated on its curative powers for anyone who cares to read it. Roni Size had a cosmic Kinder egg. Whereas bullet time by definition divides up the frame, into those inherently endowed with chronokinetic powers and those without.

Neo-liberalism isn't sold on the notion that we can adapt to these new social conditions we find ourselves in, but that you can - that this is your chance to get ahead and leave the bewildered herd behind. The Victorians had seen time frugality and ‘industriousness’ as a form of virtue, which would benefit any who applied it to their lives. Now society is like a lottery, predicated on winners and losers. So even social conditions come to be seen as individualised, where the side we’re on is determined not by morality so much as identification. The elect few gain the perspective of bullet time against the mass still stuck in their Fordist linear time tracks.

But if that doesn't convince you, consider this. Bullet time is simultaneously a description of our modern perception of time and a registered trademark of Warner Brothers. What could be more neoliberal than that?

‘DORA MAAR’

Tate Modern, London

”Nothing is as surreal as reality itself.”
Brassai

Masks and Stars

Changing her name from the less memorable Henriette Markovitch, Dora Maar’s placed herself within the Surrealist inner circle with her photography. She was herself photographed by Man Ray (who told her she couldn’t become his assistant as there was nothing he could teach her), had Paul Eluard dedicate a poem to her, conducted an affair with Picasso… okay, the last one might not be terribly unusual.

But more pertinent to her work might be her sharing a darkroom with Surrealist photographer Brassai while working as an assistant to fashion photographer Harry Ossip Meerson. The fashion work, true, she took on for the cash. And the show doesn’t shy from explaining that this was an era of “body discipline”, where articles on fitness, health and hygiene predominated. Nevertheless, there didn’t follow the distinction between day job and dark room activity that you might think.

As both Surrealist and glamour images are unconcerned with realism, they’re not just composed - they’re ostentatiously arranged. Figures sport fixed and defined poses, with shadows placed so firmly they become part of the composition. In one (untitled, 1935, above) a glamorous model who seems about to take a curtain call, looking every inch a star, has her head replaced by an actual star.

In another (also 1935) a face-mask is held away to reveal precisely the same face beneath. It illustrates Wilde’s famous credo “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” We should stop seeing masks as hiding selves and start seeing them as instead creating selves.
But it’s more than motifs jumping across genres, there’s a strong accordance between the mood of Maar’s fashion and Surrealist work. They’re both glamorous, in the sense of associated with heightened states. (And we should remember that at the time the Surrealists thrilled to the ‘irrationality’ of Hollywood films and advertising art.)

Appealingly there’s one image, ’The Years Lie In Wait for You’ (c. 1935, above) which shows a spider’s web superimposed over a model. It’s thought this was commissioned work, to sell an anti-ageing cream. But no-one’s sure, and the story’s complicated by the model being Maar’s Surrealist compatriot Nusch Eluard.

While ’Untitled (Hand-Shell)’ (1934, above) not only retains elements from ’Untitled Element For Fashion Photograph’ (also above, from the same year) it keeps much of the glamour - a manicured hand displayed under perfectly arranged lighting. It’s a strong enough image to make it onto the show’s poster. The chief difference is that the hand isn’t left as a separate object but linked to the shell. And as the image somewhat resembles a snail, it takes us a second to realise the impossibility of it. It doesn’t shock, like so many Surrealist images, so much as subvert, sneak up on us.

The disembodied hand is something of a staple of horror films, often as a kind of negative window onto the soul. It’s associated with amoral grasping, what we’d do without head or heart to guide us. But that doesn’t seem to fit here at all. One reading would be to see this as a truncated timeline of evolution, that we crawled from the sea then came to paint our nails. But the image is ambiguous; even though the hand stretches from the shell, it’s still possible to read the timeline backwards.

The collage ’Untitled (Danger)’ (1936, above) borrows from Ernst’s montages taken from popular magazines. Though he would normally manipulate what he found, adding or over-pasting elements. Society figures would come to sport bird heads or bat wings, while still sitting smartly in their drawing room. Maar juxtaposes two figures merely by placing them against a new background, the full extent of her alterations. So, much like the hand shell, our initial reaction is to try and parse it as an integral image.

And even after we’ve given up on that, it’s easy enough to image either figure in the setting of their original pulp magazine. But set against the softly lapping shore their histrionic poses look absurd. (More so for the lack of interaction between them.) It’s similar to meeting someone in real life who behaved as though they were in some genre adventure story.

The Weight of Absence

A very early photo, ’Le Mont St. Michael’ (1931, above), of a monastery cloister and described as her “first significant commission”, establishes a theme taken up in much of her later work. And it’s, I kid not, absence. What’s going on in that photo, with its space so empty but for those ominous shadows?

It’s not that something is about to happen. If fact you could almost will for something to happen, just to break the overpowering spell. When horror films switch from the atmospheric set-up to actually revealing the monster, it can come as a relief. Something often even built into the film, the revelation we’re at least dealing with a specific, defined thing renders it part-way to being defeated. This image is more the sensing of absence as a presence, the way you can realise you’re not carrying something you should be.

Which is common in Surrealist art. Objects are sometimes arranged in order to convey a central absence. Perhaps it suggests that in the object-oriented world of the bourgeoisie the irrational needs no place to hide, in fact empty space is its natural habitat. Perhaps it combines with, and extends, child animism, to the point where even absence becomes a form of life. But ultimately trying to rationalise it is paradoxical, for it literally involves focusing on nothing. Which is perhaps the point.

And you can see the echo of this image in ’Silence’ (1935/6, above), a title which is of course also a form of absence. The figures don’t fill or dominate the tunnel, but are more littered along it, like punctuation to a missing sentence.

The Surreal Lies in the Streets

We then learn the industrious Maar had a third string to her bow, she was also taking street photography. Against the background of the Depression, this era saw frequent fights between left and right (yeah, hard to imagine today), making the street a contested zone. And like many Surrealists Maar was quite partisan in those struggles, involved in campaigns and attending rallies. Many of these photos are straightforward reportage. But others, despite being entirely unaltered snaps of things she saw, are definitely Surrealist.

Take ’Untitled (Man Looking Inside a Pavement Inspection Door)’ (1935, above). An entirely explicable image, it does also resemble the Surrealist motif of a hole opening up in reality. Smartly, the image is cropped so the background figure is also headless. But it’s perhaps too smart, too witty, too close to a gag to be thought fully Surreal. However, others are more lyrical, more suggestive…

’After the Rain’ (1933, above) evokes so transient a moment there’s almost something Impressionist about it. That long-shadowed late afternoon will soon dissolve into dusk, the glistening pavement will dry, and so on. But it’s more about the passing of a mood than of the moment. And this is conveyed by the figures. Partly, by passing… by already having passed through the scene they enhance the sense of transience. But not only is one a child, the shot is taken from a low angle, suggesting their perspective. And children are more receptive to such spirits of the moment.

The capitalist city is arterial, functional, built for passing through. It’s divided neatly into zones, with mechanisms to get people and other units between those zones, according to schedules. The tendency is to reject the city with the capitalist. However the Surrealists instead re-imagined it. The city wasn’t a way to get to work on time, but a forest of symbols, a creator of chance encounters. The many elements… flow of vehicles and people, different architectural styles, times of day, weather patterns… each combine into a unique combination, and then another which overwrites the last.

To drift through the city without aim, going where you’re taken, that was thought a Surrealist activity in itself. Cities are for our senses the gift that never stops giving, an unending accumulation of impressions. We’ve stopped ourselves up so we didn’t have to notice any more. We need our eyes opening again, and this is what Surrealism is for.

The point isn’t to make art, or even change the nature of art. It’s to cure us from that affliction, by any means necessary. Louis Aragon insisted “our cities are peopled with unrecognised sphinxes which will never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless he first projects his meditation, his absence of mind, towards them.”

If we were to see the show as a Venn diagram, this is the point everything overlaps and we see Maar at her highest concentrate. There’s the immediacy of the verité street scenes but at the same time the enticing allure of the glamour images and the rich strangeness of the Surrealist collages. The show speaks of photography’s “precarious relationship to reality”, which allows it to “render the familiar strange.” Ben Luke in the Standard is more succinct: “She makes real life uncanny.”

Cause to Weep

Then in the winter of 1935 she met Picasso. At which point the show seems to be blown as much off course as was she, as if his domineering ego is exerting itself from beyond the grave. We’re shown her photos of working versions of ’Guernica’, interesting in themselves but about Picasso rather than her. We’re proudly told she was the model for his ’Weeping Woman’. But that’s not the same thing as it being a portrait of her. It’s a Picasso picture, and its true subject is Picasso. (There’s a detail of their relationship which seems telling. Having grown up in South America, Maar spoke perfect Spanish. But, despite living so long in Paris, Picasso spoke only poor French.)

After she’d guided him over a rare impasse in his art, he encouraged her to return to painting. A rare case of Picasso doing something for a woman’s creativity. The only problem being, he gave wholly the wrong advice. Her painting, in the main, just shows you what a great photographer she’d been. Worse, it’s generally imitative of his style from the period, the combination of classicism and primitivism.

However, while I may simply be hopefully imagining it, ’Portrait of a Woman’ (1939) exaggerates his tropes to the point they become exposed, like pushing an argument to its logical conclusion. The female elements placed on a table, in contrast to the neat vertical strokes of the background, seem to emphasise the artificiality of phrases like ‘putting on your face’, to the point we see "woman" as a construction. Sporting its own eyes and full lips, the table itself seems feminised, as if the two have morphed together. Notably, in French the word ‘table’ is given a feminine pronoun.

Their inevitable break triggered a depression in her. (Equally inevitably caused by him finding another woman. Or, more accurately another another woman.) Which was exacerbated by a flurry of ill winds, including the death of her mother, of Nush Eluard and the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Against this background she painted ’Still Life With Jar and Cup’ (1945, above). There’s a running joke that every contemporary art show has at least one work described as “an interrogation of ‘the real’”, a piece of boilerplate post-modern bollocks. No-one says it here, and it’s one time you could justifiably apply it. We associate such solid outlines with sharply delineated objects but, particularly with the bottle, they sport the paraphernalia of three dimensions while actually looking flat and iconic. 

The blurry paint and the narrow chromatic range make these objects look neither solid nor intangible, but some strange ghost form which slips between the two. There’s a similarity to the work of Giorgo Morandi.

Around now, Maar is supposed to have reverted to Catholicism. But there is something Zen, in the strict sense of the term, about these still lives. As they seem to question reality they’re unsettling, but at the same time they’re simple and calm, perhaps even serene. They seem to be telling us that nothing in the world is as we think it is. But never mind, you’ll get over it.

In later life, she created ‘photograms’ - photo negatives painted on, corroded or otherwise manipulated. The works are fine, if perhaps a throwback to work produced in the inter-war years. But two details stand out. She showed them to few, so few they were effectively discovered after her death in 1997. And she made a point of saying she no longer found the street inspiring; it was “more extravagant” but at the same time “banal”. Creating art purely within her own darkroom suggests she’d retreated to an insular world and, knowing it, didn’t consider it worthwhile to show her work to a world it had no connection with. It had become like dreams in the more conventional sense, incubated in private and without significance to others.

Overall, her images have none of the standard sub-Dalian paraphernalia the style is normally littered with, and are all the stranger for it. People too readily associate Surrealism with the fantastical, with the depiction of impossible things. But it’s less concerned with conjuring up unexpected sights, with simulating hallucinations, and more with challenging our existing ways of looking. As Michael Richardson has said “Surrealism neither aims to subvert realism… not does it try to transcend it. It looks for entirely different means by which to explore reality itself.” Or, to jump back to Wilde, he insisted “the mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible”.

But, while perhaps the Tate have been spoiling us, overall Maar couldn’t match the impact of Dorothea Tanning or Wifredo Lam. True the high points of the show, the Surrealist collages and Parisian street scenes, are high indeed. But like that late afternoon street she shot, they seemed to arrive too soon and pass too quickly.

But perhaps hers is more the story of Surrealism. The irony is that war, through the First World War then the Spanish Civil War, did so much to stir up the movement. Then it was war, through World War Two, which slew it. Modern art no longer seemed a transformative medium, political radicalism lay dead, the once-inspiring Soviet Union exposed as crushingly repressive, unconscious forces now nothing but tools with which ad men could manipulate us. The dream, as someone once said, was over.

‘SHAPE OF LIGHT: 100 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY + ABSTRACT ART’

Tate Modern, London

“Why should the inspiration that comes from an artist’s manipulation of the hairs of a brush be any different from that of the artist who bends at will the rays of light?”
— Pierre Dubreuil

”Photography is all about finding new ways of looking.”
Gallery guide

To The Essence

The last Modernist photography exhibition the Tate ran, ‘The Radical Eye’, effectively scuppered the standard model. The claim was no longer credible that photography served Modernism by taking from it the rote task of faithfully recording stuff, like a servant carrying out his master’s chores. Instead, it was seized on as a Modernist medium in its own right. As said at the time: “The lens was taken up as an artists’ instrument as much as the paint brush or sculptor’s mallet, if not a tool for modern times which rendered its predecessors redundant.”

But that show’s chief focus was the human figure. Abstract photography might mark a bigger jump. In fact it strikes many as actively self-contradictory. Surely photography is always contingent, always of something. The coiffured celebrity, the scenic view, the significant event… that comes first, and then draws the photographers to it like a magnet.

This is because many define abstract art quite narrowly - as the non-representational. Mondrian’s coloured squares are abstract because they’re not based on an actual scene he happened on, and so on. But it also means ‘to remove from’ or ‘reduce to its essence’. Both of which come up in this show. As Aaron Siskind says: “When a painter paints a picture it can be immediately abstract… A band of paint is simply a band of paint. When a photographer makes nature abstract, an attempt is made to transform a realistic scene into an abstraction.”

So abstract photography does see the real world but only as raw materials, to sift through and utilise. Man Ray’s quoted as saying “instead of producing a banal representation of a place, I’d rather take my handkerchief out of my pocket, twist it to my liking, and photograph it as I wish.”

And it was ever thus. The entire basis of composition lies in boiling art down into a set of shapes and forms, which can then be arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. These then attract the eye, an eye which only later recognises what those shapes and forms have been made to represent – cylinders resolve into torsos, ellipses become heads, and so on. Abstract art just does away with the unnecessary final stage, and makes the composition the end-all. So just like ambient music is really a way of listening, abstract is less an art style and more a way of looking, where composition is prized above representation.

Photography, precisely because it has to be contingent on something, is a good way of accentuating this. Significantly, Paul Strand named his pieces ‘Abstract’ then gave away their origin in the rest of the title, as with ’Abstraction, Porch Shadow, Connecticut’ (1916, below). The point wasn’t to hide away the way they were made, like in a magic trick, but to display it.

This show is more about the interrelationship of photography and abstract art than abstract photography in itself. Following the example of ’Camera Work’,

a photography journal run by Alfred Stieglitz between 1903 and 1917, it often sets up side-by-side comparisons of photographs with paintings, the labels clustered together. So for example a Mondrian sits beside German Lorca’s ’Mondrian Window’ (1960, below).

Different Eyes

A driving force behind Modernism was that we now live primarily in a made world, so there’s little sense clutching to the aesthetic rules or subject-matters of our forefathers. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s quoted as saying “we see the world with entirely different eyes”. So Lorca’s combination of rigid geometric forms is something we’re likely to encounter, despite its absence from nature. The fact that it’s a window, something you’re supposed to look through rather than at, just emphasises the way it’s about reframing things.

And of course Mondrian was inspired by the geometry of urban environments in the first place, particularly New York. Though I’d suggest Lorca works better than Mondrian precisely because the image is captured rather than composed out of nothing. Things work almost the other way up. Because we’re looking at a photo of a made object not something painted by hand, it’s the imperfections which we notice. And it’s those imperfections which look so glorious.

Also, if the urban environment gave new views it also provided no viewpoints. Such as the sheer towering cliff of a tall building, so regularly punctuated, of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s ’Balconies’ (1925, below).

And once this new way of seeing is established, we bear its imprint. We carry our different eyes with us everywhere. So Bill Brandt’s ’East Sussex Coast’ series (1957, example below), features a human figure in a natural environment, but abstracts from them regardless. In its contrast between the contours of the human form and the flat horizon, it’s similar to the sculpture of Henry Moore.

But the weakness here is the obvious one. Continue insisting that photography is the cousin of painting, and it will only ever be the poor relation. Modernism’s liberating promise to painting was that it could see itself as a thing in itself, it didn’t have to imitate to survive in polite company. It should do no less for photography. However, as the paintings start to thin out mid-way through this (chiefly) chronological exhibition, maybe that story has a happy ending.

As said photography is always of pieces of the world. Yet it contains no inherent sense of scale. Those limbs Bill Brandt snapped on a Sussex beach, couldn’t they be monumental in size? We can, if we want, blow up a pin to wall size or reduce a city to a postage stamp. Cinema jumps between these scales from one second to the next. And the cumulative effect of this show is similar. Our eyes dart continually between all of this - scales, angles and viewpoints - until we no longer even notice.

So a work like Karol Hiller’s ’Heliographic Composition XXIV’ (1936, above) takes on a Malevich-like mysticism. It could be an aerial view of a modern city, a close-up of machine parts, or simply some geometry Hiller himself assembled. It’s not obvious whether it’s bigger or smaller in scale than our everyday senses, merely that it’s outside of them. The forms become idealised, floating in a space not subject to the norms of physics. The term ‘Heliographic’ came from his desire to unite photography, painting and graphic design, ideally within the space of one artwork.

Subjective Photography

Another advantage of photography is that it seemed inherently a more democratic medium. It was simply easier to take a snap than paint a painting. And even those who didn’t, or did so in merely a casual way, might respond less credulously and more critically when presented with a photography exhibition. The Bauhaus for example sought to level hierarchies among the arts, if not between them and the crafts. Which led to them, as the show explains in a slightly Finbarr Saunders moment, “encouraging experimentation in the darkroom”. Their tutor Maholy-Nagy, already quoted above, started as a painter but soon took to photography. And his photos, at least in my view, eclipse his paintings in quality.

This extended to subject matter. Rodchenko’s primary purpose was to capture the modern urban environment. He might well have developed his own authorial style while doing so, but the subject matter was accessible to all - requiring no specialised knowledge. The above should be seen as a range of ideas, and different artists might have adhered to them to different degrees, but which point in a broadly similar direction.

Meanwhile, other works question artistic intent altogether. Take for example Brassai (the pseudonym of Gyula Halász). His series of ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ (example above from 1932) were essentially found abstracts, everyday items he’d photograph in great close-up. What would otherwise seem ephemeral became foregrounded. As he said at the time “There is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.”

Brassai also held a fascination for Parisian graffiti, example above. Rather than try to persuade you of the artistic merit of their subject, his photographs present these scratchings as inscrutably strange as rock art. In one way there’s an overlap between this and the way Abstract Expressionist artists such as Mark Tobey would evoke ancient, indecipherable hieroglyphs. But in another…

Someone, obviously, must have made that graffiti for it to be there. But that’s not where Brassai’s interest lies. Paris isn’t a canvas for his subject, it is his subject. As most of his examples are scratched or scoured into the wall, it’s often hard to tell deliberate mark making from accidental wear and tear. Perhaps one sometimes led to the other, the way cave paintings sometimes exploited unusual shapes of rock.

Aaron Siskind took similar photos in America, such as ’Los Angeles 3’ (1949, above). And with Siskind the notion is stronger of chance discovery as a means of accessing an otherwise invisible underlying process. For at Black Mountain College he taught alongside the Pope of Chance John Cage. (Rauschenberg was one of his pupils, and it shows.)

These photographs reflect the spirit of the magical aphorism “as above, so below”. The vast cities of Paris and Los Angeles are too big a fit for the most wide-angle lens, but can be captured in microcosm. The dilapidation is important, as it contrasts with the artifice of the urban environment and shows a humanised, lived-in space. (Just as there is no rust or peeling painting in those Bauhaus or Constructivist images.)

But it doesn’t work in the social crusading sense of exposing urban decay. It’s inaccurate to read them as presenting Modernist idealism gone rusty. It’s more that they have an aesthetic all their own, the way older people can develop character lines. It’s more that they act as a map of the cities’ spirits just as a more literal map capture their streets.

A different approach is taken by Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé with ’Jazzmen’ (1961, above). The residue of overlaid torn posters is something that has always fascinated me whenever I come across it. It’s interesting to note what this is not. Cubism took a hammer to letters as much as it did bottles, guitars and heads. But it always took a single image and fractured it. Whereas this is clearly multiple images superimposed, as if jostling for space. The show tells us his interest lay not the posters themselves but the act of tearing them, which he saw as “a spontaneous art of the street”.

However he has given this work the title “Jazzmen”, and the image seems centred around the guitar-sporting torso. Like Jazz did with music, de la Villeglé is taking apart and recombining something previously familiar.

And how would we represent a city sonically? The City Symphony films of the Twenties, took their structure, as it says here, “from the movements and motifs of orchestral symphonies… rather than the dynamics of narrative pacing.” They largely assumed a modern city was as grand, as cohesive, as composed as an orchestral work. Morning traffic was like fanfares, and so on. Yet if that high-minded notion ever matched the way we actually experience cities, it didn’t survive that optimistic decade.

Whereas, unlike these films (and also unlike Brassai’s found graffiti), the jazz analogy does not assume a city can be condensed down to a single item. Instead it’s composed of neighbours who do not choose one another but find a way to get along; a city is a collage to its very heart. But, more than that, the analogy assumes a city is in a continual process of being reworked and repurposed, a neighbourhood built for one thing transforming into something else, one façade put up over another but then itself starting to fray.

Anti Subject Matter, Anti-Photography

Let’s do the ‘meanwhile’ thing again, and cut to pure abstract photography. The show describes this as “focused on the tools of the medium rather than real world objects. They used photography to consider the inner mechanisms of the world and explored the possibility of creating photography that could break free from subject matter altogether.” Belina Kolarova enthused over it, “how little is needed for its creation!”

Bronislaw Schalb, in works such as ’Untitled’ (1957, above), burned, scratched and painted straight onto the negative. And the non-title is significant, there isn’t a porch shadow that if followed might lead us back to the world we know. Perhaps what’s interesting is that even as you’re told this your mind recoils from the information, still tries to find a way to associate the photograph with things around us. You try to make it into an aerial view of a parched landscape, an experiment in a petri dish and so on. And, as so often, it’s the art that’s irresolvable which is the art that lingers.

Yet while widespread these approaches weren’t universal. Otto Steinert, despite being part of the Bauhaus, later formed the ‘fotoform group’. Their credo of “subjective photography” re-emphasised the photographer’s role as “decision maker”, essentially reversing the perspective back onto the button-clicker and confirming the photographer had an artistic spirit after all.

Alfred Stieglitz went further, in his ’Equivalent’ series (1927-31, example above). He’d photograph clouds, as we all could, but in much the way a Romantic would have painted them. He spoke of their expressing his “inner resonances”, nature as an externalisation of the self. And these can be effective works in their own right. There’s no requirement for abstract photography to march in a single direction. It’s an approach, not a genre.

Evading Photography

The show is hung roughly chronologically, and as we get nearer to the present day I started to think more and more about getting nearer the exit door. Some of these later works do entertain interesting notions, but to which the actual artworks seem just an afterthought. While others just seem callbacks to earlier ideas, given a Post-Modern gloss. (Admittedly I’d have been more excited by Ed Rusha’s aerial views of sparse Californian parking lots had I not already encountered them at the Barbican’s ‘Constructing Worlds’ show.)

Of course that might sound like something I always say. But painting and sculpture ceased to be culturally cutting-edge a long time ago. While photography could hardly be any less prevalent. But perhaps that’s the problem…

Perhaps the ubiquitousness of the digital camera and its incorporation into the mobile phone, has meant that photography has become too easy, that a Goldilocks moment has been passed and being photographed no longer had any significance. But that doesn’t seem the whole of it.

The two best works (ironically two of the most recent) provide an anti-photography but of a different kind, one which kind of fetishises its limitations. Photography is associated with demarcating, with providing hard evidence. A camera’s version of events trumps a person’s. “Photos or it didn’t happen” is a phrase. Isn’t it time to start screwing with all that? And notably other works attempt a similar thing, just less successfully than these two.

First let’s look at Maya Rochat ‘A Rock In a River’ (2018, above), providing what the show describes as “fragmented pictures of digital textures, geological forms and organic matter.” It covers the final wall of the gallery with a backdrop combined with a projected lightshow. Though appealingly we also see a version of this over the entrance, as if it envelops everything contained within.

Its colourful degeneration of form calls back less to the Bauhaus than the Sixties. Though arguably it’s formlessness is not part of the psychedelic era which gets most recycled, which has more to do with the ‘sharp’ look of the post-mod hippie. It doesn’t just counter resolution with the incohate, it suggests that chaos is the primal state of things. Rochat has commented “each person has an experience that’s unique - just by being there you are activating the show… each moment is there for you, and then it’s gone. You can’t really document it.” Which means, not for the first time, I comment enthusiastically this is something you can’t just cut around, capture and stick on the internet. Next to an internet image of it I've stuck on the internet.

While E.I. City 1’ by Antony Cairns (2018, above), the poster image for the show, takes a modern city image then subjects it to a “complex developing process” I don’t claim to understand, but which seems designed to recreate the organic processes of early film. Contrary to Maholy-Nagy’s futurism, this is like framing our world through yesterday’s eyes. His images are postcard rather than wall size, suggesting a circle being completed.

And what gives these works their appeal? As I said previously “today we’re filmed for simply walking down the street.” Only in May a man was fined simply for attempting to avoid facial recognition technology, despite being on no wanted lists.

It’s not just there are more cameras, it’s that current urban environments are designed to be camera-compliant. Under advanced capitalism, all is not just a panopticon but a smoothed down surface built around observation. The outdoor space we pass through increasingly resembles an open-plan office.

Of course these days people are always photographing themselves, then publicly uploading the minutiae of their lives. This is often used to claim that, if they’re also being filmed, that can’t be considered oppressive. But this misses the insidiousness of the way it works. It’s become a process which turns us into subjects rather than autonomous agents. To be watched, to be viewed over, isn’t an imposition on your existence. It has become your existence. So of course we then subjectify ourselves. Photos or you didn’t happen.

Ironically this may have best been described by the Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem back in the Sixties, before much of this technology existed:

“We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being positioned in a perspective. No longer the simultaneous perspective of primitive painters, but the perspective of the Renaissance rationalists. It is hardly possible for looks, thoughts and gestures to escape the attraction of the distant vanishing-point which orders and deforms them, situates them in its spectacle.

”Power is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out public and private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits construction that complies with its regulations. Its own plans involve the compulsory acquisition of everybody. It builds with a heaviness which is the envy of the real town-builders that copy its style, translating the old mumbo-jumbo of the sacred hierarchy into stockbroker-belts, white collar apartments and workers flats. (Like, for example, in Croydon.)”

In short surveillance is no so widespread that the Modernist presumption of ‘The Radical Eye’ has now been inverted, the ability to exist autonomously lies precisely in not being photographed, not being catalogued and indexed. But to be outside the frame no longer seems a realistic option.

So our refuge has come to lie in the motion blur, the lack of resolution, the file error, the last few imperfections left. They appeal to us as a hole does to a hunted rabbit. Even the logo of the show is rendered out of register, an enticingly fuzzy glow to convey how homely imperfection can feel.

‘IMAGINE MOSCOW: ARCHITECTURE, PROPAGANDA, REVOLUTION’

Design Museum, London

In the world of my mind this post would have gone up straight after the Academy’s ‘Revolution: Russian Art’ show, rather than four months later. My planning it seems is scarcely any better than Stalin’s. But on the upside it does mark my starting to catch up on my art exhibition reviews. As an added inducement to the reader, this time each section… yes, really, each section… has it’s own opening quote, and not all of them are by Mayakovsky.

“The streets shall be our brushes, and the squares our palettes.”
- Vladimir Mayakovsky

On The Up
“Hey, you! Heaven! Off with your hat! I am coming!”
-Mayakovsky

Let’s cheat completely by starting with a work from another show – a film-clip from Friedrich Ermler’s ‘Fragment of an Empire’ (1921), shown in the Academy’s ’Revolution: Russian Art’. A solider is shown returning from the front to Petrograd. Almost like Rip Van Winkle, the long-bearded man arrives in a futuristic scenario which bewilders him.

To borrow from the show’s title, propaganda this film surely was. But was it not revolution but simply a lie, a mask for brute realities? In fact the truth... the actual truth of these times is more complicated. And so, inevitably, was the art.

This show is based around six unrealised architectural projects, all intended for Moscow. (Which had become the Russian capital shortly after the revolution.) This takes it somewhere different to the Academy’s ‘Building the Revolution’ exhibition, which was concerned with the history of buildings which had survived.

In exhibition book Jean-Louis Cohen’s essay ‘Lissitzky’s “Amerikanizm”’ describes El Lissitzky’s role as a “travelling salesman” between East and West. It also reprints an essay of Lissitzky’s own, titled ‘”Amerikianism” in European Architecture’ (1925). 

America was a New World country which had largely pioneered the use of skyscrapers, greatly influencing Russian architects. But it was also an avowedly capitalist nation which refused to recognise the Soviet Union, which through the White Armies had actively tried to destroy it. Arguably, Lissitzky tries to square this circle when he insists “Europe today is more American than America itself”.

And being more American than America of course largely meant being bigger than America, bigger being simply another word for better. The pissing contest of the Cold War is already here in earnest. The Palace of the Soviets, for example, was not only designed to be the tallest building in the world (stealing the crown from the Empire State Building), but to be topped by a hundred metre statue of Lenin – despite the fact that the Moscow climate would mostly obscure it with clouds. A full-size reproduction of one of the fingers, four metres tall, is somewhat surreally on show. One section of the show is appropriately titled ’Colonizing the Sky’.

Yet if this show merely recorded the to’s and fro’s between two super-powers, which didn’t even divide in aesthetics much let alone ideology, it would be of academic interest only. Happily, that’s not the case…

We’re told skyscrapers were then often called “cloud pressers”. (Though not whether this was local to Russia or not.) And even that minor variant of the term is enough to revitalise the metaphor in your mind. For example Lissitzky’s ‘cloud iron’ buildings (above) have a distinct, megalith shape distinct from the geometric block or tapering tower we’re so used to. But that just leads us into the most significant thing about them...

He conceived of a ring of these around Moscow, people living up above while the street level was reserved for transit and communications. The city was to be not an accumulation of places which happened to be clustered together, but as a set of connecting nodes.

Meanwhile, ’The Problem of the Scientific Organisation of Life’ by Nikolay Kuzmin not only designed a model miners’ apartment house but broke down their day into blocks, some as short as two minutes. Or at least from rising at 6am to 5.25pm after which he indulgently decreed “from here life dictates it’s own timetable”. Worker’s lodgings are no longer a refuge from, but an adjunct to the workplace. They helpfully wake you up in the morning and switch your lights out at night. They regulate your non-working hours almost as thoroughly as your working ones.

Two conceptions seem at work, which are surely rivals. One is based around not just the workers taking over the existing Moscow, but building an entirely new Moscow better adapted to their needs. The city becomes almost a kind of steel exoskeleton built at their arms and legs. With the other, the new architecture is more a mould in which the worker is poured to shape him. Contemporary Architecture magazine called for new buildings “that creates new social types” (1928).

The human body is itself likened to a machine, the USSR Conference on Workers’ Vacations stating “like a machine a person needs repair and recuperation: socialist leisure restores the proletarian machine-body.” Recuperative Health Factories were to be built, such as the one Sokalov designed for tired Muscovites by the Black Sea. It’s scarcely uncoincidental that infographic reductions of the human form, not previously widely seen, become common. If the world was to be transformed man must be too, and in art at least transformed physically, made by tools into a tool.

And this is perhaps at it’s clearest in Valentina Kulagina’s poster ‘To The Defence of the USSR’ (1931, above), in which robotised figures march dynamically out of the frame. They could even be produced in that factory on the lower left, along with their planes and guns. These are salutary reminders that true dystopias are all failed utopias.

Perhaps armed with our knowledge of what came next, we cannot help but notice the distinction which we perceive as a clash. For example Rowan Moore’s Guardian review commented on how “designs of wild ambition combine with homages to science and pedantic prescriptions for dividing up a worker’s day.” But it’s a distinction which, largely speaking, we make that they didn’t. And we make it precisely because for us it’s happened, because we can look back on it. (This of course cycles back to what was said about the Revolution in the Academy show write-up.)

Architecture as Fantasy, Science As Fiction

By setting itself in Moscow the show bypasses the era's most famous example of unrealised architecture, the Tatlin Tower (which was intended for Petrograd). And this lays the ground for Tatlin’s influence over the show to be exceeded by that of his arch-rival, Malevich. Yet that happens in a surprising way…

One day I was confidently explaining that Malevich was unable to realise his Suprematist visions in three dimensional space, that threshold tableware wasn’t really a thing. Then pretty much the next show I see, and El Lissitzky is doing it like he doesn’t even see the problem. And in so doing he came to influence both the Bauhaus and De Stijl. This is perhaps at it’s most pronounced in his children’s book ’Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale’ (1922) where he anthropomorphises those two squares (after Malevich, one black, one red) into a narrative. It’s an indication of how little we need images to contain for us to ‘read’ them.

But more significant here are his diagrammatic, geometric Prouns (Project for the Affirmation of the New, the acronym works in Russian). These demonstrate how artworks and architectural diagrams overlap to the point where it’s impossible to see the joins. Compare his lithograph ‘Proun 1E (The City)’ (1919) to Gustav Klutski’s ‘Architectural Study’ (1921/2, both above). (A 3D version of the Proun is also on show, though made by Henry Milner in 2009.)

But then Suprematism, even in its ‘pure’ rarified form suggested motion and often pictorial depth, even when it lacked an actual Z axis. In the guidebook, Eszther Steierhoffer describes Malevich’s art as “implying a sensation of levitation”. The disciples were merely going where the master couldn’t follow, taking up his dynamic forms more than the heraldic black square he used in place of a signature. Take for example Ilya Chashnik’s ‘Vertical Axes in Motion’ (1922/3, below).

Chashnik also demonstrates how recurrent verticality is here, the indicia remarking on “aviation motifs featuring prominently.” The show is so stuffed with audaciously imaginative but unsurprisingly unrealised projects it would be hard to sort them, but a favourite of mine was Seregy Gruzenberg’s proposal for a ‘Columbus Flying Monument’ (1923) an aerial sculpture which, while huge in size, would have drifted around the Earth like a stray balloon.

The notion this verticality can become literally gravity defying, already incipient in the flat iron buildings, can be seen in spades in two photo-collages. In Rodchenko’s ’Circus Acrobats’ (1938, above) two trapeze artists appear in the heavens, past a rocket ship. While in Piotr Gladzhev’s photocollage ’Female Tennis Players’ (1924), the players look as though they’ve leapt up into the sky. Though I could only find an image for Rodchenko, Gladzhev may be the more radical. If one figure stands on the wing of a plane, the image still feels as though they have hurled themselves up to this height. It’s as if the more more involved they grew in their game, they less connected they became to the ground. It’s an image of dizzying exhilaration.

(Like the cloud-pressing skyscrapers, these images may belong to their era as much as their place. In America, Phoebe Jane Fairgrave – among others - would wow audiences not just by wing-walking but dancing the Charleston while up there. But the notable thing is how readily they do fit into their place.)

And this new architecture of verticality might remind us of the ‘future city’ of science fiction. Given that one of Russia’s main proto-revolutionary art movements was called Futurism, we might expect to see some of the futuristic side of science fiction here. But alongside such techno-fetishism its cosmic dimension is also present, whose concerns are almost – and sometimes literally become – eschatological.

For example Ivan Ledinov’s ’City of the Sun’ series, with their clusters of elegantly slender towers which may or may not be mirages, seem to exist in the interchange between Suprematism and science fiction. (See ’City of the Sun, Distant View’, 1943/59, above.) Some are painted simply on plain board, as if a form of science fiction folk art. Yet for all his spaciness, Ledinov still contributed designs for buildings -including the Lenin Institute and even the United Nations Building.

While in 1933 Yakov Chernikhov produced a book self-styled as ’101 Architectural Fantasies’. Some might have been vaguely realisable, at least to the degree that they vaguely resembled buildings. With others, such as No 57 (above), ‘architectural’ might seem merely a synonym for geometric. Certainly it looks as influenced by Kandinsky as by Malevich. Yet while Chernikhov made no architectural designs he produced a book on design theory. There’s also a slideshow of entries for the design of the 1924 Lenin Mausoleum, which show a huge variety not only in styles and approaches but in attitudes to viability. Not a few we’d regard as outsider art.

Why should this be? Why, when the period finally granted so many opportunities to build did people stick with paper fantasies? Why, when it threw up so many immediate problems, when bellies so often rumbled, did people seem so unconcerned with even making a division between the practical and the fantastical?

Of course this question takes us back to Malevich. As said of his Tate retrospective “he was tapping into some heightened realm of pure geometry, something which could only exist through being painted – but was no less 'real' for all that. His term Suprematism does not relate to 'superb' but 'above' or 'beyond'.”

Take that titular term ‘imagine’. It may conjure up images of John Lennon at his grand piano, of the innocently well-meaning, as hopeless as they were hopeful. Yet the crucial thing was that the chains that tied us to the old world were finally broken. Now we were living in the future, today was already tomorrow. What wasn’t possible immediately was sure to be so soon. 

We had brought an end to capitalism in order to stop merely imagining and start building, but it was more than that – we meant to unfetter our imaginations. This wasn’t an end to dreaming, it was the start of dreaming. “Demand the impossible” and “let imagination rise to power” were not Russian revolutionary slogans, they arose later. But their sentiment is widespread here regardless.

Making New Men + Women
“The proletariat must destroy the family as a prime device of oppression and exploitation”
-Nikolay Kuzmin, 1928

One of the most recognised icons of post-revolutionary Russia, perhaps second only to the Hammer and Sickle, is the muscled man in a cap brandishing a lump hammer. And the veneration of that strapping male worker can be quite unguardedly homoerotic. Mayakovsky, always able to sum things up in a choice quote, insisted in ‘27 “there is no more beautiful clothing in the world than the bronze of muscles and freshness of skin.” Which normally goes only one way. Traditionally in art the more man is associated with the machine, which was at least in part about making him appear ‘manly’, the more women are with nature.

Yet here we see the very opposite. My guess would be that, is out of any Modernist movement, Russian Futurism had the highest number of women artists. And their work was often explicitly liberational. Maria Bri-Bein’s ‘Woman Proletarian’ poster (1931, above), has as it’s full text “women proletarian, seize aircraft, go to schools and colleges of civil aviation”. But neither do we see the muscled-up women, the girls-can-be-boys, the ‘women can make it work’ of Rosie the Riveter. The woman pilot in this image holds not a hammer but a map. The main instruments she needs to fly that giant plane are that map and her brain. She doesn’t need to be as strong as machines because these days we have machines for that.

Equality between men and women had been declared as early as 1918. Yet as the show sagely states “the emancipation of women was ultimately aimed at adding women to the workplace”. A poster for “nurseries, playgrounds, kitchen factories, canteens and mechanical laundries” openly boasts that this way “we will get 1,600,00 new working women” (unknown artist, 1930). The Bolsheviks’ embracing of women’s emancipation from ‘women’s work’ was ultimately merely tactical.

In Britain, during both World Wars, labour shortages meant women were encouraged out of their traditional roles. The fact that this lasted for a more extended period in Russia just shows how much of a war footing society was on.

And even within the art world, as Futurism became Constructivism, as art became chiefly interested in its practical application, women artists started to separate off into more traditional ‘female’ media, such as textile design. As said of the Tate’s earlier ‘Rodchenko and Popova’ show: “It would be a simplification to suggest that Rodchenko designed buildings and Popova cups and saucers – but not that much of a simplification!... As you walk through their exhibition, you don’t entirely shake the feeling that women’s art was a variant of women’s work.” Women’s gains were not illusory, but at best limited and conditional.

The New Idolatry
”We say Lenin, but we mean the Party”
-Mayakovsky

Nikolay Kogout’s poster ’From Darkness To Light’, 1921, above), was designed as part of the official Liquidation of Illiteracy campaign. It’s full text reads “From Darkness to Light, From Battle to Book, From Misery to Happiness.” A gargantuan book stands open before some workers, pointed to by an orator in a red starred hat. Yet behind both is a cityscape, while greenery is pushed to the lower left of the composition.

And why? Illiteracy affected both workers and peasants, as emphasised in the text of another poster “Peasants and Workers! You Mastered the Rifle, Now Master the Quill” (1920, artist unknown). But as said over the Academy’s more recent ‘Revolution: Russian Art’ show: “to them, nature was now out, mysticism was now out”. 

If nature was made up of curves and inclines, then we wanted straight lines and sharp angled edges. There is more of a visual connection between the bold geometric letters, and the straight sides or pure curves of those buildings than there would be with a nature scene. Note how some of the buildings are themselves shown sporting text.

And this visual similarity reflected ideology. Urbanisation and literacy are both seen as other terms for modernisation. The book, the plan, the diagram, the cityscape – all are being equivocated.

And, from a Western perspective, there seems something going on akin to Protestantism. Protestantism used the printed word to quite literally overwrite the image, in a bid to obliterate Catholic iconography. It wanted to strip Churches of their finery and instead fill them with Bibles. And this opposition to the fetishisation of images often became a fetishisation of the printed word.

In another quote from the Academy review: “The plan itself seemed interchangeable with communism, an ordering of things in opposition to the free-for-all ‘anarchy’ of the market... Like the Bible to an orthodox Christian, the Plan became the book of answers which could not be questioned, the book so important as to require guarding by the clergy.”

So for all the denunciation of icons, the era became exceptionally adept at producing them. It’s true that while the population remained largely illiterate, it had to be reached visually. As said over the Academy show, “only the image was going to spread the word”. Yet the dictionary gives two definitions of the term ‘icon’, which essentially reduce to “devotional image” and “representative symbol” - Jesus on the cross and those figures on toilet doors.

Yet these definitions are in practice mingled. You might, for example, expect to see frequent images of Lenin. But within these he strikes the same few stock poses, like the red version of classic Christs. For example he’s often shown with one raised arm, the pose used on the exhibition poster up top. (An appalling poster to advertise a museum devoted to design, but never mind that now.) Sometimes he’s pointing up, sometimes with fingers outstretched as if reaching to shake hands with a giant. Whichever, the iconography is of an elevated figure gesturing still higher. All of which is accentuated by the way that his death merely multiplied the images made of him. Mayakovsky pronounced him “even now, more alive than the living”.

Mikhail Balyasny’s ‘We Will Make the USSR the Country of Socialist Industry and Electrification’ (1930, above) centralises this figure, but makes of it a bold red silhouette, like it should be so familiar as to not require filling in. While John Heartfield’s ‘Montage of Lenin Over Moscow’ (1931) projects that silhouette half across the city. In Alexander Medvedekin’s film ’New Moscow’ (1938) Lenin’s statue is shown from below, as banks of airplanes fly above him. It’s like with that upraised arm he’s conducting the whole affair from that lofty perch.

And yet this seems to vie with the frequently-used form of the photo-collage. Perhaps this partly comes from our inevitable tendency to contrast them with the smoothness of modern Photoshop images, but they look rough-hewn, manipulated into existence. And the result is that they assert boldly, not insinuate, they seem innately disruptive, unafraid of their propagandist role. In Valentina Kulagina’s cover to ’Krasnaya Niva No. 12’ (1930, above) the black and white figures are not only shoehorned into those gridded streets, and juxtaposed against their boldly colourful surroundings, thee’s no attempt to find aerial views of them. They look like a demo of people of vastly different sizes, all lying on their backs.

Plans Unrealised
”There is no final one; revolutions are infinite”
-Zamyatin

Of the six unrealised buildings, the Palace of the Soviets (the one Lenin’s huge statue was supposed to top) might serve best as a summary of its times. It was to be built on the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which Stalin had dynamited in 1931. The destruction was filmed, with lingering close-ups of its iconography as if parading its guilt. To complete the site’s trajectory, it’s fairly close to the spot where one of El Lissitzky’s cloud irons would have been.

The winning design was submitted by Boris Iofan, who had studied under Armando Brasini – a fascist architect favoured by Mussolini. Kaganovich, Stalin’s appointee to the Moscow Soviet, had effectively decreed that by virtue of the Revolution Russia was already Socialist, so any suggestion of further change was suspect if not actually counter-revolutionary. And this palace looks… well, like a palace. It’s described in the guidebook by curator Dejan Sudjac as “the Socialist Vatican”.

War put a halt to construction, though Sudjic suggests it’s grandiosity was unachievable anyway. Khrushchev later made the site into an open-air swimming pool. Then, from 1995, the original Orthodox Cathedral was rebuilt, and was where Pussy Riot performed their “punk prayer” protest. The swimming pool looks by far the best option. And I’m not even kidding. A brief film-clip suggests it was heated for year-round use, and shows bathers climbing out from the steam amid icicle-dripping rails.

But we already know Stalinism was despotic. A more interesting question might be – what does any of this mean for today? The show’s video comments how “the contemporary landscape is populated by their dreams and ideas”. We can find examples of this aplenty, such as ‘paper architects’, who don’t necessarily design to be built, now being much more common. 

But of course this merely betrays their weaknesses, rather than addressing their strengths. It portrays them as literally an avant garde, planning for a future who was only realisable later. Which is to suggest they were never really that radical, that disruptive, that all existing society needed to assimilate their innovations was a little time. And yet our world is only their future in a linear sense. It’s a world they would neither want nor even recognise.

It’s like a window had cleared, and it was briefly possible to peer through into a future different from the present, before it occluded again. Looking at those city plans arranged around a bending river inevitably makes you try and project how it would have been had all this been happening in London. As the show amply demonstrates, there’s no neat transposing from then to now, no merely taking up of old blueprints. But hopefully one day we shall find out.

Coming soon! From Moscow to Washington…