Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era
Jamey Hecht
Soviet Socialist Realism is the purview of this exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle
in Frankfurt. It constitutes a sequel to "The Great Utopia," Schirn’s
1992 exhibition on the Russian avant-garde. Those artists shared with their West-European
counterparts an active hostility to bourgeois institutions and to the cultural
limits of the business-civilization embodied in Victorian England. Like the Leninist
"vanguard of the proletariat," the aesthetic "advance guard"
spearheaded something utopian, as desirable as it was impossible. The cubist
program, for instance, might yearn to see all sides of an object at once, but
the power of a great Braque canvas lies in the pathos with which that program
produces images of impossible objects. This sympathy of purpose holds together
the great figures of incipient European modernism with the Russian artists of
the pre-Stalinist period, and has brought the latter firmly into the art history
of the 20th Century.
But with Lenin’s death and Trotsky’s exile, the internationalism of the Soviet
project was, like so many painters and poets, "disappeared." Just as
Stalin’s "socialism in one country" broke with the Marxist tradition
of anti-statism — think of Trostky handing out revolutionist leaflets to
the German soldiers at the end of the Battle of Brest-Litovsk in 1918— the
Socialist Realism of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union was an insular, nationalist
endeavor. Many of the paintings on exhibit in Dream Factory Communism have not
been accessible to the global public since Stalin’s death in 1953.
Propaganda aims to bring about, and then perpetuate, the victory of a regime
that needs it. But Stalin’s political apparatus so securely dominated all opposition
during the thirty-year period of these paintings that they seem ceremonial and
religious rather than instrumental. Curators Boris Groys and Zelfira Tregulova
remind us that "mass culture" was once a domain of "centralistically
organized," state-sponsored deployment of the mechanically reproduced work
of commissioned art. From this inter-war poster and pamphlet industry there rises
the western, market-driven, florid traffic in images that we call mass culture
today. But like so much else in the Soviet Union (e.g., Lamarckist genetics,
literary naturalism, modernist architecture), the earlier form of mass art based
on wartime command painting held sway for decades after it had been effectively
abandoned West of the Berlin Wall.
Like the rhetoric
of dialectical materialism, Stalinist painting is suffused with a repressed desperation
in the face of historical uncertainty. Komar and Melamid’s magisterial 1981 portrait
of Lenin’s mausoleum (minus any protective barrier) shows a granite stairway
draped with a red curtain; at the top, the General Secretary lies in eternal
sleep, his glowing head hardly denting the pillow. At the foot of the stairway
is a draped, semi-nude female figure who kneels in a classical, Roman attitude
of submissive dedication. Though they bear no inscriptions, the stairs are plainly
the orthodox Stages of History: Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism,
all of them wrapped in the cloak of collectivist Red. They lead up to the sacralized
body on the upper edge of the canvas, as high as the brushstrokes of human action
can reach: the Revolution made Flesh.
So, says the old commonplace of Western sociology, Soviet Communism is a mirror
image of its alleged opposite, Christianity; very good, but this exhibition brings
home to us the rigidly parallel irony that authoritarian Soviet realism is a
mirror image of today’s art-world. In the former, an official bureau decides
what must flow from the writer’s pen and the painter’s brush, while outside the
USSR those implements are the sharpest tools of bourgeois individuality. In the
contemporary art scene, a similar paradox operates. Conceptual art’s fetishistic
obsession with originality drives artistic production ever further away from
its old origins (i.e., Plato’s "midwifery of the soul"). Painting and
sculpture were once the results of a single man or woman wrestling with a medium;
today they are as different from such Romanticism as Soviet Realism is different
from a personal, playful movement like Dada. Dream Factory Communism is thus
a salutary warning to our intrepid, gallery-driven culture of originality: "beyond"
the bourgeois brush there may be little more than the factory.
