| Artist: | Gabo, Naum |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Linear Construction | |
| Date of Work: | c. 1955 | |
| Nationality: | Russian | |
| Context: | Post Russian Revoltion | |
| Movement: | Russian Constructivism | |
| Medium: | plastic and nylon thread | |
| Subject: Gabo dematerializes sculptural mass into faceted planes and edges in space. He is following cubism's lead in this shift from mimesis to a mapping of the structural dynamics and inner construction of abstract form, but he translates the tension between 3-D illusionism and the 2-D flat picture plane that characterized cubist painting into a construction that works with real space and real materials. This is a late work, which grew out of Russian Constructivism, but which no longer carries the explicit goal of having a utilitarian function. Style: Gabo attains a transparency and weightlessness through this harplike construction that uses webs of tight plastic strings on frames of interlocking plastic sheets. Gone is the sense of solidity and mass so traditionally connected to sculpture; in its place we get a sculpting of space itself in a more absolute sense rather than an illusionistic one. Gabo's emphasis here is on structure and space rather than subject. Along with the other constructivists, Gabo embraced new materials rather than the marble or wood traditionally used for sculpture; here he constructs with plastic and nylon thread. Context: this construction dates long after the Russian Revolution, which broke out in October 1917, during WWI. The period of heroic Communism and Russian Constructivism followed between 1918 and 1921; after that, the party line grew ever more rigid and doctrinaire until Stalin finally established an official style of Soviet Realism in 1932, which was decidedly not conducive to experiment or abstraction, advocating a socially conscious naturalism that would be didactic (propagandistic) and easily graspable by the masses. During the early heroic years following the worker's revolution, the Constructivists had been highly optimistic about the role the artist could play in building the new social order. Gone, they thought, was the bohemian marginalization and sad alienation forced on the artist in a modern capitalist society; under Communism, the artist would be a worker engaged in production art. They embraced the machine, which Communism saw as liberating the worker from labor, enabling one to see his or her work as one's art, meaningful and fulfilling. But work only took on meaning if it served a utilitarian purpose. Post-revolutionary Russia was not the time for art about art. The Russian Constructivists, under Tatlin's leadership, published a manifesto in 1923 devoted to bridging the gap between art and industry. They saw the artist's role as that of an engineer in direct contrast to Malevich, Suprematism's artist visionary from the pre-revolutionary days. In the utopian aftermath of the revolution, they attempted to apply the lessons of abstraction to utilitarian ends by adopting the slogan: "real materials in real space." Post-revolutionary reality, however, proved not to be so utopian: there was no money to build most of what they designed, and tensions grew in the ranks of the Constructivists as Tatlin became more and more rigid and demanding that the artist must serve the party line. Gabo and his brother, Pevsner, concerned about the increasing lack of artistic freedom, broke off from the group to publish their own manifesto in 1920. Called the Realistic Manifesto, its principal author was Gabo, who spoke of their constructions as a new Platonic reality of ideas and forms more absolute than any imitation of nature. This late work follows in that tradition. In 1923, Gabo and his brother left Russia for good. | ||
