Violence and Corporeality in Soviet Photography of the 1920s

Contents:

• Monstrous Bodies

One of the key themes of avant-garde photography at the beginning of the Soviet era was the formation of a "collective body" of the new society. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to "exterminate" individual bodies.

With the permission of the publishing house "New Literary Review", we present to your attention 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 provides an introduction to the visual practices of that decade, spanning painting, architecture, photography, and cinema.

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Monstrous Bodies

Interestingly, Rodchenko's creative approach often contradicts his own statements, which are written in the spirit of factual realism. In his programmatic article "The Paths of Modern Photography" (1928), he defends the advantages of "unexpected" shooting angles, arguing that it is precisely such perspectives that most often best reflect our real perception of objects. At the same time, the desire to maintain a "correct" perspective leads to staging: the object is torn from its natural context and placed in a neutral space where it can be captured according to all the canons of classical perspective. "The photographer doesn't approach the subject with a camera; the subject itself approaches the camera, and the photographer merely poses it in accordance with pictorial standards," Rodchenko notes. However, in his own works, this or that technique, including "angle," is often applied without any "realistic" motivation. This demonstrates that such motivation is not at all necessary. A series of photographs of pioneers, taken from various heights—both above and below—is an example. Critics have noted that this series demonstrates an almost forced application of the method, representing an extreme example of the very "staging" that Rodchenko himself condemned. Critic Leopold Averbakh, one of the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), expressed the following thoughts on this matter:

He photographed the pioneer, setting the camera at an angle, and as a result, instead of a normal image, he got a monster with one huge arm, crooked and completely devoid of symmetry.

If you remove the emotional coloring of these statements, it becomes obvious that they give a fairly accurate idea of ​​​​Rodchenko's work.

Among the many similar examples, it can be noted that in the Soviet avant-garde photography of the late 1920s - mid-1930s, effects of bodily transformations, sadistic dismemberment of the human body and the creation of some new, "superhuman" order from its fragments were not uncommon. The blurring of the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, man and machine, also fits into this context. Thus, in his posters, Klutsis creates the image of a collective body using bodily fragments, while Lissitzky, in his sketch for the "Soviet Exhibition" in Zurich (1929), forcibly combines a male and female face with a double exposure, thereby erasing sexual differences and restoring a primal bipolar unity, reminiscent of Plato's "primordial humans." Rodchenko transforms the diver's body into a strange flying mechanism, devoid of anthropomorphic features. Boris Groys believes that the emergence of interest in bodily metamorphosis was a logical continuation of the avant-garde movement: the body represented a boundary for experiments aimed at transforming reality. To make the body malleable and changeable would mean overcoming the resistance of nature itself. Importantly, the avant-garde artists did not seek the source of this resistance in the very nature of things. On the contrary, they perceived its essence as boundless creativity, like fire, which "measurably flares up and measurably dies down," as Heraclitus of Ephesus described. Objects represent the alienated form of this fire's existence; created by it, they force it to retreat and die out. The task of the avant-garde is to rekindle this flame, to renew the process of creation, the necessary condition of which is the destruction of what has already been created.

One of the most impressive examples of body de/construction is Lissitzky's photomontage, which was used in the design of the Soviet pavilion at The international exhibition "Hygiene" in Dresden and the design of the accompanying booklet for this event in 1930 were both thematic and compositional. This work pays homage to Klutsis's "Dynamic City." The focus is on a vision of the future, depicted as a globe on which parallels and meridians are visible. Unlike Klutsis's early works, where the terrestrial sphere remains closed, here it appears completely transparent: the globe is associated with an industrial structure being created by two workers located within it. Lissitzky uses the method of multiple exposure to combine various elements. The construction is completed by the head of a third worker, executed on a scale significantly larger than the first two; this transforms the world-construction into a human or even superhuman (class, social) body—permeable, liberated from physical mortality, and created before the viewer's eyes. This triple metaphor, connecting the universe, corporeality, and technology, also serves as a symbol of art as a process aimed at creating life, which, in the long run, blurs the boundaries between nature and culture.

The emergence of the collective body of proletarian society became a central theme of Soviet avant-garde photography, and the technique of montage acts as its symbol and reflection. The formation of this new super-body occurs through a process of fragmentation, dismemberment, and subsequent reassembly—in other words, through violence against the integrity of the photographic image and, ultimately, against the bodies captured in these pictures. In Klutsis's photomontage "Let's Fulfill the Plan for Great Works" (1930), dozens of identical hands raised in a single gesture symbolize the destruction of the boundaries of the individual organism (this work also represents a contemporary, post-Suprematist interpretation of "Dynamic City"). Constructivist manipulations of photography are similar to the processes that underlie all initiation rituals: the achievement of a new, more perfect social or supra-social body is possible only after the destruction, the sacrifice, of the original individual body. The memory of this destruction is recorded in the form of scars, marks, and tattoos, which testify to the denial of primary corporeality. The negative aspect, consisting in the "montage of facts," serves as an analogue to these scars. Thus, one can offer another version of the answer to the question of the causes of the repression of the avant-garde. The exposure of this technique simultaneously exposes the violent aspect—a ritual tattoo that recalls violence and simultaneously controls it.

Observation shows that avant-garde art, which used methodical depersonalization and likening man to a machine, turned out to be much more totalitarian in its essence than the art of the present Totalitarian regime. The latter, lacking such consistency and candor, tends to disguise its mechanisms. This art, in turn, returns to humanity what was destroyed during political revolutions and avant-garde artistic movements—everyday life, traditions, familiar and reliable symbols of human existence—transforming them into its own ideological concepts. It is no coincidence that "pastoral" themes occupy a prominent place in Stalinist culture. It was precisely this "human, all too human" that the avant-garde artists encroached upon, leading to the exclusion of their art from public space. In place of the destroyed and distorted body in Stalinist art, including the late works of Rodchenko and Klutsis, the image of a whole, "symmetrical" body comes to the fore, often combined with elements of nature. A society that has lost its human dimension needs humanistic art.

Read also:

Rodchenko: Transformation in the World of Photography