Reconstructing the Historical Avant-garde: Art and Politics in Constructivism and Surrealism

Jung， Eun Young

doi:10.17057/kahoma.2013..34.008

Situating Constructivism and Surrealism within the social and political context in the 1920s-1940s, this paper explores the conflict between aesthetic experiments and political engagement which the two historical avant-garde movements delineated. Intending a redemptive and reconstructive historiography that illuminates the complex social history of what Peter Bürger regarded the “failed project” of the historical avant-garde, I draw critical attention to the practical and symbolic impact of radical politics on artists and their practice. More specifically, I shed light on how and why the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in the early- to mid-twentieth century made alliance or split up, and address how their conflicted relationship culminated in postwar abstraction dominated by formalist aesthetics. Russian Constructivists, particularly Vladimir Tatlin and the artists who moved toward Production Art as early as the early 1920s, attempted to bring art into life by “sublating”autonomous art in revolutionary society. But the political vanguard led by the Bolshevik party increasingly “quashed” the cultural avant-garde’s unbound formal experiments in the name of the historically necessary “proletariat dictatorship”, eventually imposing Socialist Realism as the only legitimate artistic doctrine in socialist society. Likewise,French Surrealists engaged actively in international Communism after the late 1920s,attempting to equate the freedom of the mind with the liberation of mankind from socio-political oppression. Yet, opposing Stalin’s party and Fascist regime which made a mutual non-aggression pact, Surrealists turned to Trotsky as the only viable revolutionary political visionary. Breton and Trotsky’s 1938 “Manifesto for Independent and Revolutionary Art” came out in this historical context of rapidly aggravating politics at the dawn of World War II. Tracing the complex and conflicted relationship between art and politics in Constructivism and Surrealism, I examine the political engagement of the artist in revolutionary society and address the dilemma of the artist facing the historical necessity of class liberation and the artistic freedom of aesthetic creation as two conflicting exponents.

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