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When I joined the editorial board of OCTOBER,
the New York journal of aesthetic criticism and art theory that
named itself after the events of October 1917, we understood
contemporary art practices to be transgressive. While the Bolshevik
avant-garde's official importance was as an aesthetic style institutionalized
by MoMA (the New York Museum of Modern Art), OCTOBER was loyal
to new art that resurrected the politics of avant-garde art,
the desire, through the aesthetics of daily life, to transform
society. It was for reasons of social engagement that we looked
to the past, not as an issue of art-historical chronology. Artists
and theorists were attempting to revive the political excitement
that was generated at that earlier time. From constructivism
to cinema, from public art to collective production, we turned
to the work of Bolshevik revolutionary artists for practical
inspiration. As for the ultimate triumph of Stalin's aesthetic
program in the USSR, it seemed to be the utter defeat of the
avant-garde.
We did not know then that Vladimir Paperny was writing a study
of the same avant-garde, but from a structuralist perspective
that was able to theorize the relationship in Soviet culture
between the 1920s (Culture One) and 1930s (Culture Two), at the
same time that the liberatory aspects of the avant-garde were
affirmed. I first read parts of Kultura Dva in the early 1990s,
as fragments in English translation by Alla Efimova. I was impressed
by the simplicity of Paperny's argument that allowed political
power and architectural style to be thought together without
conflating them or making one the cause of the other. In two
axes, horizontal and vertical, one could suddenly see the politics
of architecture as the structure of space, so that the historical
argument and the theoretical argument were all of a piece. No
longer was it legitimate to cut the discussion of Soviet art
off with the rise of Stalin; now we could see inside of architectural
form a double tendency, one authoritarian and the other democratic,
that existed from the beginning of the Bolshevik experiment.
Structures of high Stalinism were instantly decipherable, and
even the heaviest Stalinist Gothic building seemed full of theoretical
significance. I recognized the value of Paperny's work for issues
that were central to my own concerns in Dreamworld and Catastrophe,
and was grateful to be able to use this book in the classroom
after the English text became available.
Vladimir Paperny reveals the full ambiguity of the dream-images
that avant-garde art and architecture provided. He demonstrates
how Soviet culture was at odds with itself, as first one and
then the other of its potentialities, egalitarian/uniformist
and hierarchical/differentiating, achieved the upper hand. In
doing so, he illuminates the irreconcilable dialectic that forms
the general structure of political revolution in the modern era
that seeks to build the world anew, from the French to the Bolshevik
Revolution, China and beyond. The very conception of the avant-garde,
a term borrowed from the vocabulary of military violence, harbors
the twin tendency of social equality and authoritarian control.
Aesthetics is political as the material expression of this duality,
the experience of architecture and culture that shapes the bodies
that pass through them and the minds that contemplate their form.
Paperny's structural analysis communicates directly to the present
the political dreams of the modernist avant-garde, so that their
promise and their danger remain accessible. His account, written
with humor and humanity, differs strikingly from the historicism
of others who have cynically dismissed the whole experiment as
a relic and a ruin of the past. At the same time, he demonstrates
how easily the balance can tip from utopian dream to social nightmare,
and that no theory of radical evil is necessary to comprehend
this shift. His images are striking. His writing sparkles. Even
from a distance, the reader enters into Soviet culture with unexpected
empathy - and a shock of recognition. |
