Self-archiving of the avant-garde: genealogy vs history

Of course, everything was not so triumphant. For the most part, Provincial Museums of Painterly Culture existed only on paper. And the lifespan of the capital museums turned out to be quite short: the Moscow Museum, first headed by W. Kandinsky, then by A. Rodchenko, extended its intermittent existence until 1929; the Petersburg Museum ceased its activities in 1926.

Nevertheless, the ideology, theory and practice of the first museums of modern art remain crucial for clarifying the understanding that the Russian avant-garde had of itself. Leaving aside the peculiarities of the struggle to maintain the new museum in the conditions of civil war and military communism, also ignoring the different "leftism" of the left, and internal confrontations, intrigues and feuds due to "conflicts of interest", finally disregarding the decisive refusal of the state to support the new art, the positions and projects themselves, proposed by the artists as an effective alternative to the “unexplored past” appear to be extremely important and quite interesting.

Lack of space does not allow us to present here even a brief overview of the history of ideas, discussions and the general course of affairs that accompanied the birth of museums, their evolution, and their mortal suffocation. Leaving aside the general amount of factual material, let us dwell only on a few key points of discussion among "left" artists and theorists.

Museum objectives

The general attitude, shared by all supporters of the new museum, regardless of their aesthetic orientations and political positions, focused on the undeniable thesis at that time: the Museum should be created either by scholarly art historians, or by museum scholars/archaeologists who have long taken possession of museums, but also by the artists themselves. In expanded form, the same thesis was presented in the Declaration of the Department of Visual Art and Art Industry of the People's Commissariat for Education on the Principles of Museology dated February 7, 1919. The Declaration insisted on a deep antagonism between the museum scholar and the modern artist, wholly leaning towards the latter. 

“The professional specialty of a museum scholar is to preserve what has been created, while an artist aims to create something new in place of or on top of the old. Since the artist is a creative force in the field of art, the artist’s aim is to be the leader of the country's artistic education. Museum workers, no matter how close they are to the artistic circles, cannot, by virtue of their professional qualities, be sufficiently competent in matters of artistic creativity and artistic education.

A long-standing anachronism — the replenishment of museums with works of modern art by the choice of the museum worker should be abolished. Buying works of modern art is the exclusive competence of artists.

As professionals whose conception of the world is the basis of global artistic culture, they must have access to the works of art of the past — in order to choose from the whole mass of artistic monuments what artistic culture is, and, consequently create for themselves, as professionals, and for the growth of the country's artistic life, the museum of creative painterly culture.

Artists! Free the art of the past from dead historical pedantry.

Artists! Unite in the struggle for your professional culture of the future against the fetishism that the past places on art” [7].

The fight against "fetishism of the past" has been accompanied by a debate about the relationship between the new and the legacy of the past.

Some suggested occupational reformism and its slogan: “bring a completely new life into the dead crypts of museums”, by turning the art of the past into “historical material”.

Others, such as the art historian Nikolay Punin, called for the rejection of compromises: “Museums should not be renovated, they should be killed to the end, in other words, they should be made only repositories of visual aids in the scientific study of art history, while devoid of all grounds for direct impact on modern artistic creativity" [8]; "You can't build a common museum [...] We need to create a museum to teach us to think the way we want, and not create the same old type of museum again" [9].

Still others — Malevich among them — argued in favor of updating modernity, which would limit the impact of the past itself: “A new culture of modernity must arise, with no room for the old one [...] The establishment of a Modern Museum is a collection of modern projects, and only those projects which can be adapted to the framework of life, or which will lead to the framework of new forms, can be preserved for a time. [...] Life has torn modernity and what they were not conserving from the hands of the museum scholars. We can collect it as a living form and link it directly to life, without letting it be conserved" [10].

From this perspective, the vision of the new museum as a laboratory for the new has proved to be more productive. If the museum of the past, according to Malevich, is not a school, but the place where "traces of the artist's path, in which he concluded his time are collected", then a modern museum is, first of all, a laboratory and a factory of modernity. Therefore: "Instead of collecting any old stuff, it is necessary to form laboratories of the world creative building apparatus, and artists of living forms will emerge from its axes, and not from dead images of objectivity" [11].

The idea of ​​merging the museum with research programs of modern artistic practices, with the development in the theory of new art — suggested a completely innovative concept of topical museology. And it was not only an idea, not just a project. Both the Petrograd and Moscow museums remained important centers of research and pedagogical work.

Forerunners and heirs

In the debate about museums, Nikolay Punin suggested distinguishing between three types of museums by the nature of their collective activity:

“The first type is rather warehouses, shops, picture depositories, where works of modern art come directly from exhibitions; here these works are kept for a certain period, after which, at the request of special museum councils, they are sent to state art and historical art museums. This first type museums are review museums.

The second type is state museums of artistic culture, which should be understood as the culture of technology, forms, colors, invention of methods, etc. Museums of this type are intended exclusively for artistic purposes: to provide an opportunity to get acquainted with the development and methods of artistic creation.

Finally, the third type is state art museums of a historical nature, i.e. museums, the purpose of which is to provide as strictly scientifically as possible, or at least systematically developed material, as a visual aid for the study of art history. Museums of this kind are run exclusively by scientists and cannot claim artistic influence" [12].

Significant for modern culture, "artistic" area is thereby assigned to museums of the new. Such a museum actualizes art in a self-lawful cultural field, which is developed between exhibition funds (“selection museums”) and historical museums. However, distancing from the "historical past" did not mean rootlessness at all. On the contrary, the genealogy of new art — the visibility of its own family tree: its ancestors, forerunners, direct predecessors — constituted the most important part of the modernity demonstrated by the museum.

Malevich interpreted this artistic modernity as a museum of “the culture of color and the culture of light”: “All the works in the museum must meet the requirements of a painterly culture. What is painterly culture? A painterly culture appears where everything, even real forms, helps cultivate color, not light. This painterly center can include the icons, then the classics. Impressionists, plein air painters and also itinerants are not included here at all. Cubism, futurism, with reservation, where color unfolds, and non-objective painting of pure color relations and works, united under the name Jack of Diamonds" [13].

According to Alexander Rodchenko, the museum should have sections that combine non-traditional art (icons, signboards, lubok), artistic movements (impressionism, futurism, cubism, orphism, suprematism, non-objective art) and exhibition groups (World of Art, Donkey's Tail, Target, primitivism, color-dynamics, expressionism, Jack of Diamonds) [14].

However, the inclusion of "archaic", non-traditional art, classics, and impressionists did not mean a return to the model of an art history museum. The selective museumification of the past in the context of modern art archiving is more reminiscent of the "archives" in Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. In other words, the avant-garde museum does not accumulate the dust of statements that have become inert, but defines the type of relevance: the law of what can be said, the system that conditions the appearance of utterances as single events, and finally, what distinguishes every discourse in its plurality and distinguishes them in their own duration. In such "archives" it is not even the ancient icons that are no longer objects of religious cult, but a manifestation of modern problematic of form, design, color, intrinsic value of decorative jewelry, which got lost in the past ... The museum of modern art aims to introduce the viewer to these problems.

The result is a new type of relationship with the viewer. The viewer is now an accomplice in updating the new. Osip Brik, for instance, argues that the new museum cannot be organized on the basis of the selection of the “unique”: “For me, there is no doubt that the so-called unique is nothing but a bourgeois, individualistic ideology. It is necessary to destroy the deification of individual works of art. Museums should be organized so that paintings can be used like books in a public library" [15]. We find a similar formulation in Nikolay Punin:

"Art museum collections are an archive that can be used by everyone" [16].

In the practices of museums of artistic and painterly culture, this belief was modified through direct communication with institutions of education (Vkhutemas) and analytical, research work (Inkhuk).

Exposition practices

Understanding the museum in relation to a unique task of archiving the new has also stimulated innovative practices of hanging picture, first of all, in terms of their dynamism. According to Punin, “Let the hanging and re-hanging follow one another uninterrupted; ideally, the museum should all be fully hinged; striving for all kinds of motionless iconostasis must be radically suppressed” [17].

Malevich imagined the walls of the new museum as a conceptual artistic construction: “Taking into account that the museum will consist of a wide variety of forms of expression, the issue of hanging will be extremely important because it plays an important role in the construction and its concept, and, to reveal its real face, it is necessary to change the old principle of distributing works by schools, trends, time and events.

Therefore, I believe that the walls of the museum are planes on which works should be placed in the same order as the composition of forms is placed on the painterly plane, i.e. if rows of monotonous forms appear on the painterly plane, then the work itself weakens in tension, and vice versa.

If we hang a number of monotonous works on a plane, then we get an ornamental line, which annuls the force that could reveal itself among a variety of comparisons.

Therefore, the most profitable way is hanging the pictures in the following order: icon, cubism, suprematism, classics, futurism — painterly perception" [18].

Some ideas about experiments in the field of exhibition are given not only by old photographs, but also by the testimonies of contemporaries. Here is one of them — a diary note (dated June 2, 1920) of the "amazon of avant-garde" Varvara Stepanova, A. Rodchenko’s wife:

“They are finally hanging the Museum of Painterly Culture. Falk and Kandinsky hung up one room without any system, according to their feelings; it turned out to be like a composition of pictures, where a separate work and a separate author are not identified and do not play a role. Good, just too emotional; in such a room one cannot talk about art from the point of view of ideology, only generally talk about something emotional, not abstract, but sensual.

Anti [A. Rodchenko], of course, hangs up the pictures according to a different system; he outlined at first a common general line for a room — texture, decorative effect or emptiness, of strong color. And according to his thoughts, they hung up the rest of the rooms. He hung up the textured room himself, and, as Franchetti put it, it is ‘sharp’, I have not seen it yet.

Authors are hung in the Museum interchangeably. This means a lot, as Anti says because in this way each period value of every author remains, since, if the works of different periods by one author are hung together, then they will lose the works of the early periods and later ones will interrupt them with their quality.

Anti appreciates the movement in the author. [...] The spirit of the revolutionary speaks in Anti, he cannot stand static and immobility" [19].

BETWEEN MEMORY AND OBLIVION

The arguments of avant-garde artists about the status of modern art in the new social environment, which accompanied attempts to form a united "left front of culture", do not only testify to the diversity of aesthetic preferences. To a large extent, the public expression of various positions resulted from a change of paradigms: a transition from a historical vision of the past to a genealogical one. The historical vision inscribed art in a cumulative community of specific manifestations and equally specific relationships. The genealogical vision built lines of elective affinities, and conscious, volitional acts of succession. Any attempts to reconcile the effects of historical and genealogical visions, any calls for "objectivity" looked like opportunism. The spirit of confrontation, fueled by the idea of ​​revolutionary novelty, not only problematized the past, but demanded a severe critical reassessment.

The success of such a reassessment directly depended on a reduction from the historical to the ideological — on simplification, schematization, on the bloodlessness of the images of the past. That is why the fabric of the historical heritage looks to the avant-gardists as an orphan "raw material", an indistinguishable heap of rubbish, a senseless accumulation of "carrion" against which a person of culture is reduced to the position of "connoisseur of antiques".

For the artists who answered the call and challenge of the revolutionary situation, for those that this situation had propelled forward, at the forefront of a new culture, the logic of the path was predetermined by the initial imperatives: "Any collection of old things brings harm"; “We need to tear off the mask of carrion with a living, powerful hand, pull out the splinters of the past”; “And be just as ruthless as time and life itself” (K. Malevich). The past and with it the historical vision were pushed aside by the projectivist vision. The project was ideologically motivated. And like any ideology, it combined a critical reassessment of the past with creating its own pedigree.

To a large extent, the ideology of the Russian avant-garde echoed the Manichean dualism of the victorious revolution, which mercilessly divided the world into “old” and “new”, “reactionary” and “progressive”. However, in the ideology of the avant-garde its own motives are also clearly distinguishable, woven into the general model of the “revolution in art”: there are not only “left” ideas and artistic innovation in the field of form, but also less noticeable, although extremely important motives of messianic theology and, of course, Nietzsche's "revaluation of all values" with which his "genealogy of morality" is associated.

Of course, artists have been more interested in the genealogy of art than morality. But the attitude as well as the train of thought remain in tune with Nietzsche’s: on the one hand, criticism of values, the value of which was taken for granted, for a fact or for something unshakable, inviolable, on the other — a demonstration of alternatives which can be convincingly stated on the basis of museum exhibitions and laboratory analytical studies.

In this sense, the museum of new art is both a product and a producer of a genealogical attitude and binary typology. For A. Rodchenko, for example, the dominant opposition is that between dynamic and static developments: "New museum construction is based on the principle of a museum of stages in the development of an art form, and not in the creation of a museum of a historical nature, which resulted in its definite static forms under the capitalist system" [20]. For Kandinsky, the generalization of the opposition between the “old” and the “new” is a universal system-forming principle of museum work:

“The usual, universally established (i.e., both in Russia and abroad) approach to the organization of art museums is a historical one. The museum marks the condition of art period after period, century after century, regardless of whether one period has any connection with another other than a historical sequence. Thus, the usual type of museum resembles a chronicle, stringing phenomenon after phenomenon, without delving into their inner meaning. Such art history museums have their definite value as a repository of art phenomena that can serve as raw material for a variety of research and conclusions. The common disadvantage of such museums is, obviously, the lack of a guiding principle and system".