The reconstruction of museums has long been equated with their expansion. This is partly necessitated by growth in the size of exhibits, as the spatial aspect has been essential to many post-war art forms, such as installation and land art. The dematerialization of art has not been able to stem the tide of demand for physical exhibition space. On the contrary, digital technologies have made it possible to document performances and reproduce ephemeral events in the form of numerous square feet of photographic print and thousands of characters of accompanying text, and to do so easily and almost uncontrollably.
So the drive to expand seems to derive from a transformation in the nature of art and to be inevitable. The trend is not specific to a particular geographic region or phase of development of the culture industry. It is happening in the United States (where a new Whitney Museum building by architect Renzo Piano was opened in 2015, and the renovated and enlarged San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to visitors in 2016), in Europe (where the long-awaited new wing of Tate Modern opened in 2016) and in Russia (where a new building is being designed for the National Center of Contemporary Art, as well as a whole museum quarter for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). These are just a few, high-profile examples of a much broader trend: new museums opening today aim to achieve unprecedented capacity from the outset.
But capacity for what? If we are talking about works of art, then, as Hal Foster noted, Richard Serra, for example, undoubtedly produces great work, ‘but that doesn’t mean that its size should be the standard measure of exhibition space’. [1] Moreover, a significant part of the space in museums today is taken up by rest zones, food courts, and retail areas.
Limiting ourselves to museums of modern art, we notice that, despite offering new exhibition strategies and pondering the very phenomenon of museumification, they tend inexorably to expand their floor area. Take the flagship Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums of its kind and the most famous of them all. First opened in 1929 it has moved several times from a smaller to a larger building and is now preparing to expand once again.
But there comes a limit to any expansion. And here we might recall the museum that lent MoMA its name (though Anson Conger Goodyear insisted that the borrowing was inadvertent) [2] and part of its collection, but which—most importantly for our purposes—was based on a model that was diametrically opposed to that of MoMA.
A museum of modern art vs The Museum of Modern Art
In 1920, artist and collector Katherine Sophie Dreier, together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, founded Société Anonyme, Inc: The Museum of Modern Art: 1920. The first exhibition of this ‘experimental’ museum took place in May 1920 at 19 East 47th Street in New York City, where the heterodoxy of the idea was immediately apparent. The organizers sought to make a space akin to a dwelling, where intimacy and human scale contrasted with the grandeur of national museums. Katherine Dreier was dissatisfied with vast unitary spaces, such as that which hosted the Armory Show. She believed they left the visitor with no emotion except that of being lost and isolated from the artworks. The Société Anonyme wanted to exhibit art in less spacious premises that ‘articulated like small rooms’, [3] but not because it intended to exhibit art to potential buyers as they would see it when they had taken it home. The museum, despite its misleading name (‘société anonyme’ in French means ‘limited company’, suggesting Dadaist wordplay on the part of the founders) [4] emphasized the non-profit nature of its activities. ‘The Museum does not sell any works exhibited under its direction but gladly brings any prospective buyer directly in touch with the artist,’ stated the flyer to the exhibition of 1921. [5]
Dreier’s idea was that people should not come to art in order to worship it. To achieve a full understanding of art, one has to live with it, neither considering it as decoration nor evaluating the interior that results from its presence in terms of good or bad taste. ‘Today our greatest danger is our good taste,’ she stated, worried by how fashionable concerns were displacing the challenges and transformative potential of modern art. [6] So, for the Société Anonyme, the museum should evoke a home rather than a temple. [7]
Denying hierarchies was a fundamental principle of the Société Anonyme. The Société collected and exhibited not only the most challenging art of the time (abstract art not yet known to a wider audience), but also artists who would need years of struggle to arrive at the Olympian heights of other museums. The Soviet avant-garde was out of sight for Americans in the 1920s, for political reasons, but there was other art which, for a long period of time, was valued only for its exotic nature, such as the art of Latin America. ‘We have to change our attitude towards Latin races and recognise the great contribution which they have made and continue to make to civilisation,’ Dreier insisted. [8] Finally, thanks to Dreier, who was a suffragette, the Société Anonyme brought to the pubic gaze an unprecedented quantity of works by female artists: Marthe Donas, Suzanne Duchamp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Lyubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Milly Steger, and others.
The Museum of Modern Art, with Alfred H. Barr as its director, also began by exploring new and unknown art, addressing itself to the not-yet-established living artists of the current time. But it quickly shook off any reputation for being an innovative and experimental institution, and returned to the stereotype of the temple-like museum. The radical difference between the identity of MoMA compared with the Société Anonyme is apparent from a MoMA eulogy that appeared in the The New York Times of 1932: ‘Novitiate has passed. Still young in years but rich in experience and accomplishment, it [the Museum of Modern Art] has demonstrated ability to play the role of modern chronicler and prophet in New York.’ [9]
The deliberately anti-hierarchical stance behind the Société Anonyme collection came largely from Katherine Dreier’s reflections on the relationship between idea and patent. Dreier articulated the problem of authorship in a new way. A museum had to contain ‘art, not personalities’. ‘The person who gets the recognition isn’t necessarily the only person who conceived the idea,’ Dreier stated. ‘There are all these other people who reinforce the idea and contribute to it who are unknown.’ [10]
Although rejecting hierarchies, the Société Anonyme could not forego making judgments, but it did not assume that any judgment was more correct than any other. Marcel Duchamp, talking to Pierre Cabanne about the Société Anonyme, confessed that he almost never went to museums, including the Louvre: ‘I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.’ [11] So the anti-hierarchical stance of the Société is essentially a noteworthy extension of Duchamp’s famous question: what makes an object a work of art? ‘Is the museum the final form of comprehension, of judgment?’ he asked Cabanne. A work of art becomes such in the eyes of a spectator: ‘It is the onlooker who makes the museum, who provides the elements of the museum.’ [12]
We can see, in this context, why the Société Anonyme could so nonchalantly relinquish its own exhibition space: the museum only kept its original premises until 1923, after which the collection was kept at Katherine Dreier’s home. [13] Although this deterritorialization was forced, it was in perfect harmony with the museum’s ‘horizontal’ program. Instead of establishing itself on a particular plot of earth, the Société used other institutional venues to acquaint the maximum number of people with the art that it promoted and, thereby, to perform one of its main stated missions, that of education. Indeed, the museum was committed to such a nomadic style of life even when it still had a permanent location. As reported in American Art News on May 21, 1921, the Société’s exhibition of ‘extremist’ art, held in the summer of 1921, was scheduled to arrive in Massachusetts in the autumn, and afterwards to make a tour of other American cities. [14] Subsequent projects, which sometimes included lectures, discussions, and conferences, were held in venues from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Museum, where a significant exhibition opened in 1926, to art galleries in Buffalo and Toronto and in schools and universities. To some of these places the Société Anonyme returned more than once.
The Société Anonyme, in Duchamp’s words ‘contrasting sharply with the commercial trend of our times,’ [15] was finally sunk by the financial crisis of the 1930s. In 1941 it handed over its collection to Yale University Art Gallery and in 1950 the collection was dissolved.
The New York Museum of Modern Art thus obtained a monopoly on contemporary art. Funded by the Rockefeller fortune and moving to larger premises three times in the first 10 years of its existence, its ethos as a museum was the antithesis of the Société Anonyme. MoMA’s aim was to become the only museum of contemporary art, absorbing weaker structures. In an extensive memorandum entitled ‘Theory and Content of an Ideal Permanent Collection,’ which Alfred Barr sent to the Board of Trustees in 1933, he noted the existence of other collections of modern art, including the Société Anonyme, and recommended keeping in touch with their owners in case they could be persuaded to transfer their works to the Museum of Modern Art. [16] The MoMA ethos, rather than that of the Société Anonyme, would be the prime model for other cultural institutions exhibiting modern art, first in the United States and then in Europe.
Refinding the path: The Stedelijk Museum
Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray did not blaze a trail, but they marked a path. In America the path quickly grew over, but not in Europe, where it was kept open after World War II thanks to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I will discuss the immediate post-war period of the Museum’s
existence under the directorship of Willem Sandberg (1945–1963). Sandberg was an admirer of Alfred Barr, [17] but he was also the person who kept the vision of Dreier’s Société alive and at the forefront of international museum life.
Sandberg began work to reconstruct the Stedelijk immediately after World War II. However the only increase in the museum’s exhibition space between then and 2004 was the addition of a small wing in 1954. [18]
The reason why spatial enlargement was not significant (and even not desirable) for a museum with a collection among the best in the world is clear from something Sandberg said in a lecture at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1973. ‘Today we don’t want to live with what we are expected to venerate. We really don’t know if museums, and specially museums of contemporary art, should exist in eternity. <...> Ideally, art should once again be integrated in daily life, should go out on the streets, enter the buildings, become a necessity.’ [19]
Sandberg put forward the same propositions as Katherine Dreier. Firstly, museums should not be perceived as temples and the hierarchical thinking that goes with such a view is to be rejected. Secondly, and relatedly, art is to be lived with rather than worshipped. And if the Société Anonyme made its exhibition spaces akin to rooms in a home, Sandberg suggested an even more radical path away from aggrandizement of the museum building. He said, bluntly: ‘This should be the major aim of the museum: to make itself redundant.’ [20]
Seen in this light, the strategy shared by the Société Anonyme and the Stedelijk is perfectly consistent: it played down the role of buildings and fostered cooperation with other institutions in order to display exhibits outside the limits of the museum’s own architecture. [21] The Stedelijk’s artworks travelled to meet new viewers instead of becoming entrenched on their own territory. The Museum of Modern Art had, by the 1960s, intermittently raised the question of whether it should lend artworks from its collection to other museums and galleries, [22] but nothing had come of it. The Stedelijk and its collection had been guests elsewhere as often as they had been hosts on their own turf. Without emphasizing this information, and providing it among other statistics on Stedelijk activity in his usual lower case lettering, Sandberg noted in 1961 that 50 exhibitions a year were held in the museum building, while 50 more were hosted by other institutions. [23]
Some of the Stedelijk’s external projects were one-offs, but others led to new things. In 1958, for example, Willem Sandberg found common ground with Paolo Marinotti, head of the International Centre for Art and Costume in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and together they immediately conceived the idea of the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte (Vitality in Art). It was presented in 1959–1960 at the Palazzo Grassi and the Stedelijk Museum, before moving to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. [24] Sandberg pursued the cooperation with Marinotti in a thematically related joint exhibition entitled Natuur en Kunst (Nature and Art). These projects expanded the boundaries of the museum, but the expansion was not in terms of space but in terms of what the museum was capable of doing. Natuur en Kunst, as if saluting Duchamp, displayed natural objets trouvés, such as pieces of wood and stone, handcrafted objects made out of shells and wood, as well as amateur paintings. [25]
Sandberg also cooperated enthusiastically with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement, the cover of the exhibition catalogue featured Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp) curated by Moderna Museet director Pontus Hulten in 1961 spent six weeks in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk before moving to Stockholm, changing its name to Art in Motion, and then arriving on the already familiar territory of the Louisiana Museum. [26]
Bewogen Beweging, exhibition catalogue. 1961
The extent to which the museum wall was for Sandberg a vague and conditional boundary (the wall in Sandberg’s new wing was of glass) is also exemplified by his attempt to work with the Situationist International. [27] In 1959–1960, Sandberg and the Situationists planned a three-day drift (dérive) to be simultaneously effected in two rooms of the Stedelijk, transformed into a labyrinth, and in the streets of Amsterdam (the plan did not come to fruition due to potential dangers of the labyrinth installation). [28]
Evolutionary perspectives
It would be an easy step from the Dadaist background of the Société Anonyme and Sandberg’s utopian remarks about the superfluity of museums as institutions to a nihilist rhetoric, espousing anti-museum concepts. I prefer, though, to use the similarity of structure and operation between the Société and Sandberg’s Stedelijk to help define a particular type of museum, which can be seen, from the perspective proposed by Svetlana Boym, as ‘off modern’. It is something that ‘involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity’, [29] revealing potential paths of development that had not been noticed before.
The philosophical concepts that Dreier and Sandberg relied on do in fact have a common source. Dreier was fascinated by theosophy and spiritualism, and was influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, and this background helps to explain the selection of artists, whose work was included in the collection of the Société Anonyme: Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters. Sandberg’s thinking was also much influenced by Bergson’s biological metaphorics, and not only by the work of Bergson himself (a quotation from whom provides the epigraph to a book, to which Sandberg contributed, on pioneers of modern art in the Stedelijk collection), [30] but also by the writings of his devotee, the poet, critic, and anarchist Herbert Read. In particular, Read’s concept of vitalism was directly related to the themes of the above-mentioned exhibitions by Sandberg and Marinotti. [31]
Two other admirers of Bergson deserve mention here, namely Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose text A Thousand Plateaus expands the horizon of Bergson’s metaphysics. [32] If we look at the rhizome structure they describe, it constitutes just the type of decentralized, comprehensive, anti-hierarchical organization championed by the Société and by Sandberg. And the working principles of the Société Anonyme and of the Stedelijk during the time of Sandberg seem to prefigure the Deleuze-Guattari idea of nomadism.
The type of museum that we have described here is unlikely to, and probably should not, serve as a model at the present time. But, it can become a resource for cultural “exaptation”—a concept, also borrowed by Svetlana Boym from biology, which describes what happens when a particular trait evolves to serve some new function that was not part of its original purpose. [33]
The exaptation from the ‘Société-Sandberg’ museum that could be most relevant today relates to museum governance. The vertical, tree-like structure that defines most institutions today means that, the larger a museum grows, the more rigid its hierarchy must be in order to manage this structure. As a result, what museum directors require above all nowadays is exceptional managerial skills, and other aspects of a museum’s work risk being sacrificed to managerial efficiency. Rejecting such an authoritarian model, where the core objective is to control the dependent units, in favour of a heterogeneous, anti-hierarchical type of organization implies, as a minimum, the opportunity for a museum to reallocate its resources and focus on its original purpose of dealing with artists, art, and exhibitions, and, as a maximum, restitution of the museum to artists and return to the governance model of the artist-driven space, which was used in the first museum of modern art.
Translated from: Shpilko O. Iskusstvo, a ne personalii // Dialog Iskusstv, №4, 2016. P. 70–73.
In 1918, a group of avant-garde artists active in Moscow and Saint Petersburg joined forces to create an experimental format for a process of musealisation, almost completely self-organised, which culminated in creation of the museums of pictorial culture in 1919. The New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow organised a research-based exhibition to celebrate the centenary of this event, reformulating for a wider audience a story that had previously been little known beyond a small circle of specialists, focusing particularly on the Moscow input to the experience – Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture. If the importance of this historical reconstruction per se is undeniable, it also enabled a more complex and deeper understanding of the avant-garde movement by presenting the best-known section of the New Tretyakov collection in a brand new light. This revision challenged the status of the museum as a ‘dead’ institution, bound by established canons, and applied different critical principles to its historical collection in a process that I would like to call ‘institutional self-critique’. This formulation refers to the tendency that some institutions are developing, as an attempt to reflect on their own collections and practices with the aim of de-colonising, de-constructing, and self-criticising their own approach and history. This stage can be intended as the development of the ‘institutional critique’, which has been consciously enacted by artists since the 1960s, and that has already been absorbed by the narration and methods of current art history as a pivotal moment in the art system.
Reconstruction of the history and context of the museums of pictorial culture has the potential to open up awareness of formats of self-organisation in more recent decades, some of them made in conjunction with established institutions. For the retrospective look that is applied in the present text (which will be too concise to tackle such a demanding and complex topic in detail) it is moreover interesting that the history of the Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture can be interpreted as an early attempt at self-organisation and self-institutionalisation in the history of Russia and the USSR, where there would be further use of this strategy in the development of contemporary art history in the following decades. It is further possible to see the inclusion of administrative tasks in the artists’ practice as a preliminary influence on the art world of the bureaucratisation process, which was typical of the 20th century. This view has already been formulated for some unofficial Soviet artists who, active since the 1960s, organised their own events and exhibitions in private spaces, and implemented self-archiving and self-historicising practices. Consequently, in order to properly shed a light on the self-organisation practices enacted by avant-garde artists, it is fundamental to contextualise this experience in the whole history of Russian contemporary art. However, several problematics arise: how the concept of self-institutionalisation, with all its current meanings and readings, can be applied to a previous era without falling into the error of wrong attribution. Can our contemporary understanding of self-organisation, through a retro-imposed filter, help us to bring out nuances in the story of the museums of pictorial culture?
Self or non self-organisation?
In the aftermath of the October revolution, the entire social structure in Russia, including the domain of art and culture, was mobilised by the State for the cause of Sovietisation. Many artists responded to this new deal with enthusiasm and played an active role in it at the same time as they were conceiving and creating artworks that are today recognised as some of the most important masterpieces of Russian art. In the multitude of artistic researches that shaped the polyphony of the Russian avant-garde the recurrent theme and concept was: ‘new’. Appearing in countless written records of the era, used in reference to many different proposals and in diverse contexts, the category of the new was intended to be something that would be used to construct, piece by piece, a not-so-distant future society.
As conceived in 1918, the museums of pictorial culture were to have one central site in Moscow and 13 other venues in various Russian cities including Voronezh, Vitebsk, Samara, and Penza. [1] At the beginning, the name was slightly different: and museums of artistic culture was transformed into museums of pictorial culture in order to accord pride of place to painting. The project arose from a series of events that took place in the ‘revolutionary’ transition period, when the approach to art and culture applied by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar for Education (acronym, Narkompros), and particularly by the IZO (acronym of the Department of Fine Arts of the Narkompros), was implemented as part of a broader organisation and systematisation of the cultural scene based on the new principles of the post-revolutionary era. In a moment characterised by the abolition of private property and the nationalisation of goods, a huge amount of artworks was put at state disposal. Many of them were taken from outstanding private collections, such as that of the brothers Sergei and Pyotr Shchukin, and of Ivan Morozov, while others came from Lunacharsky’s initiative to purchase the most interesting pieces of avant-garde art from the artists themselves. The requisitioning of artworks was organised through legal but nevertheless compulsory purchases, and was often driven by the artists themselves. It is therefore possible to assume that the museums of pictorial culture constituted an experience of shared responsibility between official institutions and artists, who often also assumed administrative tasks (particularly in the period from 1919 to 1922).
The involvement of artists officially began in 1918, when a commission was set up to oversee first organisational steps and there were several meetings of artists to discuss collectively the methods and the purposes of the project. Outcomes of the discussions were set down in texts signed by artists, including the Report on a Museum of Contemporary Art by Vladimir Tatlin and Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaia. [2] It was drawn up following a discussion on 28 July 1918 by the Narkompros Artistic Collegium and Moscow Artistic Collegium, and proposed a list of theoretical and practical principles to be followed. Much attention was given to criteria for the selection of artworks to constitute the collection, a process that was to be detached from any issues of ‘personal taste’. This concept was judged to be a category of the past, i.e. a method that concealed a traditional and conservative approach. Instead, a committee named Artistic Collegium resolved to use its knowledge to help make the selection more appropriate.
The new art
In a context characterised by heterogeneity of artistic researches, the topic of ‘the new’ had the role to reunite such diversity: thus the creation of a new institution, that could host and display the new kind of art that new artists were creating, was the solution. The Tatlin-Tolstaia text clearly stated commitment to pursue a selection process that would single out the most interesting coeval production, regarding which no established art critics or museological figures could give better advice. Moreover, the selection was to be of artists’ names, while the final choice of artworks would be carried out by the nominated artists. Finally, it was decided to keep a record of the names of collectors, from whom works or entire collections had been requisitioned, in order to trace provenance, a decision which shows commitment to keeping historical vestiges and sensibility towards the historicisation process around the artworks.
Since the art was new, the methods used to decide what was innovative and what was not also had to be new. The need for self-organisation was part and parcel of the attack on established institutional methods and the ending of reliance on museum professionals and art critics, who were blamed for not understanding the latest artistic researches in Russia. In several writings, such as those by Olga Rozanova, and Kazimir Malevich, artists accused ‘czarist’ curators of cowardice and of insulting revolutionary art. In particular, Malevich put into words a vision composed of two opposed sides – conservative and innovative – that could not be reconciled: ‘Due to conditions generated by refined connoisseurs, the creations of the innovators were shoved back into cold garrets and miserable studios where they awaited their fate, being abandoned to destiny’. [3]
Malevich poured scorn on the different scale of value attributed to institutionalised artists, such as Vrubel, or foreign artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, highlighting the centrality of the concept of time in the evaluation process used by professionals: ‘They have established time as a barometer of understanding. When a work wallows in the monstrous and inept brain of public opinion for an impressive number of years, then this work that has not been eaten but soiled by the saliva of society is accepted in the museum. It is recognized. This is the fate of innovators.’ [4]
The dichotomy between ‘old’ and ‘new’ grew gradually in the eyes of the artists. On one side, the museum professional was deemed to be an archaeologist only able to deal with the past, and found guilty of Russia’s conservatism. On the other hand, the pioneering ideas of the revolutionary artists extended also to a new conception of the display of artworks. Even if the works were still predominantly hung on walls (in a pure gesture that demonstrated respect for the canonical perception of the pictorial dimension), they were to be organised in rooms that did not follow a chronological order. As reproduced in the exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, the display was conceived as a tour through rooms dedicated to different artistic groups, but giving special attention to the contrast of shapes and rules of construction. This approach is clearly seen in the article ‘The museum of painting culture at Rozhdestvenka street, 11’ published in the guide Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow in 1926 (after the Museum had already closed). The text describes how each room was organised to show representative pieces of the most recent and experimental researches of the period. The distinction of periods and the fundamental role of time in the dissection of the true was thus negated, breaking with tradition and asserting a new rationale behind the preservation and display of these works, which had not been welcome before in established institutions. The materiality of the artwork and of art work would overcome the concept of linear time.
The challenge to the traditional role of time in the presentation of works of art was matched by a new approach to space, as manifest in the decision to create a network of museums of pictorial culture across Russia, covering different geographies and territories. The centripetal force that for many years had been characteristic of coeval contemporary art, as it was increasingly drawn to the biggest European cities, was thus negated. A more horizontal approach was put in opposition to the vertical model of art history (still predominant nowadays), aiming to spread knowledge in remote regions of the country, contributing to the creation of a less peripheral landscape. This aspect deserves more attention as a preliminary and authentic turn towards the local sphere, addressing a currently existent dualism between the two domains of the global and the local, although today’s critical discourse plays out this dichotomy in a quite different scenario and between different subjects, through questions of nationality in a reality that tends towards the fading of geographical borders while erecting new theoretical ones. In the vast spaces of Soviet Russia, shortly after the revolution and in line with the goal of constructing an egalitarian society, museums had to be spread far and wide so that everybody who worked outside the city centre, or in smaller cities, and also the ‘peasants and workers’, could have access to culture, as clearly stated in the preparatory documents for the museums of pictorial culture.
As David Shterenberg, the IZO director, wrote: ‘The concept of artistic culture contains, in accordance with the very meaning of the word “culture” as a dynamic activity, a creative element; creative work presupposes creation of the new, invention: artistic culture is nothing other than the culture of artistic invention.’ [5]
This concept of dynamism naturally implied the opening of more venues and the plan for a network of institutions across the country, around which art collections would travel. This was the same motivation that gave rise to the agit-train and Okna ROSTA posters, which used the media of transport and of communication, respectively, as tools of Soviet propaganda. More museums in more cities would facilitate the circulation of artworks and the diffusion of knowledge about the new art.
For the democratisation of art
As director of the Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture, a position he held from 1919 to 1920, Wassily Kandinsky stated the need for unconventional methods as well as new principles for the selection of artworks. These should be ‘new contributions of a purely artistic nature, i.e., the invention of new artistic methods’, and ‘the development of purely artistic forms, independent of their content, i.e., the element, as it were of craft in art.’ [6] In his opinion, attention to problems connected with shapes, as well as a more generic approach to the tangible elements of artistic practice would reveal the ‘need to struggle painstakingly with the purely material aspect of his work, with technique – all this has placed the artist, as it were, above and beyond the conditions that determine the life of the working man.’ It was thus fundamental to spread proper understanding of the profession of the artist who ‘creates works of real value and demonstrates his definitive right to take, at the very least, equal place among the ranks of the working population.’ This egalitarian aspiration was summed up in Kandinsky’s term ‘democratisation of art’, a locution that he used in the belief that such a goal could be fully attained through the active involvement of artists in all the processes of art management. [7]
Speaking against the old anachronism that marked the choice of previous cultural operators, Aleksandr Rodchenko, who assumed the directorship of the Museums of Pictorial Culture from 1921 to 1922, said that artists are ‘the only people with a grasp of the problems of contemporary art and as the creators of artistic values, are the only ones capable of directing the acquisition of modern works of art and of establishing how a country should be educated in artistic matters.’ [8] The polysemic vision translated into multidisciplinary and helped to determine a reflection on the practice of research, too. In fact a fundamental part of the project was collecting an interesting number of publications, organised in a library, whose importance was also shown in the exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, with a display that exhibited several books and art catalogues, both from Russia and from elsewhere. A rich selection of original books, now part of the museum’s library, was hosted in the vitrines and shelves, attesting the interest and connection of Russian artists to the international scenario of avant-garde researches that had developed abroad.
The experience of the museums of pictorial culture can be retrospectively interpreted as a utopian dream that came true in a certain place and a certain era, and that permitted the development of an experimental platform over a number of years. However the utopian project ended up being institutionalised. Closed in 1922 due to lack of financial support in a harsh socio-political and historical environment, the Muscovite section was acquired in its totality by the Tretyakov Gallery, which, in 2019, finally brushed away the dust to allow a second look at this fascinating episode in art history.
Леонардо Моссо, Джанфранко Кавалья. Выставка «Другая Италия в знаменах трудящихся». Турин. 1981
Addressing a congress of architects in 1963, the Professor of Turin Polytechnic University, Leonardo Mosso, declared: “Unfortunately, we must state that at this time there is no existing architectural culture”. [1] Mosso would later draw a distinction between “culture” and “ac-culturation” and would argue that the former is often replaced by the latter when what is implemented in the cultural field is not the creative will of the people, but that of a select few, whose will is imposed on the majority. [2]
If, in the 1960s, there was no architectural culture, there was certainly a tradition. From the 1960s onwards the thought and the work of Mosso, who was an artist and theorist as well as an architect, entered into a complex and interesting relationship with the concepts of tradition and the avant-garde on the threshold of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde and the closely related ideas of Manfredo Tafuri. I will examine Mosso’s concepts of structural design and sustainable programmed architecture, as embodied in museum and urbanistic projects, through the prism of their relationship to a range of architectural, cultural and scientific traditions.
Leonardo Mosso, Gianfranco Cavaglià. Exhibition “Another Italy in the Banners of Workers. Symbols and Culture from the Unification of Italy to the Advent of Fascism”. Turin, 1981
Italian rationalism
The first tradition of relevance to Mosso is that of rationalist architecture, specifically of Italian rationalism, which faded into the shadows at the end of the 1930s, oppressed by fascist monumentalism, but still lingered on in the post-War years as a memorial to a future that was at once impossible and annihilated, symbolized by the Monument to the Victims of Concentration Camps created in a Milan cemetery by the Italian architectural group BBPR in 1946. Apart from its literal purpose, the Monument can be read as homage to ideals that were not destined to come true in principle (especially if viewed, not even from the 1960s, but from the disillusionment with utopias that ensued in the 1970s). Since the 1930s, pure rationalism had been criticized as an expression of liberal European culture that was incapable of dialogue with reality. [3] But its formal language would leave an imprint on the architecture of Mosso, whose career began in the early 1950s in the studio of his father, the futurist and rationalist Nicola Mosso. Father and son together designed the Turin church Gesù Redentore (1954–1957), with its clear reminiscences of the mathematically determined architecture of the Cartesian Guarino Guarini and his Chapel of the Holy Shroud, also in Turin.
BBPR. Monument to the Dead in the Concentration Camps at the Germany Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. 1946
The visual cues of Mosso’s architecture have a clear affinity with such 20th century rationalists as Franco Albini and especially Edoardo Persico. Mosso weaves a new musculature of semiological theory and critique of capitalism onto the familiar skeleton-grid, transforming the structure into a self-governing organism that opposes the absolute rule of the architect. In his 1969 Manifesto of Direct Architecture, Mosso sought “to overcome the violence of architects and come to a direct architecture, to overcome the violence of power and come to direct democracy.” [4] Other manifestos of programmed architecture, notably “Self-Generation of Form and the New Ecology”, [5] would come later. But their main principles were already set out in one of Mosso’s first independent projects, the Chapel for the Artist’s Mass, built in 1961–1963, which survives only in photographs. [6] The Chapel used a modular architecture of geometrical shapes reduced to their simplest form. In a style similar to that of Edoardo Persico, Mosso places an image (of the Madonna by the artist Carlo Rapp) in one of the modules. (It is interesting to note that Persico himself, in his 1933 article, “Italian Architects” had declared: “We believe that Italian rationalism is dead”). [7] The face of the Madonna, inscribed in a square, appears highly fragmentary. Judged by the standard of altar images, and in combination with the framework that defines the wall surface and holds the image, the effect is close to an Orthodox iconostasis, where the contours of the painted body often seem to support the frame. The other modules of the Chapel are empty and transparent (purified, like the elements of language in structuralism, which was a base theory for the 1960s and, in particular, for Mosso) and what knits the structure together is their linkage – a nodal point or joint. From the Artist’s Chapel onwards the development of this joint was the key task of Mosso’s work. The basis of the universal “elastic” joint, which holds the structure, is a sliding mechanism of elements fastened together with compression straps. In other, later models, there is a void at the centre of the joints; at their ends there are metal rings, which allow free rotation of the structure. [8] Numerous experiments that Mosso carried out with colleagues and students (teamwork was fundamental to his practice) produced a theory of the “virtual” joint, where virtuality is an almost philosophical concept [9] of multidirectional elements and limitless possible linkages.
Leonardo Mosso. Cappella della messa dell’artista. 1961–1963
Mosso calls these regulated connections “post-Cartesian”, which implies the preservation in his world system of rationalism and a mechanistic philosophy, but with two important provisos. In the first place, the void, which Descartes rejected, is admitted and, moreover, takes precedence over substance and is the bearer of the functions, with which Mosso wants to endow his architecture. Due to the entropic nature of the joints proposed by Mosso, subsequent modifications to the structure re-record those made previously and cannot be undone, [10] leaving the trace of each person who influenced its transformation, but not fixing it in a stable state. Each iteration is conditioned by others in this sequence, but is associated with them only by memory (“The memory of the computer for a programmed city formed directly by its inhabitants” is one of Mosso’s “margin slogans” to his article on self-generation of form). [11] The second, equally important proviso of Mosso’s Cartesianism is rejection of the antinomy between mind and body, which is the mainstay of Descartes’s system. As Mosso declared in 1963: there is no “irreparable conflict” in the relationship between mind and body, any more than there is a conflict between idealism and positivism. [12] For Mosso the ultimate task of such a structure was the transfer of control from architect to users and elimination of the contradiction between man as subject and as object.
“Madonna” by Carlo Rapp in the Cappella della messa dell’artista. 1961–1963
Mosso’s rethinking of Cartesianism – enriched, as will be seen below, by cybernetics – involves the elimination of antinomies, making the human being into the subject of architecture and enabling the emergence of a new forms of social and spatial organization, “from the bottom up”, entailing a crisis of elitism. In Mosso’s own words: “This inversion, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring the notion of ‘intellectual’ and ‘expert’ to a severe crisis, turning it from the function of a component in a directing elite, which always somehow tries to direct people even when its tendencies are socialist, into that of effective service for popular construction.” [13]
The transition from statics to dynamics represents another task: the limitlessness of formal transformation is identical with the variability of the scenarios of social transformation, which can be carried out by the same people. All of these principles were behind the “Commune of Culture” project of programmed architecture, which was Mosso’s entry in 1971 to the design competition for the future Centre Pompidou in Paris. What Mosso envisaged was an architectural and urbanistic organism controlled by a collective (a community) and developing thanks to structural processes in its cells, each of which contains the possibility of the most various configurations.
Leonardo Mosso. Commune of Culture. 1971. Courtesy Alain-Marie Markarian, Centre Pompidou
Structural and semiological approach
Mosso equates the role of an architect with that of a linguist, who reveals certain mechanisms (the linguist in language, the architect in buildings) instead of describing the possibilities of an element’s functioning. [14] Put in linguistic terms: the basis of syntactical structures in a language is not the component (which is intentionally treated as inexpressive and devoid of a priori meaning), but what links them – the “joint”. [15] Mosso’s idea is that these mechanisms come into the hands of users and are activated by them, because architecture is the least autonomous sphere of culture and society. This is the new tradition of structural-semiology, which was taking hold in the 1960s and which the architect encountered and began to work with at its origins (unlike his encounter with the established discourse of Italian rationalism).
In the 1970s the publicist and anti-fascist activist Franco Antonicelli asked Leonardo Mosso to work on a project for the Museum of the Resistance (the architect had already designed several museum and exhibition projects by that time). [16] Creation of the Museum in the Palazzo Carignano in Turin occupied Mosso from 1974 until 1977. The idea [17] was to divide the Museum into three parts: a first part that the designers called “symbolic” or introductory; a second consisting of a gallery with exhibits, the “Corridoio dei passi perduti” (Corridor of lost steps); and a third part offering a multimedia centre for research and education. [18] The same elastic joints, made from neoprene are used in the structure that contains the Museum exhibits and in the Red Cloud – Mosso’s floating sculpture, made from wooden elements painted red, that leads into the exhibition. The Red Cloud looked out onto Turin’s Carlo Alberto square through the high window openings of what, in the 19th century, had been the hall of the Italian parliament (before its relocation to Rome). Mosso considered Red Cloud to be a milestone of his conceptual and formal explorations. In 1981, the sculpture was included in the exhibition held by the Piero Gobetti Study Centre, Another Italy in the Banners of Workers. Symbols and Culture from the Unification of Italy to the Advent of Fascism, which displayed the political insignia of a broad range of communities, from Catholic organizations to feminist groups and left-wing parties, anarchist groups, trade unions, etc. (the exhibition was made possible by Carla Gobetti’s discovery in January 1978 in the Italian state archives of about 190 flags and banners confiscated and exhibited in Rome by the government of Benito Mussolini at the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, held in 1932 to mark the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome). [19]
Leonardo Mosso. “Red Cloud” in the Museum of Resistance, Turin. 1974
The models that Mosso built following the example of syntactic relations reflected the influence of structuralism and a belief in the possibility of new subject-object relations. In his text “Semiotics and Design, Consciousness and Knowledge. The Museum of the Resistance in Turin”, Mosso states that “research and experimentation with decoding, classification, documentation and communication, with the semiotic order of various object and document forms, with the legacy of those messages that are already available” are a necessary condition – the sine qua non – of museography. [20] Flags and banners are themselves sign systems. Mosso was the architect of the 1981 exhibition and his sculpture served as an overhead vault for the exhibits. Prior to the exhibition opening the curators carried out work to decipher the emblems, symbols, slogans and use of colors in the exhibits, tracing their transformation through the history of various labor movements. The work uncovered much that had not previously been known about political trends in Italy and about propaganda techniques. The aim was to help reformulate (albeit broadly) the language of the workers’ and peasants’ movement, reconstructing the tradition of each specific symbolic element and the overall, collective expression of will and thought. [21] And yet, both in 1974 and as a frame for the 1981 exhibition, Mosso’s sculpture seemed to be in clear contradiction with the structuralist approach. The red color and the cloud amount to what Umberto Eco called the “anthropological code”, that is, “facts relating to the world of social relations and living conditions, but considered only insofar as they are already codified” and, therefore, reduced to phenomena of culture. [22] They return the viewer to an established historical reading of the sign, and “the appeal to the anthropological code risks (or at least seems to risk) destroying the semiological system that rules our whole discourse.” [23] Red unambiguously marked the labor movement that was dear to Mosso and that was strongly present in the cultural life of Italy in the 1960–1970s even without the occasion offered by the exhibition, as manifested, for example, by the Marxist magazine Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), published in 1961–1966, and the autoreduzione movement, in which left-wing protesters refused to pay market prices for goods, instead offering what they considered a fair price (the movement began in 1974 at the FIAT car factory in Turin).
Leonardo Mosso. Dynamic modification of a structure with a virtual joint. Courtesy Leonardo Mosso & Laura Castagno
The image of the cloud is even more complex, but also rooted in the historicized past. Hubert Damisch’s book A Theory of /Cloud/, published in 1972, had considered the multi-level and powerfully semiological nature of the concept of the cloud, viewing it as inextricably linked with the architecture of a powerful signifying space, usually bordering on the sacred, as in the case of the flags presented at the 1981 exhibition. [24] (Mosso himself spoke of the need to “‘desacralize’ the museum itself “, its appropriation by the people and the transformation of the self into a historical subject, to be achieved primarily by the decoding of documents). [25] In his book Damisch analyzes the functioning of the cloud as sign in different periods and cultural contexts and reaches interesting conclusions: on the one hand, the cloud, as a field, “has no particular meaning in itself; its only meaning is that which stems from the relations of consecutiveness, opposition and substitution that link it to other elements in the system”. [26] On the other hand, as Damisch says elsewhere in the book, the cloud always testifies to the closed nature of a system, “since it is the sign of opacity … the limit of representation, of what is representable.” [27] Despite Mosso’s fascination with open systems, despite his optimism about the potential of architecture to be a vehicle for social transformation, his self-positioning and his positioning of cultural production in the museum might be seen as reactionary in comparison with his contemporaries who at the same time were taking further the efforts, initiated by the historical avant-garde, to destroy the border between art and life. For Mosso, the Museum of the Resistance, “like potentially any other urban structure,” “starts from its sector of competence,” [28] which is to say that it is, essentially, autonomous. This is not to say that the museum should not be a living and contemporary structure, but “living” here means “museographically living”. In the words of anthropologist Alberto Mario Cirese, quoted by the critic Arturo Fittipaldi in his article on the Museum of the Resistance: the museum must admit that it is a metalanguage, which will be adequate to life on condition that it is aware of its essence and its limitations. [29]
Leonardo Mosso. Projet de ville-territoire programmée et autogérée. 1968–1969. Courtesy Centre Pompidou
So Mosso, operating within the tradition of structuralism, consciously departed from it and entered the tradition of semiotic reading, which he considered to be a necessary condition “for accessing a historical understanding of past reality” [30] and also for dialogue with the viewer about contemporary problems. By thus rejecting the accepted historicism he agreed with Hubert Damisch that the history of culture needs to be presented as a dynamic model and to be understood as a continual return to the source, and that it is akin to continuous movement within a certain given space. In such a model there can be no contrast between tradition and the avant-garde, and this acceptance of their reciprocity entails agreement with the pessimistic conclusions of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. It can be argued that Mosso performed a decomposition of tradition (specifically a “decomposition” and not a “deconstruction”, because in the latter, according to Derrida, the generation of meanings occurs thanks to the interconnection of elements, while the former implies only flexibility in their use), separating traditions into various ideological and formal elements, thereby levelling their temporal aspect, their extension, and hence also doing away with the division into “old” and “new”, “good” and “bad”, “productive” and “unproductive”. On the one hand, the effect of the Red Cloud was to destabilize the visitor’s perception by its alien nature in the realm of the visual, but, on the other hand, the Cloud remained neutral, transparent and non-invasive towards the enclosing architecture, with its frescoes on the theme of the commonwealth of art and science. [31]
Leonardo Mosso. Elastic joints in the studio of Leonardo Mosso. 2016. Courtesy Gianfranco Cavaglià
Organic architecture and programming
The tradition of organic architecture in its relationship with techno-positivism and the concept of a programmable city was also of decisive importance for Mosso. The architect came into contact with organic architecture when he was working in the studio of Alvar Aalto in 1955–1958. Its ideas were championed in Italy by Bruno Zevi, who was deeply influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the title of Zevi’s seminal work Towards an Organic Architecture (1945) refers explicitly to Le Corbusier’s Towards Architecture (1923). Zevi was categorical regarding what he considered to be a “modern language of architecture”, and particularly that it must reject geometrism and, most of all, symmetry: “Once you get rid of the fetish of symmetry, you will have taken a giant step on the road to a democratic architecture”; [32] “The public buildings of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist Russia are all symmetrical”; [33] “Symmetry is a single, though macroscopic symptom of a tumor whose cells have metastasized everywhere in geometry. The history of cities could be interpreted as the clash between geometry (an invariable of dictatorial or bureaucratic power) and free forms (which are congenial to human life).” [34] In Zevi’s view, if such great masters as Aalto, Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe returned to symmetry as to the “bosom of classicism”, that was an act of surrender on their part and an admission of their inability to create a new language. Organic architecture, like Italian rationalism before it, saw itself as the antithesis of monumentalism and its myths. [35] Its principal ambition was to return to a humanistic measure, which was especially important in the context of post-war reflection, and to advance the democratization of culture and society. Organic architecture believed that this required a denial of rationalism and functionalism, seeming to forget that they had had (and still retained) their own humanistic measure, but one based not on form, but on proportion.
A Congress held in 1951 in Milan, as part of the 9th Triennale, was devoted to the theory of proportion and was accompanied by an exhibition of studies in proportion. Two of the leading theorists of proportion, Le Corbusier and Rudolf Wittkower, both took part in the Congress and deep disagreements between them ensured that the atmosphere was tense. [36] Construction of the exhibition, designed by the young architect Francesco Gnecchi-Ruscone, was in the best rationalist tradition, using iron pipes and in accordance with the golden ratio, allowed the exhibits to be viewed from a variety of angles, including from the bottom up.
Few have been able to bend the parallel trajectories of rationalism and the organic to a point where they meet. The most notable effort in this direction is the “biotechnics” theory of the Austrian botanist and microbiologist Raoul Francé. Biotechnics, in Francé’s understanding, means the “technology of life”, a concept that fits very well with Mosso’s Cartesian mechanicism. Francé, like the rationalists, reduced the diversity of biological and technical forms to basic elements: “What is perhaps most amazing is that all these countless needs for movement, all the alterations of appearance and way of life were met and produced by the application and varied combination of just seven basic technical forms: crystal, sphere, plane, ribbon, cylinder, screw and cone.” [37] Man, Francé believes, can only invent what vital matter has already invented before him. “The biotechnical principle reigns everywhere we look. The decisive factor is necessity. What is needed is done, and the first adaptation is then improved where possible. Moreover, everything is done with the least expenditure of effort, in the most rational way. The system of T-beams that we use in our buildings is also applied in a similar way by plants.” [38]
Mosso also equated his structures with the organism: the thrust of his program text “Self-generation of Form and the New Ecology” was “for architecture as an organism”. [39] Beginning from 1964, he collaborated with the magazine Nuova Ecologia (New Ecology), which drew together the threads of structuralism, politics and environmental awareness. In 1970 Mosso and his wife Laura Castagno set up the Center for the Study of Environmental Cybernetics and Programmable Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Turin, where he developed an “eco-social” model of architecture, based on semiological, anthropological and ecological theories, calling for the involvement of ordinary people in the organization and management of space. [40] These principles were the basis of Mosso’s “non-authoritarian structural self-programming” and “non-object-based architecture” (the latter defined by Mosso when he presented his work at the 1978 Venice Architecture Biennale).
How does the idea of the organic come into connection with the idea of the programmable? In 1953 the editorial column of an issue of Architectural Forum magazine, in which Frank Lloyd Wright published an article on the language of organic architecture, asked the question: “But who is to say what is human?” [41] And in 1969, Manfredo Tafuri, in his article “Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology”, asked: “What does it mean, on the ideological level, to liken the city to a natural object?” [42]
Mosso intertwined the organic paradigm with a rationalistic language, which had been compromised not only by Zevi, but also by other contemporary theorists, who offered a critique of techno-positivism that was to a large extent justified. For example, Tafuri linked all formalized artificial languages, be they sign systems or programming languages, to the scientific forecasting of the future and the use of “game theory”, and also to the development of capitalism, asserting that they contribute to the “plan of development” of capitalism. [43] Mosso emphasized that programming in his theory is not “game”, but “the self-determination of life and of each one’s personal abilities for the realization and conservation of the equilibrium man-environment-knowledge research-freedom-life-architecture”. [44]
Leonardo Mosso. Universal three-dimensional serial structure, self programming with movable and elastic connections
How did the requirement for direct personal participation in “self-planning of the community” [45] and architectural planning coexist in Mosso’s program with the mediation of this participation by technology? Mosso was not a supporter of techno-positivism. As he declared in 1963: “The open wound torn by the industrial revolution in man has not yet healed.” According to Mosso, the new revolution, generated by the earlier one, had brought changes of a completely new level, being inspired not by the machine, but by the idea of organization and of a system. The idea of organization is what is crucial here, and it is contrasted with the absolute of form, which had previously concerned architects. Now, as Tafuri put it, the architectural object in its traditional understanding “has been completely dissolved” [46] in the task of industrial planning of the city. This distinction between plan and architectural object is most significant. The opening words of Mosso’s text about the new ecology show that the distinction was as important to Mosso as it was to Tafuri and that Mosso saw the concept of the plan as an unavoidable necessity in today’s world: “We must first understand that we all have to plan, not only a few of us. <…> It is simultaneously our duty to create those structural instruments of service which are indispensible for everyone in exercising their right and duty of planning ”. [47] Mosso renounced this function in his role as architect and delegated it to the computer, just as Tafuri renounced it and preferred to be a historian and critic. Mosso recognized that computational and programming methods had become a tool of exploitation, [48] but, realizing the impossibility of overthrowing them, he instrumentalized and intensified them, following the logic and, in fact, anticipating the project of accelerationism, similarly to Tafuri, who proposed that the shock of modern civilization should be “swallowed, absorbed and assimilated as today’s inevitability.” [49]
Alexander Dorner is acknowledged as the one of the most innovative curators of the pre-war era. Atmosphere rooms, a concept proposed by Dorner, were created by El Lissitzky in 1927 (Cabinet of Abstract, 1927) and designed but not realised by László Moholy-Nagy (Room of the Present, 1930) at the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover have been acclaimed as role models of the modernist museum. This book offers new insight into Dorner’s art philosophy, curatorial practice, his projects in the United States after his escape from Nazi Germany in 1937, as well as number of controversies surrounding his activities and legacy.
The first section is a collection of articles on Alexander Dorner’s activities at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum), which he headed in 1938 — 1941. Dorner’s openness to an egalitarian educational curriculum and his concept of the museum as a powerhouse, discussed by Rebecca Uchill in Chapter 2 of the book, are concepts of much relevance for contemporary museums worldwide. Today Dorner’s impact on the RISD agenda is highlighted by the annual Dorner prize: “An award for a creative intervention in the museum’s spaces” (p. 108). The marriage between Dorner and RISD was, however, short-lived and unhappy. He omitted to mention his period as RISD director in his autobiographical preface to the catalogue The Way Beyond Art (1947) (p. 95), and RISD staff were not sad to see the back of this stranger with awkward food habits and a total disregard for the members of the local intelligentsia who served as RISD trustees (Chapter 1 by Andrew Martinez, pp. 26−31; Chapter 4 by Daniel Harkett, pp. 95−105). His cause was not helped by xenophobia in the American museum world and society on the eve of the Second World War, when 250 German art historians and museum directors had recently arrived in the USA from Nazi Germany (p. XV) and the broader refugee crisis had roused hostility to German nationals, the Jewish community, other aliens and anyone suspected of Communists sympathies.
In a thought-provoking account “Tea vs. Beer. Class, Ethnicity, and Alexander Dorner’s Troubled Tenure at the Rhode Island School of Design”, Daniel Harkett recounts the history of RISD before and after Dorner’s arrival. The picture he paints is of a highly conservative, Protestant and anglophone regional museum, closed to internationalism and multiculturalism, and utterly unprepared for the arrival of this radical foreigner, who was catapulted into RISD directorship under the personal protection of Alfred J. Barr, Walter Gropius and other prominent figures of the American art scene.
Soon after his arrival in the US, in the late 1930s and 1940s, Dorner collaborated with several key figures of American modernism, including Henry-Russell Hitchcock, with whom he worked on the Rhode Island Architecture Exhibition at RISD in 1938. Hitchcock was less than satisfied with the partnership, as explained in Chapter 3 by Dietrich Neumann “‘All the struggles of the Present’ Alexander Dorner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Rhode Island Architecture”, although the American historian successfully continued a series of shows on modern American architecture that had been inspired by Dorner.
Dorner’s influence was also visible in Herbert Bayer’s design for the Airways to Peace show at MoMA in 1943 (p. 63). Dorner’s keen interest in the special arrangement of viewpoints and in four-dimensional effects dated back to his Hanover atmosphere rooms (the room created by El Lissitzky was destroyed by the Nazis in 1936, but reconstructed in 1969; the design by László Moholy-Nagy was never realized, but was reconstructed for LACMA in 2017). Bayer would produce sketches featuring multipoint spatiality soon after a short-lived collaboration with Dorner for the RISD retrospective of Bayer’s works, The Way Beyond Art, in 1947.)
the starting point for dorner is the regrettable detachment of museums from the needs of life.
The impact of Dorner’s art historical agenda is also visible in the all-time bestseller of modernist architecture, Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, though Dorner’s ideas are not attributed by Giedion (pp. 48−49).
As Blythe’s collection suggests, unwillingness to recognize the impact of Alexander Dorner’s thought and oeuvre on the modernist agenda in the USA may well have geopolitical reasons related to the conventions of the Cold War era. The analytical articles in the book reveal a contradictory attitude towards Dorner’s personality, activities and philosophy among museum staff at RISD in the early 1940s. Chapter 4 by Daniel Harkett discusses how Dorner was caught in a “double-bind”, as he was suspected of being both a Nazi and a Communist. His behavior was inscribed in the anti-Semitic paradigm of the era when he was judged to be a supporter of Jewish refugees (p. 105). Aside from problems of personality race and politics, Dorner’s artistic ideas may have compounded his chilly reception in America. As Sarah Ganz Blythe argues in the next chapter of the book, “The Way Beyond Museums”, Dorner’s concept of the evolution of art history, drawn from Hegel, led either to Hitler or to Marx (p. 118). That such nervousness can still be inspired by a commitment to Hegelianism shows that the Cold War legacy remains relevant to today’s museum expertise.
The second part of the book contains texts by Alexander Dorner written after his arrival in the USA. “My Experiences in the Hanover Museum (What Can Art Museums Do Today?)” from 1938 is followed by a 64-page unpublished manuscript from 1941 “Why have art museums?” The two texts provide a comprehensive insight into Dorner’s original concept of atmosphere rooms. Chapter 5, “The Way Beyond Museums” by Sarah Ganz Blythe, introduces these texts, providing historical and cultural background, which brings out their importance for European and US museological practice, particularly educational practice.
As Rebecca Uchill, a leading scholar of Dorner’s oeuvre in the English-speaking literature, has pointed out, contemporary scholarship, interested primarily in the innovative and abstract concepts of international modernism epitomized by the works of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, has tended to disregard the coherent “architectural and interpretive framing apparatuses of Dorner’s curatorial container.” [1]
The starting point for Dorner is the regrettable detachment of museums from the needs of life. In the well-documented essays published in Why Art Museums? he outlines a line of thought that combines art history with museum display, describing the function of a museum with a collection of historical art and how such a collection should be displayed in modern surroundings. For Dorner, contemporary art has no need of explanation as it directly refers to contemporary life and ideas. His concern is with the art of the past, and he traces the emergence of historical styles, first in Winckelmann’s works on Greek style (p. 215), then in the context of the Gothic revival and in artistic spheres up to his own time. The problem, which Dorner identified, was that art museums perceived and taught appreciation of all these styles from an imagined perspective of “the eternal laws of beauty”, with total disregard for the temporal aspect (p. 215). This approach, he believed, had been cemented by Formalism, based on the autonomy of individual perception and empathy (Dorner calls this “Romanticism”, p. 152). He credits Aloïs Riegl as the first to overcome this idealist, timeless evolution of art history by attributing time-bound features to each epoch in his work Late Roman Art Industry (1901). This new, time-aware art historical approach had been further elaborated by Dorner’s classmate Erwin Panofsky, who analyzed perspective-related aspects of art historical development, as well as Aby Warburg with the Mnemosyne Atlas (1924 — 1929) and his search for “how specific motives emerged in ancient Greece and persisted through to Weimar Germany” (p. 118). Dorner valued these studies for their keen sense of temporal distance and the autonomy of each cultural epoch, which must be made visible and recognizable in a museum display.
Alexander Dorner. Custom-designed bench in the room for Expressionist art in Provinzialmuseum Hannover after its reorganisation. Courtesy: Sandra Karina Löschke. Photograph courtesy: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie
But what, for Dorner, is the use of museums of art history? For him, the aim of any art historical museum is to show the development of art and the influence of past cultures on the modern era — something, which will not end in our time, but will continue to evolve based on premises as yet unknown. Although he remained completely eurocentric, Dorner was committed to an ideal of the autonomous value of every culture and self-conscious awareness of history in the wider political and social context (as part of culture studies).
His theoretical views were made concrete in the atmosphere rooms that he famously created at the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover and the RISD Museum in Providence. In Dorner’s own description: “a succession of what I would like to call ‘atmosphere rooms’ to be created through architectural design, infusions of music, and images of historical exteriors placed over outward-facing windows” (p. 54). The visitor should be made aware that he is in a cultural institution learning about cultures that have long vanished. Color and a sense of space/mass are they key features that Dorner works with in order to create each atmosphere room (Chapter 5).
The displays in Hanover and Providence were short-lived and until now had been considered quite marginal to Western 20th century museology. Publication of this new book on Dorner is an excellent opportunity for English-speaking scholars to learn about his innovative and original ideas. The collection contributes to an ever-growing literature on alternatives in the interwar years to the type of modernism, which treats the museum as a “white box”, formalist space. It also enriches scholarship on German art theory regarding space, mass and culture, already handled in such classic works as the collection edited by Harry Mallgrave on architectural history, Frank Mitchell’s work on art history and Kathleen Curran’s study of museum history, to name but a few.
German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism. Edited by Mitchell Frank and Daniel Adler. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012;art history / review /
Kathleen Curran. The Invention of the American Art Museum. From Craft to Kulturgeschichte, 1870 — 1930. Getty Trust Publications, 2016.
The right hand of Igor Stravinsky. Illustration to a text by André Schaeffner (Documents, 1929, No. 7). Schaeffner was the head of the ethic music department at the Trocadéro Museum (the department was set up in 1929). Stravinsky’s music was the main object of analysis of left-wing Eurasian aesthetic theory. Petr Suvchinsky, the ideologist of left-wing Eurasianism, was of the view (shared by Stravinsky himself, with whom Suvchinsky collaborated on texts) that music is an ontological reality and should be a bridge connecting us with the being in which we live, but which is not us.
1. Ethnography is generally understood to be the field study of social and cultural groups. And ethnology compares the results obtained by ethnographers in order to arrive at certain generalisations about human nature. The key feature of ethnology understood in this way is the comparative method, which aspires to a certain theoretical meta-level with respect to ethnography, since ethnography is exclusively concerned with observation of the facts of specific cultures.
The French tradition preferred to call itself ethnological. Starting at least from Émile Durkheim in the second half of the 19th century, French researchers focused on decoding cultural reality. In the process, the border between sociology and ethnology was blurred, i.e., the study of cultures was understood primarily as the study of “social facts” (Durkheim’s term). While the Anglo-Saxon tradition continued to describe various ethnographic and cultural formations as values that have an indubitably unitary nature, the French sought to perceive them as semantic sign systems. The French approach revealed the social construction of cultures and opened the way for full cultural relativism, where different cultures are merely different systems of signs and conventions. James Clifford expressed this by saying that the French ethnological tradition is highly sensitive to the over-determination of total social facts.
Paradoxically, the belief in complete semantic cultural relativism gave rise to a search for cultural, or more ontologically profound, invariants — universals that unite people beyond the confines of constructed symbolic cultural systems. So French ethnology produced generalisations about human nature, justifying its more theoretical character compared with ethnography. And if one believes a “Cartesian” tendency, a rational dissection of the world, to be the distinguishing feature of French thought, this dual process of deconstructing cultural and social facts and then searching for humanistic universals (what are left after the semantic “dissection”), is a very clear manifestation of that thought.
Remains of a monument on the site of the French colonial exhibition of 1931 (Bois de Vincennes, Paris). A cock, the symbol of France, perched on a globe (possibly the Earth) surrounded by the national flag, the fruits of nature and the tools of colonial expeditions. 2018. Photo: Nikolay Smirnov
In regard to museums, these issues were exercised most clearly in the encounter with objects of other cultures. It could be said all of the challenges described above originate from a certain perplexity in the presence of an other object, an object that denotes a world outlook and life practice that are radically different from those accepted in the society, to which the ethnologist belongs. That encounter spurs research to find answers to certain questions: why is this object other and what exactly is other about it; to what practices does its other form lead; and, finally, is it really so completely other, or does the effect, which it produces on us, in fact depend on something we have in common with it?
French colonialism brought home a generous supply of objects that posed these questions, and private collections and museums became places of encounter with the Other.
2. From 1878, ethnographic objects were amassed in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris (the Troca as it was familiarly known), a building in outlandish Byzantine-Moorish style. The collection was poorly organised and presented, resembling a repository of strange things rather than a museum. By the turn of the 20th century, what visitors found here was a dust-covered miscellany of unlabelled objects in an unheated and inadequately lit space. The impression, according to contemporary accounts, was mystical.
From the 1910s the Troca suddenly became a place of pilgrimage for innovative artists. It was where, in 1907, Picasso discovered African art. What the Troca and private collections of ethnographic objects offered to Picassos and other future heavyweights of 20th century art were examples of an other aesthetic, which they could set against the European aesthetic.
This felt like the birth of the Contemporaneity, in opposition to the linear, narrative, Western-centred Modernism (the logic of the modern period). Proto-postmodernist, or proto-contemporary views were well represented among the international avant-garde, which was gathered in France at that time, notably among the surrealists and some ethnologists. The ideologues of left-wing Eurasianism, a trend in Russian émigré thought, also had close ties with this environment. [2] In 1928, for example, the émigré composer Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) published a programme article in the Russian-language Paris newspaper Eurasia entitled “Modernism against the Contemporaneity”, in which he championed the Contemporaneity in opposition to Modernism. The Contemporaneity was understood by Dukelsky and those of like mind as the substitution of a geographical for a historical understanding of the World, and of a spatial, egalitarian understanding for one that was linear and progressive (and thereby repressive). The avant-gardists sought real alternatives to the indulgent orientalism of the 19th century and made cultural relativism possible. By an irony of fate, the authors of the Contemporaneity project — rebels against Modernism — were later dubbed “classics of Modernism”, and their logic was called the “modernist cultural attitude”.
the aim of the eco-museum was to involve people in the process of museum creation, bringing them together around the project, making them actors in and users of their heritage, creating a community database, and thereby initiating a discussion within the community about self-reflective knowledge.
By the mid-1920s, the Troca was a fashionable place and the Contemporaneity project — or, according to accepted terminology, the “modernist cultural attitude” – was in full flood. In 1925−1926, the Institut d’ethnologie was opened in Paris, the manifesto of Surrealism was published, Josephine Baker played her first season at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and the Eurasian seminar “Russia and Europe” was held next to the Troca. The neighbourhood of these last two is striking, since their missions were similar: they radically questioned the norms of European, Western culture and offered alternatives from other geographical contexts.
The deep relationship between Surrealism and the emerging modernist ethnography has been described in some detail by James Clifford. [3] Ethnology [4] provided a science-based levelling of cultural norms, which entailed a reset of all generally accepted cultural categories (“beautiful”, “ugly”, “sophisticated”, “savage”, “music”, “art”, etc.). Ethnology and the other objects, which it provided, were the wild card or joker in the pack — the card that can take on any value. In the 1920s the young generation of French scholars (Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Georges Bataille, Alfred Métraux, André Schaeffner, Georges Henri Rivière, Robert Desnos) divided their interest between ethnology, poetry and surrealist art. All of them attended the ethnology lectures of Marcel Mauss, who was the link between the sociological ethnology of his uncle and teacher, Émile Durkheim, and the new generation, which shaped modernist ethnology. Mauss’ lectures used a “surrealist” technique: collating and comparing data, conclusions and facts from different contexts. This often led to inconsistencies, which Mauss did not seek to dissolve within the framework of a single narrative or point of view. He is credited with the adage, “Taboos are made in order to be broken”, to which Bataille’s later theory of transgression is a close correlate.
The long friendship between Bataille and the field ethnologist Alfred Métraux symbolises this single field of ethnology and surrealism in the 1920s, and the publication of Documents magazine in 1929−1930, under the editorship of Georges Bataille, can be viewed as the joint achievement of the two movements. The magazine combined texts by ethnographers, semantic analyses of contemporary French culture (including mass culture, such as the Fantômas books), and essays on contemporary artists. For example, the Polish-Austrian art historian Józef Strzygowski in his article “‘Recherches sur l’art plastique’ et ‘Histoire de l’art'” http://redmuseum.church/smirnov-objects-in-diaspora#rec172587079[5] called for linear historical narratives in the study of art to be replaced by plastic formal analysis, for a geographical instead of a chronological view of the World, using maps instead of history as a measure, and filling gaps with monuments (plastic art research instead of art history). In an illustration to the text, he visually compared the plans of three churches: Armenian, German and French. The comparison shows that they are all similar and reproduce an initial structure, which is seen in it most “pure” form in the (oldest) Armenian church. Strzygowski’s conclusion, overturning established cultural hierarchies, was that “Rome is from the East”.
In the second issue of Documents in 1929, Carl Einstein, poet, art theorist and author of the important article “La plastique nègre” (1915), offered an ethnological study of the contemporary artist, André Masson. The study deserves to be called ethnological because it argues that Masson used psychological archaism in his paintings and turned to mythological formations akin to totemic identification for the creation of his artistic forms.
This method of searching for mythological formations and an ontological universal archaic explains the interest of Documents in parts of the body. In two essays on civilisation and the eye, in the fourth issue of 1929, Michel Leiris writes that all civilisation is a thin film on a sea of instincts. When various cultural conventions are laid aside and cultures are deconstructed, what remains is a “dry residue”, outside the bounds of civilisation, such as the eye or the big toe.
The right hand of Igor Stravinsky. Illustration to a text by André Schaeffner (Documents, 1929, No. 7). Schaeffner was the head of the ethic music department at the Trocadéro Museum (the department was set up in 1929). Stravinsky’s music was the main object of analysis of left-wing Eurasian aesthetic theory. Petr Suvchinsky, the ideologist of left-wing Eurasianism, was of the view (shared by Stravinsky himself, with whom Suvchinsky collaborated on texts) that music is an ontological reality and should be a bridge connecting us with the being in which we live, but which is not us.
It is not surprising that the fictional idol of French popular culture, Fantômas — a fierce criminal and sociopath, a character without identity who dons various masks to commit crimes against his own culture — was among the favourite topics of Documents. His cruelty and sociopathic attitude towards his compatriots matched the “cruel” analysis and dismemberment of their own cultural order, which the surrealists and ethnologists undertook in their transgressive role as cultural “criminals” or “terrorists”.
Documents was compiled on a collage principle and was, in essence, a museum that subverted and disrupted cultural standards. It was a playful collection of images, samples, objects, texts and signatures, a semiotic museum, which, in the words of James Clifford, did not strive for cohesion, but reassembled and transcoded culture through collage. Any divisions between “high” and “low” were discarded, everything was deemed worthy of collection and exhibition, so the only task was that of classification and interpretation. The combinations on the pages of Documents are a question analogous to that, which is posed by an ethnographical exhibition. By combining materials and images on the pages of the magazine, its authors carried out the same function as modernist ethnologists working in the museum.
The cultural climate of the 1920s gave the Trocadéro a new lease of life in the later part of the decade. In 1928, Paul Rivet, one of the founders of the Institut d’ethnologie, became director of the Museum. He involved the young museologist, Georges Henri Rivière, in his work at the Trocadéro. The two men, each of them key figures in French ethnological museology, immediately set to work reorganising the collection.
Paris was seized by a craze for everything that was “other”. Wealthy collectors begin to patronise the Troca. Star-studded fashion shows and boxing tournaments were held to raise money for new expeditions such as the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, the main purpose of which was to collect new ethnographical exhibits. However, the single undifferentiated field of ethnology and Surrealism, with their shared orientation towards semantic critique of their own culture, began to disintegrate. The work of corrosive, i.e., “questioning”, deconstructing analysis of reality had been completed, and each of the two spheres began to acquire its own definite outlines. Surrealism soon had its own institutions and specialised print media, in which the new art was associated with the internal, visionary approach of the Breton mainstream faction, from where it is not far to the old, conservative figure of the artist-genius who creates worlds from his inner experience. Ethnology, for its part, affirmed cultural relativism and went in search of universals of human nature.
3. The transformation of the Trocadéro into the Musée de l’homme (“Museum of Man”) has to be understood in the political context of France in the 1920s and 1930s. Paul Rivet, the founder of the Musée de l’homme, was a convinced socialist and his new museum sent a political message. A left-wing left coalition consisting of the French section of the Socialist Workers International (SFIO) and representatives of the Radical Party has been in power in the country since 1924. Despite its “radical” name, the party occupied liberal-progressive positions: its members could only be considered radicals in the context of an exclusively bourgeois and conservative political environment and in the absence of strong socialist and communist parties. The Radical Party was the oldest political party in France, and its position was analogous to that of the Russian Narodniks (“People’s Party”) or of Evgeny Bazarov (fictional hero of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons) in the conservative, bourgeois environment of the late 19th century. At that time the French Radical Party had been truly radical, but by the 1920s it had shifted to a centrist position, defending market-oriented freedoms.
By the mid-1930s, leftist intellectuals had become acutely aware of the dangers of fascism. In 1934, right-wing street demonstrations led to the break-up of the left coalition government, and anti-fascist intellectuals began to mobilise against the perceived threat. In the same year Rivet was among the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (“Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals”, CVIA), which brought together representatives of the French section of the Workers International, the Radical Party and the Communists in an unlikely alliance. The CVIA can be seen as the prototype of the Popular Front government, which was formed in 1936 from representatives of the same three main leftist parties. The period of office of this government (1936−1938) was the high tide of left-wing ideology in France, and it was during these years that the Musée de l’homme was opened.
Universal humanism, declared as the programme of the Musée de l’homme, was the embodiment of the CVIA’s international humanism, a manifesto of anti-fascist socialist universalism. The Museum asserted the primacy of universal values over cultural differences (prized by the fascists and by right-wing ideologies in general), championing the mind against the aura and magic of the object. The creators of the Museum believed that the divisions of political geography are just as arbitrary as cultural divisions within humanity.
The cosmopolitanism of the Musée de l’homme was the dialectical heir of the collapse of hierarchies in the surrealist ethnography of the 1920s. After the work of total cultural relativisation has been carried out, no single cultural whole, including that of one’s own culture, could be taken as foundational. Under the growing shadow of fascism, the Museum postulated a single humanity, emphasising what was in common rather than what was different.
What was left after the fragmentation of the 1920s? A considerable amount was left: the shared biological evolution of humankind, the archaeological remains of primeval history and the assertion of the equal value and equal rights of today’s cultural alternatives. The museum no longer executed corrosive analysis of the cultural codes of reality. French ethnology abstracted from different and equal symbolic constructions of cultures to obtain the integral humanism of Mauss and Rivet and, later, the human spirit of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
This was, without a doubt, a progressive attitude, and the Musée de l’homme became a symbol of the ideas of the Popular Front in the pan-European socio-political context of those years. The old Byzantine-Moorish Trocadéro building was demolished and replaced by the modernist Palais de Chaillot as part of large-scale reformatting of the architectural landscape in central Paris and preparations for the World Exhibition of 1937. Just as modernist ethnology abstracted from cultural specifics and differences, beloved of Orientalism and emphasised by the political right, the new palace used only the “pure”, abstract forms that remained after the reduction of the historical stylisations and architectural historicisms of the 19th century (the “Moorish” decoration and “Byzantine” roof of the old Trocadéro). Abstraction also meant the search for universal human foundations and the rejection of any cultural hegemony.
The main practical consequence of such an ideology for actual museum exhibitions was much broader contextualization: the exhibits were shown with titles and explanations, placed in the context of their function, and distanced from the viewer in glass cabinets. Objects of “primordial art” were radically de-aestheticised and considered as functional and symbolic components of specific cultures. The Musée de l’homme preserved geographical divisions, including the creation in 1937 of a France department, headed by Georges Henri Rivière. The Museum’s informational and scientific component was much increased, building a clear and progressive narrative into its exhibition. It differed from the pre-surrealist, orientalist narrative by the abolition of any hierarchy or “insuperable” cultural differences and emphasis on what people from different cultures and races have in common. [6] The ethnological museum has ceased to be a collection of titillating objects. Instead, it offered clarification and made the other accessible and understandable through a detailed explanation and the creation of a universal semantic field.
4. Museology experienced a crisis in the 1970s. Large, universal narratives were now felt as repressive. It became clear that such narratives leave their source and the projections of their would-be universalism — the discursive structures of the particular society that formulated such universalism — invisible, even as the specifics of that society’s “logos” [7] remain scattered throughout the narrative and expositional structure, and even if a distancing from that society is postulated by the structure, as in the department of France at the Musée de l’homme. At issue were the invisible epistemological and hermeneutic structures that organise knowledge itself.
It was understood that the museum should be much more connected with the social life of the local community and play a greater role for that community than could be played by a brute collection of objects and repository of knowledge. In the new museology, museums were to be the servants of specific communities. In France, this need gave rise to the concept of eco-museums, developed principally by three museologists: the same Georges Henri Rivière and two representatives of the younger generation, André Desvallées and Hugues de Varine.
In 1969, the France section, Rivière’s brainchild, moved from the Musée de l’homme to a separate building where it became the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires (“Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions”, MNATP). Ten years earlier Rivière, then also director of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), had hired André Desvallées to run the museology department of the France section. Desvallées gained renown as a methodologist in the sphere of folk museums for his work in the 1960−1970s in the France section and at the MNATP, which set standards as an advanced museum institution.
In addition to its permanent exhibition the MNATP had three galleries for temporary exhibitions, which Desvallées also worked on. The main practical principles of his museology were emphasis on the “vernacular” [8] and context dependence. Influenced by Duncan Cameron, [9] Desvallées came to understand the museum exhibition as a communicative system with visuality and spatiality as the key features of its medium. He developed the theory of “expography”, or the technique of “writing” an exhibition as a text. According to Desvallées, this process is based on research and its ultimate aim is to establish communication with the public and convey to it the message intended by the museographer.
The impact of Desvallées on formation of the eco-museum as an institution was very great: both conceptually, by developing and putting into practice the principles of regional folk museums, and also in terms of organisation. [10] The term “eco-museum” was proposed by Hugues de Varine at the 11th ICOM conference in 1971. It was intended that eco-museums would be the main vehicles of new principles in museology. They would serve as mirrors for the local community, both as internal mirrors, explaining to people the territory, which they themselves inhabited, and their connection with the generations who lived there before, and also as external mirrors for tourists and visitors. The key principles were the social aspect of the museum and emphasis on the tangible and intangible heritage of the community, in which the museum is created and whose identity it reflects. The aim of the eco-museum was to involve people in the process of museum creation, bringing them together around the project, making them actors in and users of their heritage, creating a community database, and thereby initiating a discussion within the community about self-reflective knowledge.
Screenshot from the interactive site of Écomusée du Creusot Montceau-les-Mines, one of France’s first eco-museums, opened in 1972 and dedicated to the local industrial community. One section of the site offers a virtual tour of the exhibition and is entitled “Objects speak”.
The structuralist realisation that any knowledge and narrative is a sign and part of an identity has led to the requirement that museums should be constructed by communities themselves. So it is to be left to others themselves to care for their heritage and objects. French museology has, in this, largely coincided with museology in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which began at about the same time to engage the members of First Nations and Indigineus cultures in the creation of museums representing their cultures. These practices correlate closely with the “chorological” projects of local history museums, which were developed by the Russian liberal intelligentsia in the 1910s and the first half of the 1920s. The concept of chorology (from the Greek “khōros”, plural “khōroi”, meaning “place” or “space”) is based on the idea that the space of the Earth is made up of specific “khōroi” each of which is a separate, distinctive, complex space. Chorological local history highlighted, described and identified such “khōroi” and chorological museology sought to represent them in regional and local museums. The Moscow students of Dmitry Anuchin’s school (representatives of the new geography) were particularly committed to this approach. The most notable among them was Vladimir Bogdanov, who created the Museum of the Central Industrial Region in the Soviet capital in the 1920s. However, chorological local history in Russia was subsequently reformatted to fit the Soviet Marxist mould.
In Western European the 1970s saw a return of cultural relativism associated with local identity (the same occurred at the same time in the unofficial sphere in the USSR). In French museology, this process was a dialectical development of the socially engaged project of the Musée de l’homme. But the order of the day was no longer to affirm universal human values, which were now passed over in silence, but to cultivate local communities. In the concept of the eco-museum, the progressive pathos of French ethnological humanism was combined with a post-modern deconstruction of universal narratives.
But, despite the application of new principles in community museums and particularly in various regional eco-museums, the principal ethnological museums remained as they had been, their entire exhibitions embodying knowledge structures that were already perceived as repressive. In the 1980s, the whole of ethnographic science was perceived as a way of creating a dominant narrative. And while Anglo-Saxon science traditionally recognised differences, emphasising the struggle of minority cultures for their rights, French museology insisted on universalism, egalitarianism and the equality of races and cultures. So French ethnological museums faced a paradoxical task: to dismantle universal narratives, while at the same time insisting on certain unchallengeable and specifically “French” universal values, such as tolerance and the equality of cultures. [11]
Under the conditions of (neo-)liberalism and a corresponding upsurge in the role of collectors in all spheres related to art, a solution was found in the “subtraction” of the repressive scientific narrative and the re-aestheticisation of ethnographic objects. In France, this process is associated with the project of Jacques Chirac (President of France from 1995 to 2007) to create the Musée du quai Branly, a vast new ethnographic museum on the banks of the Seine in Paris.
5. Chirac had been an enthusiast of eastern cultures from an early age and in 1992, as Mayor of Paris, he refused to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, citing the crimes against other cultures, which followed upon that event. In the 1990s, during a vacation in Mauritius, Chirac met Jacques Kerchache, a collector and amateur ethnographer. A couple of years earlier, Kerchache had published a book, African Art, where he argued that, apart from, and more importantly than their ethnological value, objects of “primitive” or “first” art possess high artistic value and that these objects should be viewed through the prism of aesthetics. The story is that Kerchache was emboldened to introduce himself to the Paris Mayor after spotting his book in a photo of Chirac’s office, among the books and papers on the Mayor’s desk. Chirac told the collector that he had indeed read the book several times and was very glad to meet the author. An alliance was forged between politician and collector, which would have momentous consequences for ethnological museums in the French capital.
Chirac considered art and ethnology to be two completely different disciplines, as he emphasised in a landmark speech given in 1995 at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (Natural History Museum) in Paris. He and Kerchache supported the concept of “arts premiers” (“first arts”), which was anathema to the social and contextual thinking of the ethnologists of the Musée de l’homme. For them, the term “first arts” represented a return of obscurantism, since it was a descendant (albeit less harsh on the ear) of the term “primordial arts”, beloved of the Gaullist Minister of Culture, André Malraux. It should be noted, however, that a decade before Malraux gave currency to “primordial arts”, the structuralist Lévi-Strauss had taken the “human spirit” as the building block of his universal theories. The concept of “first arts” can be seen as the triumphant return of universalism to French museology, but accompanied by a re-aestheticisation of the object, which the “priests of contextualisation” found unacceptable.
Chirac and Kerchache initially wanted to reform the Musée de l’homme, but, faced with powerful opposition from its curators, they decided that it would be easier to build a new museum. In 2000 a department specialised in the “best” works of first art was created at the Pavillion des Sessions (part of the Musée du Louvre), under the management of Kerchache, and in 2006 the Paris public was presented with the highly ambitious Musée du quai Branly. The collection of the new museum consisted of works from the ethnology laboratory of the Musée de l’homme and from the Musée national des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania), enriched by 10,000 objects acquired from museums and collections, over which Kerchache had rights.
The two institutional collections, which the new museum brought together, were of quite different natures. The Museum of Africa and Oceania had been established by André Malraux in 1961 as a museum of French overseas possessions on the basis of the colonial exhibition of 1931 and was an aesthetically oriented collection. The ethnological collection of the Musée de l’homme was a highly contextualized collection, which “abstracted from” the aesthetic properties of objects.
a diaspora of forms, objects in diaspora, are, in a sense, the ideal republican model (if, by “republican”, we mean the new political mainstream, combining economic neoliberalism with cultural conservatism).
Choosing a name for the new institution presented special challenges. Chirac and Kerchache wanted to affirm cultural diversity through the universal dominance of art, but some new museological concept had to be found to express this, which would not scandalise the scientific community of museologists. Names such as “Museum of the First Arts” and “Museum of Man, the Arts and Civilisation” were considered, but the first introduced regressive terminology and hinted at a connection with the art market, while the second unjustifiably separated art from civilisation and put them in apposition. So it was decided to name the new institution after its address: Musée du quai Branly (“Museum on Branly Embankment”). Later, the name of the Museum’s creator, Jacques Chirac, was added to the title. Oddly enough, the final version successfully reflects the voluntaristic and subjective nature of the institution in the new (neo-)liberal context.
The declared goal of the Museum was cultural diversity and its creators explicitly presented it as post-colonial. Kerchache wrote in his manifesto: “Masterpieces of the entire world are born free and equal”. However, the noble task of putting the cultural diversity of the World on display was represented exclusively through art practices that were proclaimed as universal. The architect Jean Nouvel built a “temple of objects”, where the visitor, after passing through the “sacred garden” of landscape architect Gilles Clément, found him/herself in a hugely immersive space without reference points.
Scandals soon erupted around the new Museum. The architecture critic of The New York Times Michael Kimmelman described it as a “spooky jungle, […] briefly thrilling as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded”. [12] The curator of the Asian collection, Christine Hemmet, showed Kimmelman the back of a Vietnamese scarecrow, on which falling American bombs had been painted, and said that she had wanted to install a mirror to show this to the viewer, but was not permitted to do so. The director of the Museum, referring to the earlier generation of socially oriented museologists, told Kimmelman, that “the priests of contextualization are poor museographers”.
A conflict broke out between the ethnological laboratory of the Musée de l’homme, on the one hand, and Chirac and Kerchache, on the other. Bernard Dupaigne, the head of the laboratory, published a book, Le scandale des arts premiers: la véritable histoire du musée du quai Branly (“The scandal of the first arts. The true story of the Museum on the Branly Embankment”), [13] where he called the new museum “pharaonic” and wrote that the staff of the Musée de l’homme have nothing against the exhibition of non-Western objects as art, but are against the term “first art”, because it denies that the objects have a history or underwent changes, and treats them as “original, primary art”, which leads to a “new obscurantism”.
The museologist Alexandra Martin called the new institution the “Museum of Others”, arguing that others are represented there as others for Europe, without a past or a living present. [14] Bernice Murphy, head of the ICOM Ethics Committee, dubbed the new principles, manifested by the Musée du quai Branly, “regressive museology”, and the Portuguese museologist, Nélia Dias, suggested that what had happened at the museum was a “double erasure”, rubbing out both France’s colonial past and the history of the collections. [15] Dias suggested that the museum had an implied political brief: it was opened at a time when France was experiencing problems with migrants, and, unable to solve problems with real people, the country had delegated this task to the museum. The mission of the Musée du quai Branly, according to Dias, was to exculpate society for its failure in dealing with the people and cultures whose objects are kept in museums dedicated to cultural diversity, so that equality in the field of art goes hand in hand with inequality in society. [16]
Ethnologists who kept faith with progressivist traditions perceived Chirac and Kerchache as the epitome of the Gaullist art establishment. Journalists alleged that Chirac (once nicknamed “the Bulldozer” by his political ally, Georges Pompidou) had pushed through his museum project amid nepotism, corruption and exorbitant pricing, ignoring the opinion of the scientific community and focusing only on the opinion of Kerchache, whom Bernard Dupaigne referred to as a “trader” and even a “looter”. [17]
All in all, the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (to give it its full name) was seen as an attempt to create a new type of institution reflecting neoliberal ideology. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the museum proclaims cultural differences, as if proclaiming as a new kind of universalism. Kimmelman, in his damning review, cited Chirac’s declaration at the Museum’s opening that “there is no hierarchy among the arts just as there is no hierarchy among peoples”, and made the powerful retort: “No hierarchy, except that at the Pompidou Centre [the best-known Paris collection of modern and contemporary art] you find Western artists like Picasso and Pollock; at Branly, it’s Eskimos, Cameroonians and Moroccans. No hierarchy, but no commonality either. Separate but equal.” [18] Indeed, this artificial division between human cultures expresses the core of neoliberal conservatism, which states: “To each his own.” Cultural divisions correspond to economic divisions, which are beneficial and desirable for the market and for the centre-right political parties that dominate the world today, notably the republican parties in France and the United States. Pluralistic universalism and assimilative universalism are quite different things.
In the new paradigm, the world is divided between, on the one hand, those who have identity and produce cultural diversity, “nailed” to their places of residence and, as a rule, poor living conditions, and, on the other hand, the few who are able to “understand” them, i.e., to consume their culture, have access to it, play with identities, proclaim universalism and have an increased appetite for everything that is other. This situation sets the stage for an interesting piece of legerdemain in respect of objects. As Octave Debary and Mélanie Roustan have written in a study, the visual experience of a visitor to the Branly museum is that of a meeting with the Other and with the absence of the Other. [19] Others have disappeared, they are absent, there are no accompanying texts to explain anything about them, but their objects remain, and this unexpectedly prompts a question on the part of the visitor: why are we seeing these cultures here, what happened to them?
Objects without their creators generate a diaspora of things, or, to use John Peffer’s term, “objects in diaspora”. [20] These objects seem to have achieved something that was not vouchsafed to their creators: they have emigrated and fitted into the Western context. The creators of these objects — certain tribes and societies — no longer exist, but the objects taken from them, which came to Europe through processes of coercive control, are here, representing their cultures. It is clear that all the theories of the last 30 years, which lend great importance and independent life to objects, are connected with the new political and economic conglomerate. A diaspora of forms, objects in diaspora, are, in a sense, the ideal republican model (if, by “republican”, we mean the new political mainstream, combining economic neoliberalism with cultural conservatism). This model brings along with it a speculative philosophy that endows things with a special agency, freeportism as an artistic style and ideology, [21] an enhanced role for collectors and, to a large extent, a postcolonial theory, which proclaims difference and is neutral towards separation.
The ruins of the French colonial exhibition of 1931 in the Bois de Vincennes (the remains of one of the Indochina pavilions are shown). 2018. Photo: Nikolay Smirnov
The key question in the new situation is: do the intellectual ideologies and concepts, which have been described, offer any new progressive opportunities? The crisis of ethnographic representation in the 1980s was clear to see. A full return to the principles of contextual, “correct”, socially responsible museology is no longer possible. One sign of this is the fact that the Musée du quai Branly has proved very popular with the general public. Ethnological museology in France has passed through a series of dialectical transformations: from the unified experience of science and art (the “surprising objects” of the Trocadéro Museum) to the stripping away of the aesthetic and private (the ethnographic humanism of the Musée de l’homme), then to the removal of the universal and the return of differences, but maintaining a social mission and still excluding aestheticism (eco-museums), and finally to the return of aestheticism at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, whereby Paris has restored one aspect of the old Trocadéro.
Marking the opening of the Musée de l’homme in the 1930s, Michel Leiris praised the new institution as progressive, but paid tribute to the old Troca for its avoidance of didacticism and strict boundaries, a loss which he sought to remedy in the Collège de Sociologie, [22] which retained the spirit of surrealist ethnography as radical cultural criticism. Today in Paris there is a partial recreation of the Troca, in the Chirac Museum, and there is the Musée de l’homme, but neither of them achieves an integrated, critical attitude towards their own culture. The only alternative offered by Bernard Dupaigne and many other critics of the Chirac Museum is a return to contextualised exhibitions, which, let us remember, were also once seen as repressive. The Chirac Museum does not attempt cultural criticism in its permanent exhibition, but its parallel programme raises many questions and perhaps shows a way of escape from disciplinary frameworks, contextualisation and aesthetics. Interdisciplinarity and cross-culturalism are, undoubtedly, among the products of the described “republican” conglomerate. [23] It may be that the new political economy has given birth to a new museum form, a form that cannot be described using exclusively old definitions without omitting precisely what is new about it.
But this does not stop us criticising the political and economic forces and processes that generated and maintain the Chirac Museum. We might propose a new concept, that of “republican museology”, the essential features of which have been described above, including a special focus on the object, as expressed most vividly at the Chirac Museum. This museology combines progressive and conservative features, postulating cultural diversity, but depriving the diversity of anything rational in common besides its possibility to produce affect in viewers. It mirrors the transformation, undergone by the republican ideal itself. Today this ideal is more likely to be the preserve of the centre-right, where market freedoms make an alliance with cultural diversity, underwritten by a conservative and post-colonial agenda, and market universalism is often left hidden. Real social problems to do with people are transferred onto objects, which are endowed with fetishistic, auraistic and subjective properties in a “total market” context. This is accompanied, in the intellectual sphere, by various speculative theories and, in the field of art, by the special role accorded to collectors and the increased importance now given to the materiality of works and practices of working with objects.
What we are faced with, overall, is the traditional problematic of French ethnology, with the issue of an other object at its centre. Hence the scale and intensity of the public debate aroused by the recent reformatting of Paris’ ethnological museums.
Contemporary Russians continue to live under the visual supremacy of the USSR: communist symbols, monuments, and toponyms are still pervasive elements of the post-Soviet public space. In today’s Moscow one can still find over a hundred of monuments to Lenin and hundreds of memorial plaques, commemorating, quite literally, every step made by the revolutionary leaders of 1917. Needless to say, these objects are not (critically) reframed by the current municipal authorities.
The commemoration of Vladimir Lenin in Soviet art was an archetypal modernist campaign that can serve as an excellent illustration of the commodification of public art and memory. Theoretical reflections on this subject did not begin in Western academia up until the 1960s [1]. While the cult of Lenin itself has been thoroughly examined, almost nothing has been written about the production of the statues of Lenin and their distribution across the Eastern Bloc [2]. The institutional history of the most powerful commemorative gesture in Europe — the dissemination of visual Communist symbols — is still awaiting its researchers and chroniclers [3].
Portrait of Lenin in Krakow (Poland, circa 1970s).
In what follows I will consider the ways of producing, distributing, and promoting monuments to Lenin in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and will reflect on their function and legacy in contemporary public space. I will examine 1) the techniques and methods employed in the production of the statues of Lenin 2) the creation of a network of rituals and traditions, centered around these monuments. Finally, I shall contemplate the outcomes of the commemorative campaign geared towards the immortalization of Lenin in post-Soviet Russia.
Erik Bulatov, Ulitsa Krasikova (1977).
It is noteworthy that the groundwork for the dissemination of the cult of Lenin was laid even before his death in January 1924. The first museum collection of Lenin’s works and personal items, such as paintings, photos, private letters, etc. was supposed to be exhibited in May 1923. By then Lenin had already been terminally ill [4]. When he died the following year, there was no hesitation or uncertainty as to how his memory should be preserved. The Commission of the CEC (Central Election Commission) of the USSR for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I Ulyanov-Lenin was established with an explicit purpose of organizing Lenin’s funeral and overseeing proper memorial ceremonies [5].
Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Two days later, local authorities in Petrograd decided to rename the city into Leningrad (literally the city of Lenin) and to erect a monument to the deceased Bolshevik leader. Five days later, it was decided to build a crypt and a number of monuments in the largest Soviet cities. Six days later, municipal authorities in Moscow launched a fundraising campaign to erect the “greatest monument to our leader.” In conjunction with these proposals other commemorative and propagandistic initiatives gained momentum, such as the resolution to publish the complete works of Lenin, to set up Lenin Corners (a social center of sorts equipped with benches and chairs and shelves lined with books, journals and magazines, where workers or soldiers could read, play checkers, listen to the radio and consult the helpful staff that was always eager to clarify the readings or answer questions — translator’s note), to establish a Lenin Foundation and so much more. In May 1924, only four months after Lenin’s death, the first museum dedicated to him was unveiled [7].
Shortly afterwards Leonid Krasin, one of Lenin’s closest associates and comrades, a Soviet diplomat and the head of the Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin, published an article “On architectural commemoration of Lenin” in a volume titled “On Lenin’s Monument.” Krasin proposed to erect a mausoleum by deciding on the design of the future crypt and argued that a realistic image of Lenin’s facial traits (i. e. his portrait without any stylization of his appearance) should be preserved as well, since according to Krasin, this would convey the personal charms of the deceased Party leader [8].
Soon enough depictions of Lenin did assume truly scientific precision, consistency and regularity. Two basic principles at work were thought to guarantee the highest quality of any monumental portrait: 1) people who had been personally acquainted with Lenin were invited to consult the artists working on his portraits, 2) artists had to study Lenin’s photographs to ensure documentary authenticity of their own work.
One of the statues of Lenin meant for the erection in the Moscow region that had not been approved by the Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin. (Moscow region, no later than 1932). Archive of the Moscow Union of Artists.
However, the first monuments presented to the public showed that these early portraits of Lenin lacked the necessary artistic and, more importantly, documental quality. That is why in June 1924, half a year after Lenin’s death, the CEC issued a Resolution on the reproduction and distribution of busts, bas-reliefs, etc. carrying the image of V. I. Lenin. Besides the central Commission, which was based in Moscow, local branches were also established in Leningrad, Ukraine, and Transcauscasia. They were called upon to exercise control over the production of portraits and other images of Lenin [9]. Besides being endowed with the authority to censor productions deemed improper, each commission was obliged to have one member in its ranks who had personally known Lenin. The practice of inviting people who had been personally acquainted with him or even met him once, however fleetingly, in order to consult sculptors or painters, persisted for decades to come.
Nikolai Andreev. Portrait of Lenin (circa 1920s). State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Just how such consultations were held can be surmised from an excerpt of the transcript of a discussion around the project for the monument to Lenin in his native Ulyanovsk in the later 1930s. The renowned sculptor, Matvei Manizer, who was working on his project, was advised by none other than Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia. When examining the maquette of the future sculpted portrait, Krupskaia noted: “[You depicted him with] an imperious face. The shape of his body is accurate, though, but the face is supposed to show much more agitation. When he stands in front of a crowd of workers his face is much more agitated as he is trying to persuade them. When he speaks with his political opponents his facial expression is totally different, though [10].”
Realism was key to the depiction of Lenin’s physical appearance. However, a special, rather sophisticated allegorical language was elaborated in order to depict his clothes or posture as is evinced in the words of the local Ulyanovsk official: “We had some discussion about the proposal for a statue, [and we mentioned] that it would be too windy around it. But Lenin’s entire life was such that he always stood firm against stormy winds [11].”
Over the next thirty years this much-debated monument was copied several times. In 1938 it was erected in Ulyanovsk; in 1960 a slightly modified version of it appeared in Moscow and finally, seven years later, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth it was unveiled in Odessa.
Sergei Merkurov, Lenin (1939). Behind the statue is Sophia Loren on her visit to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (1965, Moscow).
Some artists, such as Ivan Shadr and Sergey Merkurov, were invited to Lenin’s deathbed to draw and sculpt his body and face, to capture the last minutes of his evanescent appearance. However, it was photography that quite naturally became a far more popular source for artists portraying Lenin for many years to come. A photo album titled 1927 Lénine album. Cent photographies was published in 1927, with captions in Russian and French [12]. By the late 1930s, as Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality had come to dominate Soviet culture and society, the sculptural or pictorial image of Lenin underwent little if any artistic evolution and was somewhat “frozen” or “suspended”, with no new photo albums or new sources published to promote stylistic modifications or transformations. The only exception — the publication of a single album with selected art works depicting Lenin — only went to show that the range of visual sources available to artists at the time was severely limited [13].
Lenin’s political and visual legacy came under scrutiny and revision twice: the first time it happened in the wake of the so-called de-Stalinization of 1953−1961 and took twenty years to crystallize. The new era of commemorative practices dedicated to Lenin started in 1969−1970. It was not until 1970 that two volumes of his photos and movie-stills (a total of 343 images) Lenin. Collection of Photographs and Stills were published to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth (the book was republished again in 1980). Not only did it contain the most comprehensive collection of photos and film stills to date, capturing the slightest movement of Lenin’s body and face and the most flattering angles, but it also included an extensive and very thorough description of his appearance, almost an ekphrasis [14].
The second wave of revisions swept across Lenin’s commemorative cult during the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost’ (1985−1991) that inspired critical reexamination of Leninism and triggered renewed interest in Lenin’s image and legacy [15]. Though stylistically the images of Lenin dated from this period evolved and changed as the artists sought to uncover the simplicity and ingenuousness of Lenin’s personality, the sources that inspired them remained the same: painters and sculptors merely altered certain minor details of clothing and posture.
Lev Kerbel, monuments to Lenin created in honor of the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth: A guided tour for workers to the studio of the artist (12 January 1970); Monument to Lenin in Kemerovo (April 22, 1970); Monument to Lenin in Sofia, Bulgaria (January 6, 1971). Newspaper collection of the Moscow Academy of Arts.
In the age of photography, the Bolsheviks succeeded in employing and promoting the bourgeois art of sculpture as a proletarian art form. They also drew on the powerful ideas of the Enlightenment, such as the cult of grands hommes, as well as on the practices of the French Revolution and the cult of psychological, scientific, and factual accuracy in portraying distinguished public figures that dates back to the times of the Third Republic [16]. These ideas became deeply entrenched in the Soviet culture, all the more so due to the structure of the modernist production: the rapid creation of a very specific proletarian culture with its own traditions, lieux de mémoire, and “imaginary memories” [17]. All the above mentioned initiatives staked the boundaries of a full-fledged artistic industry that encompassed commercial sculpture manufactories and enterprises that produced millions of copies of Lenin images for mass market, and an impressive range of commemorative practices and rituals, such as newspaper and magazine articles regularly appearing in the press, school trips to memorial sites and monuments, tourist guidebooks and so much more.
Special issue of a newspaper to honor the anniversary of Lenin’s birth contained an inquiry sent by the young pioneers: “We have a tradition at our school: at the beginning of each school year we lay flowers at the monument to Lenin near the Smolny Institute. We kindly ask the editorial board to help us learn more about the monument: how it was created, when it was opened, etc.” (1964) Archive of periodicals at the V. Surikov Moscow Art Institute.
There were three main reasons behind the government’s eager support of the distribution of mass-produced statues to Lenin. First and foremost, the nascent country did not yet have a developed network of artists and culture-makers and the former ties connecting artists and art buyers were shattered or lost in the new economic and political reality. Cultural goods could only be distributed by and through the central authority that consolidated in its hands the entire system of production and distribution.
The first manufactories to produce monuments Lenin were set up immediately after his death in 1924, a project spearheaded by the modernist sculptor Sergei Merkurov. Merkurov was educated in Munich and had come under a very strong influence of the Fin de siècle agenda, which ultimately led him to become one of the most prominent creators of death masks of Russian public figures, including Lenin. In the new post-revolutionary reality, it was Merkurov who proposed to launch the mass production of images of Lenin to supply the new Soviet socialist society. His proposal was endorsed by the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) that took care of advertising and distribution of the statues and busts [18]. Later on this private initiative turned out to be one of the most successful and long-standing commemorative projects. That is why Merkurov’s enthusiasm and his initiative could not but boost the dissemination of the unified Soviet culture and ideology.
1928 saw the establishment of Vsekokudozhnik (The All-Russian Cooperative Association of Artists), a semi-private, semi-public enterprise that laid the groundwork for the socialist artistic industry for many decades to come [19].
Mass production of sculptures (Moscow, circa 1920s).
The second reason behind the Soviet government’s endorsement of Merkurov’s initiative was rooted in the ideology of the Soviet economic system of the early 1920s, which gave no hope and left no space to any private art buyers, and at the same time promoted a form of “state capitalist” economy. Lenin died in 1924, at the height of the so-called New Economic Policy, NEP (1921−1928). The system, which had been previously built upon a network of private collectors, overnight became a rigid structure composed of the nationalized manufactories, art collections, and the likе, whose main task was to guarantee continuous supply of ideological goods/productions across the nation. Soviet artists were eager to take part in that new public system of production and distribution that guaranteed regular and secure commissions from the state. After the revolution of 1917 they lost all their patrons and sponsors and by 1920s were obliged to pay considerable taxes since the new state regarded them as “exploiters” – private employers of labor [20].
The third reason that prompted the Soviet government to support the distribution of the mass-produced statues of Lenin had to do with the emergence of the new type of socialist, anti-hierarchical system of dissemination of intellectual production. The anonymous character of production, mechanized labor, and the idea of justice and fairness (i.e. unified system of payment), appealed to early Soviet thinkers and artists alike, particularly those that belonged to the Left Front of the Art (LEF), popularized in Western Europe by Walter Benjamin in his 1934 essay Der Autor als Produzent (Artist as Producer). In the words of Benjamin “the rigid, isolated object (work, novel, book) is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations” [21]. This was in tune with the Soviet brand of Marxism as well.
New monuments and public images of Lenin created by the Soviet government had to be contextualized. As Benjamin put it in 1936, the technical reproduction of art has no authority of the original which in turn leads to the independence of a reproduced work from the tradition, the ritual and the place, and its existence is based only on politics. Politics has the power to create new traditions and to abandon the old ones. Benjamin compared the dissemination of reproductions with architectural phenomena — building space is something that we get used to through constant repetition [22]. This is exactly what happened to the commemorations centering on Lenin: a system emerged that smoothly distributed images and at the same time worked to disconnect them from local or recent political traditions just as smoothly.
The principles of anonymity, standardization and mechanization that characterized the operation of “Vsekokhudozhnik” with its integrated manufactories turning out mass-produced images, sculptures, busts and paintings, defined the socialist method of creation for the anti-hierarchical, and even more importantly, anti-exploitative, anti-predatory socialist culture.
Left: Vasilii Kozlov, Man With an Idée Fixe (1913); Right: newspaper article about the first bronze monument to Lenin by V. Kozlov (1924).
Soon enough, every minute detail of the production process was thoroughly elaborated. Standard contracts were drawn up for the artists that were commissioned to create models for the mass-reproduction in accordance with the production plan and thematic calendars. Standard pricelists were also put together. An original artwork had to be scrutinized by a special commission: in the case of images of Lenin it was The Commission of the CEC (Central Election Commission) of the USSR for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I Ulyanov-Lenin that was responsible for such an examination. Images of Lenin were among the most expensive works. The fact that there existed a direct correlation between the significance of the subject and the remuneration received by the artist was duly noted (not without a certain wry irony) but many a private diarist as early as 1925 [23].
By the 1950 both the prices and the themes had been tailored in accordance with an elaborate hierarchy of genres and artists, giving rise to a corrupt system of privileges. Giant factories and industrial plants were key consumers of the mass-produced copies of statues of political leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin (as well as Leon Trotsky and Genrikh Yagoda before both of them fell from grace). These sculptures were needed to inscribe public spaces such as squares, railway stations, workers’ clubs and the like, with visible symbols of the state and the Party.
Considering the relatively small number of authorized sculptors entrusted with such commissions (by the mid-1930s their number ranged between five to ten people), the sheer number of copies of monuments produced was staggering. For example, in 1932 Vassily Kozlov, a sculptor, whose carrier had been started by the late Tsarist times created more than 40 public monuments to Lenin and hundreds of busts for Soviet public spaces [24]. Another popular model designed by Georgy Alekseev and approved by a special state commission was replicated in 10 thousand copies [25]. In 1950 the process of replication was brought under regulation: now artists were expected to copy not the original work, but only the pre-approved reference samples or master samples: in effect, we are talking about “copies of copies” here [26]. In his private letter to the People’s Commissar for Education Andrei Bubnov (arrested and purged in 1938) Boris Korolev, one of the most prominent sculptors of the 1930s complained bitterly about the situation in this field: “Over the past fifteen years, opportunism, spiritual poverty, blatant ignorance and the cold empty formality have left ineffaceable traces on all of the widely proliferating sculptures and the entire domain of public art [27].”
Two statues of Lenin and Marx. Dmitrii Tsaplin in his studio (1963).
Indeed, the discrepancy between the works of sculptors, routinely using photographs of Lenin as their reference sources and turning out mass-produced copies of his image on the one hand, and the official policy of the regime that called for authenticity and verisimilitude in sculptural representations of the Bolshevik leader was truly striking [28]. Moreover, with the outset of Stalinist terror party activists eagerly seized on the idea that low-quality mass-production promoted by disgraced functionaries and officials, was really damaging for the Soviet art, an accusation, which was particularly widespread during the purges of 1936−1938 [29]. Yet at the same time, following the annexation of Western Ukraine and Belorussia in 1939, local manufactories were swiftly converted into wholesale mass-production operations. “In Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and Lviv these manufactories should have become the hothouses for the creative growth and development of local sculptors. In reality, however, they have been converted into commercial enterprises that focus exclusively on mass production [30].”
Vsekohudozhnik was disbanded in 1953, although it had already begun to lose some of its influence back in the late 1930s, when the majority of the most prominent members of the cooperative were arrested and purged. Its property was passed on to the Artistic Foundation of the USSR (Khudfond), which had remained one of the monopolists in the field of art production and distribution up until the collapse of the USSR [31].
The next important stage in the history of immortalization of Lenin was ushered by the process of destalinization that began in 1954. Criticism of Stalin and his personality cult gave a new impulse to the veneration of Lenin and called for the return to the pure dogmas of Leninism, untainted by the abuses of Stalinism. With renewed vigor traditions and rituals, like guided tours and annual celebrations of revolutionary holidays, including Lenin’s birthday, were reintroduced into the developing infrastructure of public art. The 1967 all-union campaign to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October revolution of 1917 marked new beginnings of the socialist iconography, that in fact had by 1970 smoothly evolved into the celebrations of the centenary of birth of Vladimir Lenin. In order to discuss the most topical issues pertaining to the celebrations, a special meeting of the Academy of Fine Arts was convened in Moscow on April 23−26, 1969. The meeting was dedicated to monumental sculpture. Urban planners, architects and artists, some of whom were delegates from the fellow socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc, got together to discuss the most urgent and vital problems in the field of public art. However, the enthusiasm evident in some of the speeches and reports presented at the meeting that called for new initiatives and projects did not translate into any significant practical outcome. For instances, while more than twenty monuments to Lenin were erected all across the nation in honor of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, some of these monuments were created from the same template [32]. Thematically, the range of statues dedicated both to the 1967 anniversary of the Revolution and the 1970 century of Lenin’s birth was rather poor. For instance, out of ten monuments erected in 1967 in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution, three were dedicated to Lenin, while the others depicted cosmonauts, a far more popular and relevant topic at the time [33].
The Soviet pavilion at Expo-70 in Japan.
As a matter of fact, over the course of Soviet history the party activists and artists had failed to come up with a single main monument to the Revolution or to Lenin himself that would have been endorsed by the authorities. This is not to say, however, that there were no attempts at designing such a monument, or that such projects often lacked in ambition. Quite on the contrary. Consider, for example, the monument to Karl Marx, the foundation stone for which in the early 1920s was laid by none other than Lenin himself. Or the notorious Palace of the Soviets (1931−1960) that during the reign of Stalin was considered to be a giant monument to Lenin. Or the enormous monument to Lenin that was supposed to grace Lenin Hills (1958−1970) [34]. A large-scale museum to Lenin was inaugurated in 1970 in his birth-city of Ulyanovsk, while a more modernist museum in Gorki Leninskiye was not opened up until 1987, that is to say, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, although initially it was supposed to be opened in the 1960s [35].
The 1960s — 1970s saw the rise of a new interpretation of the image of Lenin [36]. Sculptors and artists resorted to a more laconic, simplified rendition of his body, typical of late modernism, although Lenin’s face was still to be portrayed with realistic precision. Consider, for example, Lev Kerbel’s 1959 monument to Lenin in Gorki Leninskiye or Nikolay Tomsky’s post-cubist monument to Lenin that was erected in Berlin in 1970. Sites associated with the life of Lenin were described in the special genre of popular literature and in books on regional history and cultural geography. A typical example of that kind of literature is a book by Mark Etkind titled Lenin Addresses the Crowd from the Top of an Armored Car (1969). Half of it deals with the history of this particular commission and documents the process of creation of the monument, while the second part is a detailed and richly illustrated story of the everyday present condition of the monument placed in the context of multiple national holidays, guided tours and the like [37]. The majority of monuments to Lenin erected in larger Soviet cities and republican capitals were produced by the sculptors who had become quite well known during the reign of Stalin, such as Matvei Manizer, Evgenii Vuchetich, or Veniamin Pinchuk [38]. With the exception of several artistic innovations, that soon enough became banal and worn out by the massive scale of copying and reproduction, local Unions of Artists remained faithful to the same iconographic type, that was successfully introduced in the late 1930s. By 1990 the number of public monuments to Lenin in the Russian Soviet Federal Republic alone reached a staggering figure of seven thousand monuments [39].
Unknown sculptor, Lenin. The All-Union Exhibition of Young Artists. (Moscow, 1980).
The final stage in the history of immortalization of Lenin coincided with the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989. Its outset was marked by the real and metaphorical iconoclasm, the fight against all sorts of images of Bolshevik leaders. Later on, memorial sites and monuments to Lenin were simply forgotten and abandoned [40]. In Russia, which was the ground zero for the political testing and expansion of communism, the process of reexamination of Lenin’s political legacy and consequently, of the role and function of his monuments within the context of contemporary cities proved highly ambiguous. Images of Lenin used to figure too prominently in the field of Soviet public art and for too long a period to be easily forgotten. Monuments to Lenin that still tower over many a central square in towns and cities all across the country, still function as important landmarks or tourist magnets, drawing crowds of both visitors and residents up to this day. Think, for example, of the giant monument to Lenin on Kaluzhskaya (former Oktyabrskaya) square in Moscow created by Lev Kerbel in 1985, or a monument on the eponymous square in Saint Petersburg (that monument was designed by Sergei Evseev in 1926). These and other monuments still receive a lot of attention from art critics and tourists.
Matvey Manizer’s monument to Lenin (1960) photographed in the 1990s, when the site was converted into a marketplace (Moscow).
According to statistics, the majority of monuments [to Lenin] that have survived up to this day in Russia are located in the nation’s capital: a total of 103 sculptures [41]. Mass-produced political public art from the Soviet era is now preserved in two locations. One is the specially designed park of Soviet sculpture Muzeon in Moscow, the only park of this kind in the country. The other is the ROSIZO Museum that has been assembling a sizable collection of socialist realist art, including political sculpture, since the 1940s [42]. The way each monument is contextualized largely depends on its location and status. As is the case with the Lenin’s Mausoleum located at the heart of Moscow’s Red Square (e. g. Mausoleum was hidden behind special ornamental boards during the V-Day parade in Moscow in May 2014). Some of the [Soviet-era] monuments still occupy key locations on the central squares of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Others fall off the radar and become largely ignored by those whose job it is to preserve cultural and historical heritage, since these monuments are now believed to be of “mediocre” artistic and dubious historical value.
Other experts argue, that there is no pressing need to preserve these monuments since throughout the Soviet period, they used to be replicated in numerous copies all across the former Soviet space [43]. Still others believe that it is possible to disregard the political connotations of these monuments and to transform the numerous monuments to Lenin into de-politicized “dedushkas” or “eudemons” in order to turn political hallmarks into tourist attractions or important sites for the local communities that can be used for public celebrations and the like [44]. Another important trend is also worth mentioning in the discussion of the post-Soviet interpretations of the cult of Lenin. One of the latest Lenin museums in the Soviet Union, the Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, has been converted into a Center for Contemporary Art and has incorporated the exhibition dedicated to the October revolution that it had inherited from the Soviet times into an exhibit and heritage object [45]. However, there is no comprehensive cohesive strategy behind these disjointed processes and initiatives, which partially explains why they largely miss the point. As I have sought to argue earlier, the very infrastructure of production and distribution of commodified Lenin’s images across the Soviet domain is in itself a fascinating legacy that should be preserved and promoted as one of the most impressive projects of Soviet modernist culture.
Restoration of Piotr Yatsyno’s 1954 monument to Lenin (1954) at the VDNKh, (The Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) photographed in 2015 in Moscow.
The Soviet system has elaborated very specific and clear-cut criteria that staked the boundaries of the so-called high-brow sophisticated culture. It also promoted the prestige of education in the field of liberal arts, so that the public space filled with works of art was considered to be a part of the natural habitat of a homo Sovieticus [46]. The ambiguity and inner inconsistency of this habitat was reflected in the fact that regardless of the high status of arts and the prestige bestowed on it by the regime, Soviet artists had to create portraits of the leader based on his photographs and to do it under the scrupulous eye of numerous censors and controlling agencies, while ordinary citizens and city dwellers were forced into urban public spaces filled with second-rate copies of these portraits. Today this issue of discrepancy between the status of art and the socialist artistic industry in the USSR prompts historians to seek other way to analyze public art in the context of the absolute and total historization of public space [47].
Isaak Brodskii, monument to Lenin in Gorki Leninskiie (1980) photographed in 2015.
This article is based on a conference paper delivered in September 2015: Maria Silina, “Memorial Industry: V. I. Lenin Commemoration in Soviet Russia from 1924 until today.” International Conference “Sites of Memory of Socialism and Communism in Europe”, Bern, Switzerland.
In 1927 the Far Eastern Geophysical Laboratory published a book titled Permafrost soils in the USSR. The author, Mikhail Ivanovitch Sumgin, summarized disparate studies (some dating as far back as the 18th century) of crystosphenes, made a valid case for the use of the term “permafrost,” delineated the boundaries of the permafrost zone on the map and put forward a number of ground-breaking hypotheses and insights. For instance, he discussed the ancient, pre-historic genesis of this phenomenon and the gradual degradation (that is to say, the warming and thawing of permafrost and the concomitant decrease in the thickness or the areal extent of permafrost) in our times. Furthermore, in one of the chapters of his book Sumgin argued that a “subterranean museum of eternity” should be created in order to preserve the most valuable documents, samples of plants, animals and even corpses of people. The idea was to safeguard these “model exhibits” for future research and study by relying on the preserving properties of the frozen soils.
Such project went far beyond the narrow instrumentalist and practical attitude towards permafrost that had dominated Russia’s scientific discourse on the subject and its research since the late 19th century. In 1937, in the book’s second edition, Sumgin still asserted the importance and beneficial role of his museum project for the humankind as a whole. From his first encounters with the permafrost in 1910s onwards he opted for an integrated approach to this phenomenon, which he regarded as a “Russian Sphynx”, an enigma waiting to be solved. Sumgin’s passion, energy and personal integrity, his ability to think in terms of projects, ultimately led him to spearhead the institutional creation of the new branch of Soviet science: geocryology, the study of frozen soils.
A brief overview is due of the scientific context of the era and of Sumgin’s biography. From the 17th century onwards written sources have been mentioning accounts of the Cossacks about the subterranean ice deposits. However, for a long time it was believed that these disparate accounts were mere legends. The colonizers, faced with the necessity to procure water, could not dig wells, because the ground was frozen. The first discursive descriptions of permafrost (Lomonosov, Gmelin, Middendorf) are recorded in the 18−19th centuries.
In the first half of the 19th century, a certain Yakutian merchant by the name of Shergin managed to dig a well 116 meters deep. He did not reach water but the well shaft that he had dug became a scientific sensation of sorts and a testing site for measuring temperatures deep underground amidst the thickness of the ice. The outset of the construction of the Trans-Siberian inaugurated the new era in the study of permafrost from the practical point of view that took into consideration the tasks and objectives faced by the engineers. The industrial construction that was then underway necessitated development of specific methods and strategies of building on permafrost foundations, as well as the study of its properties and features. Different governmental agencies that had to do with the colonization of Siberia began to create specific departments and offices dedicated to the study of this phenomenon. One of these service agencies, the Amour Expedition of Transmigration Administration, came to play a vital role in the life of Mikhail Sumgin. By 1910, when Sumgin joined the Amour expedition, he was a political prisoner who had been exiled to the Tobolsk region.
A son of a scribe from a small Mordovian village, Sumgin was kicked out from the Saint Petersburg University (and not once, but twice!) for his participation in various underground groups and student riots. By the early 1900s he had joined the Socialist-Revolutionary party and was an enthusiastic member of Samara’s revolutionary circles. Most notably, he played an active role in the creation of the short-lived separatist peasant movement, the so-called Stary Buyan Republic, for which he was later sentenced to five years in exile. A chance encounter with the Asian expedition of the Transmigration Administration of the Ministry for Agriculture enabled Sumgin to participate in the scientific exploration and research in the Amour area, where he dedicated himself to the study of frozen soils. By 1917 Sumgin had become a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party but soon left the party because he disagreed with the terror that the SRs unleashed against the Bolsheviks. He appealed to the Joint State Political Directorate, asked to be rehabilitated and promised to abandon any political activity for good. The period of stagnation during which Sumgin was not able to lead a productive professional or social life lasted for ten years. Sumgin tried to survive, took on odd jobs as a common laborer, or statistician, while simultaneously writing a book about permafrost.
A portrait of M. I. Sumgin (Kristina Popova, 10 years old, Igarka).
The late 1920s saw the institutionalization of permafrost studies, the onset of what came to be known as “the golden decade” of the new branch of science, geocryology, and a rather happy time for Sumgin himself, who managed to spearhead and coordinate the entire process. In rapid succession a Commission for the Study of Permafrost was set up, followed by a Committee for the Study of Permafrost, until finally, in 1939 the Institute of Permafrost Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences headed by and named after Vladimir Obruchev was established. All this time scholarly works about permafrost were being published, special Arctic stations and laboratories for the study of frozen ground were being founded and university curricula were put together. Predictably, the major thrust of Soviet geocryology was quite practical: it was important to study this phenomenon in order to develop appropriate construction methods of building on frozen ground, to be able to drill all the way down to reach the sub-permafrost waters and to understand how permafrost can serve the country’s economy. Thus, Sumgin’s first book carries a characteristic preface written by the director of the Far East Geophysical Observatory P. Koloskov. The preface reads: “Our ultimate task should be the destruction of permafrost by the joined forces of science and technology” [1].
Nevertheless, Sumgin continued to promote his own figurative, “poetic” notion of “permanent frost” and to advocate his project of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity. His determination was given a further boost by the successful experiments conducted by P. N. Kapterev who reported on finding viable amoebas and ciliates in the Transbaikalian permafrost sediments at the Skovorodinskaya permafrost station in the 1930s [2]. Perhaps, sensing that his own project was vulnerable at best, in the 1937 introduction to the second edition of his book Sumgin maintains that his “fantasies” were perfectly realistic. In one of the chapters of his work he writes: “Would it be possible to completely reverse the situation and to let the scientists who would live tens of thousands of years after us, examine the animal world of today through the study of permafrost? In other words, can the preservation of dead bodies within the permafrost, which up until now has been a matter of whimsical accident, become the conscious objective of human activity?” [3].
He continues: “Let us now imagine a storage place dug inside the permafrost into which corpses of animals that are of practical and scientific interest to humanity are systematically deposited. Once every millennium, corpses of different animals will be taken out of the depository for study and comparison with similar species, who will inhabit that distant future. And this scientific research will be carried out from one millennium to the next. I will not go into details as to the significance of such a museum for science, this is a task better left to zoologists. I merely propose the idea of using permafrost as a scientific museum-cum-fridge. However, I cannot help but dwell on one specific idea. Human corpses belonging to people of differences races can also be stored in this museum for thousands of years.
What is going to happen to humanity many thousands of years from now, when people’s life styles, diet, occupations and their way of relating to each other will have changed beyond all recognition, and when humanity will have in fact merged to form one big family?
we are talking about an institution that should be able to continuously operate for thousands and thousands of years without a slightest interruption. even a minor interruption is bound to destroy the results of centuries and millennia of work.
Even beyond those ambitious objectives, it would be really interesting to chronicle the development and evolution of certain organs of the human body: brain, heart, the digestive system, etc. However, this museum-cum-refrigerator can serve other purposes as well. Continuous and uninterrupted exposure to the very low temperatures of the permanently frozen ground enables scientists to conduct experiments with long-term anabiosis lasting hundreds and even thousands of years…
Moreover, our museum built into the frozen ground can become a custodian of the most valuable and unique manuscripts of the famous people, of archival sources, of photographs documenting significant events and so much more… [4]“.
“We are talking about an institution that should be able to continuously operate for thousands and thousands of years without a slightest interruption. Even a minor interruption is bound to destroy the results of centuries and millennia of work. Can we really vouch for a refrigerator operating without a hitch, for thousands of years on end? No, we cannot guarantee that a surface-mounted refrigerator will be able to operate trouble-free for so long. In contrast, the “refrigerator” of the permanently frozen ground is certain to function without a hitch for thousands of years and to safely preserve its contents. Moreover, if a social or a geological disaster were to ever destroy the museum-refrigerator inside the permafrost, its contents would not be damaged, although it would be difficult for humanity at large to conceive of the contents of this subterranean repository. I am convinced that despite the skepticism of the “sensible” naysayers and “well-wishers”, such a museum is bound to be created one day to serve the humankind, and in doing so, it will contribute to its progress much more than the pyramids have ever done [5]“.
Thus, the conservation of model samples of plants, animals and cultural artifacts for the purposes of comparing them with the evolved “offsprings” in the distant future becomes the key objective for Sumgin. By way of example, he speaks of a horse, that progress is certainly bound to change biologically, and argues that it would be really illuminating and fruitful for science to be able to compare contemporary (early 20th century) horses with the horses of the future. The very idea of preserving model samples in order to compare them with similar species in the future is closely linked to the constituent practice of establishing wildlife sanctuaries and reserves that was popular in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. These natural conservation areas were conceived of as a matrix or model of entire eco-systems that are subject to preservation. Sumgin’s ideas on the subject dovetailed with the thinking of V.V. Dokuchayev, V.I.Vernadsky and the like. Parenthetically, Vernadsky’s support of Sumgin and his authority in the academic community played a non-small part in the creation of the Commission for the Study of Permafrost in 1929.
Both editions of Sumgin’s book contain almost identical deliberations on the subterranean museum of eternity. The popular science-fiction publication “The Conquest of the North”, however, that Sumgin co-authored with Boris Demchinsky, a journalist, adds new touches to the subject: an enthusiastic description of the future museum itself: “The interior design of the museum can be very austere and simple, and yet magical, as if belonging in a fairy-tale. The pillaring and wall coverings leave much room for artistic creativity. Nothing on the surface above the site shall give away that there is a magnificent edifice concealed underneath. Perhaps, the only visible marker of the hidden museum would be the towers erected above the day-drifts equipped with elevating machines and integrated management of the lighting circuit and of automation devices installed inside the mines. Since the museum’s interior space needs to be guarded against the impact of exterior temperatures, the vertical passage into the mine should be fenced off with isolating compartments to prevent warm air from entering the galleries. Electric lamps with their warm light gushing out would have been dangerous for the permafrost. That is why their light should be cold. Cold air injected from outside might cool the lamps and eliminate that danger. Galleries will be located on several levels or floors of the structure, one above the other. This would enable engineers and planners to have spaces with different temperatures at their disposal. At a certain depth the change of cold and warm seasons no longer has its effect. While on the surface bitterly cold winters give way to sweltering summers and the torrents of spring ice over in autumn, deep down under the surface temperatures do not fluctuate and remain continuously very low. At a certain distance from the subterranean museum of permafrost (so as not to disturb its smooth operation), a city of science should be built, with laboratories, study rooms and apartment blocks for scientists and researchers. This will inevitably resuscitate the surrounding region, spurring its economic and cultural development…
This grandiose project would be unique and unrivaled in the entire world in terms of its scale and originality! Nothing would serve the cause of life better than its silent galleries. Science would translate their silence into its own language. The process of evolution in its entirety would be displayed right in front of the viewers’ eyes for all to see, thereby bringing into sharp relief the laws of life. Such a museum would be an invaluable gift for the future generations, exposing them to evolution, culture and the past in all their entirety [6].”
The lofty rhetoric and the non-academic tone of the book, among other things, suggest that it was probably authored by B. Demchinsky who drew on the ideas of Sumgin, rather than by Sumgin himself. Sumgin’s conception itself, just like the discursive field of the then nascent area of geocryology is located in between the noosphere as an area of thought and the practical studies of that period geared towards the creation of underground depositories to serve economic or industrial purposes, not unlike Krylov’s project for underground glacial storages.
Glacial storages designed by M. M. Krylov, created in the early 1930s.
For example, in December 1936, the geocyologists at the Igarka permafrost research station that at the time was operating under the auspices of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (also known as Glavsevmorput’) began to construct a large-scale underground research laboratory. Constructors took particular interest in the issues of technical exploitation of subterranean spaces as natural refrigerators or traffic arteries. One of the underground chambers functioned as a biological museum since 1942. It contained frozen lizards, bumblebees, ruffes, as well as a sphinx-moth in the state of anabiosis, a ladybug and a fly. Scientists replenished the collection of the museum whenever possible and welcomed visitors.
Seeking to translate into life Sumgin’s idea about the preservation of documents, museum and historical objects de vertu inside the subterranean depositories, staff members of the Igarka permafrost research station decided to deposit a stack of war-time newspapers into this repository on April 6, 1950. Among the publications — “Pravda”, “Izvestia”, “Trud” and “Krasnoyarsky rabochy”. In memory of the war dead the entire staff of the Igarka permafrost research station with L.A. Meyster at the hem declared that the box filled with newspapers should be open on May 9, 2045. The newspapers were put inside a wooden container which had been specifically manufactured for the occasion and had been well insulated to keep humidity out. The box was then placed at the center of chamber # 5 at the depth of two meters below the floor. In March 1965, a piece of Whatman’s drawing paper (with the copy of the “Act” about the burial of the newspapers on it) was frozen-in, embedded into the permafrost [7].
The head of the permafrost research station, a certain A.M.Pchelintsev, decided to put into action Sumgin’s idea. Besides the conservation of biological material and valuable documentation proposed by Sumgin, Pchelintsev conceived of a project to construct an underground skating rink, or rather a 120-meter long race track in the shape of two concentric circles carved out of the permafrost. V. Yaroslavtsev, a journalist for the “Krsanoyarsky rabochy”, reported on this construction project: “The usual skating rinks in the Arctic are covered with layers and layers with snow during the heavy blizzards that last for many days on end. Moreover, it is not really that pleasant to skate outside when temperatures drop to — 40 degrees. [The new skating rink] will allow the locals to enjoy skating come rain or shine, in winter and in summer alike”.
Construction of the museum began in February 1965: chamber # 5 was enlarged to match the size (3×7) of the small hall of the Museum of Permafrost, designed by Pchelintsev. The “burial” place of the newspapers-filled box was properly fitted out, a copy of the “Act” documenting the burial of the newspapers was installed in a wall niche inside two sheets of ice. The floor of the chamber was covered with water and frozen thoroughly. And thus, work began to fill the museum with exhibits.
A special register of all the exhibits of this museum that dates back to March 20, 1965, contains a complete inventory of all the objects that constituted its first exposition: a total of 34 items, mostly academic scholarship on the study of permafrost. The books were embedded, frozen inside the sheet of clearest ice taken from the Yenisey River. Workers used electric carpenter’s plane to treat the ice sheets that were then filed down and smoothed thoroughly with the help of heated steel plates. The polished ice sheet was “stamped” with a hot stamping tool to match the size of the books. Books were then placed inside the indent and covered with another sheet of ice and finally frozen through and through with the help of wet snow.
Unfortunately, the “Diary of the Museum of Permafrost” does not contain entries for every occasion. The most detailed notes were made by the Museum’s first ever guide Pavel Alekseevitch Evdokimov since 1972 onwards.
The Museum of Permafrost became an integral part of the system of the country’s academic and research institutions, and was mentioned in the reference book “Museums of the Soviet Academy of Science” and “Museums of the Academies of Science of the Soviet Republics” published between 1980 and 1985 [8].
Blueprint for a skating rink inside the permafrost by A.M. Pchelintsev (1965, Igarka).
Thus, the idea of an underground museum of eternity articulated within the nascent Soviet academic community, was partially realized. What is more, it was realized within its own institutions. However, it is interesting to view it against the backdrop of the global philosophical thought of the early 20th century on the one hand, and on the other, to juxtapose it with certain theories, including some that are still relevant today in the sphere of arts. If viewed in the context of the latter, Sumgin’s project can be regarded as something refreshingly original and sensible.
As I have noted earlier, certain ideas of the founder of geocryology came close to the noospheric thinking of the time, so it is possible to say that they were implicitly characterized by certain general “scientific esotericism”, “integral to the scientific discourse of modernity” [9]. Yet even more importantly, the author makes a special point of stressing that the subterranean museum of eternity denies overt metaphysics and symbolization of permafrost. By applying poetic, lyrical terms M. Sumgin nevertheless, believed it was important to reclaim them back from theology, and to understand these terms in their strict natural-philosophical sense: “I think that the authors that protest against the use of the word “eternal” in relation to permafrost, have issues with the use of terms that have already been deeply entrenched in theology. But this is nothing but a tactic of defeatism in the face of theology, while what we should really be doing is to launch an all-out offensive, including the sphere of terminology: we have to reclaim and repossess the terms and concepts appropriated by our opponents, and to imbue them with the natural-philosophical meaning, whenever possible [10]“.
This specific focus distinguishes Sumgin’s beliefs from Pavel Florensky’s ideas about permafrost [11], and even more so, from Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre (“World Ice”) cosmological theory, which was built around mythical epiphanies and later put at the service of German Nazism. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the museum intentions of the “World Ice” doctrine on the one hand and of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity on the other can become the subject of further research and study [12].
The absence of overt references to metaphysics also sets apart Sumgin’s museum from the museum conceived of by Nikolay Fedorov. Russian Orthodoxy was at the heart of Fedorov’s thought, while Sumgin refused to undergo the ceremony of confession at his wedding.
However, for our current purposes it is more important to highlight their similarities, such as orientation towards projects and universality. Planetary (and cosmic, in Fedorov’s case) regulation certainly constitutes a chain of long-term museum projects. In this sense they are rigidly teleological. In Sumgin’s case, a world museum constructed inside permafrost is integral to the planetary regulation in the future. Both Fedorov’s and Sumgin’s projects imply an exclusively scientific, research purpose of their museums: their museums are created by researchers and for researchers. “The Radiant Future” belongs in this world, it arrives as a result of the collective efforts and labor of the entire humanity, it is not given from above. It is important to overtake and possess nature and to triumph over death. Sumgin suggests that the way to do it is through the development of scientific methods, biology and experimentation with anabiosis, while Fedorov believes that the Resurrection of the dead is the key. Although Sumgin, the founding father of geocryology, does not explicitly speak about the triumph over death, in a sense, his references to the conquest of nature and his avid and continuous interest in anabiosis do imply exactly that. The very term “eternity” in the name of the museum suggests a certain finality of this project, the potential “unlocking” or opening up of human life span in the Future.
Both Sumgin and Fedorov believed it was important to engage the general public into their respective projects. While accumulating information about permafrost, Sumgin initiated a project of collecting observations from representatives of different social strata (alluvial miners, ethnographers, educators and students). In the early years of his life, Sumgin began his studies driven by a dream of becoming a “travelling professor” who could work towards improving the situation of the Russian peasantry. In the following years, whenever circumstances demanded it, he repeatedly sacrificed his academic pursuits to revolutionary activities and his work with the peasants. Ultimately, his academic and revolutionary pursuits merged into one big project that had to do with permafrost.
it is quite clear today that contemporary art is a systemic art of capitalist world order, and that is why we can often here calls for overcoming it, which essentially means, calls for overcoming capitalism per se.
When Sumgin came up with a proposal to create the Subterranean Museum of Eternity, in a sense, he instrumentalized the present for the sake of the Future, renounced the aesthetical properties of material objects for the sake of their function in future research. In other words, he postulated the supra-aesthetical mode of their existence, in which aesthetics was subjugated to certain more important tasks and objectives.
This correlates with the ideas of several contemporary theoreticians who are trying to solve the “access problem”, the problem of the “subject-object relations” and that of overcoming contemporary art, “exiting” art and creating a supra-aesthetical mode of existence for contemporary art.
It is quite clear today that contemporary art is a systemic art of capitalist world order, and that is why we can often here calls for overcoming it, which essentially means, calls for overcoming capitalism per se. Contemporaneity is conceived of as Capitalocene or Anthropocene — a historical period when the scale and intensity of the impact that capitalism has on the planet have become truly menacing, “geological”, which only goes to show that humanity has to find some ways of vanquishing this world order and moving on to a safer and more harmonious mode of being. This transition will inevitably lead to a change in the modality of being for society and for art in particular. Philosophers of speculative realism show that the art of the last two centuries is the art of correlation that operates and “happens” first and furthermost in the perception of the viewers without enabling them to access things “as they are”, without as much as giving them hope of ever gaining such an access. But the most important thing is that art and contemporaneity are extremely self-involved, obsessed with themselves and anti-utopian in nature. The horizon of the Future as a point of attraction is missing, at times appearing in the guise of commodifiable ruins and ghosts, at best. It is exactly the urgent task of dramatically altering the objectives and modes of being that dictates the need of “exiting”, abandoning art [13].
Theoreticians raise the question of creating a non-correlational art, an art that is born out of humanity’s encounter or collision with the “arche-fossil”, that is to say, with a certain fact that precedes the history of humankind. For example, Suhail Malik suggests the ultimate project for such a museum: not unlike an “arche-fossil”, an artwork can exist for an indefinitely long period of time within an eternal darkness. “The demand here upon contemporary art is strictly non-trivial: it removes subjective interpretation or experience as a condition or telos of the artwork, and therewith collapses the entire edifice of the contemporary art paradigm [14].”
In a sense, the discovery of the remains of mammoths and other pre-historical animals, as well as certain “successful” cases of anabiosis of protozoans in the permafrost conditions outlined a particular horizon for contemporary scientific inquiry, not unlike the one that according to Quentin Meillassoux, is outlined by the problem of “arche-fossil” [15]. Sumgin’s response to this — the project of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity — is a repository or a storage place of sorts, a machine manufacturing “ache-fossils” for the Future. It is an anti-teathron, a place of not-seeing, an art sanctuary, a port-franco and a duty-free storage [16], a solution to the problem of “access” on the part of natural sciences, a radical project of art without any viewers in the present. These are the objects that radically withdraw themselves from the field of experience, critical assessment and aesthetics in the present. This is the kind of art that seeks to become the “arche-fossil” itself. We are talking about a totalistic teleological museum project that postulates art and culture not as a flight of fancy or a frustrated desire, but as a rational knowledge and a project-oriented activity.
In that sense, Sumgin proposed a project of a supra-aesthetical museum, a museum with a “delayed” or “deferred” viewer, a museum-repository or archive of “arche-fossils” preserved for the future. The Subterranean Museum of Eternity postulates the duty of each and every individual to dedicate his or her life to the wellbeing of all the other people, including those, who have not yet been born. It warns us against being overly focused on the short-term trivial concerns. To this effect, it is geared towards the overcoming of the Present as it asserts its concept as a holistic creation, uninterrupted by the generational change, with a focus on the piecing together of a cohesive unity. Reason is called upon to govern that mega-project. This is the language of Utopia, which is still a non-being, but a potentiality, a project that constitutes (at least in the realm of language) an explicit possibility of existence.
Today it is one of the practices that are capable to a certain extent of providing an outline of the present and of overcoming its totally anti-utopian essence. Benjamin H. Bratton, for example, seeks to delineate the project of exiting the Anthropocene, that is to say, our current predicament, through accelerationism, the perception of the Present as an incubator for a certain xeno-Future and the shifting of attention towards the forms of this future, would-be “Other”. This implies, among other things, inverting the logic of the “arche-fossil” but redirecting it towards the present. In the words of Benjamin H. Bratton, “For the post-Anthropocene, and our contingent disorientations (apophenias, aesthetics, designs) we must pivot and rotate that arche-fossil’s temporal trajectory from one of ancestrality toward one of alien descendence”. It means visualizing and encountering our descendants that we already carry within us in a form of complex biotechnological processes and “for which we are the ancestor and for which we are the unthinkable fossil” not very different from the Caenozoic Era fossils [17]. This rotation of the logic and trajectory of the “arche-fossil” was integral to Sumgin’s thinking as well. His Subterranean Museum of Eternity was a project of collecting arche-fossils for the future that today can be regarded as an attempt to guarantee a Future, a different, post-Anthropocene kind of future, by making it a matter of concern.
Thus, we can adapt the project of a global museum inside permafrost to these current demands by reconsidering and redefining a number of its conditions or stipulations.
Irina Filatova, The Subterranean Museum of Eternity. This project was implemented on the premises of the underground laboratory of geocyrology at the Institute of Permafrost Studies, within the framework of the Arctic Biennale of Contemporary Art. (Yakutsk, 2016, transmission customized by Aleksei Romanov).
First of all, we should radicalize the supra-aesthetical mode of being of this subterranean museum that implies a total absence of viewers in the present and in general, a substitution of viewers by future researchers. By fulfilling this stipulation we can hope to be able to overcome contemporary art as an industry of display and demonstration and to identify a solution to the philosophical «access problem». It will also help constitute a museum of non-correlationist realism in the present.
Secondly, it is suggested, that a certain xeno-descendant in the Future will become a researcher. For now we can ignore the anthropocentric character of Sumgin’s project that is also centered around science, while maintaining its teleological essence. The planet Earth itself is drawn into the project with all of its geological layers. Artifacts belonging to human culture, art, animals, biomaterial, plants and any other possible entity become equally important and valuable as exhibits.
Thus, the modified museum envisioned by Sumgin receives a new emphasis and focus that turns it into a project that accelerates and overcomes contemporary art in its conventional forms, which support the status-quo, and more generally, Anthropocene and Capitalocene as expressions of the logic of algorithmic neoliberal capitalism on its route to post-Anthropocene.
