“You see, comrade Arvatov,” a talented youth once said to me, “the new actor must reject all aestheticism, the new actor is, first and foremost, a qualified human being, healthy and strong, an actor of constructions and not of decorations.” This talented youth was wearing eyeliner and lipstick; powder was all over his phiz. He waved his hands about and screamed loudly as if at least a whole infantry division stood in front of him: “You must understand! Our art knows no accidents and inspiration; regularity, precision, and economy—these are our slogans!” Last week I had a chance to speak with one novice productivist artist who told me: “To hell with all the theaters! Art for art’s sake is only for those who are scared of life, who cannot overcome it. Art for art’s sake is a fetish, an anesthetic drug, a harmful illusion.” She went on and on trying to prove all these points to me. But there was one thing she forgot to mention: the day before, she’d hidden in a bathroom and smoked hashish. “Enough with all these dramas and tragedies! Enough with the intelligentsia’s emotional manipulation!”—insisted a twenty-two-year-old gentleman in a fashionable yarmulke who was about to get busy snorting cocaine and throwing fits of jealousy. I stop here. One can cite an infinite number of such examples. Let me move on to conclusions. The idea of productivist art was put forward under the influence of the workers movement. At the present time, this idea has become widespread. Everyone grasped onto it, even the intelligentsia’s decadent youth. Sick to the bone, looking for a way out, they attach themselves to a healthy undertaking in order to compensate for their own uselessness. But they do this in vain. Art is but a superstructure. A healthy actor will emerge only from within a healthy human being. The proper organization of theater will follow the proper organization of byt; once hashish vanishes from our life, the hashish of art will vanish too.1 Only the socially healthy core is capable of creating a base for productivist art. Not the old intelligentsia, but the workers, and all those who join the workers’ ranks and follow their path. “Kvalifitsirovannyi chelovek ili gashish v ubornoi,” Zrelishcha, 1922, no 7:4. 1. The October revolution caught art in a state of acute crisis. First, this crisis was a crisis of pictorialism, and second, it was a crisis of easel painting.2 Bourgeois society has turned architecture and artistic industry into a production of stylized forgeries; having created nothing original in this realm, it established easel painting as the main and dominant form of art. This form had triumphed by the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, when the collapse of medieval guilds paved the way to the artist as an independent, individual producer. Easel painting is a commodity form of art, a product of a society in which the artist works for the market; being separated from the process of social construction, the artist presents the organization of things (color, canvas, wood, and so on) as the organization of ideas (a depiction of the external world). As I have indicated many times, the social meaning of easel creativity consists in its ability to supplement the disorganized and disharmonious reality: it is not by accident that ancient Greek sculptures of “beautiful” bodies flourished during the decline of the Olympic games; or that landscape painting triumphed in an urban setting; or the portrait—in a society of individualists estranged from one another. As long as bourgeois society was fairly secure and self-confident, life was perceived in a positive manner, and easel painting remained realistic; hence, artists created paintings aimed at achieving the maximum of verisimilitude. Actually, this was not realism but pseudo-realism; impressionists were its extreme and most consistent adherents. 2. At the end of the nineteenth century, art fell into the hands of joint-stock companies, and the artist was completely separated from the consumer. Having grown up in the bustle of gigantic industrial cities, having been educated in an atmosphere of technological advances of modern industry, having personally experienced the oppression of capital, the younger generation strove for complete personal freedom. This generation stopped paying attention to the social groups that old masters catered to in the past; new artists were predominantly interested in self-expression; their extreme subjectivism, their thirst for innovation, and, finally, their disgust for the slavish copying of external reality resulted in a total rejection of pictorialism. From the artistic conventions of Cezanne and Van Gogh there was only one step to the dislocations of Gleizes and Picasso. No longer bothered with “similitude,” the artist transformed nature as he pleased. True, at first, he would resort to unconvincing arguments in order to justify his work from the same pictorial point of view: Cubists “depicted” an object from all sides; Futurists “depicted” dynamism; Expressionists “depicted” their individual emotions. However, historically speaking, they all were moving in the same unavoidable direction—they took apart pictorial painting and replaced it with highly technical photography, posters, cinema, and so on. Gradually, the plot devolved into an excuse to pursue independent formal and technical constructions, until it was discarded altogether. Artwork became non-objective. But this fact revealed something that the mask of depictive illusion used to hide for such a long time: painting’s self-referentiality (samotsel'nost'). Non-objectivity turned out to be nothing but a consistent expression of easelism: it existed for itself and in itself. It openly presented itself as a self-sufficient world, thereby condemning itself to death. Bourgeois art found itself at a dead end. 3. All attempts by pseudo-Narodniks and reactionaries to stop this movement were doomed to fail. History cannot go backward. Revealing their own historical helplessness, some tried to revive painting, but they could only stylize primitive art and imitate early Italians; others convulsively grabbed onto the debris of past epochs, begging Rafael and Rembrandt for mercy. Painting was rapidly dying. All of these formations of color, lines, pieces of wood, wires, and other objects—large and small—were needed by nobody; everything was about to become fuel for a grandiose auto-da-fé that the suicidal artist, pressed by history, was about to set on fire. Art was facing either its death or a revolution, irrevocable and total. 1. Art found itself at a dead end. Artists on the right (pictorialists like Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Alexandre Benois, Ivan Zholtovsky, and others) impotently paced around the same spot putting on a tragicomic drama with a serial change of costumes borrowed from Egypt, Greece, or the long-dead Versailles.3 Artists on the left furiously destroyed everything, including themselves; yet they brought with them a great and valuable thing: a passionate thirst for breaking through the present, the revolutionary courage of inquisitive youth that hated clichés, fetishes, and formulas. A lot has been written about the dominance of Futurism during the first years of the revolution. This phenomenon was explained in different ways: some said that Soviet authorities had to enter into a mésalliance with the “left,” since only they supported the October revolution; others talked about an emotional analogy between the left in art and the left in politics; all kinds of other things were said, too, including some skepticism about young artists partiality and dependence. I think the matter was much more complex. First and foremost, we must establish one historical fact: artists from both camps were negotiating with Soviet authorities. Both brought to the table their projects and plans; both were willing to collaborate with the proletarian revolution. Why, then, did the left come out ahead? 2. If we look at the plans presented by the right (with Benois as its leader), we see that all those plans were reduced to one thing—the preservation of art monuments and cultural heritage. These museum dwellers saw in the revolution only a hurricane of destruction that threatened to wipe out the remnants of the past so dear to them. Hiding in the sand of centuries, they wanted to know nothing about today or tomorrow. The right-wing artists thought neither about schools, nor about living artistic creativity. They only cared about mummies. But the revolution could not care less about the mummies. The revolution demanded something different. Academies, art schools, committees were full of politically reactionary professors; the mask of realism concealed Black Hundred aspirations, and priests of the eternal art (sympathetic to the Constitutional Democratic party) malevolently hissed from everywhere. These elements had to be annihilated, removed, and disarmed; this was a purely political requirement, not an aesthetic demand. The artists on the right were not suited for such a “sacrilegious” undertaking. But the leftist artists were. 3. After rebelling against the past in the name of the future, the leftist artists fought on the artistic front against the very same social groups that the revolution with the proletariat at its head fought against economically and politically. The main interest of the leftist artists was the same as the revolution’s utmost desire: the future of modern artistic production. Far removed from any concern about some pebbles from St. Basil’s Cathedral, the left tasked themselves with the reorganization of educational institutions. Having lived in obscurity and barely surviving in filthy attics, they embraced the revolution’s promise of free competition, equal rights, and plentiful opportunities for defending in word and deed the principles that a new art put forward. From the revolution’s point of view the academy represented a stronghold of political reaction; the leftists also saw in it a citadel of artistic reaction. It is here that the interests of both negotiating sides coincided. There was more than that: the struggle for a new art was not simply the struggle of nonprivileged classes against the privileged ones. It was also a struggle of student youth, young and unhappy with the old forms, against traditions and the scholastic clichés of the professoriate. Students met with great enthusiasm the reform of the academy that was carried out by the left (Natan Altman, Nikolay Punin, Osip Brik, David Shterenberg, Alexei Karev, and others).4 Their 1918 conference celebrated the victory of the October Revolution as their own victory, and they were right to do so, of course. 4. So, the left won. The new artists were teaching in schools alongside the old ones; in museums one could see works of Tatlin, Malevich, and Kandinsky, and multiple new exhibitions of young artists were on display, too. The right surrendered its positions without a fight. Some, lacking new creative material, started to restore the ancient Rus style; others went into an almost underground existence; yet others started working as experts, with a heavy heart. The rest either stopped working altogether or emigrated abroad in order to amuse the Europeans with home-grown Russian “Cézannists” and patriotic bric-a-brac. Under the care of Parisian and Berlin generals, these gentlemen were waiting for the end of the revolution, disparaging the transformation that was going on in Soviet Russia. 1. The left helped the revolution. But this help was purely negative. As long as it was necessary to fight against the counter-revolution, as long as destructive tasks were the order of the day, leftist artists were not only useful collaborators but also the only ones. Everything changed completely when destructive tasks were replaced with positive and organizing ones. After opening up before the new art all the opportunities that it needed, the revolution presented its fellow travelers with its own forceful demands. As soon as the heat of battle faded away, the political workers of the October revolution said: “Artists, we gave you what you wanted, now you give us what we want. Give us posters, illustrations, pictures—give us works that are useful and accessible; we need them now, right away—we have no time to wait.” In their response, the leftist artists argued that their cause was the revolution of consciousness; instead of appealing to cultureless Russia, they had to wait until the masses elevated themselves to the level of the new art. The artists were justly rebuffed: “The revolution cannot wait until the nation regenerates itself; the revolution needs assistance today—plus, nobody knows for sure whether your leftist and incomprehensible art forms are any better than the old forms that were familiar and accessible.” 2. The idea of people’s art had become epidemically popular by February 1917. The right understood it from the pictorial point of view (clear pictures), while the left (proponents of non-objectivist art), naturally, advanced the decorative aspect. However, they were not able to achieve anything substantial in this regard. Without even mentioning the scarcity of material resources, we can say that the left predominantly pursued, and could not but pursue, the goals of the fight against the forms of modern bourgeois byt. In other words, their decorative work had a purely protestive meaning, which could hardly meet the needs of the traditional consciousness of their contemporaries. In spite all its supreme innovativeness, the work of Altman (the decoration of Uritsky Square in Petrograd in 1918) was yet another manifestation of the aesthetic discordance between the left in politics and the left in art (Figure 1). The more determinate and powerful the political pressure became, the more distinctive was the feeling of the left’s insufficiency and inability to adapt. Refusing to paint depictive pictures, leftist artists who were raised in the traditions of old art and its self-contained easelism saw a threat to their art in the revolutionary pressure. Struggling against the fetishism of the past, they were still dedicated easelists, heroes of the same pure art that appeared in a new guise now; they fetishized their own creative work in the same way as the old masters before them. This was the main cause of the failure of the left in the face of the revolution. 3. The period of Sturm und Drang had to subside so that the leaders could come to their senses, look around, and launch a campaign against “futurism.” As a result, administrative centers went through a rotation of leaders; educational institutions went through some change as well; more art work was commissioned from the so-called “realists.” The right-wing artists temporarily triumphed. But even the most convinced art-conservatives among the revolutionary politicians were disappointed by the first result of these changes. The revolution brought both rival groups to their demise: pictorialists and non-objectivists alike equally capitulated before the demand to fuse the tasks of artistic creation with the tasks of social construction. Regardless of artistic orientations, this failure was the failure of so-called pure art, or to be more precise, it was the failure of easelism. 1. Around the time when the capitulation of easel art took place, the group of so-called productivists began to form inside the left. These artists were fully determined to find a juncture between art and social practice; they supported the revolution not out of spontaneity, not only because it was beneficial for them, but also because of its ideology. In their worldview, they were revolutionary Marxists who understood a need for a decisive break with all pure art, including the leftist kind. Starting with a critique of the main concepts of bourgeois aesthetics, they shifted the focus—from the problem of the form to the problem of the method of artistic labor. The idea of proletarian art gave them a clue to a possible solution: the collectivization of artistic labor turned out to be unthinkable without its synthesis with the sphere of social practice that was the foundation of contemporary collective construction, namely—industry. Thus, productivist art was born as a natural outcome of the proletarian revolution; and it became a stumbling block not only for rightist art, but also for leftist art. 2. Indeed, the issue was no longer a change of certain artistic forms; nor was it a struggle of various strands within bourgeois art; nor was it about using forms for decorating things (applied art). Rather, at stake was a complete liquidation of, a complete break from, all the techniques of modern artistic creativity. A campaign was launched against any type of individualistic artisanal method, be it on the right or on the left. The situation changed drastically. Together with it, the very course of the struggle between artistic groups changed, too. A split emerged within the left. Holding on tight to easelism, the majority was frightened by the grip of the revolution that they had praised only recently; the majority began to backtrack. This gave rise to the psychological reaction that ultimately led to the touching union of the right and the left (“World of Art”) on the basis of a defense—indeed, a self-defense—against the bogeyman of productivism.5 The easel turned out to be more important than the deepest disagreements within the community that emerged around this easel. Expressionists, with Kandinsky as their leader, were the first to retreat; their mystical and emotional soul could not withstand the pressure from the extremists. Then came the rebellion of the Suprematists led by Malevich. Convinced proponents of “art as an end in itself,” they cried out about the murder of “holy” art, being unable to process in their consciousness any other artforms, apart from the easel ones. A break was inevitable. In 1920 the Institute of Artistic Culture, which once united leftist artists, fell apart; after some time, it restarted under the banner of productivist art. After a long process of realignment, after a period of persistent struggle within the left, there emerged a group of non-objectivists/constructivists (Tatlin, Rodchenko, the Society of Young Artists group) who focused in their practice on the study and the treatment of real materials as a transitional stage towards constructivist engineering. During one famous meeting at Institute [in 1921], a unanimous decision was made to abandon self-made constructions and to take all the necessary steps in order to immediately connect with industrial production. 3. This is not the first time that the idea of productivist art emerged in our midst. But every time it did appear, its realization was always closely connected with the problem of socialism. To organize holistic, collectivist society means to make social construction dependent on the free and systematic will of the people and, consequently, to make this construction consciously creative. If Fourier and Owen were utopian predecessors of Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, then Russian productivists found their predecessors in William Morris and Walter Crane. Utopian in its nature, the work of these predecessors was directly influenced by the workers movement; however, it remained the work of lonely craftsmen because the workers movement itself was still within the confines of the adaptive approach to capitalism. The proletarian revolution was the first to establish a firm foundation for creative organization of labor. Despite the peculiar difficulty of the situation, the artistic revolution did not stop after proclamation of its slogans. Productivist art evolved from a myth into a real fact as the state and professional organs of working-class Russia familiarized themselves with the goals of the new movement, as they discovered that productivist art was capable of solving the problem of qualification of labor and production (“the maximum of artistry is the maximum of qualification,” and vice versa). Tatlin cooperated with the Petrograd Proletkult and began working at the Lessner factory; the cultural departments of All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and Moscow Regional Council of Trade Unions announced that the tasks of productivist art were its tasks and after some hesitation rejected the idea of applied arts.6 “Cherez 5 let posle Oktiabr'skogo perevorota (Izobrazitel'nye iskusstva,)” 1. The byt of bourgeois society and, consequently, our own byt, is disorganized in the same manner as that society itself. People do not know how to speak, how to walk, how to sit down, how to lay down, how to arrange things, how to go about their public life, how to treat guests and attend funerals. Modern social byt is characterized by randomness, personal whims, and a complete lack of qualification. It is organized neither in its form, nor in its materials. Are these people even human beings? All these one-dimensional cripples with twisted joints, weak muscles, and crooked gaits? Cripples whom we for some reason consider to be like us? We live in a disharmonious world populated by mass-made things that we cannot feel, by emotions that we do not trust, by gestures that we cannot control. We do not master our own byt; byt itself is our master; it rules over us with its spontaneity and disorganization. And we are thrashing around in it—like frogs in a swamp, croaking when it rains, like frogs. 2. Still, we have theater, don’t we? It teaches us how to talk, how to lay down, how to visit friends. Theater builds things and organizes forms. We can find an organized byt in it. But how is it organized? Aesthetically! That is to say, theater teaches us to walk around in a special way—artistically; it teaches us to lay down in a certain style; it teaches us to stand with a certain attitude. Theater teaches us things that are useless in life. What for? So that once we left our swamp, we could peek at a “higher” life, a life of beauty, which has nothing to do with reality; but the experts on aesthetic byt could show it to us in exchange for money. How long is this going to last? As long as humanity cannot manage itself. Until the anarchy of life is counterbalanced with the harmony of life. 3. Comrade theater directors! The working class builds not in dreams but in deeds. The pre-history of humanity is about to end. The collectivization of the global economy and the planned organization of society are seeds that have been already sown in fertile ground; their revolutionary sprouts and growth have already begun. It’s time to give up your stage, curtains, and performances. Go out into real life to retrain and to train yourself. Absorb the methods of universal social construction, not the aesthetic methods. Be engineers and montageurs of byt. The working class wants not illusions but real, scientifically organized forms. It needs not an imitation of life but a construction of life. If you, stage directors, possess all the resources for byt-creation, then stay away from violating byt with the fetishistic mirages of beauty; instead, transform your workshops into engineering laboratories, into factories producing qualified human beings and qualified byt. “Ot rezhissury teatra k montazhu byta,” Ermitazh, no. 11 (1922): 3. Bourgeois art, in all of its realms, is separated from life and squeezed into independent, self-sufficient forms of “easel art.” For bourgeois society, these forms embody ideals of “beauty” and act as a counterweight to the anarchically fragmented “ugly” reality. Aesthetics is not only a feature of any easel work but also a condition of its existence. Easel artforms are determined by specific methods of professional creative activity, not by collectively shared (obshchezhiznennye) goals and methods. Even if it is filled to the brim with “civic motives,” easel art is always seen as a “pure” art. What is the role of easel art? It depicts life either realistically or conditionally. What is the social purpose of this sort of “depictionism”? To supplement disharmonious, i.e., unorganized, reality. In other words, since it is impossible to theoretically transform life itself, artistic creativity is realized at a distance from life; such an artist is necessary for those who are incapable of conscious creation on the social scale. All of this is entirely relevant for bourgeois and, consequently, modern, theater. Easel theater is a theater of a small building with a small stage, visited by those who have escaped life and real byt in order to “enjoy” an illusion of life and an illusion of byt. At some point, many thought that theater could be collectivized by moving action from the stage into the audience. But they forgot that the mere transferring of aesthetic forms from the stage to the audience can hardly salvage these forms; in fact, this move only corrupts the theater-goers. The stage-based theater is the theater of aestheticizing actors; throwing these actors back into life does not help revitalize theater, but it certainly theatralizes life, i.e., it aestheticizes and decorates life, in short—it engages in applied, artisan theatricality. What are we to do, then? We must transform theater itself. Theater is nothing but aesthetically organized forms of human activity—i.e., organized with the help of aesthetic methods of stage direction and aesthetic education of the actor. To transform theater means to transform the methods of stage direction and the education of the actor. But there are many ways to reform theater; what exactly should be the nature of our reform? The proletariat is called upon to kill aesthetic easel art and to create a new art, the art of real life, the art that is organizing, as opposed to being primarily reflective. The stage director must be transformed into the master of ceremonies of labor and byt. The actor, i.e., an expert of aesthetic action, must be transformed into a qualified individual, into a socially agentive person of the harmonious type. In the future, proletarian theater will be a platform for creative forms of genuine reality; it will construct patterns of byt and models of human beings; it will become a massive laboratory of new sociality, using any performance of social functions as its material. Sooner or later, the working class will write on its banner: theater as production, theater as a factory of the qualified individual. Could today’s theatrical methods and forms play the role that the proletariat envisions for them? No, and I have already discussed this. In order to play this role, it is insufficient to simply put forth new goals and tasks: the old anti-life methods cannot deliver. In other words, methods themselves must be proletarianized. To proletarianize these methods means to make them collectively lived (obshchezhiznennye), not to reduce them to universal organizational methods, while using as a guide not theatrical experience of theatrical sciences but ordinary extra-aesthetic experience of natural and historical sciences. This path is unthinkable without struggle and destruction. Dialectics in art is the function of dialectics in economics. Therefore, the disintegration of aesthetic forms in theater is the precondition for new construction; first and foremost, of course, this disintegration concerns the foundation of the aesthetic-easel form of depiction. Vulgar literariness, “playwritingness” (p'esnost'), “dramaturgy,” and scenic props are doomed to be inevitably abandoned in theater through their deformation and complete annihilation—just as they were similarly abandoned in painting. This rejection is inevitable because life can be constructed only from real materials, cleansed from alien aesthetic wrappings that violate and obscure its true properties (we think of the work in painting started by Cezanne and completed by Tatlin). An active individual is theater’s material. Not an actor, since an actor is only an aesthetic form, while an active individual is a socially functioning individual, who is situated in time and space. I consider the main task of the proletarian study of theater to be the construction of a system of orientation that is capable of carrying out any social function whatsoever, a system that would be biologically useful, psychically regulated, economical, and utilitarian; it would be technically advanced in perfecting the grasp of materials, and maximally adapted to any changes of environment (in the language of theater aesthetics, such systematic adaptability is called “improvization”). The joy of life will come only when the laws of life become the laws of art, when the artist accepts reality and merges with it. Artistic creativity is possible everywhere: a high level of technology and mechanization frightens only artisans of the aesthetic; in a collectivized society, a high technological level is not oppressive; instead, it becomes a utilitarian and mighty tool in the hands of the future engineer-constructor, the composer of living byt (in the world of theater). It is perfectly clear that such a revolution will have to go through its own “transitional period.” The accumulation of the elements of the future theater is already taking place—in various places, by various means, in some places—consciously, in others—unconsciously. In its growth, this accumulation is connected to a social stratum that we define as the revolutionary and technical intelligentsia, which occupies a similarly “transitional” place in relation to the proletariat, as well as all to other realms of social life. The liquidation of the dictatorship of the plot. In theater, the primary role of the theatrical plot has been going for some time through its gradual dissolution, unnoticed and unrealized by those who are involved in this very process. It all started with the fight against authorial immunity; the theoretical and practical destruction of this immunity was initiate