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Research  Research Publications  Tate Papers  Tate Papers no.12  The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity
TAT E PA P E R S ISSN 1753-9854

The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity

In Western art history the grid has been positioned as an emblem of modernism. In Russia, however, early constructivist
artists saw the grid as both a formal and ideological device. After a period dominated by socialist realism, the grid was re-
adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by some dissident modernist and conceptualist artists. This essay argues that the grid
can still be an effective device in radical art practices as long as it is not perceived as an escapist structure that does not
address the topics of today.

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CO N T E N TS 

1 In her seminal essay ‘Grids’, the art historian Rosalind Krauss claimed that ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of
modern art’.1 ‘By “discovering” the grid’, Krauss continues, ‘cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich … landed in a place that
was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was
declared to be the past’.2 In the first part of this essay I should like to begin filling up the space of Krauss’s omission points
which she placed after Malevich’s name, and thus unravel a trajectory of the function of the grid in twentieth-century
Russian art.

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Fig.1 Fig.2
Aleksandr Rodchenko Aleksandr Rodchenko
Construction no.95 1919 Popova’s Studio 1924
Oil on canvas Gelatin silver print
64.5 x 40 cm 25 x 16.5 cm
Collection Otten © A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, © A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, DACS 2009
DACS 2009

Fig.3 Fig.4
Aleksandr Rodchenko Aleksandr Rodchenko
Hanging Spatial Construction no.11 (Square in Square) c.1921 Popova’s Studio 1924
Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print
15.6 x 11.7 cm 25 x 16.5 cm
© A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, DACS 2009 © A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, DACS 2009

2 Technically speaking, Malevich’s eidetic suprematism relied on the intersection of planes rather than lines (the main
operative tool of the grid) and is less relevant to the genealogy of this emblematic modernist structure than Aleksandr
Rodchenko’s and Liubov Popova’s constructivist paintings (figs.1 and 2) and their sculptural sequels called ‘spatial
constructions’ (figs.3 and 4). Rodchenko derived his painting grids from his radical and stylistically diverse architectural
drawings made between 1919 and 1920 when briefly a member of the Zhivskul’ptarkh.3 While some drawings relied on
planar compositions, expressed at the same time in his non-objective paintings, other proposed models of socialist urban
spaces imitated the steel grids of skyscrapers. Post-Revolution economic hardship and political instability prevented
Rodchenko and his Zhivskul’ptarkh colleagues from realising most of their architectural projects. The latter were further
delayed by the architects’ commitment to study and adopt the principles of modernist painting that had shifted
theoretical debates, continued in the newly formed Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), surrounding two-dimensional art.
In this context Rodchenko decided to introduce the grid into his last series of paintings, and identify the line as ‘the new’
and, more importantly, ‘the last form of the non-objective art’.4 In her paintings of the same period Popova similarly

demonstrated architectural aspirations Launched after the infamous 0 10 exhibition of 1915 and united under the title
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demonstrated architectural aspirations. Launched after the infamous 0.10 exhibition of 1915, and united under the title
Painterly Architectonics, the paintings adapted Malevich’s pictorial vocabulary but added greater tangibility. The tension
between the aggressively overlaid planes, each delineated with a hard edge, created a sense of ‘painterly realism’ of form
and, together with a reference to architecture in the series title, indicated Popova’s urge to build rather than paint. (This
predilection reveals her knowledge of Vladimir Tatlin’s pre-Revolutionary constructivist sculpture and her friendship and
collaboration with Aleksandr Vesnin, a painter, designer and civil engineer and in the 1920s a major constructivist
architect.) Popova most amply demonstrates her thinking of a painting as a structure rather than a surface in her
subsequent and the last two-dimensional group of works called Space-Force Constructions. Here she renders the grid with
impasto white and black lines, varying in width and criss-crossing the raw plywood surfaces.

3 As the grid established its reign in Rodchenko and Popova’s canvases, it moved away from the course planned for it within
Western modernism, that is, to signify the autonomy of art. Instead, it offered an exit from two-dimensional production,
achieving, in the words of the critic and designer Aleksei Gan, ‘the so-called overcoming of art’.5 Rodchenko sealed this
role for the grid in his design for the cover of one of his hand-made catalogues for the 5 x 5=25 exhibition that opened in
autumn 1921 and marked in his and Popova’s careers the end of easel art. Here Rodchenko commenced the typographic
grid that has since represented an ordering system for graphic designers and, according to one recent design historian,
‘the expression of a certain mental attitude in as much as it shows that the designer conceived his work in terms that are
constructive and oriented into the future’.6 But the typographic grid still mapped the two-dimensional surface rather than
dared to organise the new socialist reality. By 1922 Rodchenko submitted his grid-like spatial constructions to the service
of Dziga Vertov’s newsreels Cine-Truth (meant to be screened on a street) in which they became mobiles and optical
mechanisms fused with speech elements. By creating the textural grid Rodchenko gave his sculptural objects a voice and
violated another key function of the Western grid, namely, to demonstrate what Krauss has called ‘modern art’s will to
silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse’ and to wall ‘the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality’,
thus defend[ing] them against the intrusion of speech’.7 Popova broke another law of modernism when immediately after
saying farewell to painting, she engaged in preparing the monumental grid structure for the mass spectacle The Struggle
and Victory, dedicated to the Third Congress of the Comintern. For an enactment of workers’ victory over capitalists,
Popova, in collaboration with Vesnin, conceptualised an edifice consisting of  triangular forms divided in sections by
vertical lines and flanked by the maquettes of ‘The Fortress of Capital’ and ‘The City of the Future’.8 Such functionalising of
abstract forms aimed to provide a matrix for an effective interaction between performers and crowds of spectators and
oust urban estrangement (read silence) with an internally organised form of human communication and
physical interaction.

4 Unable to realise this project9 or to organise the collective everyday through the distribution of constructivist open
structures on the streets, Popova reluctantly returned to the confined space of theatre and produced the now famous set
designs for Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922 and Earth in Turmoil, 1922–3. Both productions included oversized wooden
lattices that actors climbed on and from which they interacted with other performers thus physically invading the space of
the grid and breaching the rule that ‘the grid forever leaves the viewer outside looking in’.10 Popova’s constructivist props
sought to secure the grid’s function as a shield against mimetic stage designs associated with the pre-Revolutionary
theatre. Rodchenko proposed a similar utilisation of the grid in his 1928 set for Sergei Komarov’s film Doll with Millions,
where he installed a long horizontal lattice in the communal space, offering it as a utilitarian structure that organised
humdrum and routine activities such as washing oneself in the morning.

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Fig.5
Vadim Ryndin
Scene from Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, Chambers Theatre, Moscow 1933
Gelatin silver print
24 x 14 cm
Private collection © The estate of Vadim Ryndin

5 Popova’s use of grids in theatre design survived on the Soviet stage until as late as 1933 when the anti-avant-garde
zealots began to take charge of the Soviet art world. In the same year Vadim Ryndin built a series of lattices for Aleksandr
Tairov’s production of Sophie Treadwell’s play Machinal (fig.5). Ryndin simplified the open geometric shapes typical of
constructivism to the utmost degree, alluding indirectly to the similarity between the grid’s open geometries and a prison
cage and thus endowing this abstract emblem of modernity with an ideological meaning relevant to the increasingly
hazardous political climate. Paradoxically, in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death, the constructivist Gustav Klutsis had
converted, for a political book cover design, an open cube structure derived from his street constructions for kiosks and
tribunes, into a hard labour, capitalist prison, filled with despairing inmates.11 By the middle of the 1930s the grid
disappeared from Soviet art, for its ‘antinatural, antimimetic, antireal’ properties contradicted socialist realism’s loyal
service to mimetic representation. When the first generation of dissident modernists emerged in Moscow in the end of
the 1950s, and adopted gestural expressionism in rebellion against the officially approved style, the grid, because of its
association with materialism, science and logic, found no advocates. In the early 1960s, however, artists Lev Nusberg and
Francisco Infante (founders of the Movement Group) recognised the value of science for the arts. They reintroduced the
elements of the grid into two-dimensional works and aspired to realising Popova’s concept of organising public spaces
through people’s interaction within the matrix of three-dimensional grids. Infante’s Galaxy 1967 exemplifies such effort: it
is a monumental metal skeleton structure webbed with cloths-lines and was interactive. Remarkably, Infante managed to
install it next to a Stalin-style neo-classical pavilion on the site of the Permanent Exhibition of the Achievements of the
People’s Economy (in abbreviation VDNKh) (fig.6). Begun in the late 1930s and open during the whole Soviet era, VDNKh
was a blend between socialist-style entertainment and a propaganda machine generating scenarios of the triumph of the
country’s economy. The removal of Infante’s alien modernist edifice from this epicentre of the regime’s myth-making,
ordered by the authorities only a few hours after the structure was completed, demonstrated that the grid had regained
its status as modernity’s checkpoint.

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Fig.6
Francisco Infante
Installation view of ‘Galaxy’ at VDNKh, Moscow 1967
Gelatin silver print
5 x 10 cm
© courtesy private collection

6 In the 1970s the conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov departed from the grid as an untainted geometric structure. Unaware of
Rodchenko’s practice of using non-objective constructions to deliver a verbal message, Kabakov, in an untitled small ink
drawing, infested the grid’s inner structure with fragments of communal speech, such as ‘How much for what?’ and ‘Give
it to me quickly’. Occupied throughout the 1970s with making albums (loose pages of texts and drawings stored in boxes),
Kabakov monumentalised his model of the narrative grid ten years later in a series of mechanically painted (following
Rodchenko’s monochrome triptych) white masonite works. In one of these panels, titled The Schedule for Taking out the
Garbage Can, he reduced the function of the grid to the level of a bureaucratic chart recording collective participation in
such repetitive and most mundane chores. (fig.7) In these, perhaps the artist’s most original two-dimensional works, he
utilised the grid to replace a representation of reality by a construction of its inventory.

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Fig.7
Ilya Kabakov
The Schedule for Taking Out the Garbage Can 1980
Enamel on masonite
150 x 210 cm
Kunstmuseum, Basel © Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

7 In such works Kabakov may have taken into account the way in which his close friend Erik Bulatov in the early 1970s had
combined the grid with perspectival space, thus sort of traveling backwards in time to when, in Krauss’s words,
Renaissance painters drew ‘perspective lattice on the depicted world as the armature of its organisation’.12 And yet as
Bulatov’s seminal paintings Entrance 1972 and Skier 1971–4 (fig.8) demonstrate, he did not isolate himself in the distant
past. Instead, he effectively confronted key spatial and conceptual taboos that twentieth-century modernists had assigned
the grid to guard.

Fig.8
Erik Bulatov
Skier 1971–4
Oil on canvas
180 x 180 cm
Private collection, Bern © Erik Bulatov  

In Entrance Bulatov mapped the canvas with a red grid and thus instantaneously endowed this visual structure with an
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In Entrance Bulatov mapped the canvas with a red grid and thus instantaneously endowed this visual structure with an
8
ideological function. Furthermore, he did away with the grid’s stubborn two-dimensionality by inscribing the word
‘entrance’ at an angle and then twice more on each side of the painting. As if using words in repetition were not enough
to destroy the silence of the grid, Bulatov painted an arrow between each pair of words, forcing the viewer’s eye to
trespass through the grid’s bars, overcoming the grid’s ambition to freeze the viewer’s gaze on the surface of the canvas.
In Skier, the painting that Bulatov took several years to finish, he uses the same red grid to define the borders of mimetic
representation. Here the skier is moving away from the viewer towards a distant forest in pursuit of the tiny figure of
another skier, drawing the viewer into the pictorial space as words and indexical arrows had done in Entrance. The grid
responds to this assault by imprisoning its representational enemy and by compromising the viewer to the extent that he
or she tolerates the elements of the real within the aesthetic field only if those elements are ‘locked behind bars’.

9 Ivan Chuikov, another important artist from the Moscow conceptual milieu, likewise appropriated a pre-modernist format
of the grid – a window structure that served as a device to show a fragment of visual reality in a painting. And like Bulatov,
Chuikov turned this tradition upsidedown in works in which he replaced a painted image of a window with a window-
object where the spaces between the bars were opaque flat surfaces on which he rendered a representation of his choice.
Adorned with imagined slices of reality, these fake windows become a panacea for the stagnating and agonising order of
things beyond his secluded studio. Chuikov’s urge to erect the grid in the form of windows between his private aesthetic
space and the mundane public one points to the constructivists’ failure to organise and ultimately aestheticise Soviet byt
(daily life). Rodchenko’s 1926 cover design for Marietta Shaginian’s book Everyday Life and Art, has remained an
emblematic advertisement of this utopian project of the post-Lenin era. On this unpublished maquette, the image of the
new woman (modelled by Rodchenko’s wife, artist Varvara Stepanova) grins at the hopeful Soviet citizens through a grid of
vertical white lines.

10The marriage of formalism and politics has haunted the history of Russian art since the Revolution when avant-garde
artists proposed using non-objective forms to serve political causes and disseminate political messages. It is owing to this
persistent ambition to utilise the emblematic geometric structure within political discourses and contexts that the Russian
grid has taken a rather different trajectory from that in the West. To illustrate this difference, in my book Against
Kandinsky I offered a comparison between the earlier mentioned Ryndin’s stage props, derived from the constructivist
morphology of the 1920s, and Sol LeWitt’s 1966 installation at the Dwan Gallery, New York, in which he inaugurated his
serial approach to modular open structures. In his seminal project LeWitt forfeited the colour black that he previously
applied along with white to paint similar structures because, as the art historian James Meyer has written, for LeWitt
‘black was too “expressionistic” … black still possessed the tragic associations invested in it by the abstract
expressionists’.13 Thus, unlike Ryndin’s cage-like structures alluding to political repressions of the 1930s, and Bulatov’s red
grids blatantly suggestive of the socio-cultural limitations of the 1970s, LeWitt made sure to fortify his three-dimensional
grids from the intrusion of just such significations. His modular open structures operated solely through the function of
the signifier becoming, in Meyer’s words, ‘the latest manifestation of the minimal look, the most uncompromising, the
most radical reduction of all’.14 This distinction led to the fact that if in Western art ‘one of the most modernist things
about [the grid] … is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the
antihistorical’,15 in Russian art the grid, through its marriage with factographic (the avant-garde)16 rather than narrative
(realist or socialist realist) images, is open to change as it functions to map specific historical moments as outlined above.

11 Unlike the colour red that even today continues to carry political connotations, black was divorced from individual
psychology (as promoted by Kandinsky after his return to Moscow),17 with the help of such artists as Malevich, Rodchenko
and others who used it in an unemotional, mechanical mode. This made the colour black, like the grid, a checkpoint of
modernity, and it reigned as such in the early 1950s in paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. Can the colour
black still take on that role and can it do so in alliance with the grid?

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Fig.9
Andrei Molodkin
Installation view of Liquid Modernity 2009
Orel Art UK © Andrei Molodkin

12 Andrei Molodkin’s installation Liquid Modernity 2009 (fig.9) proposes a union that entails the grid’s ‘antidevelopmental’
characteristic (only as far as the grid’s insistence on repetition is concerned) that was brilliantly exploited by Piet
Mondrian, as well as by Frank Stella who constructed his white grids over pitch-black canvases). Molodkin’s transparent
acrylic tubes are filled with crude oil, which despite of being an inalienable part of ‘modernity,’ has never been
mythologised by modernists. Futurists, for example, had used other, oil-mediated images such as aeroplanes and
automobiles, but rarely has anyone represented oil as the blood that feeds modern infrastructure in fine art.18 Molodkin
bares the skeleton of industrialisation as he imprisons oil in the Bastille of acrylic boxes or bars. The use of this organic
matter in an art work gives it a status of colour that I would dub ‘liquid black’ (whose degree of blackness fluctuates
depending on the origin of the oil, Russian being the darkest and the thickest), and gives to Molodkin’s cold structures the
status of liquid grids. Just as cubist painting dissolved classical canons of representation, oil, as it penetrates insulated
acrylic tubes with the help of loud pumps, liquefies the solidness of modernist grids. In this case the controlled
(constructivist) and free (expressionist) artist’s hand is mechanised, resulting in yet another form of ‘machine art’.

13 If for the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk oil gushing from a well symbolised twentieth-century modernism, Molodkin’s oil
grids can be seen as emblems of a current ‘liquid’ phase of modernity.19 Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman defines it as ‘a
condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines,
patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long, because they
decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them’.20 Molodkin’s imprisonment of oil in transparent tubes
(besides being a perfect opposite to Sloterdijk’s image of gushing oil) conveys a paradoxical characteristic of ‘liquid times’
that are both mutable and rigid. To a degree, it can be seen as a product of the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose
macro-ideology by virtue of contradiction helped the West to promote itself as a pluralist, democratic and ethical society.
However, as soon as this Cold War dichotomy was gone, the immeasurable wealth of the new Russians and their non-
transparent ethics pervaded the hitherto unavailable space of their former opponent. This new order of things has made
a lasting imprint on the post-Soviet Russian culture, leaving no space for radical art (unlike in the period of stagnation and
even more during Perestroika) and making many artists shift from the Soviet conformity to a post-Soviet ‘flexibility’. In
Bauman’s words, this new period is marked by ‘a readiness to change tactics and style at short notice, to abandon
commitments and loyalties without regret – and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability, rather than
following one’s own established preferences’.21 Within this social, economic and cultural viscidity (not so much political
after Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Eltsyn), contemporary artists tend to dwell within the parameters of a false modernist
consciousness. Among the most visible examples are, in my view, Anatoly Osmolovsky’s belated reading of Clement
Greenberg’s writings in order to advance his own laboratory, rather than productivist, leftism, Dmitry Gutov’s similarly
deferred deployment of Marxism to confront, if only scholastically, the unleashed rein of post-Soviet capital and hunger
for hitherto unavailable commodities, and Oleg Kulik’s donning a curatorial mask to re-enact Soviet ‘communal
modernism’.22

14 Unlike these artists who are engaged in the carnival of simulacra, Molodkin exhibits a modernist stubbornness with
respect to his use of a specific medium and the message that it insistently and repetitively delivers. Molodkin’s
stalwartness bothers some fellow artists and Russian collectors for he reminds the former of their political indifference
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stalwartness bothers some fellow artists and Russian collectors, for he reminds the former of their political indifference
and prevents the latter from escaping into the world of pure aesthetics where there is no ‘odour’ of black gold.23 As
Molodkin uses crude oil – material that has been fundamental to his country’s infrastructure, and even survival – to make
his sculptures, he is engaging in a truly deconstructivist activity with respect to the social and political mechanisms of
post-Soviet Russia.

15 In Liquid Modernity Molodkin’s adjoining of an open cube (saturated with oil and symbolising materialism) and a white
one (made out of fluorescent tubes and symbolising idealism) speaks of the grid’s ability to encompass ‘the sacred and
the secular’. His black and white cages critically allude to politicians’strategies of masking the link between oil and capital,
and the veiling of their interest in oil-rich territories with the rhetoric of a higher purpose – be it the spread of democracy
or the protection of religion. At the same time, Molodkin’s use of fluorescent tubes evokes Dan Flavin’s oeuvre, which is
particularly relevant given Flavin’s series of works dedicated to Vladimir Tatlin, the patriarch of constructivism. Both Flavin
and Molodkin exploit the extreme fragility of fluorescent tubes to create a sense of the volatility of cultural icons (Flavin)
and of societal canons (Molodkin).

16 The modernist grid in its very structure is an opponent of mental and visual disorientation, and its subsequent marriage
with documentary (factographic) material (made in Russia by constructivists and in Germany by the Bauhaus artists)
changed the grid from being a structure of an ‘abbreviatory optic’ to being a tool for attaining what the Bauhaus artist
Herbert Bayer called ‘the extended vision’.24 It calls for a constant flux of forms and media, and yet prescribes in order to
preserve one’s system of thinking. Postmodern artists were the last to adopt collectively this second function of the grid,
the paradigm of art making, now melting, like arctic glaciers, in the global space of political, economic, and
social uncertainty.

Notes

1. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1985, p.1.

2. Ibid. p.10.

3. The Zhivskul’ptarch (Painting-Sculpture-Architecture) collective formed in 1919 and was committed to examining the formal
achievements of modernist artists in order to revolutionise architecture.

4. This is written on Rodchenko’s sketch for the cover of his 1920 unpublished treatise ‘Liniizm’ (Linearism).

5. Aleksei Gan, ‘Konstruktivizm: Fakty neobkhodimy’, Zrelishcha, no.80, 1924, p.4.

6. Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Sulgen 2008, p.7.

7. Krauss 1985, p.9.

8. For a detailed description of this mass spectacle see Natalia L. Adaskina, ‘Theory, Teaching, Theater, and Design’ in Dmitri V. Sarabianov
and Natalia L. Adaskina, Popova, New York 1990, p.249.

9. In 1921 the government issued a decree prohibiting mass festivals and celebrations requiring huge expenses.

10. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture Redrawn’, Artforum (May 1972), p.38.

11. This was done in a cover illustration for the book In the Capitalist Labor Camp published in 1924.

12. Krauss 1985, p.10.

13. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s, New Haven and London 2001, p.200.

14. Ibid., p.202.

15. Krauss 1985, p.22.

16. A Russian neologism coined by the Lef theorists to define radical documentary practices in film, photography, and literature.

17. Kandinsky abandoned expressionism after he left Moscow in 1922, and in his paintings from the Bauhaus period used Mondrian’s
grids as intertexts, thereby endowing them with yet another function. On this see my Against Kandinsky, Ostfildern 2006, pp.148–9.

18. To my knowledge Richard Wilson is the only other post-war artist to use sump oil (in his installation 20:50, 1987).

19. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge and Malden 2007, p.1.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p.4.

22. I borrow this term from Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, 1950s–2000s, Cambridge
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22. I borrow this term from Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, 1950s 2000s, Cambridge
MA and London, 2009.

23. This divergence in opinions regarding the relationship between aesthetics and politics exploded during the opening of the 53rd Venice
Biennale, 2009. Two days after Molodkin’s installation Le Rouge and Le Noir was complete, the curator of the Russian pavilion noticed that
Molodkin had inscribed on the wall information about the Chechen origin of the blood and crude oil that gushed within the two miniature
sculptures of Nike of Samothrace. Fearing that the arriving Russian dignitaries would punish her for overlooking these politically
controversial references, the curator began to scrape off the stencilled letters. Such unprecedented curatorial vandalisation of an artist’s
installation was not subjected to any criticism from Molodkin’s fellow artists who believed that the effectiveness of his work would not be
lessened if the public thought the sculptures were filled simply with red and black paint. The resulting ambiguity would leave this icon of
antiquity in the domain of aesthetics rather than to re-excavate it and turn into a fluid vessel for a political message.

24. On both concepts, see Victor Tupitsyn, ‘Herbert Bayer: Von der Erweiterten Sicht zum Erweiterten Field’, Bauhaus, Dessau, Chicago, New
York, eds. Georg-W. Költzsch and Margarita Tupitsyn, Essen and Köln 2000, pp.82–9.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a talk given at Constructivism and the Art of Everyday Life, a study day held at Tate Modern,
on 28 March 2009, during the exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism at Tate Modern, which
was co-curated by Margarita Tupitsyn.

Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent scholar and curator.

Tate Papers Autumn 2009 © Margarita Tupitsyn

Download the print version.

How to cite

Margarita Tupitsyn, ‘The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity’, in Tate Papers, no.12, Autumn 2009,
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/the-grid-as-a-checkpoint-of-modernity, accessed
22 April 2019.

Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and modern
international art, and on museum practice today.

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video recordings from past TateModern abstraction; past
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the Tate Modern conference, exhibition at Tate
conference Constructivism and Modern
Constructivism and the Everyday Life, exploring
Art of Everyday Life issues raised by the
Rodchenko & Popova
exhibition and ...

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