Pursuing the Logical End: Rod&chachek;enko and Witkiewicz at the Crossroads of Artistic-Social Avant-Garde
Juras
Ryfa
In his 1918 work, New Forms in Painting and the
Misunderstanding Arising Therefrom, the most original Polish
writer and painter Stanis&lbar;aw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy,
expressed the underlying ideas that would serve as a model for the
lonely Polish avant-garde of intense individuality and nonconformism
and provided a critical framework of his own ominous artistic theory
in a bourgeois interwar Poland. Alexander Rod&chachek;enko's
experimentation in the sphere of visual and plastic arts provided an
optimistic vision of arts in the Communist society. Yet both artists
share seminal ideas on the fate of art in the modern age. The present
paper has two main goals: to trace the transformation of the initial
creative impetus of the Polish and Russian avant-garde artists from
their similar yet distinct beliefs in the power of art and to show the
transformation of their strategies along their way—to the art's
disintegration and its formal end.
Witkiewicz's original concept of art in its relation to society
sheds light on the exclusive demeanor of the phenomenon of the Polish
artistic-social avant-garde. The central philosophical question for
Witkacy was the search for the essence of Being through seeking
metaphysical feelings,
the totality of which determine
Pure Form—the cornerstone of Witkacy's aesthetic theory. His
theory is inclined toward the apocalyptic vision of human
history. Even before Oswald Spengler's monumental Decline of the
West, Witkacy believed in the irreversible decline of Western
culture. The artist's fears were based on the belief that humanity
will eventually lose its individuality in the name of social progress
and the necessary pragmatic adjustments to the needs of mass
production.
The second part of this comparative analysis reveals a creative
impulse behind Rod&chachek;enko's views on art in the context of
Soviet Russia. The years 1918 through 1921 were a period of intense
creativity in Rod&chachek;enko's art. Taking as his point of
departure the abstract vocabulary of Malevi&chachek; and Tatlin, he
isolated individual qualities of painting and analyzed them in
successive series: the planar surface of the work, its faktura, the
density and weight of color, the complete absence of color, and
line. In Moscow in September 1921, Rod&chachek;enko exhibited three
monochromatic canvasses: Pure Red Color,
Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow
Color. Similar to Witkacy's pursuit of Pure Form and the
resulting rejection of art, Rod&chachek;enko also reduced painting to
its logical conclusion. The three paintings realized a key imperative
of modernist art: to pursue formal investigation to its logical
end. Achieving this, Rod&chachek;enko renounced painting and turned
resolutely to new forms of art as instruments of social progress. This
bold stroke soon led him to outstanding achievements in a wide range
of design and in photo collage and photography.
Despite the obvious formal similarities, Witkiewicz and
Rod&chachek;enko clearly should not be considered coeval
thinkers. Ironically, Witkacy abandoned the pursuit of Pure Form in
art and engaged solely in the utilitarian production of portrait
painting. Having earlier denounced utilitarianism, he opened a
quasi-capitalist enterprise—a portrait studio. As he pursued his
art, Rod&chachek;enko identified the systematic investigation of the
material and formal logic of art with the creation of a new Communist
society. For him, the artist was no longer an intuitive spirit but a
constructor or visual engineer.