Art and Production

Art and Production

Art and Production

Boris Arvatov

Edited by John Roberts and Alexei Penzin

Translated by Shushan Avagyan

First published in Russian 1926

This edition first published 2017 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright English translation © Shushan Avagyan 2017;

Introduction © John Roberts 2017; Afterword © Alexei Penzin 2017

Financially assisted by the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 9945 4   Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3736 4   Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0125 8   PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0185 2   Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0184 5   EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction Art and ‘Life-building’: The Legacy of Boris Arvatov, by John Roberts

1  Capitalism and the Artistic Industry

The Form of the Artistic Industry

Art and Craft

The Art of Commodity Capitalism

The Artistic Manufactures of Monarchic Absolutism

Applied Art in the Age of Machine Capitalism

Technical Intelligentsia and the Birth of New Forms

Architecture

2  Easel Art

The Origins of Easelism

The Degradation of Sculpture

Painting

Flight from the Easel

Constructivism

3  Art and Production in the History of the Workers’ Movement

Petty Bourgeois Utopianism

Art and the October Revolution

Productionist Art and LEF

4  Art in the System of Proletarian Culture

Methodology

Technique

Collaboration in Art

Ideology of Artists

Art and Everyday Life

Depictiveness in Art

Afterword The ‘Electrification of Art’: Boris Arvatov’s Programme for Communist Life, by Alexei Penzin

Index

Acknowledgements

Boris Arvatov (1896–1940) has long needed an English-speaking audience for his work. Hopefully, this present book will be the basis for other translations of his writing into English. We would to thank the University of Wolverhampton and the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow for financial assistance with the translation, and the V-A-C for its financial commitment to a new, commemorative issue of Art and Production in Russian. This gives an opportunity for Russian readers to read a book long out of print. And finally, we would like to thank Shushan Avagyan for her excellent translation, and Anne Beech at Pluto for supporting this project.

John Roberts and Alexei Penzin,

15 February 2017

Introduction

Art and ‘Life-building’:

The Legacy of Boris Arvatov

John Roberts

Boris Arvatov’s Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo (Art and Production) was first published in Moscow in 1926, and was published in an amended form in German (Kunst und Produktion) by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich in 1972, and then in Spanish and Italian the following year. As with many other key texts from the Soviet avant-garde from the 1920s and 1930s, its reception in the Anglophone world has been fragmented and beset by hearsay. So on the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, this first English translation is an excellent opportunity for English readers to acquaint themselves directly with a canonic, revolutionary and avant-garde text. I say directly, for although the work still awaits a wider readership, Arvatov’s thinking has had a significant impact on the Anglo-American, new Soviet avant-garde studies and art history over the last 20 years. Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Soviet Constructivism (2005) and Maria Gough’s The Author as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (2005), both draw on Arvatov and his theory of art-as-production, as a way of redrawing the conventional historical map of the Soviet avant-garde – that Arvatov’s Productivism1 was a failure, certainly compared to the successes of Constructivism – and of testing some of the unexamined assumptions of contemporary art theory. Thus, there has been an interesting convergence between the Arvatov theorized in these two books, and the recent ‘social turn’ in contemporary art and theory globally, with its emphasis predominantly on ‘social construction’ and the necessary temporality of artistic production, as opposed to the gallery-based display of art objects and image production.

This does not mean that we can impose Arvatov’s thinking onto this ‘social turn’. The revolutionary conditions under which Arvatov develops his notions of art-as-production and ‘life-construction’ or ‘life-building’ are, for all obvious reasons, very different from today. Yet, Arvatov’s thinking, driven as it is by the political, technical and cultural demands of the early years of the Russian Revolution, addresses some of the substantive problems and issues that define the post-traditional status of art in the twentieth century and today. What might art do once it steps outside of the studio and gallery? What kind of skills and resources might artists rely on once they abandon painting or freestanding sculpture, or even photography? In what sense is the artist a ‘collective worker’, in the same way that the labour-power of workers is organized collectively? How might artists contribute to a collective product or process? How might artistic creativity, then, be directed to the transformation of social appearances and the built environment? As such, in what ways is the artist now – after the crisis of art’s traditional artisanal function – a specialist in non-specialism, so to speak, a producer of things and meanings across disciplinary boundaries and practices?

All these questions preoccupied Arvatov and his generation of Constructivists and Productivists, just as all these questions dominate the theory and practice of the new participatory and community-based, post-object art today. Yet, if there are clear overlaps here, there is one thing that concerns Arvatov more than anything else. If art – in the second decade of the twentieth century – is now post-artisanal having left the traditional arts behind, and the artist’s skills, therefore, are part of an extended social division of labour, is it possible for art to actually enter the relations of production itself? Can art in fact contribute to, and help direct, economic production? Arvatov believed it could, and should. That is, for Arvatov, the revolutionary and technical changes of the Bolshevik Revolution not only demanded a cultural reorientation of art’s priorities – consciousness raising; new forms of cognition through art and film – but a material-functional reordering of art’s use-values. If art was to truly transform its bourgeois identity and escape its old hierarchies, if it was truly to accept its post-artisanal and post-aesthetic condition, then it should make itself available to the technical demands of modern industrial labour. This would involve, necessarily, not only a radical transformation of the artist and the category of art itself, and the materials artists work on; but also, most importantly, the very site of artistic production. In short: the artist should enter the factory. For if artists were technicians and labourers above all, then where else should their skills be better used and developed, but amongst other labourers and technicians?

As such for Arvatov this involved a radical rethinking of the artist’s creativity, even within the functionalist ambitions of Constructivist circles, which were still too attached for his liking to a model of the individual producer and to art as revolutionary representation and social decoration. Opposed initially to Constructivism’s research-based artistic functionalism, he encouraged artists to think of themselves as technicians who had finally left the self-image of individual creativity behind, even when this individuality was attached to collective projects or to the educative requirements of the new state. Thus, rather than designing revolutionary objects, symbols or propaganda-tokens – or even revolutionary-functional objects in the spirit of Alexander Rodchenko’s famous information kiosks (1919) – artists should subordinate their technical skills to the greater collective discipline of the labour process and the workshop. For it is in the factory and the workshop where the erosion of the distinction between workers (as culturally excluded) and artists (culturally privileged), individual ideas and collective creativity will be tested and challenged in practice, and the real work of a new egalitarian culture created. Artists, then, should enter the factory as part of the collective transformation of the relations of production called forth by the revolution, and by the demand to transform production for profit into production for need. Accordingly, artists should not simply join the technical staff or the production line in order to do the bidding of technicians and managers, but work in dialogue with managers, technicians and labourers on transforming the content and form of industrial labour and the life of the factory. And to do this convincingly, artists should know as much about the given labour process as those technicians and labourers who labour in the factory themselves.

Hence, under these conditions artists require a different ‘skill set’ than anything hitherto expected or demanded of artists in bourgeois culture: they should be able to think of what they do creatively as part of teamwork, and – in situations where ‘expressive values’ are not required – should think of making as a contribution to the solution of the formal and technical problems of production. To do this, Arvatov suggested that it would be better for artists to bypass art schools and art academies altogether, and go and study engineering and the sciences. This would then allow artists or artist-technicians to expand the use-values of art and the meaning of creativity to the productive and scientific realm generally. By increasing the technical and scientific knowledge of artists, artists would be in a position to have a determinate say over the big decisions of production: what is to be produced, with what resources and with what scientific inputs and to what ends. In this sense the functional and practical field of operation of the artist becomes the modern intellectual and social division of labour itself. ‘Socio-technical purposiveness is the only governing law, the only criterion of artistic, i.e., form-inventing activity’. Thus, if the confidence of this vision is, at one level, defined by an avant-garde revaluation of all values common at the time, it is also, on another level, an immediate response to the chronic crisis of Soviet industry after the Civil War; factories were running at extremely low capacity, given the shortage of raw materials and workers. Therefore, there was a cognitive dissonance between what factories were realistically able to produce and Bolshevik images of a new industrial culture. Productivism’s concern with the qualitative and technical problems of labour was, consequently, a response to this gap, and to the general underdevelopment of economic production in conditions of general need. Improving the technical conditions of the labour process and productivity, for Arvatov, was the first step in the revolutionary transformation of the relations of production.

This radical re-visioning of art and the artist under the auspices of this new productive role is the theme of Art and Production. Written during the cultural maelstrom of the early years of the revolution, when artists and intellectuals were beginning to rethink all aspects of visual culture and the identity of the artist, it sees the revolution as a harbinger of an epochal change in notions of ‘making’, ‘doing’ and ‘creativity’. Arvatov’s principal theoretical concern, therefore, is to delink the received assumptions about what artists do from the practical demands and emancipatory horizons of the ‘new age of labour’. As such his primary concern is to re-define the wholly limited understanding of creativity historically in bourgeois culture and the rise of the autonomous-aesthetic artwork produced (by an individual practitioner) for exchange on the market. In this he follows Marx and Engels of The German Ideology (1846) and the Romantic anti-capitalism of William Morris and John Ruskin, in insisting that this shift was fundamentally detrimental to the social use-values of art. Art became subordinate to the discrete aesthetic interests of practitioners, patrons, collectors, and art’s small bourgeois audience, separate from art’s communal and shared function.

Unlike Marx and the Romantic anti-capitalists (largely writing before the full industrialization of culture), Arvatov