Art and Production

Boris Arvatov, John Roberts, Alexei Penzin, Shushan Avagyan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786801845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

Boris Arvatov's Art and Production is a classic of the early Soviet avant-garde. Now nearing a century since its first publication, it is a crucial intervention for those seeking to understand the social dynamic of art and revolution during the period. Derived from the internal struggles of Soviet Constructivism, as it confronted the massive problems of cultural transformation after 'War Communism', Arvatov's writing is a major force in the split that occurred in the revolutionary horizons of Constructivism in the early 1920s. Critical of early Constructivism's social-aesthetic process of art's transformation of daily life - epitomised in studio-based painting, photography and object making - Arvatov polemicises for the devolution of artistic skills directly into the relations of production and the factory. Whilst acknowledging the problems of a pure factory-based Productivism, Arvatov remains overwhelmingly committed to a new role and function for art outside the conventional studio and traditional gallery. Addressing issues such as artistic labour and productive labour, the artist as technician, art and multidisciplinarity and a life for art beyond 'art' - finding new relevance amidst the extensive social turn of contemporary participatory art - Art and Production offers a timely and compelling manifesto.

1

Capitalism and the Artistic Industry

The Form of the Artistic Industry

There is no more urgent issue, no more fundamental question in the theory of art than the issue of so-called aesthetic culture.

Art and life – how should these apparently heterogeneous phenomena be connected to each other?

The question stood as a stumbling block in front of bourgeois science and bourgeois practice, unsolved and unsolvable in the conditions of capitalist society.

Indeed, art requires free, independent labour as a necessary condition, whereas the capitalist system either excludes such a possibility, or subtracts free creation from the processes of ‘life-building’.¹

The age of machine capitalism is characterized, first of all, by the accumulation of instruments and means of production in the hands of private ownership, second, by mechanized mass production, and third, by the anarchic spontaneity of economic development. Under such conditions, neither the proletarians, the only true but unfree builders of life, nor the private owners, the non-working element of society, can become the creators of artistic culture. The worker is subordinated to the machine, while the factory owner is subordinated to the iron law of competition. There is no place for free creation in private ownership production, and thus the main current of social development is separated from the artist by a Chinese wall. Art falls into the hands of specialists from the intelligentsia, who do not produce material values and who are deprived of any kind of possibility (even with good will) of participating in mass labour processes (as an example, we may recall the attempts of the French painter Díaz who made a vase based on his own design in the Sèvres porcelain factory; he was immediately dismissed).

Craft is what is left in the hands of the artist. But if in the guild society of the distant Middle Ages the artist and the practitioner were united into a single whole through the shared instruments of labour (craft), in capitalist society the artist must either perish in a futile struggle or go into the back alleys of life to create outside of it.

Moreover, the artist worked for the consumer in the guild society, whereas in capitalist society his works turn into market goods – the creator is separated from the masses by an impassable line, becoming a refined individualist. Losing his connection with the collective, he learns to see his creative work as something valuable in itself, self-contained, and he accordingly changes the devices and forms of work. The painter no longer paints on walls – he now takes a piece of canvas and frames it; the sculptor does not install his work in relation to the spaces of a building – his sculpture must be subordinated to itself in all senses, it must affect the viewer independently, separate from the rest of the world.

This change obviously did not happen all at once. In the urban society of the late medieval period, artistic creation was still part of everyday life [byt] in every aspect:² from dresses, to towels, carpets, furniture and books.

This may have happened for the following reasons. The artist, i.e., the free, conscious creator, found in craft the kind of technique that allowed for his creation: ‘Every craftsman functions as the organizer as well as the head of production’³ – and, indeed, this is necessary for art. It is foolish, of course, to conclude from this that craft is a generator of art, that it always presupposes artistic creation, or, the opposite, that artistic production is conceivable only on the grounds of craft technique, as the consciousness of the bourgeois individualist claims, cursing the machine. The guild craftsman, in his very essence, is conservative: ‘The Renaissance epoch possessed such marvellous artistic crafts not because the craftsmen were artists, but, on the contrary, because the artists were craftsmen.’⁴

The artists never thought of removing themselves from life if they could put their talent into the general repository of ‘human praxis’: ‘art for art’s sake’ was utter nonsense for them or a madman’s delirium.

Art and Craft

There is an opinion, according to which art and craft always accompany one another. As proof, those who think this way reference the contemporary ‘folk’, i.e., peasant, art of artisans and the art of the urban craft epoch of medieval Europe (twelfth to fourteenth centuries).

First, let me address the second example.

If we look closely at the organization and work of the medieval guilds, we shall see that art never entered the realm of their tasks and was even expelled in a most decisive way from production. The work of the guilds was strictly regulated. The making of every object was regulated by strict standards passed down from generation to generation; the objects were made according to specific patterns and moulds, and no original creation was permitted. The craftsmen themselves, as a mass, were distinguished from the rest by their deep conservatism and rigidity, which at the time served as an economically beneficial mode of protection against mercantile capitalism. They killed talented inventors, destroyed technical innovations, and regarded their fellow artists as competitors, despite the fact that most of the artists were members of their guilds.

The perception of the craft epoch as an age of artistic production is a crude illusion, explained typically by the petty bourgeois idealization of the Middle Ages, cultivated among members of the intelligentsia, who worked individually and for whom obviously this epoch of individual (craft) labour seemed Edenic.

Meanwhile, artists, then as now, were solitaries, who had joined their own special artistic groups that worked for a very narrow circle of patrons, city magistrates, the church, large public organizations (such as the guilds), and the elite layer of craft and merchant bourgeoisie.

How, then, can we explain the penetration of art into industry?

By the fact that society had not yet delimited the different forms of labour: any type of labour in this epoch, including the labour of the scientist, the labour of the producer of material values, and the labour of the artist, was individual, as this was the technique of the Middle Ages. Hence, the penetration of one specialization into the other was possible, and the artist could create objects for material everyday life without changing either the social skills of his work or the technical devices.

While the guilds worked mainly and directly for the consumer, the artist made use of all the areas of production. However when social production was subordinated to the market and became more depersonalized, the artist began to handle only the types of labour that were not yet subjected to commerce, namely, crafts that produced objects of luxury. Artists were becoming jewellers, master goldsmiths and so on (fifteenth century), turning into total solitaries, ‘masters’, ‘specialists’.

The capitalist collectivization of production emerged on the basis of the division of labour, competition and the growth of private capital, which made the production process irrevocably spontaneous and therefore intolerant of free, conscious creation. This kind of collectivization touched only material production; the other areas of production remained within the boundaries of individual labour. The artist was stuck in the old technical methods.

Now there was an impassable line of radical differences of methods and forms of technique between him and mass production. The artist remained a craftsman; he was technically backward, even though the process of ‘social building’ – leaping over workshop manufacture – based itself on the machine.

These changes formed the ideology of the artist: he began to see craft as his ‘special’ area; it seemed to him that art could not be other than what it was, and he hated the machine with all the might of his craftsman’s soul. He did not understand that the problem was not in the technical form of the machine, but in the capitalist use of machines. He thought that the machine form was killing various social possibilities (for creation), when, on the contrary, it was the social, and more specifically, bourgeois form that was killing the creative possibilities embedded in machines. He called for a return to the past, and, like William Morris in England, initiating the organization of the artistic industry, opened craft shops (which, of course, could not compete with machine production and which worked for a small circle of connoisseurs, philanthropists and Maecenases) disconnected from ‘social building’ and therefore cultivating similar lifeless, archaic forms that imitated, for the lack of their own secure footing, the idealistically deified forms of the Middle Ages. These were reactionary attempts to prevent historical development, to place the backward, dead way of life on the throne of modernity. Such attempts were, of course, swept away by life and they were swept away rather quickly.

The new culture, the culture of the industrial city, could not satisfy the reactionary technique of the artist-individualist, and it is only natural that he escaped to the village, where the techniques that had died in the cities – peasant crafts, artisanal trade – were still somehow alive.

I should emphasize here as clearly as possible that there is no such thing as ‘folk’ creation, and there never was. It is time that we discard this Socialist Revolutionary⁵ utopia in art and understand that what is called ‘folk art’ is nothing other than the art of the patriarchal, technically backward, private-property type, petty bourgeois village.

What is more, peasant artistic-artisanal creation does not even exist anymore: it is a phantom, a ghost; a product of the urban aberration of vision. What we have now from art in the artisanal industry are the decaying relics of a past magnificence, the last convulsions of a backward technique, characteristic only of such an economically backward country as Russia.

The artistic forms created in the contemporary village seem to be ‘new’ only because we never knew or saw them before. In reality, they are the last helpless repetitions of traditional, patriarchal clichés.

The peasant was an artist in the distant past, during the age of feudalism and a self-sufficient household economy. Since then, the introduction of a monetary economy, the rule of the merchant and serfdom instituted by the landowner, killed the technical and therefore artistic progress among the peasantry, and its most gifted representatives either perished within the suffocating frames of aesthetic scholasticism (there are innumerable examples of this in the recent history of iconography, engraving, etc.), or they escaped into the city in rare, serendipitous circumstances (like the village born artist Taras Shevchenko), into the ranks of the intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia (raznochintsy and so on), understanding what the bourgeois narodnik can never understand – the inevitability and necessity of standing on the fundament of a high culture and not conserving a sentimentally popular ‘primitivism, sweet, only for those with over-refined hearts’.

But they also advance other arguments in defence of artisanal art in Soviet Russia: they argue, first, that it is easier to carry out the fusion of art and labour in the artisanal trade than elsewhere; second, that it will be beneficial for the republic considering the wide interest in Russian handicrafts abroad (one of the advocates of such an argument is Comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky, who endorsed in Izvestia the speech of the most reactionary Russian architect – the ‘academician’ Ivan Zholtovsky).⁶

I ought to point out straight away that the fusion of art and artisanal production is not only difficult, but also quite impossible. And here is why: our epoch does not have a single artist who could engage in this kind of production. The left are understandably repulsed by it, and the right, or the ‘depicters’ – i.e., people who cannot contribute to ‘life-building’ but only know how to depict, which means that they are useless and even harmful to production, or stylizers such as Viktor Vasnetsov,⁷ i.e., people who fake ‘folk art’ and therefore are useless for being the engines of production, for animating, reviving production – are people who will come to the artisan offering him (or his ancestors, as the modern artisan is only imitating them) forms that were stolen from him and remodelled to fit the taste of the intelligentsia.

To search for artists among artisans is a hopeless task; they exist, of course, but they are either inveterate ‘rubber stampers’, or upstarts who have turned up on the city road, adventurers who have broken away from their organic trade; their artisanship is artisanship under the influence of the Impressionists, or the Cubists, or the Futurists, in other words, degraded artisanship that has capitulated to the city.

The defenders of artisan production point to the great advantage of the artisan industry as an export potential, but here, too, it is important to take into account that the long-term exploitation of this type of export is doomed to failure: the demand for the Russian artisan is a demand by the invariably sated foreign bourgeoisie for a ‘rarity’, an exotic gastronomy. A towel embroidered à la russe, which is a source of pride for some Parisian lady, is no different socially to an Eskimo in a cage, exhibited for money in European zoological gardens. And Russian artisan production cannot, for understandable reasons, depend on consumers from the working class, peasantry and urban petty and middle bourgeoisie of the West.

Finally, it remains to point out that the cultivation of artisan art is nothing but the cultivation of artistic, and more specifically, archaic-artistic nationalism: all of these ‘roosters and barrels’ have outlived their time. The productive development of art in our age is accomplished, and can only be accomplished by other means.

The Art of Commodity Capitalism

In the time of the guild system, the artist-craftsman was distinguished from the regular craftsman not because he treated objects in a special way, using methods independent from production skills, but because he was a more qualified worker than the rest. The concept of artistry was almost synonymous with the concept of the highest qualification. The artist was more skilled than others (and it is from this that the very word ‘art’ is derived);⁸ he was an inventor, innovator, gifted craftsman and his creations were valued more than those of others because they were made in the best way possible. In the fifteenth century, for example, the prominent Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia (bourgeois scholars are casting him now only as a specialist in sculpting Madonnas) was celebrated in all of Italy for his firs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Art and ‘Life-building’: The Legacy of Boris Arvatov, by John Roberts
• 1 Capitalism and the Artistic Industry
• 2 Easel Art
• 3 Art and Production in the History of the Workers’ Movement
• 4 Art in the System of Proletarian Culture
• Afterword The ‘Electrification of Art’: Boris Arvatov’s Programme for Communist Life, by Alexei Penzin
• Index