Modernism/modernity

Thus by plural number does my greatness cast its spell.

I am the Many-Maker, Multiplicator of Planet Earth.

—Velimir Khlebnikov¹

Suspended between two gallery walls in an installation photograph of 1915, Vladimir Tatlin's Corner Counter-Relief, no. 133 (1915) dramatizes the obduracy with which his sculpture has sat with silent agitation at the heart of modern art for almost a century [Fig. 1]. Invoked at the First International Dada Fair in 1920, awarded a gold medal at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, engaged in American serial art of the 1960s,² Tatlin's work has been employed repeatedly within the production of art but rarely addressed on its own terms. The greater part of the artist's most rigorous sculptures and designs now exist only in coarse photographs, which, like the one before us, are slow to disclose the details of their subjects. In what we see here, taut metal cables cross through the center and frontal plane of a bulky mass of metal scraps. Curved and bent pieces of aluminum and iron have been arranged along predominately x-, y-, and z-axes and tip slightly into the gallery space. Even from the single vantage point of the camera's lens, these surfaces present a complex interaction of planes. Along the left side of the large, central sheet of metal, it appears Tatlin has applied several strokes of paint or primer to his object with a bluntness one typically finds in the broad strokes of a house painter testing a swatch of color. Then again it is likely the artist merely found the metal this way. Indeed it is precisely the rawness of these materials in general [End Page 109] and their utter lack of reference to a subject outside the work that contributes to the common claim that Tatlin's Corner Counter-Reliefs are best understood as works that acknowledge real space.³ No longer in the thrall of a sublimated gaze or fine touch of the artist, these works have been taken off the sculptural pedestal and off the gallery wall to now directly address a physical existence in the world. Yet, along this line, Tatlin's critics have moved no closer to breaking the reticence surrounding these objects. To dwell only upon the immanence of Tatlin's materials to everyday objects of the world misses the demanding orientation of such material elements within the constructed work itself. This observation is no less striking when we consider the political environments in which the artist actively participated: first as a leading figure in Russian avant-garde circles preceding the October Revolution, then as an official in the Bolshevik state, and finally as a founding professor of the reorganized Soviet schools of art.

The following study will address this apparent discrepancy between the radical form of Tatlin's art and his political activity. More precisely, it will address his art as a political activity, since it will privilege neither of these terms as a ground for the other. The most original and important work of Tatlin's career spans a period beginning in 1914 when he first began making constructed sculpture and ending approximately in 1932 when he permanently turned to painting comfortable, domestic easel pictures. The period in between is marked by three major phases: constructed sculpture he called Painterly Reliefs, Counter-Reliefs, and Corner Counter-Reliefs produced before 1917; state monuments he both planned himself and supervised of others following his appointment [End Page 110] to head the Moscow Department of Fine Arts (IZO) in 1918; and finally, prototypes for everyday objects such as stoves and teapots he designed in the '20s while teaching and working at several institutes of art. In what follows I will look broadly at these three periods using primarily the insights available from the work itself but also the words of others with whom Tatlin shared close intellectual and artistic...