Making Do for the Masses: Imperial Debris and a New Russian Constructivism

Russian Constructivist artists rejected the “elitist” medium of painting and instead set about redesigning the objects of everyday life under socialism in a devastated and “closed” economy. This dissertation expands the conventional art historical narrative by arguing that Constructivism adapted, rather than failed, in the 1920s. In so doing, I identify an alternative Constructivist strain that developed a tactic of recycling and re-appropriation in response to factory shortages and lack of raw materials. I examine how the former Imperial era’s debris became both the physical and ideological building material for its class enemies’ society, and the repository of lost Constructivist ideals. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, I show how his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”— illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and Russian artists on the margins that deployed a wide range of clever “make-do” tactics. I show how specific examples of existing porcelain “blanks,” clothing, film footage, and architecture from the newly requisitioned “collective stock” underwent transformation. For example,at Paris’s glamorous international exposition of industrial and decorative arts in 1925, a former Russian dressmaker to the Imperial Court received a grand prize for a flapper dress sewn from household table linens. Similarly, while the Soviets had to import Western “capitalist” films to compensate for the shortage of raw film stock in the 1920s, filmmaker Esfir Shub recycled Imperial-era film footage, creating Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, a masterpiece of Soviet propaganda and first feature-length compilation film. St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, a symbol of Imperial rule and splendor, became a shifting stage for performance, government offices, a museum of the revolution, film set, and at the end of the 1920s, auction house. Similarly, leftover Imperial porcelain dishes, with marks from three previous tsars on their bases, now carried Bolshevik propaganda on their surfaces. These were portable artistic objects whose meanings came from their status as captured loot, a radical surface for socialist themed decoration by State Porcelain Factory artists. Yet, if these artists made innovative use of materials on hand, their methodological approach had already been modeled by the Bolshevik government’s reallotment of aristocratic mansions and reuse of requisitioned private goods. My study is intended, not merely to add these works to the Constructivist canon, but to change the shape of the current discussion, broadening the definitions of “mass production” and “industrial art” as well. Re-appropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wider range of play and possibility in the decade between 1918 and 1928. The use of scavenged Imperial leftovers as “raw materials” was economically strategic, but it also allowed artists to manipulate ideology embedded in the found material, creating objects with radically new emotional and symbolic trajectories.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History of Art

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Walworth, Catherine

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mudrak, Myroslava M.

• Art History
• Economic History
• Film Studies
• Russian History
• Slavic Studies
• Theater
• Russian Constructivism
• Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, Varvara Stepanova
• Aleksandr Rodchenko
• October Revolution
• Soviet Film
• Russian Fashion

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366044910

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1366044910