Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art (for VAULT magazine 2017)

 

Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, reveals how Constructivism has influenced the work of certain Australian artists from the 1930s to the present.

This is the third in a series of exhibitions focusing on Modernist art movements and their impact on Australia; the previous being: Cubism and Australian Art (2009–10) and Less is More: Minimal and Post Minimal Art in Australia (2012).

Constructivism began in Russia around 1913. It morphed out of Russian Futurism, alongside its austere, antagonistic brother, Suprematism. Central to the Constructivist Movement was Vladimir Tatlin, who had been enthralled by Picasso’s Cubist reliefs, which he had seen in Paris. Tatlin wanted to make art relevant to modern purposes and fit for the rigours of the oncoming Communist Revolution.

Constructivism had the urgency and vigour of all cultural revolutions. As it developed, the movement had a number of permutations and eventually several splinter-groups grew from it. It was a major influence on early C20th art movements, inspiring new trends in industrial design, architecture, graphic design, theatre, film, dance and fashion. Bauhaus and the De Stijl Movement were heavily influenced by it. Dada artists plucked various aspects of it for their anti-art, deconstruction hijinks. In the 1920s, German Expressionism adopted its angular forms in posters, paintings and set designs - adding sex and psychological trauma to the mix. In the 1930s Naum Gabo transported a version of Constructivism to England, where it was readily adopted by certain architects, designers and artists over the next few decades (Victor Pasmore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are represented in the exhibition). And time moves on, as necessarily do artistic and cultural trends. Newer art movements eclipse previous ones.

The Heide exhibition features 70 artists. There is an overabundance of certain artists’ work; and there are a couple of notable omissions from the show – missing, for instance, are one or two of the late Robert Jacks’ elegant abstracted cardboard guitar constructions, which would have been an obvious fit.

The exhibition features cameo appearances by actual Constructivist artists, El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko – who had earlier been associated with Suprematism. There are also other Russians in attendance, such as the Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Wassily Kandinsky. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp are also included amongst the international artists present. These all give prestige and an authoritative historical validity to the proceedings, but their very legitimacy serves to reveal, by contrast, the often facile engagement with Constructivism apparent in some of the Australian works as the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s give way to the ‘60s and beyond, and as the present day rushes away from the period riven by the Russian Revolution.

The tumultuous, sociopolitical dynamics that gave rise to the Constructivist movement in Russia in 1913 have never touched safe, suburban Australia. Australian art that aligns itself to an art-movement from over a century ago is necessarily nostalgic – but it is a nostalgia removed from its historical source; a cosy nostalgia gleaned fifth-hand from art books and magazines, or from an occasional overseas trip to see one or two iconic works now safely entombed in the rarified chambers of a European or American (rarely Russian) art gallery. Nostalgia is safe and comforting when it is stripped of any genuine connection to its source. Consequently, a lot of the later works in the exhibition drift into superficial, unintentional parody.

The exhibition stands somewhat as a cautionary tale, reminding us that yesterday’s revolutionaries are today’s conformists. Since its eruption over 100 years ago the energetic, culture-changing, hands-on dynamism of Constructivism has been co-opted, traduced, enervated and reduced; its Avant-Garde, for-the-people, revolutionary force reduced to bland, anodyne patterns and well-mannered, gift-shop mimicry – a kind of quaint, bourgeois history-grab that conveniently overlooks the original point of Constructivism in favour of a decorative simulacrum of the forceful, relevant original. In the 1980s, British graphic designers Peter Saville and Neville Brody separately resurrected Constructivism’s revolutionary punch, producing album covers and magazine graphics that sabotaged the intentions of the movement, making them redundant by wringing them out in the service of pure consumerism.

It is instructive that some of the best Australian works here were made within the first half of the C20th, when the clarion call to arms of Constructivism could still sporadically be heard through the West, albeit from wheezing lungs – although in Russia itself the movement had largely dissipated during the 1920s. Many of the very recent works in the exhibition, with some exceptions, are attenuated of meaning or real purpose. The result is a kind of plastic, middle-class, cartoon-Constructivism, which is undertaken with such a po-faced seriousness that one assumes the artists are unaware of the irony attending their pristine, shiny replicas.

More successful are some of the senior artists who have dedicated their career to investigating and refining the tenets of Constructivism whilst at the same time keeping them relevant to the gradually unfolding history of their own work - they understand that the pursuit of art is a slow and steady course, set over a lifetime.

It is sobering to contemplate how rapidly the Avant-Garde always becomes negated by conformity. The last (now-ironic) word must go to Vladimir Tatlin: “In the squares and in the streets we are placing our work, convinced that art must not remain a sanctuary for the idle.”