See, for example, Maria Zalambani, Literatura fakta: Ot avangarda k sotrealizmu (Literature of the fact: From the avant-garde to socialist realism) (Akademicheskii proekt, 2006); and Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).
Devin Fore, “Sergei Tret’iakov: ‘Fakt’” (Sergei Tretyakov: The fact), in Formal’nyi metod: Antologiia russkogo modernizma (The formal method: An anthology of Russian modernism), vol. 2, ed. Serguei Oushakine (Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2016), 184–85.
It would be wrong to say, of course, that claims for the significance and relevance of a particular period have only to do with its ambivalence. If a period is recalled over and over again—in other words, if the ideas and issues typical of the period alone resurface in a similar historical context—we can speak of the period’s exceptional importance. It is assumed that by reinterpreting the period, which has often been omitted in accounts of the so-called historical avant-garde, we can not only move away from the facile contrast between the 1920s and 1930s but also reevaluate the Soviet art of the cultural revolution in the light of its unexpected modernness. For example, according to the art scholar Ekaterina Degot, “A view not clouded by knee-jerk anti-communism discovers in the art of the cultural revolution a huge similarity with the art practices of the early twenty-first century … Far from representing a return to nineteenth-century realism, Soviet realist art foreshadows the conceptual practices of the late twentieth century.” See E. Degot, “Sovetskoe iskusstvo mezhdu avangardom i sotsrealizmom, 1927–1932” (Soviet art between the avant-garde and socialist realism, 1927–1932), Nashe nasledie, 2010, 93–94 →. This, however, is a separate topic that is beyond the scope of this article.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer (Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934),” trans. Edwin Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–34 (Belknap Press, 1999), 770.
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 771.
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 770–71.
Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 42–77; Maria Gough, “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October, no. 101 (Summer 2002): 53–83.
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 770.
“Constructivists abandoned the enervated field of language and signification—which was dismissed as the dominion of illusionism, thought, verisimilitude, and mere secondary effects—in order to commune with systems of physical force. Matter itself, not the sign thereof, was the point of departure for the anthology of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) writings, From Representation to Construction, which was proposed by Brik in September 1921 to be the group’s collective opus on the transition from composition to construction.” Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006): 99.
Tselesoobraznost’ was a keyword in the famous debates that took place at the INKhUK from 1920 to 1922. Usually translated into English as “expediency,” the word can be translated literally as “formed in relation to a goal.” Not all the artists of the INKhUK were equally enamored of the productivists’ utilitarian imperative. There were some groups who were determined to defend artists from what they regarded as productivism’s narrow utilitarianism, proclaiming the right of artists themselves to make decisions about the purpose and practicability of things. For a more detailed discussion, see Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press, 2005).
Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October, no. 30 (Autumn 1984): 82–119.
This interest was one of the main things that prompted Benjamin to go to Moscow. He went there in hopes of finding the characteristics of the professional intellectual. However, his hopes were doomed to be crushed, as was his unhappy love affair. See W. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth (Harvard University Press, 1986).
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 777.
Gerald Raunig recalls the Proletkult’s previous experiments in organizing collectives, experiments in which Tretyakov was involved: “Tretyakov had also worked together with Eisenstein and Arvatov on the ‘Experimental Laboratory of Kinetic Constructions’ of the Moscow Proletkult. All possible forms of social assembly were to be experimentally tested in the workshops in the course of training: ‘Conference, banquet, tribunal, assembly, meeting, audience space, sport events and competitions, club evenings, foyers, public cantines, mass celebrations, processions, carnival, funerals, parades, demonstrations, flying assemblies, company work, election campaigns, etc. etc.’ It almost seems as though Tretyakov seized a long sought opportunity almost a decade later with his work in the kolkhoz to try out the same work on the forms of organization that he had conducted in the meanwhile closed laboratory of the Proletkult, but now decidedly outside the realm of art institutions.” G. Raunig, “Changing the Production Apparatus: Anti-Universalist Concepts of Intelligentsia in the Early Soviet Union,” trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal, September 2010 →.
I owe thanks to Jihoon Kim, one of the leading film and media researchers in Korea, and the supervisor of the Korean translation of Steyerl's book, The Wretched of the Screen, for the introduction to Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall, especially for bringing to my attention the citation of Sergei Tretyakov's essay in the film. I wish to express my gratitude to him.
Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall, video (color, sound), 32 min., 2010, 07:20–08:08.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “The Biography of the Object,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006): 59, 62. As Fore notes, “This overhaul was not just a matter of enthroning objects at the center of the novel where the hero once was, for that would still leave the disproportionate and latent humanist structure of the novel intact.” D. Fore, “Introduction,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006).
Tret’iakov, “The Biography of the Object,” 61.
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009) →.
Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” The title of Steyerl’s first collection of essays, The Wretched of the Screen (2012), which includes the two pieces cited in this article, was inspired by Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” In this regard, we should pay mind to the ambivalence of the title of the film In Free Fall. Historically, of course, it alludes to various events, including the stock market crash of 1929 in the US. In light of the formal and methodological aspect, however, it can also allude to creative destruction, that is, the possibility of generating new horizons and types of visuality. As Steyerl writes, “While falling, people may sense themselves as being things, while things may sense that they are people. Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.” See H. Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux journal, no. 24 (April 2011) →. On this subject, see also Paolo Magagnoli, “Capitalism as Creative Destruction: The Representation of the Economic Crisis in Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall,” Third Text 27, no. 6 (2013): 723–34.
Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”
Translated from the Russian by Thomas Campbell.