Corporality and Violence in Soviet Photography of the 1920s

Contents:

• Monstrous Bodies

One of the key aspects of avant-garde photography in the early Soviet period was the formation of a "collective body" of the new society. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to "kill" individual bodies in order to create something greater.

With the permission of the New Literary Review publishing house, we present an excerpt from the section "Soviet Photo Avant-garde" written by art historian and critic Andrei Fomenko. This section is part of the book "The Soviet Twenties," which serves as an introduction to the visual practices of that decade, covering such fields as fine art, architecture, photography, and film.

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Monstrous Bodies

Interestingly, in his artistic work, Rodchenko sometimes contradicts his own statements, which are formulated in the spirit of factographic realism. In his seminal article, "The Paths of Modern Photography" (1928), he argues that "unexpected" perspectives have their advantages, citing as evidence that such angles often more accurately reflect our perception of the world around us. In contrast, attempts to maintain a "correct" perspective lead to staging, where the subject is separated from its natural context and placed in a neutral space where it can be captured according to the canons of classical perspective. As Rodchenko notes, "The photographer does not approach the subject with a camera; rather, the subject itself comes to the camera, and the photographer poses it according to painterly standards." However, in Rodchenko's own work, the use of various techniques, including "angles," sometimes occurs without any "realistic" justification. This emphasizes that such justification is not necessary. A perfect example is a series of photographs of pioneers, taken both from above and from below. Critics have noted that this series displays an almost forced application of techniques, a clear example of the very "staging" that Rodchenko himself condemns. Critic Leopold Averbakh, one of the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), commented on this situation as follows:

He photographed the pioneer, setting the camera at an angle, and instead of the expected image, he got some kind of monster with one huge arm, crooked and clearly devoid of any symmetry.

If you remove the accusatory heat from these expressions, we can confidently say that they represent a fairly accurate characterization of Rodchenko's activities.

This is far from an isolated case: examples of bodily transformations, sadistic dismemberment of the human body and the creation of new, "superhuman" forms from its parts are quite common in the Soviet avant-garde photography of the late 1920s and mid-1930s. Added to this is the blurring of the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, man and machine. For example, in his posters, Klutsis creates the image of a collective body made up of fragments, while Lissitzky, in a sketch for a poster for the "Soviet Exhibition" in Zurich (1929), forcibly, through double exposure, combines male and female faces into one, thereby eliminating sexual differences and restoring a primal, bipolar unity reminiscent of Plato's "primordial humans." Rodchenko transforms the diver's body into something resembling a flying machine, having lost its anthropomorphic features. According to Boris Groys, interest in bodily metamorphosis was a natural continuation of the avant-garde movement: the body represented a boundary for experiments aimed at altering reality. By making the body malleable and changeable, it would be possible to overcome the resistance of nature itself. However, according to the avant-garde, the source of this resistance is not the nature of things as such. The essence of this nature lies in infinite creative energy, reminiscent of fire, which "slowly ignites and slowly dies out," as Heraclitus of Ephesus said. Objects are an alienated form of fire's existence: they are produced by it and cause it to retreat and die out. The task of the avant-garde is to reignite this flame and renew the process of creation, which requires the destruction of what has already been created.

One of the most striking examples of body de/construction can be considered the photomontage created by Lissitzky for the design of the Soviet pavilion at The international exhibition "Hygiene," held in Dresden in 1930, and also for the design booklet for the event, is a work that shares much in common with Klutsis's "Dynamic City," both in its subject matter and composition. The work centers on the depiction of a future world, represented as a globe covered with a grid of parallels and meridians. While in Klutsis's early works the terrestrial sphere appears closed and impenetrable, in this case it becomes completely transparent: the globe is associated with an industrial structure being created by two workers located within. To connect the various elements, Lissitzky employs the technique of multiple exposure. The construction is completed by the head of a third worker, depicted on a significantly larger scale; it transforms the world-construct into a human or even superhuman (class, social) body—permeable, devoid of mortal flesh, and created before the viewer's eyes. This triple metaphor, uniting the universe, corporeality, and technology, also serves as a symbol of art as a process that shapes life and strives to erase the boundaries between nature and culture.

The emergence of the collective body of proletarian society becomes a key theme in Soviet avant-garde photography, and montage acts as its symbol and reflection. The creation of this superbody occurs through a process of fragmentation, destruction, and subsequent reunion—in other words, it is a violation of the integrity of the image and, ultimately, of the figures captured within it. In Klutsis's photomontage "Let's Fulfill the Plan for Great Works" (1930), dozens of identical hands raised in a single gesture suggest the destruction of the boundaries of the individual organism (in essence, this work is an updated, post-suprematist interpretation of "Dynamic City"). Constructivist manipulations of photographic images are akin to initiation rituals: in order to acquire a new, higher, social, or even supra-social body, it is first necessary to destroy, to sacrifice, the original individual body. The memory of this destruction is preserved in the form of scars, marks, and tattoos that indicate the denial of the original corporeality. The negativity created by the "montage of facts" is the equivalent of these scars. Thus, one can offer another version of the answer to the question of why the authorities repressed the avant-garde. The exposure of this technique also became the exposure of violence—a ritual tattoo that recalls violence and simultaneously keeps it under control.

Observations show that avant-garde art, which actively used methods of depersonalization and sought to compare man with a machine, exhibited more totalitarian traits than The very art of real totalitarianism. The latter cannot be so consistent and open in its approaches, preferring to conceal the mechanisms of its functioning. This style restores to humanity those aspects destroyed by political upheavals and the influence of the artistic avant-garde—everyday life, traditions, familiar and reliable symbols of human existence—while simultaneously transforming them into its own ideological constructs. It is no coincidence that "pastoral" themes occupy a significant place in the culture of Stalinism at the highest level. It was precisely this "human, all too human" that the avant-garde artists encroached upon, which led to the exclusion of their works from public space. Instead of a destroyed and deformed corporeality, Stalinist art, including the late works of such masters as Rodchenko and Klutsis, foregrounds the image of a whole, "symmetrical" body, often in harmony with natural elements. A society that has lost its human traits feels the need for humanistic art.

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Rodchenko: a revolution in the world of photography