CTS SEMINAR 2

Last week was looking at modernism in a eurocentric focal point. This week is REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN DESIGN.

• (slide 2) revolutionary armed workers
• Bolsheviks - lived in ARISTOCRACY
• the worlds first communist country - workers country (USSR)
• COMMUNIST = wealth of a country is owned by everyone
• (slide 4) Russian Revolution (1917) - Led by Lenin
• 1917 - 1921 - Russian civil war
• 1927 director: Serge Eisenstein
• THE VIDEO
• siege of the palace, all shots are showing workers overwhelming the palace - strength in numbers
• destroying all luxuries (wine, pillows, curtains) - getting rid of the decadent lifestyle - everything shared - looting
• kid on the throne - symbolic of the birth of a new era - ideology that the monarchy was chosen by God to rule
• clocks - symbolise that it's felt all over the world - no longer separatists from the world more international. Definitely propaganda
• PROPAGANDA - propagate
• subjective, deceptive, manipulation of the audience to show superiority 
• public was uneducated - had to be visually educated
• The BOLSHEVIK - oil paintings (slide 5) dressed like a worker, towers over the city, leader of the people - red representing the blood of the Martyrs and the workers connoting revolutionary struggle (red army vs white)
• (slide6) 1917 - mid 1920's: intense artistic experimentation's - scraped the old style
• from here they jumped about 5 cultural stages to become the new largest aesthetic in the world (industrial aesthetic) 
• the workers main experience was industrial - faith in technology as apposed to religion and religious experience
• late 1920's onwards: SOCIALISTS REALISM (slide 7)
• Lenin dies STALIN comes to power - bans the artwork, says they don't understand the work and visuals it's too much like the Capitalists in the West
• (slides 8 and) encouraged people to look at European artworks e.g. Picasso and Matisse
• (slide 10) El Lissitzky - 'Beat the White Circle with the Red Wedge' - very famous - depicting the red army invading the white army's palace gates
• avangaurde - leaders - the 'elite' of the group
• circle shape - closed off, exclusive
• wedge shape - started out as a small group and got bigger - wedging the door open - doors of privilege - penetrating the circle
• (slides 11 and 12) - pastiche
• 'books' poster by Rodchenko - commissioned to be put outside libraries and reading rooms to encourage people to come and educate themselves
• peasant woman - implies books/education is meant for all - availability
• women gain a higher status on the back of revolution - you see women having the same status as men - the same wedge motif penetrating the circle is used
• woman is photographed - shows reality  - turning to new ways of showing imagery
• (slide 13) Photo montage experiments were pioneered in this era
• Lenin mucking in as one of the people - building the new future
• print media became more popular apposed to printing and sculpture - also it's modern it's new in method - re printable
• (slide 16) Designers calling themselves CONSTRUCTIVIST - they had a role, a purpose
• constructing things between 2D and 3D - the idea of just making an aesthetic of a structure of design jettisons the idea of work being able to finish and building in progress
• (slide 17) Tatlin's model of the monument to the third international
• bottom layer full of theatres to lecture and educate (it had a purpose as well as an aesthetic)
• on an axis (and extension of the earth through Russia) it was never built
• epitomised the zeitgeist of freedom to experiment
• the 3 floors would revolve
• (slide 18) The Constructivist: AIM = '...achieving the communistic expression of material structures'
• STEPANOVA & POPOVA (slide 19 - 21)
• constructivist drapery, clothes, wallpaper using generic vectors to connote revolution - new scientific modern colours
• (slide 22) interdisciplinary to their practice  - they would spread their work over photo montage/posters/constructivist patterns
• (slide 24) radical architecture for the working men not the elite ad not from the bankers
• (slide 25) Vkhutemas (ve-who-ti-mas) Russian art school - interdisciplinary - radical - modernist (check library for Bauhaus, there will be nothing on Vkhutemas - due to politics, it was an insular society, didn't want to admit that someone from a different social system had a better institution)
• (slide 26) architecture is till male dominated but there was a breakdown in the gap of men and women's role in construction, women were as much a part of it
• (slide 27) clothing designed to be almost unisex - levelling down on men and women so they were no longer objectified - men and women wearing the same clothing
• A message and fear of variety in the textiles and fashion actually aiming for EQUALITY (it seems to be a denial of originality and individuality it became a problem in the communist project)
• (slide 29) flying 'sky-bike' eutopic dream of being able to fly
• hammer and sickle (hammer from the factory - men. sickle agricultural labour - women.)
• russia realises they have no good designers because they been chased out of the country. all good design and culture has been crushed by politics
• the Russian example design - that design is subject to politics - we're limited - you can only create as modernist society will let you.