The Institutional Component in the Thinking and the First Reforms in Artistic Culture of Russian Avant-garde Artists

Abstract

The paper aims to carry out a historical and cultural examination of the insufficiently studied social practice experience of Russian avant-garde artists: their innovative activities leading towards radical institutional modernization of artistic culture in the early years of Soviet power. An institution-and-system approach laid the methodological groundwork for the analysis since it is the phenomenon of the institute that integrates and regularizes various components of artistic culture: artistic consciousness, social subjects, their artistic practices and relationships, strategic and specific programs (goals, values and methods), economic, ideological and political conditions. The paper reflects upon the main paradigms and directions of the restructuring and systemic development of artistic culture and the creative role of avant-garde artists, the short but fruitful experience of their collaboration with the Soviet government. It started with the substantive coordination of the artistic avant-garde program and the ideological program of political power. Then this experience resumed in the avant-garde artists’ work in state cultural management bodies, in their large-scale practical participation in artistic and cultural construction, which they tried to combine with their pioneering notions of art and its social role. V. Kandinsky, K. Malevich, A. Rodchenko, V.Tatlin, N. Punin were among the ideologists and leaders of this transformation program, many avant-garde artists also took part in its implementation. These efforts resulted in creating a network of artistic and cultural institutions of a new type, the formation and implementation of a new state policy in the field of artistic culture, the change in the principles and forms of organization and functioning of all aspects of artistic culture. The author concludes that the short tenure of avant-garde artists and the implementation of their institutional construction program had a significant impact on the development of artistic culture of the early Soviet period. It has fulfilled the task of its drastic modernization, which had no analogues in the world, and later, even in the face of an artificially interrupted reform process, became a resource for its future development.