New Graphic Design in Revolutionary Russia by Szymon Bojko (review)

374 Books declare that certain artists are ‘outside of it’, then it makes it equally difficult to prove. It seems reasonable to assume that mentally ill patients may be exceptionally ignorant of the cultural traditions of Europe but the author confounds his argument by making so careful a selection of works and artists. His choice, of course, is the choice of a man very fully informed by his cultural heritage. After all, looking at the work of psychotic patients as art is not new (madness has long been compared to genius); it has in itself a cultural background in the 20th century, in which Cardinal would probably admit that Andre Breton held a place. One could argue that the author’s sophistication of vision is what debars him from any close experience of the original intensity and significance of psychotic art, experiences that are presumably accessible only to the patient. Other more readily accessible qualities naturally exist but these reflect directly the cultural standards of their day. Adolf Wolfli is too close to illuminated manuscripts and the Gothic Revival, Gaston Chaissac to Dubuffet and Ferdinand Cheval to the encyclopaedic sculptural architecture of Gaudi for any of them to be safely beyond the reach of the European cultural heritage. On the other hand, the reader is sometimes confronted by outstandingly original productions, as in the works of Madge Gill, August Neter or H. A. Muller but no indication is given of how to sidestep, in one’s r6le as viewer, a visual knowledge of Klee, Ernst, Miro or Dubuffet or whichever other artist might pervade one’s view of primitive, naive or psychotic art. If the author points out a land where original marvels await discovery, then he may have achieved a great deal. But he does not begin to show us how to go there or how to leave behind the culture that we know. New Graphic Design in Revolutionary Russia. Szymon Bojko. Lund Humphries, London, 1972. 156 pp., illus. Reviewed by: Bradford R. Collins* Bojko’s book, unfortunately, reads like many Constructivist documents; it is elliptical, fragmented and sorely in need of an editorial overhaul. It is a useful book but not for its stated aim of introducing ‘some semblance of order into existing research’. Bojko has gathered a great deal of new information and many unpublished designs from the period 1912-1 930 but the material is essentially undigested. The text is a series of loosely connected paragraphs that contain insufficiently developed commentary. Equally frustrating is the absence of reference to the graphic designs. What is needed is a book that isolates the salient characteristics of Constructivist graphics and discusses their historical sources and theoretical basis. Certain stylistic features, simplicity and clarity, are mentioned by Bojko as are the chief ~ * Department of Fine Arts, University of British Columbia, Vancouver 8. Canada. historical sources, folk art and Cubo-Futurist graphics, but reference is the extent of attention. Aside from the work of Lissitzky, which employs Suprematist principles of balance and tension, Constructivist graphics are characterized by simplicity , clarity, regularity and repetition. This combination results in works whose meanings are immediately comprehensible and memorable. The priority of content reflects the strictly utilitarian principles that developed out of both the necessities of the Revolution and the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage. The Cubo-Futurists had also been involved in developing a graphic art governed by considerations of content. They admired the effectiveness of folk art in this regard. The simplicity and clarity of Constructivist work derives not only from this heritage but from the machine-aesthetic responsible for the other two characteristic stylistic features, regularity and repetition. The machine was not only the favorite symbol for the promise of a Utopian future but the model for it. The machine quality of Constructivist graphics reflects not only the application of its principles of effectivenessbut the shape of the new order of things to come. This explains the indiscriminate application of style to which Tatlin so objected. The major exception to the above was photomontage , in which principles of complexity and subtlety dominate. The essentially unaltered Dadaist source of these characteristics reveals the Constructivist artist’s dilemma: the reconciliation of demands for an art...