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Оглавлениеfrom Artist V. Palmov, Chita 1922
A battle between two ideologies is raging in the left wing of contemporary Russian visual art (painting, sculpture), between the nonobjective and the productionist tendencies. The crux of their conflict concerns value, the so-called “aesthetic state”—i.e. a very specialized concern related to how a work of art is experienced. Here, the work is conceptualized as its own special world, imbued with its own value. The finished work is a world comprised of the traces of the artists’ conquest over his materials (paint, solid matter).
The lifelike little world contained within a painting, which reflects reality or the nearly real imaginings of the artist, has long ago been blasted to smithereens by the continual attacks of art workers beginning with the Impressionists, who were the first to reprioritize the “how” of painting over the “what.” Their incursions were primarily focused on material elements: color, surface (faktura), the relationship between these, and the approaches to working with them for the purpose of making the most expressive visual impression possible.
Cézanne first established the principle of “visual contemplation,” the use of color that creates material form by means of color and color juxtaposition. Cézanne’s discovery, a method for conveying the muscular and tactile sense of the mass, weight, and resistance of objects, inspired artists to demonstrate power relationships between masses in their work with forms. This led to the emergence of Cubism, in which the entire world is nothing more than the interweaving of hulks in the simplest forms. The artist admires and becomes intoxicated on the literally just-discovered sense of weight, flexibility, and hardness, which he conveys through color.
Material relationships inspire interest in power relationships. The sense of material moving through breakage rather than adhesion represents a shift; the interest in conveying all power sensations inspired by an object gives rise to Futurism in the narrow, painting context with its founder, Picasso. Artists turn their focus to objects in motion; the principle of indivisibility is shattered along with the principle of the single, unified viewpoint.
The object is depicted from multiple angles at once, a method that had already existed in icon painting, Chinese art, and the work of children. The greatest plenitude of sensation created by the object inspires the most interesting interventions in the play of the paint and other developments on painting surfaces. It is no longer compulsory to paint the object in a motionless pose or a split-second view. Instead, the artist fixes snapshots of an object in motion onto the motionless canvas and even creates these movements, whether they be general or partial. The artist introduces the fourth dimension, time, capable of making even the most solid objects penetrable and interpenetrable, like crystals growing out of crystals. The painting becomes an integrated mechanism, a kind of machine that moves through the interaction of the objects and forces within it, conveyed to the viewer via the tactile effects of color and faktura.
Little by little, the old purpose of painting—to be a window into a world reflected by the artist for viewers to admire while frozen before it in terrified or ecstatic contemplation—gives way to the new: to comprehend the painting, following the path of the combination of colors, lines, and surfaces constructed by the artist, appreciating the organization of materials and arrangement of elements to achieve material or energetic tension.
Paint on the surface is no longer enough. The artist now employs everyday materials (tin, wood, metals, paper), arranging them on various planes in relation to the primary one. This gives rise to counter-reliefism, which completely departs from the painting’s main plane and works over the materials, intertwining, bending and cutting them. The color of the auxiliary materials that the Futurists introduced into painting completely supersedes the color of the paint. The artist begins to chisel, drill, solder, screw. In Russia, it was Tatlin who pursued this most dimensionally and logically, whose counter-reliefs are reminiscent of the models of objects such as cars, machinery, and industrial tools.
The artist regains his sensitivity and love for the materials that practical, necessary things are made of—sensations endemic to the craftsman, technician, and builder.
One more step in this direction and the artist will be known as one who, loving and knowing materials and expert at working with them, organizes and “shapes” these materials, using all of his inventiveness in order to create forms that aren’t exclusively for contemplation, but have practical applications. Thus, the artist becomes one with the craftsman and the technician. The painting as a window into another world, the world of “art,” is no longer needed because the “world of art” will have become our everyday, practical world. These are indeed the claims of the productionists, summarizing the achievements of the leftist movement in art: Futurism, which brilliantly destroyed the painting from within, annulling it as an object of aesthetic pleasure and developing the sensibilities of the “arrangers of materials” to the maximum extent.
Pure art is dead because no more leisure time needs to be filled up by it. Leading the mind out of the world of “art,” they say, “Long live production art, in which the old principle of ‘the beautiful’ now coincides with the hated principle of the ‘useful’ into a new concept: ‘constructive.’ This movement is closely tied to the reorganization of the human psyche on the basis of the reorganization of economic and productive life—i.e. the task of social revolution. Within this movement, there is a developing dream of creating a new kind of man—an organizer, constructor, and inventor, a man rejoicing in the active conquest of matter and the elements through joint, concerted efforts: a man who forms matter (form) to answer the demands (content) of humanity.
I thought it was important to include this introduction in order to illuminate the web of interconnected realms in art, so that, with this in mind, we can answer the question of the art of Palmov (or, to put it more precisely, in order to avoid the flavor of sacrimony that comes with the word ‘art’—Palmov’s work or constructions).
Palmov is a Futurist, or rather, a Cubo-Futurist. His paint constructions solve problems related to the interaction of masses and forces using particularly emphatic and inventive color and texture.
Is he a productionist? For the moment, no, but he will doubtlessly also pass through this phase, considering his rapid path from influence to influence, from Cézanne, to Picasso, Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, and then from construction to construction. Is this bad?
It is only natural if we take into account the power Palmov wields over the medium of paint, the power color itself has over him, and the incredible diversity of his output, in which it’s surpassingly rare to find even two or three repetitions of the same approaches and materials.
If we roughly divide Palmov’s work into periods spanning his life in the Far East until today, we can speak of the Vladivostok, Pacific, and Chita periods.
In Vladivostok, his palette was still relatively muted. He was working out the problem of movement through shifts, finding an interesting, linearly-shifted picture. Movement was created by means of shifted perspective (a house, a barbershop), shifted masses and planes (Burliuk’s family portrait). The associative method (especially applicable to Burliuk) for depicting ideas about complicated processes and extracting only the most characteristic phenomena from the given process onto the canvas, phenomena, objects, and motions (Shven, Tanets, Perevorot). The attempts to introduce colorful material marks to the canvas through the incorporation of pieces of fabric, boxes, and paper. The latter method in the black-violet palette led to the exemplary Skorb, perfect and icon-like, in which the angles of the face create a psychological effect that hits the mark directly on the head.
Japan and the Pacific Ocean: the viewer’s contemplation is refined, the artist masters a bright and expressive palette, focusing on blue-green, the oceanic mass of water. The sense of materiality is sharpened. Human bodies seem to be made of sheet metal or soldered iron pipes. His water is hard, stony crystal. His air is blue, fantastically forged steel. For him, the world takes on a special material hardness in which he, like a sculptor, carves out routs, sharp-ribbed and taut, with the strikes of his brush. We see this kind of metallic world in his Rybake, Kapitan parokhoda, Yapontsy s rakovinoi, and Progulka po ulitse. The artist develops a particular economy and precision toward every part of the painting. At the same time, the shifting of dozens of perspectival planes in each painting don’t make them look like frozen crystal fields, but moving swells of a solid sea, splashing with sharp waves.
With this particular kind of rendering, the flatness of the painting shatters, transforming from a “window” into a kind of arranged “pile,” that needs to be investigated from all angles at the risk of cutting the clamoring eye on the sharp edges of objects and materials.
The tropical Pacific islands also intensify the powerful colors of Palmov’s paintings. His metal, sharp and complex as ever with its teeth and ledges, becomes molten, red-hot. Wild tropical greenery and crimson volcanic earth go head-to-head in a furious battle of color on color. The clusters of trees and feathered palms, provide an excuse to create green and blue glass bubbles and spheres that shine through each other, establishing equivalences between the artist’s beloved glass-metal and the eternal shaggy-haired wood (recall Levitan’s green water on tree trunks).
In Chita, the paintings’ tone grows harsher. Our harsh era makes itself felt. The molten, crystallized metal gives way to renderings of heavy broadcloth, sackcloth, felt, soldered metal and sawtooth. Snow white patches appear. The faktura is developed. Sparkling glass and metal are introduced—silver paper. This creates matter-object organisms on a plane dressed in sharp, shiny skin. That which is usually referred to as background undergoes a special, intense working over. Decorative ornamentation is applied, and among the ornamental “embroidery” dancing across the canvas, in front of the background, filled with constructions, the tensed ribcage of the subject (in the literary sense) chirrs, most often in a symbolist and revolutionary manner. The metallic background and color and the textured edges attracted to it create something analogous to icon painting. The artist paints completely subjectless—that is, un-titleable paintings—colorful assemblages and mountings with bright and linear centers of gravity, whose subject lies in the battle or, on the contrary, within the solid cooperation between areas of color and faktura.
The impulse of the inventor and constructor and the ability to lovingly admire material and conquer it through shaping drives the artist forward, keeping him from staying in any one place, as I have described above, among his already accomplished combinations. Each painting is but an intensification of the artist’s methods for working with his materials which paves the way for the next one. Beyond this demand, the individual painting has no other value.
“So is any of this necessary?” one may ask. It is. The work of the Futurist artist on a framed surface has not yet been perfected, and meanwhile, the call of the productionists has been sounded. The longing for paintings that are windows one wants to fall through onto soft meadows of “different worlds” “created” by the artist has not yet been wrested from human hearts. The charm of “recreating reality” has not yet been lost. People have not yet completely trained themselves to approach paintings the way they approach blueprints in order to repeatedly overcome all of the efforts undertaken by artists who create colorful, plane-studded organisms.
It’s understandable why everyone seeking the subject in Palmov’s paintings is so overwhelmed by the materialization of such things as air and water, that metallic outfitting of space with brushstrokes. They are swept off their feet and out of their reason by the need to climb over all of the swirls and cracks in the painting’s structure with their eyes. After all, for Palmov, the subject is not the purpose, but the means—his excuse to call out a handful of habitual perceptions and then, with his shifted planes, by leading the eye and attention away into the very thick of his “working over of the material,” he forces the viewer to seek out the system of forces and approaches invented and employed for this illumination rather than the “illuminated object” itself. Of course, after having held the viewer under this psychological checkmate of constructions and conquests, he leaves him lost and bewildered. All that is left for the viewer is to weep from the depths of his sentiment, feeling insulted on behalf of tradition and his natural right to “calm contemplation,” uttering the sacramental phrases, “it didn’t move me,” and “I don’t get it!”
Palmov is one of the great battering rams smashing apart the idea of the self-sufficient, aesthetically hermeneutic painting from within while also attacking the passive, layman’s psychology of “perceiving” but not desiring to “conquer.”
Viktor Palmov, Horse Taming, 1927
And if the productionists make up the frontlines, attacking head on with their demands that artistic practice and aesthetics submit to the needs of building a new life in solidarity, in the name of the new man, the constructor, then Palmov the Futurist is a partisan in the enemy camp. He is entirely in the picture plane. However, at the same time, these are no longer paintings at all, but construction sketches. He constructs bridges of mutual understanding between the painting and the viewer, whose only choice is to either retreat to the vaults of what had once been considered “great” art or push through the breach down the path of solving the constructive problems expressed in painting.
This work by this Futurist artist is particularly valuable and necessary. It is no less necessary than the work of the productionists, for it is through their joint efforts that the principle of the relative assessment of revolutionary tension leads to the development of coherent methods for conquering stagnation, both material and psychological, brought into the consciousness of the masses awash in revolution.
Everything that can be brought into the realm of human conquest must be. Critical thought, intense inventiveness, tactical flexibility, the joy of solidarity in shaping musty or elemental material—these are the paths that the revolution takes into people’s psyches and how it becomes entrenched in them.
Palmov’s work is a battlefield within a giant front fighting to neutralize the war between a millions-strong army of passive viewers against a small group of specialists, the artistic innovators, and unite these factions into a single mass of humanity, in solidarity with one another in labor, imbued with a common and universal joy at seeing the world in a new way, in a unified, inventive onslaught of the expressive construction of everything that humanity needs.
Sergei Tretyakov
from Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings (1989), 1913–40; first published as “Fotozametki,” in Novyi Lef, no. 9, 1928
When I was in Kislovodsk, a photographist came up to me (I won’t say “photographer” because that usually suggests a professional practitioner) who wanted to work in the Lef style.
He told me that a local photographer had begun to take portraits “from way below” and that, consequently, this fellow now thought he was making leftist art.
So I explained that this kind of “ersatz Lef” does not make us especially happy (we immediately punned on the theme of “pod Lef” [ersatz Lef] and “opodlev” [having become mean]). It’s the application of our constructive principles to aesthetic ends.
There is no such thing as Lef photography. What matters most is how you go about setting it up, the aim (purpose) of the photograph and why you have to take it, and then finding the most rational means for the actual photographing and the points of view—that’s the Lef approach.
We started to talk about portraiture. The photographist said:
“Lef once wrote that a man’s portrait should be composed of an entire range of snapshots taken of him in his normal environment.”
We came to the conclusion that there are portraits and portraits, i.e., there are different goals. If we want to form an impression of a fellow in his everyday reality, well, there’s no better approach. People generally conceal their real, ordinary selves and have themselves photographed looking unusual, very special, heroic. Naturally, heroes need Rembrandt shadows, a clean-shaven face, a youthful air, a special twinkle in the eye, and smart clothes. So all warts, pimples, and wrinkles are carefully removed. But there’s also the kind of portrait where it’s important to record these very same details, I mean the I.D. No Rembrandt shadows, no snapshots of the ordinary environment, either—just an exact description of the face. Those are the kind of portraits used by the Department of Criminal Investigation.
The ability to pinpoint a necessary feature of detail assumes particular importance when the portrait is a scientific commission. Medicine has no interest in likeness, but on the other hand will demand the exact rendering of an eczematous texture; anthropology will demand the close-up of a cranial construction; eugenics needs to see the elements that resemble ancestral portraits; while a reporter will reproduce a face against the background of the sensational event which he is describing in his telegram.
In struggling against the professional photographer we are fighting against the habit people have of lying about themselves. We are struggling against the widespread opinion that individualistic and false self-promotion is the synthetic (aggregate) truth about this or that person.
The Kislovodsk fellow is photographing geological sections in precipices. But he forgets to put a human being or tree next to the precipice. So the result is a precipice devoid of scale—it could be either a piece of geology or a slice of layer cake.
As we analyze these geological photographs, let us take into account the possible mistakes. We might enthuse over the play of light and shadow and enjoy an effect like that of a nice landscape photograph; but the shadows traversing the strata or cast next to them confuse the viewer, creating the impression of varieties of rock strata which actually are not there.
Could there ever be a reason to set up a landscape and photograph it so that it looks nice?
Yes, there could, if the purpose was to attract the kind of idle tourists who exclaim “Marvelous!” at a particular sight. But Lef is for the re-education of the tourist, and feels that this kind of purely picturesque delight is characteristic of the bourgeois—not the Soviet—tourist.
Delight in nature “untouched by the blasphemous hand of man,” in “virgin” forest, in “chaos,” in the great masses of tree trunks rotting irresponsibly and unmethodically, is just a belch of reactionary Romanticism. Would it not be more correct to express interest in nature organized to human advantage? In the fields plowed and sown, in the forests cleared and cultivated, in the rivers locked in the casemates of dams turning the hydroelectric turbines?
The poster. The book cover. The postcard. The atlas. The guidebook. The textbook. All these are different kinds of useful objects that dictate to the photographer different methods of photographing. The photographer’s worth lies not in his inventing his own particular “style” of working, but in the fact that he executes every commission with maximum expedience and ingeniousness, making it accessible to the consumer.
I took a lot of photographs in an agricultural commune, and I had to conduct one of the photography sessions in the repair workshop. This involved a good deal of self-control; the workers were forced to pose against their will. They crowded around a disassembled tractor engine, and one of them grabbed a ruler in one hand and calipers in the other so as to measure the thickness of the shaft. But the calipers appeared at the very edge of the foreshortening focus and would have looked in the photograph like a piece of cotton thread. So I asked the worker to point the calipers at another shaft, so it would appear bigger.
The reply was exhaustive:
“You want to make a fool of me? That shaft can never be measured with a pair of calipers.”
For this man it’s the opinion of his fellow technicians that is important. He wants to be photographed as an engineer, not as a hero.
When I was photographing a work scene at a brick factory, I pointed the camera at a woman who was turning some bricks. When she saw this she immediately took off her kerchief, and to my question why she had done that, she replied:
“Why should I come out looking like an old woman?”
This reluctance to be photographed during working hours is characteristic (especially of women): “This is an old dress.” “My hands are dirty.” “I have to look at what I’m doing, you won’t see my face.”
The method I used in order to bring people out of their stiff posing was to turn their attention to some defect in their work, and while they were straightening it out, to photograph them—before they had a chance to adopt a pose. They were usually full of regrets:
“What? You’ve already taken me? And I had my hand on my hip.”
On Sunday one of the commune men dropped by to have himself and his family photographed. His wife was in her Sunday best and held a kerchief in her hand. The youngest son was holding a toy horse. They explained that this was precisely how a photographer from the town had photographed them before.
I let them make themselves comfortable as they thought fit.
Basically it was the typical pose: one sitting, another standing alongside with a hand on the other’s shoulder and looking straight ahead. The children were arranged around them.
The mother instructed the little boy with the toy horse to look straight into the lens and insisted that he not screw up his eyes from the sun. Another boy wearing a jacket and long trousers held a puppy (people don’t like being photographed empty-handed, they just have to be holding something—an apple, a pigeon, a chicken, any old object, an instrument, a branch, and if worse comes to worst, even a handkerchief). When the family members had already grouped, the mother suddenly shouted to the boy with the dog:
“Take off your shirt and roll up your trousers!”
All the family helped him to roll up his trousers and then pronounced with great satisfaction:
“Now you’re wearing shorts. You’ll look like an athlete. In any case, the dog will come out better against the white body.”
