This thesis attempt to study the process of the reception of Russian constructivism in Western art and to analyze art historical research on the recent discourse of Aleksandr Rodchenko, the representative artist of constructivism. Throughout his life,...
This thesis attempt to study the process of the reception of Russian constructivism in Western art and to analyze art historical research on the recent discourse of Aleksandr Rodchenko, the representative artist of constructivism. Throughout his life, Rodchenko's work, including traditional media such as painting and sculpture to typography, space design, industrial design, photomontage, and photography, has been partially accepted. Therefore, this study aims to expand the scope of the study on constructivism and Rodchenko by revealing the recent change of constructivism research to examine the process and limitations of constructivism in the Western art’s context.
First, Chapter I examine Russia ideological background before and after the revolution, and outlines the social background in which constructivism emerged. At that time, through the process of transformation into modern society, the population of urban workers increased, and Marxism was flowing in ideologically. These social and political changes required a new social role for artists, and constructivism seeks to practice ‘art into life’, not Western bourgeois art. However, Lenin's ‘New Economy Policy’(1921) to rebuild the economy collapsed by war and famine allowed the inflow of foreign capital and the operation of partial private enterprises, creating a special situation of capitalism in socialist countries. Accordingly, constructivism, which was closely connected to social change, practices a unique experiment of coincidence between art and production. However, this originality of constructivism was not fully accepted in the process of being accepted in the context of Western art history. Therefore, this study will focus on Hal Foster's discussion and examine the limitations of early research that Russian constructivism was selectively dealt with according to the American capitalism ideology in the process of being accepted into the United States.
Subsequently, Chapter II will examine the flow of research analyzing constructivism as an artistic practice of Russian socialist ideology. The research of art historians Maria Gough and Christina Kiaer in the 2000s interprets the combination of the production and art, which has been limited to the advance from Western context to design, in connection with Russian political, social, and cultural context. Their interpretation pays attention to the aspect that the art into life does not aim for functionalism that produces goods, but acts as a practice of socialist ideology and can change users. In particular, recent studies have extended discussions on Russian abstract paintings centered on Malevich and Kandinsky to Rodchenko's nonobjective paintings, suggesting that Rodchenko's painting experiments have influenced spatial construction, industrial design, graphic design and photography. In addition, this study analyzes that the concept of Kiaer's ‘socialist objects’ that Rodchenko wanted to form a new relationship between humans and things and change society through this is also revealed in Rodchenko's non-objective painting, which has recently been reexamined.
This thesis is an attempt to expand the partial understanding of Constructivism and Rodchenko and to understand them in the context of a special Russian society at that time. Most of all, Rodchenko's painting work, which was not noticed much, pointed out that experiments on ‘socialist objects’ could be captured, and tried to analyze Rodchenko's work through new relationship with ‘things.‘ Through such an attempt, I would like to provide an opportunity to re-examine Rodchenko and constructivism, which were dealt with in a Western context.