Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Perpetual Revolution
Review of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 at the Cooper Union, April 25–May 5, 2023
The exhibition Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930, co-curated by Anna Bokov (PhD ’17) and Steven Hillyer at the Cooper Union, retrieved the history of an astounding institution, Vkhutemas (acronym for Higher Art and Technical Workshops), from its “near eradication from the history of modernism,” according to Hillyer’s curatorial statement. Founded in Moscow in 1920, this design school for the masses was an early product of the Bolshevik Revolution, established as soon as Lenin and Trotsky took power and undertook educational reform. The timing alone speaks of strong ties, and mutual support, between the visual arts and political spheres — a moment when propaganda was a recognized constituent of cultural discourse. From the present standpoint, considering the divide separating politics from the academy and the arts, it is remarkable to look back at this synthesis of political and intellectual effort.
The mandate was both ambitious and indicative of the social transformations afoot. At a time when levels of education varied prodigiously, the school would be open to all, and up to 2,000 students enrolled at a time. Coming into being at a moment of profound artistic iconoclasm, the school was formed as the stratification of society and the canons of figural representation were deemed equally defunct. In the immediate wake of total and violent social upheaval, the curriculum established at Vkhutemas would reject conventional methods of art production as well as its means: the fixed student-instructor hierarchy was jettisoned, gender equality was fostered, and education was free. The institute drew together pioneers of new modes of artistic creation such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kazimir Malevich, many of whom had previously been experimenting and teaching at the Vitebsk Art School, headed by Marc Chagall, and later by Malevich.
The exhibition channeled pragmatic and profound questions addressing the pedagogy of the school. How do you create a common set of tools among students with entirely different degrees of prior education? How do you pursue new objectives and instill new techniques while banishing traditional emotive, compositional, and representational tropes? A new language was elaborated across creative disciplines, melding the technical, scientific, and inquisitive registers. As the school opened its doors, students were inducted into the freshly developed “foundational disciplines” that had been shaped by a subcommittee of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk).
The work on display — photographs, records, and recreations of Vkhutemas student projects by students of the Cooper Union — exhibited immense creativity, invention, and disciplinary overlap. Though the show was organized to present the work though different pedagogical ends in different areas (exercises, combinatorics, constructions, instruments, projects), the artifacts suggested fluid exchange across studios. Indeed the collective reset brought on by the Russian Revolution of 1917 manifested in the pedagogical program of the school and ultimately in its creative output: the Foundational Courses were required of all of the students, and the school sought to recognize all of its members on equal footing.
The school’s porous environment comes through in the exhibition. In Rodchenko’s “Composition on a Plane” graphics studio, the fundamental formulas of type setting and print layout were cast aside and the page was reintroduced as a two-dimensional expanse, or a spatial proposition. This work clearly anticipated and dialogued with the Constructivist compositions of his colleagues in the architectural studios, conveying the fruitful intermingling across disciplines promoted at the school. Grappling with what Bokov calls the “the role of collectivity in learning,” this environment offered a stark contrast to Western European academic models that marked divisions between the technical and the plastic arts.
While the exhibition portrays an artistic idyll of creativity and equality, colder aspects of Taylorist production were also instrumentalized at the school. In the “combinatorics” section of the exhibition, the wall text offered a less egalitarian view of the student body in which an instructor tracks success though quantitative output. Perhaps employed for their “objective” criteria, such systems reveal rigid means of evaluation, foretelling other tallying regimes that would define the USSR. Yet this undercurrent stands in vivid contrast to the many photos of students and instructors in their studios, brimming with excitement.
When Lenin died in 1924, the trajectory of the new Communist state was irrevocably shifted. While the mourning nation grappled with elaborate political maneuvering, Vkhutemas had lost its most powerful ally. By 1927 Trotsky was forced into exile, and Stalin, who remained in power, preferred a monumental Beaux Arts architecture. Before the school’s closing in 1930, the institution continued to form designers while sustaining bruising interventions from the Stalinist state. In its ten-year run, the school had construed its avant-garde thinking into a functioning institution. Before it fell into anonymity — atomized and unappreciated in Stalin’s USSR, and unspoken of in the West — the school’s achievements were recognized triumphantly in Paris, at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, where it was awarded the Grand Prix.
— Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of Citygroup.
