Tatlin: The Great Fool...

Vladimir Tatlin's aim was to put cubist space into a three dimensional lived form and it's all kind of old hat now for us at the end of the era of modernity we have found desperately wanting and empty. Ehrenburg said that the Café Pittoresesque where Tatlin along with others of the Russian avant-garde displayed more than their wares was "the only café that all the artistic sewers in Europe's capitals would envy." as, after all, Tatlin in collaboration with El Lissitsky, had fundamentally altered its interior. From then on Tatlin wanted to spatially recreate the world......

On the one hand Tatlin is seen as the most modern of the moderns of the first 50 years or so of the 20th century and indeed the first written re-appraisal of Tatlin in Russian didn't come about until 1966, thirteen years after his death! On the other hand the guy was also in person a somewhat yob of a guy from the back of beyond, of an old peasant Russia, which was rapidly dying out and as he got older he seemed more and more to cling to this past. Then Tatlin shared his sleeping quarters with his famous Tower and the less famous glider, sadly taking refuge in painting. The German Dadaist George Grosz said of him: "I met Tatlin the great fool once again. He was living in a small, ancient and decrepit apartment. Some of the hens he kept slept on his bed. In a corner they laid eggs.....behind him a mattress, entirely consumed by rust was leaning against the wall; on it sat a couple of sleeping hens, their heads in their feathers. This was the good Tatlin's frame and when he played his homemade balalaika – it was growing dark already outside the uncurtained window, the panes of which had been replaced by small plates of wood – he gave the impression not of an ultra-modern constructivist, but a piece of the genuine, ancient Russia, as if from a book by Gogol; and there was suddenly a melancholy humour in the room."

Tatlin may have died forgotten but in the early 1920s he was regarded as one of the leading Russian artistic revolutionaries. Nay more than that: he was a kind of innovative cultural boss sitting astride the new hierarchy. I think it's this moment which makes Tatlin's example so appealing to so many younger so-called revolutionaries today, gauchiste artists who in their baneful dreams would like to take over culturally bankrupt institutions becoming new 'enlightened' bureaucrats and powerful careerists of creativity! (Ugh) After all Tatlin was elected leader of all artistic organisations in Moscow. He was head of the Narkompros Board for Plastic Art and Head of the Dept of Painting at the Free Studies School in Moscow. He was commissioned by the Commissariat of Education under Lunarcharsky to make the Monument to the Third International (the Tower) and which has become the most famous of the Russian avant-garde constructions. Many copies have been made. Perhaps the most notable is by Ulf Linde in Utrecht and another stands (painted red) in the forecourt of the Management Studies building of the Central London Polytechnic. As a symbol it is the insignia of New Left Books. Yet as a monument does it really have much relevance for us today? Like shite it does.

As with many others involved in the Russian avant-garde Tatlin wanted to grasp the whole of space again by a kind of unity of the arts through the use of new materials – his famous "culture of materials". He intuitively - more than theoretically or through historical knowledge – realised that all the central reference points in the arts had been lost and the only way out of this impasse, this avoidable crisis for Tatlin, was through a huge extension of formal, modernistic, machine-made radicalism applied to the everyday utilitarian objects we make use of which should become charged adjuncts of a changed revolutionary lifestyle in the process of being realised in revolutionary Russia. It went little deeper than that for if he'd look behind surface appearance, Tatlin would have realised the revolution had soured pretty quickly and we should be preparing for a really subversive new revolution! Instead he accepted the shibboleths. In a manifesto Tatlin wrote in 1920 apropos of the Monument to the Third International he says, "The results of this are models which stimulate us to inventions in our works of creating a new world and which call upon the producers to exercise control over the forms encountered in our everyday life."

The points to make here: What new world, what changed everyday life? Hopes yes but precious little realisation and we saw how Mayakovsky came to grief over this growing absence. The Third International had become threadbare; the Kronstadt sailors' revolt was only a year away, and an ultra-leftist, anti-Bolshevikh communism well on the rise around the corpse of Rosa Luxembourg and, yet it seems Tatlin's ears were closed to all this! Moreover, about the only familiar and human detail in the monument is the canteen, as basically The Tower is a representation of vulgarised communism assisted by a crude technolatry, or should I also add a technology which has little to do with any liberating practical science like say a Brunel had practised e.g. his improvisations when constructing the Great Western Railway. If you like Tatlin's is an aestheticised technology based on the synthesis of architecture and the leftovers of sculpture and painting that had been in a purposeful, creative freefall. Tatlin had said the artist's "creative method is qualitatively different from that of an engineer" and in reality the tower's dynamic central spiral is similar to that of the "Bottle in Space" by the Italian Futurist Boccioni. I think this comparison is better than the usual one, that of the Eiffel Tower in Paris though I think there's little point in researching the iconography of the Tower. Trotsky in "Literature and Revolution" had also compared the Monument to the Third International to the Eiffel Tower. He said of the latter, "It stimulates us by the technical simplicity of its forms but it alienates us by its purposelessness". (Later, never forget the International Lettrist, Chetchglov in the 1950s was going to blow the Eiffel Tower up, an early indication of a drift into tachiste spontaneous 'terrorism' harbinger of the Angry Brigade and an argument elaborated in, "A Catastrophic Social / Creative Impasse (....by way of the personal tragedy of Mayakovsky)."

Nonetheless Tatlin subscribed to a utilitarian ideology that for the life of him he could never adhere to as always the poetic and evocative was attempting a takeover within the depth of his being. In one of his final brochures, "The Man on the Stage", a photo displays bent discs hanging from the ceiling which when illuminated, evoke the moon, like something out of Elizabethan poetry in Shakespeare's time. Indeed Shklovsky called Tatlin's utilitarianism "a strange utilitarianism". Trotsky was more than in agreement seeing little that was utilitarian in the Tower. Somehow you get the impression of scaffolding that the builders have forgotten to take away. In any case why should revolutionary meetings take place in cylinders and cones amidst all the debris of Cézanne and Picasso? However Trotsky's critique remains on the level of the visual and goes no deeper; now we must more than plummet greater critical depths we must again practically act upon our conclusions.

The Ornithopter (the glider) was also called Le-Tatlin a Russian futurist neologism meaning to fly. Many contemporary commentators immediately invoked the experiments of Leonardo and Lilienthal. Tatlin himself mentioned that Icarus was the first to fly. Again, this is a big harking back spliced onto an aesthetic technology at once, as Zelinsky said, humdrum "home handicraft" and / or "technological Khlebnikovism". As for myself I can look at the Ornithopter as a bizarre piece of Art Nouveau. Moreover, science, apart from spontaneous science is of little avail here. Tatlin was far too much the primitive, watchful, old fashioned peasant for that and for inspiration he simply watched the flight of bees in meadows, although some commentators have rather pointlessly tried to make some connection between the pioneer of Russian rocket research, K. E. Tsiolkovsky who in 1912 had said," if the aeroplane is ever to be replaced by ornithopters, then rational planning of the latter will demand an even more thorough study of birds and insects ability to fly." I doubt if Tatlin ever read Tsiolkovsky. In any case it was Tatlin's belief that the machine could be propelled by muscular power alone and therefore quite at odds with Tsiolkovsky. Tatlin himself said of the glider, "I have made it as an artist...don't you think "LeTatlin" gives an impression of aesthetic perfection, like a hovering seagull?" This is early ecological stuff and what's even more interesting, Tatlin then went on to say, "I want also to give back to man the feeling of flight. We have been robbed of this by the mechanical flight of the aeroplane." I also like to think it's more than that, more to do with a multi-dimensional world and the insights of various mystics, that sensation of flight that goes back to ancient religious sects, to the witches on fly agaric and the shamans; all a far cry from the Age of Enlightenment.

So often the Tower and the later Ornithopter are regarded as early examples of aestheticized objects (objet d'art?) which began to bridge the gap between art and modern technology. Perhaps but hasn't this trajectory since Tatlin only had baneful conclusions resulting in a plethora of spectacles and ludicrous constructs like the recent displays of the idiotic Nicholas Schoeffer's light towers he refers to as Cybernetic Serendipity or on an even more banal level, the pseudo technical / industrial apologetics of the Art Placement Group. (In any case how can you make the baneful social control inherent in cybernetics become playful serendipity?) None of these pathetic, so-called experiments ever once question the traditional role of the artist and the omnipotent sway of now bankrupt art objects have today over our lives. Do we need a 'new' aesthetics or, do we dispense with aesthetics altogether? For me the only aesthetic question that has any relevance today is, "How much does it cost?" True there must be a creative technology but then creativity and aesthetics are no longer synonymous; in fact they are poles apart. The useless pursuit of a fusion of art and technology is nothing but a reification avoiding the question of how technology can become genuinely creative and relevant way once a world total social revolution is reaching a stage of no going back i.e. when the capitalist mode of production has been thrown into the dustbin of history when something like a permanent festivity is beginning to emerge within a daily life on the cusp of magnificent renewal. At that moment technology, for the first time in world history especially of the last 150 years or so, will do most of the work that the wage labourers of today have no choice but to do and not as is the case in the present organisation of society, part of the increasing organic composition of capitalism defraying some of the costs of variable capital (wages). Indeed some of the Russian avant-garde vaguely intuited some such future scenario. El Lissitsky, surprisingly, considering his often baneful pre-figuration of something like a Russian MaLuhanism said, "Communism will have to be left behind because suprematism which embraces the totality of life's phenomena – will attract everyone away from the domination of work."

Although not really elaborated – it's not much more than a vague intuition – it is a remarkable enough forecast. The best I think that can be said about Tatlin's experiments were that despite heading for a cul-de-sac there was something interestingly mock heroic about them; they were attempts to bring about radical, fundamental changes before the wider perspectives and possible subsequent problems had been thought through. There is of course, no point in even attempting to repeat them. It could be said that the Tower reveals Tatlin's bourgeois cum bureaucratic conceptions re the functioning of a transitional 'proletarian' democracy, ('proletarian' deliberately italicised because the proletariat must, of course, abolish itself through a successful uprising). Tatlin in his construction envisages a separation between executive and legislative to be housed in distinct cones or cylinders and thus (whether the guy was conscious of this or not) a feature of bourgeois state rule. All previous experiments in transitional proletarian democracy, the Paris Commune of 1971, the 1905 revolution in Russia had seen a fusion; a possible supercession of the legislative, executive and judicial with no supposedly neutral civil service proclaiming declarations and distributing / enforcing enactments etc. In the 1905 uprising we saw for the first time in world history, the creation of workers' councils where delegates were elected from work places on permanent revocable mandates. In short tendentially creating the most advanced form of democracy (direct democracy) the world has ever seen. Most revolutions since then have tended to throw up similar forms of proletarian, self-management, including Hungary 1956 and to a lesser extent May 1968 in France (though the French Communist party managed to stymie or derail much self-organisation in the factories).

But where is all the earlier experience of direct democracy in Tatlin's Tower. Well it ain't there folks because this is for The Party and nothing but the Party Line! In fact it falls in line with the Bolshevikh dictatorship (the baneful Workers' State) over the autonomous power of the Workers' Councils. Let's face it; the guy was ignorant regarding a lot of basics. On the general level Tatlin was submissive, at best naively following all the changes in the Bolshevikh party line. At worst, his "Art into Technology Manifesto" is prefaced by a singularly stupid comment of Stalin's, "During the epoch of construction, technology determines everything."

As for the future will we need such Internationals housed in such monuments? Come off it, of course not! Assemblies, Workers' Councils (call them what you will) will meet anywhere and everywhere: a university building, a factory, a mill, a warehouse, a football stadium, a concert hall, a cinema – what buildings are appropriated won't be of any consequence because these structures will also be in the process of losing their former roles, never, hopefully to return to their original purpose. In any case such popular ferment will contain within itself radical critique of all monumentality and all the edifices of state functions etc. as well as the ubiquitous application of all the stylistic 'innovations' of modern art nowadays applied to vast stretches of our urban spaces, especially our living areas. Inevitably too, consciously or not, there will be a critique in motion of all modernist processes not only elaborated by Tatlin, Malevich, Lissitsky and others but for us in the West omnipotently imposed by all the fallouts from the Bauhaus to De Stijl, especially the sheer brutality of The International Style as moulded by the horrors of Le Corbusier etc. And, let's face it, the Russians tended to back all this crap to the hilt. In one of his letters from the Unovis School in Vitebsk, Malevich ended with the salutation, "Greetings to non-objective Holland and all the innovators living there." For let's be honest, the difference between Russian applications of modern art to most aspects of design – supposedly 'communist' in orientation – differed little from what was taking place in the West; a little bit more bizarre perhaps (e.g. Malevich's crockery) but not fundamentally that different (e.g. the Dutchman's, Rietveld's nutty De Stijl chair and both meant to be utilitarian objects that are profoundly non-utilitarian). Even today, a blinkered leftist will always persist in coming out with the notion that the Bauhaus was better once the Communist party apparatchik Hannes Meyer took over from the social democratic Walter Gropius.

Anyway within the context of contemporary advanced Workers' Councils once the repressive state apparatus has been subdued and conquered, immediate tasks - no matter what – regarding the exigencies of the urban situation will still, first and foremost have to deal with the immediate socialisation of the land and the abolition of rents and mortgages etc. meaning that an active critique of modern art and design will come about somewhat farther down the scale of urgent tasks. In any case such critique is more likely to happen spontaneously anyway outside of any solemn decrees from on high (no matter that it is from some top dog workers' council) and happen it will and quickly simply because the proletariat has been at the drastic receiving end of a modern art funnelled through design, especially an architecture degree zero and will be only too delighted to critique its miserable presence in a probably almost endless, mass active alteration and supercession, particularly an urbanism built around car transport. At that point the pathetic notion of the "philistine workers" in comparison to the "enlightened intellectuals" will well and truly have bitten the dust. Of course it isn't ( and never was) as cut and dried as that and while recognising that many Russian "workers" laughed at the Tower unfortunately preferring traditional sculptural busts of Karl Marx and at some moments thoroughly objected to Mayakovsky's free verse, elsewhere this was not so, particularly in Italy. Gramsci mentions even before the First World War that the radical workers of Milan and Turin supported Italian Futurism and that three quarters of the copies sold of the futurist periodical Lacerba were bought by them.

More to the point, it hasn't been easy to supercede the perspective of an interlocking art / technology / new architecture syndrome. The project of the total work of art was there well before the Constructivists especially throughout the latter half of the 19th century with John Ruskin, William Morris's Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and even the Pre-Raphaelites. Since the closing of the Bauhaus in the early 1950s we have had the New Bauhaus which, though rather more subversive (capitalism was at least regarded as the enemy) fell within the same paradigms of the grande projet – a slowly disintegrating Le Corbusier-ism – whereby the designs of seemingly liberated individuals would from on top help liberate the people living in this new habitation of movable spaces made of ultra-modern, manufactured, pliable, lighter materials. But who wants these on top enlightened supermen liberating us? Why cannot we free ourselves in a wonderment of different ways - neither modern nor ancient - and collectively remake our own spaces from the bottom up minus the guidance of the grande projet? Let there be the abolition of money among wildness, wilderness ..... and sanitation.