I spent several hours yesterday afternoon in the wonderful Tate Modern on London’s South Bank. The big pull was the Rodchenko & Popova exhibition, Defining Constructivism. Being interested in things Russian, this was a fascinating enquiry into Constructivism’s attempt to do art under the newly-formed revolutionary socialist Soviet Union – functional, abstract and pragmatic. Or not.
The exhibition has to be viewed as if we were back in the 1920s and not with the benefit of 2009 hindsight. The revolution was precarious; there was no gurantee it would survive; there was massive economic upheaval and poverty was awful across Russia. We know what happened as the twentieth century rolled on, but the Constructivists did not. It is a fascinating exhibition and worth a visit. (Although, given that so much of the exhibits contain words in Russian, it is odd that no translation is provided. In some cases the exhibit cannot properly be understood without an understanding of the content.)
However, that aside, I was also reminded that Nicky Gumbel wasn’t the first to write a book called ‘Questions of Life’ with a big question mark on it.
Leon Trotsky wrote his Voprosi Byta (bizarrely translated at Tate Modern as ‘Questions of Everyday Life’) in 1923. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t come to the same conclusions as the Alpha Course.
May 17, 2009 at 8:42 am
Was Don Cupitt calling his paperback “The Great Questions of Life” an attempt to outflank Nicky Gumbel?
May 17, 2009 at 6:17 pm
“Leon Trotsky wrote his Voprosi Byta (bizarrely translated at Tate Modern as ‘Questions of Everyday Life’) in 1923. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t come to the same conclusions as the Alpha Course.”
True. But he eventually got the point.
May 17, 2009 at 9:45 pm
“The exhibition has to be viewed as if we were back in the 1920s”
This is always so hard to do – whether it’s in terms of knowing how the revolution turned to tragedy on such a scale, or knowing how fine art moved on and trying to see old images afresh – I saw this show earlier this week, too, and found it fascinating. I found a lot of the later graphic work beautifully balanced – but I take your point about missing a lot as I don’t speak Russian.
Seeing the constructivists give up painting was hard, although probably the right decision for them in their circumstances – it’s something I can’t quite stop doing even though I am often not sure what I am doing, or not sure it hasn’t been done to death before – I do not want to create purely kitsch “Christian” art, nor simply be self-indulgent, etc etc. I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about what kind of art they would like to see, and their ideas will probably influence me somehow in the coming months.