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A sense

of the
future
Foundations For a
Mass Media Avant-Garde
Omer Krieger
MA Fine art Report
Slade School of Fine art
7 September 2005
2
Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Historical Avant-garde
a. Concepts, characteristics and problems
b. Avant-garde and politics
3. Russian avant-garde
a. Constructivism
b. Agit-prop
c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk
Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda
4. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing?
a. Deferred action
b. The new media avant-garde
c. TV CHANNEL (2004-)
5. Appendix: Tomorrows Television
6. Bibliography
3
1. Introduction
This composition stems from a simple question: what does an avant-garde art practice
mean today, and is it possible?
In this essay I will explore the concept of avant-garde art, specifically its relation to
politics and political change, in an attempt to provide foundations for a contemporary
mass media avant-garde.
First, I will present concepts and characteristics of the avant-garde, along the
positions and insights of Renato Poggioli, Peter Brger and Andreas Huyssen. This
will be followed by a discussion of Poggiolis pessimist views on the relations
between avant-garde and politics. Then I will approach the question of a mass media
avant-garde, through the discussion of Russian avant-garde, which will include
Constructivism and agit-prop, and the case of Gustav Klucis Propaganda kiosk
(1922). I will proceed, evaluating possibilities of a contemporary avant-garde: First,
Hal Fosters optimistic writing on neo-avant-garde as creative critique and the model
of deferred action. I will then argue with Lev Manovich and his notion of avant-
garde as software, which suggests new digital media as the avant-garde of the 21
st
century, and conclude in a brief overview of my project TV CHANNEL (2004-), as
a sounding board for these issues and concerns.
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2. The Historical Avant-garde
a. Concepts, characteristics and problems
In the beginning of The Theory of The Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli states a main
characteristic feature of the phenomenon of modern culture called avant-garde. This
feature regards the relationship of art and politics in the concept of avant-garde.
According to Poggioli, the historical phenomena of the avant-garde contained the
subordination of the avant-garde imageto the ideals of a radicalism which was not
cultural but political.
1
Quoting a 19
th
century French scholar, Poggioli stresses and
anchors historically the connection that is constituted in this term between art and
politics: Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most
advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to know
whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of
the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of
the human race is.
2
Poggioli marks four general aspects, or moments of avant-garde movements. The first
is activism. It implies an existence towards a positive result, a concrete end. The
ultimate hope isthe affirmation of the avant-garde spirit in all cultural fields.
3
Nevertheless, claims Poggioli, this activistic moment can be manifest in an existence
for no other end but its own self, out of the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action,

1
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, 1968. p. 9.
2
Gabriel-Dsir Laverdant, De la Mission de lart et du rle de artistes, 1845, in Poggioli, ibid.
3
Poggioli, p. 25.
5
a sportive enthusiasm, and the emotional fascination of adventure.
4
The antagonistic
moment is a second aspect: A spirit of hostility and opposition, which is revealed
when we see avant gardists agitating people or institutions of cultural power and
tradition. Activism and antagonism can be transcended, says Poggioli, by two extreme
attitudes that derive from them: nihilism and agonism. The activistic dynamism
inherent in every movement can become nihilism when social controls and moral
conventions are abandoned. The urge to destroy the status quo and the febrile anxiety
to go always further can lead to a self-destructive attitude, defined by Poggioli as the
agonistic moment.
5
These two sets of attitudes enable us to start looking at the phenomenon of the avant-
garde as a site of tension, rather than a coherent movement or a consistent political
idea. Much of the theoretical writing that tries to understand and explain 20
th
century
avant-garde art includes pairs of clashing concepts or seemingly contradictory
tendencies that characterize this phenomenon. Poggioli, as weve seen, argued that
while avant-garde art has been articulating itself as an agent of progress and
positivity, it also contains seeds of destruction and negation.
Andreas Huyssen focuses in the link between culture and anarchy, from which derive
a number of contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of avant-garde.
1. the eminently aristocratic nature of avant-gardism and its displays of the
plebian spirit

4
Ibid.
5
Poggioli, p.26.
6
2. Alienation as the situation of the artist in modern society and the particular
fascination with the Communist experiment, even though it is totalitarian and
antilibertarian, hostile to any individual exception or idiosyncracy.
3. The desire to see realized a destructive impulse and the opposite desire for the
latter to serve future construction. The extension of antagonistic and nihilistic
tendencies into the political field, to be turned against the whole of bourgeois
society rather than against culture alone.
4. The activist impulse leads to militate in a party of action and agitation, while
the agonistic and Futurist impulses induce to sacrificing ones own person,
movement and mission to the social palingenesis of the future. Avant-garde
Communism is the fruit of a simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic state of
mind.
5. As a result a morbid condition of mystical ecstasy, which contradicts self-
criticism and self-knowledge, prevents from realizing that the artist would
have neither the reason nor the chance to exist in a Communistic society.
6. (Avant-garde) art can only live in pluralism, which only bourgeois
democracies provide, but chooses to promote communism, which is inevitably
totalitarian. Communist sympathies can favor the avant-garde spirit only
within a bourgeois and capitalist society.
6

6
Andreas Huyssen, The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-garde-Technology-Mass Culture, in The Myths of
Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, Kathleen Woodward, Ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
and Henley.
7
Peter Brger deduced from the historical avant-garde a logic, according to which we
can formulate a problem that is at the core of this essay.
7
On the one hand, the
ambitions of avant-garde art were intrinsically placed in and targeted towards the
public sphere, informed, encouraged and enthralled by new technologies, in the
attempt to reach a high level of popularity, and thus become a new mass culture. On
the other hand, it is often too new to be understood by its public.
If indeed the new cannot be recognized as such (categorically, like Boris Groys
argues, following Kierkegaard)
8
, then maybe innovation is an intrinsic quality of the
avant-garde, which explains the failure of the avant-gardes ambition to be popular.
The plot thickens, or the problem develops when we add to this equation [new = -
(popular)] another factor the state. The power of the Bolshevik revolution was
exercised in order to enforce (or at least massively propagate) innovation on the
population. What happens when avant-gardes ethos of negation meets the power of
the state? In the case of revolutionary Russia, is it transformed by the appropriation
of the state to a position of an affirmative agent in culture, and thus dies? Or does it
maintain its soul of resistance even as official art of the state?
9
There are several
possible histories of the rise and dominance of Russian avant-garde after 1917, and of
its decline.

7
This is a good point to join Hal Fosters doubts about the attempt to theorize avant-garde while using so few
concrete practices. One cannot go on writing too many general statements about this phenomenon without asking
oneself what practices are included under this title, and is such a unified discussion helpful at all, given the
differences between the different avant-garde parctices. It seems a new category, or new sub-categoies would be
helpful.
8
Boris Groys, On the New, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html
9
The latter dynamic can be elicited from TJ Clarks Farewell to an Idea. Maybe it is the case that traces of doubt
and difference from Futurism, and especially Suprematism have found their way to agitprop practices.
Nevertheless, this kind of reading would be influenced by what we believe agitprops value as art is.
8
The question of innovation is indeed central to the notion and artistic legacy of the
historical avant-garde. The New is a recurring concept in its artworks and art
writing. Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, in Moscow: to create means to live,
forever creating newer and newer things.
10
The relation of the idea of artistic
innovation and radical politics in the Russian avant-garde is evident in the term
Futurism which was attributed to and adopted by artists creating new forms and
wishing to abandon old forms of expression, as part of the creation of a new culture,
for a new society. Gradually, with the growing support and participation of avant-
garde artists in the Bolshevik party and Revolution, the term Futurist became a
signifier of a leftist artist, committed to a political and artistic Revolution and to
Bolshevism as a progressive political power in Russia and the whole world.
Nathan Altman discusses in 1918 the question of the Russian avant-gardes relation to
the Revolution. In his note to the title of the text Futurism and Proletarian Art
(1918), Altman indicates I am using futurism in its everyday meaning, i.e., all
leftist tendencies in art.
11
Altman asks Why did only revolutionary futurism march
in step with the October Revolution? Is it just a question of outward revolutionary
fervor, just a mutual aversion to the old forms, that joins futurism with the
proletariat?
12

10
Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,1915, in Russian
Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, Ed. And Trans. John E. Bowlt, The Viking Press, New
York 1976, p. 122.
11
Editors note, Nathan Altman, Futurism and Proletarian Art (1918), in Russian Art of the Avant-garde:
Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, Ed. And Trans. John E. Bowlt, The Viking Press, New York 1976, p. 161.
Altmans text was originally published in Iskusstvo kommuny [Art of the Commune], no.2, December 15, 1918, in
Petrograd. This publication was the weekly journal of IZO Narkompros- the Department of Fine Arts in the
Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment.
12
Altman, p. 162
9
Altmans response to this question is based on several assumptions: First, futurism is
a revolutionary art that is breaking all the old bonds and in this sense is bringing art
closer to the proletariat.Proletarian art will be collective, just like anything made in
the new society. The collectivity in question is not about making art as a group, but
about the construction of an art work whose parts are indivisible, in what can be seen
as an allegorical relation to the principle of proletarian solidarity. ..each part of a
futurist picture acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other
partsA futurist picture lives a collective life: By the same principle on which the
proletariats whole creation is constructed. Try to distinguish an individual face in a
proletarian procession. Try to understand it as individual persons absurd.
13
The
quality of syntactic unity in a picture is equated to the revolutionary power of unity
and the collective consciousness of the proletariat.
b. Avant-garde and politics
What, then, is the relation of avant-garde and politics? To what extent does the term
avant-garde define an artistic practice as political? What kind of politics does it
stand for?
On the question of the relationship of avant-garde and politics, Renato Poggioli is
quite clear: it is not a true love story, but rather a short-term affair, opportunistic on

13
Ibid, p. 163
10
the part of artists, and destructive on the part of the state. Poggioli talks about the
myth of a parallel artistic and political revolution:
14
Politics do not make avant-
garde happen. It has an influence, but usually a negative one: a regime or society can
easily destroy the cultural or artistic condition which it cannot, of itself, bring to
life.
15
Poggioli is deterred by theories linking necessarily political radicalism to
artistic radicalism. He would rather see the perceived relation explained as often
merely a necessary and opportunistic affair in prosecuting or authoritarian regimes,
a following of fashion or a cultural survival instinct. While in libertarian regimes, he
will consider the existence of genuine sentiments as the root of artists affiliation to
political causes. This affiliation, though, this sentiment, is seen by Poggioli to be just
wishful thinking or caprice. Thus the hypothesisthat aesthetic radicalism and
social radicalism, revolutionaries in art and revolutionaries in politics, are allied,
which empirically seems valid, is theoretically and historically erroneous.
16
According to Poggioli, the conjunction between avant-garde movements and radical
political change is actually a result of coincidence and spiritual analogue. This
coinciding is fleeting and contingent, given that the motivation for the temporary
bond is a love of adventure or attraction to the nihilist elements that revolutionary
politics provide and not, presumably, a profound ideological commitment.
17
The
identification of artistic revolution with social revolution is now no more than purely
rhetorical, an empty commonplace.
18
Thus proclamations like calling the new art in
Russia to express the music of the revolution is considered by Poggioli to be
sincere, but a sentimental illusion, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovskys declaration
of himself as being on the left of the Left Front is an extremist pose or fashion.

14
Renato Poggioli, Avant-garde and Politics, Yale French Studies, No. 39, Literature and Revolution (1967), p.
182.
15
Ibid, p. 180.
16
Ibid, p.181.
17
Ibid, p.182.
18
Ibid.
11
The Russian avant-garde contributed greatly to what Poggioli terms the modern
concept of culture as spiritual civil war. From such concepts, borne in pose, argues
Poggioli, stems the typical psyche of the modern artist, his position and attitude of
disdain: rebel and revolutionary, outcast and outlaw, bohemian and dracin,
expatriate and migr, fugitive or pote maudit and (why not?) beatnik.
19
Moreover, Poggioli understands the Russian case of avant-garde art, and especially its
decline, as proving an essential and crucial connection between avant-garde and
democracy. The avant-garde, like any culture, can only flower in a climate where
political liberty triumphsavant-garde art is by its nature incapable of surviving
prosecution, protection, or patronage of a totalitarian state and a collective society.
The hostility of public opinion can be useful to it.
20
He reminds us that although
Russian avant-garde is identified with the October revolution, Lenin always showed
an unreserved antipathy to extremism in art.
21
Still, it should be stressed here that
what Poggioli tells here is not the commonplace story in which the Soviet
beaurocratic, oppressive, authoritarian and totlitarian monster is strangling the
innocent, honest, well-wishing and genuinely radical avant-garde artist. The story is
more complex. The nihilist energy of the avant-garde is needed in the first stages of a
revolution on all its levels, and the Russian avant-garde had contributed to the cultural
front by negating the pre-revolutionary order, the conventions and traditions of
bourgeois culture. Their role, though, seems to fade as the regime is stabilized, and
their independence diminished. Nevertheless, since the declared mission of Russian
avant-garde -indeed, any avant-garde- is the demolition of the institution of art and its
autonomy, the decline of avant-garde art as an autonomous realm and its merger with

19
Ibid, p. 183.
20
Ibid, p.181.
21
Ibid, p.180.
12
the state can be seen as a success, indeed a fulfillment of its goal. Then, the
authoritarian regime subsumes the avant-gardes function as the art of the new state.
Nobody left to criticize and negate the new order. Mission accomplished? Not sure.
Taking a broader look at the concept of avant-garde and its historical constituents,
Poggiolis surprising conclusion is that libertarianism and anarchism are, after all, the
only recurring political ideologies within the avant-garde. these ideologies, he then
goes to argue, are actually antipolitical.
2. Russian Avant-Garde
a. Constructivism
Russian avant-garde art of the early twenties (futurism, constructivism) not only
zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial
man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but
the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated
industrial machine....a thorough depsychologisation...what was perceived in the West
as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism...was in Russia hailed as the utopian
prospect of liberation.
22

22
Slavoj Zizek, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No.2 (Winter 2002), p. 536
13
An account of the group of practices called The Russian avant-garde should include
several considerations. We should look at a wide variety of practices, dwell upon the
question of political motivation and commitment, have an idea of the historical
conditions and the forces that are at play in the works, and look for the writers
attitude toward the October revolution and the legacies of Marxism and socialism.
Constructivism, writes Christina Lodder, was not merely an art movement, but
something much wider: an approach to working with materials, within a certain
conception of their potential as active participants in the process of social and political
transformation.
23
The group of practices called Constructivism consists of a rich
texture of practices. We are concerned here with the strand of Constructivism that
opposed a purely artistic activity, and regarded its own as a functional aesthetic. The
variety of attitudes and the distinctions between each of them can be approached
through A.J. Greimas semiotic map.
24
It is based on two crossing axes over the field
Constructivism. One axis is stretching from Art as works in an autonomous
institution, created and received individually, to Not-art,negating those principles as
bourgeois and anti-revolutionary, and another axis, whose poles are Production -as
utilitarian and collective artistic-industrial practice- and Not-production.
Another way to look at Constructivism and to arrive to the Kiosk is through an
important agent in this field The Journal Lef. Abbreviating Left front of the Arts,
Lef was a journal for literature, history and visual art, which published 7 issues
between 1923-1925. LEF provided a forum for Constructivists, Futurists and

23
Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism, Yale University Press,New Haven and London, 1983. p. 1.
24
Quoted and explained in Hal Foster, Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism, Art into Life: Russian
Constructivism 1914-1932, Rizzoli, New York. P. 242-3.
14
Formalists, and was edited by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. particiapants included
Osip Brik, Aleksander Rodchenko, Boris Arvatov, and Gustav Klucis.
The initial expression of Lefs aims was made in the first issue. Commencing by
This is addressed to us. Comrades in Lef!, the manifesto-editorial Whom is LEF
Alerting? calls artists to reassemble their efforts and regroup around the now stable,
post-revolutionary Communist Soviet Union: Sweeping away the old with the
revolution we cleared the field for the new structures of art at the same time. The
earthquake is overIt is time to start big things.
25
Lefs dedication to the Bolsheviks
was then proclaimed: Futurists! Your service for art are great. ButShow by your
work today that your outburst is not the desperate wailing of the wounded
intelligentsia, but a struggle, laboring shoulder to shoulder with all those who are
straining toward the victory of the commune The ambitions were fashionably
elevated: Contsructivists!Constructivism must become the supreme formal
engineering of the whole of life. The text calls for an artistic practice that is based on
craftsmanship, technical skill, but that insists on social involvement and political
commitment, with more than a hint of grandeur. The most skillful forms will remain
black threads in blackest night, will evoke merely the annoyance and irritation of
those who stumble over them if we do not apply them to the shaping of the present
day, the day of revolution. Lefs first issue, published in March 1923, includes 252
pages of politics, prose, poetry and theory, and only four non-textual pages. The
images are characterized by a programmatic tendency to engage in technologies and
media of mass production and dissemination. Included are two drawings (schemes)

25
All quotes from Whom is LEF Alerting?, LEF, Moscow, 1923, p.10-11. trans. Richard Sherwood, in Art in
Theory 1900-1990, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Eds., Blackwell, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA, 1992,
p.321-2.
15
for radio masts, And a double spread with works by Rodchenko, who also designed
Lefs covers. Rodchenkos contribution included one page showing four book covers
designed for Aseev, Mayakovski, and Alexei Gans book Constructivism, and a
second page with drawings-plans for kino-automobiles (cinema-trucks), a sketch for
an agit-prop vehicle.
b. Agit-Prop
Landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation.
26
This
sentence opened the Decree on Land, published on the first day of Lenins regime
,26 October 1917. The decree announced the nationalization of all land, taken from
former rulers of the land: the Tsar, the aristocracy and the church, to the hands of the
state. The peasants were to gain control and ownership over the lands they had been
cultivating for centuries, in a political move that is considered by the historian Peter
Kenez to be Lenin and the Bolsheviks trump card in the ongoing struggle for
power. The Bolsheviks needed to mobilize support from the Russian peasant
population, which was viewed as the most needed base of support for the Revolution.
The Partys activities on this issue developed with the recognition of the need to
communicate information to many people, in a vast country. This need brought about
the practice knows as agitational propaganda, which derives its name from the
Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which was part of the Central and regional
committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In short, agit-prop. By July
1918, approximately 50,000 people are said to have been participating in agitation

26
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm
16
and propaganda for the new regime, still struggling to gain popular support in the
country. The first and most valuable item in a propaganda package agitators were
carrying was the land law. Along with it, the latest newspapers were sent. The
agitators role was to inform people in remote places about the latest political
developments, but also to create, through various tactics, a new political reality. The
partys venture in this area was to encourage participation and support in the
Bolshevik Revolution, and it took upon it the role of an educator as well. An activist
who was sent to the countryside was expected to acquaint people with Leninist land
policies, to establish Soviet power in the villages by agitating and organizing political
debates, but also to make sure the right decisions are made by local assemblies, in
favor of the Reds.
A carriage of the Agit Train The October Revolution, 1919
Another method for mobilizing support for the Bolsheviks was in the form of trains
and ships, sent into the countryside. At that time, trains were still considered symbols
of the new age, and the arrival of a decorated agit-prop train to remote areas of the
country was received with enthusiasm and festivity, as a kind of attraction similar to a
17
traveling circus or fair. In august 1918, the Military Section of the Executive
Committee of the Soviets decided to equip trains with agitators. The first agitational
train was named V.I. Lenin, and was sent to various fronts of the civil war, where
crucial battles were taking place, as well as visiting little towns and villages in
Belorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine.
27
Following the success of V.I. Lenin, more
trains were converted to agit-trains, and agitational stations (agitpunkty) were
established in major railroad stations. These agitation points contained libraries of
propaganda material, lecture halls, and film theatres. The commander of each train
was a political commissar, which was in charge of the main function of the train the
political section, responsible for agitation and liaison with local authorities.
According to Kenez, the most famous train was the October Revolution, in which
some of the chief figures of the Bolshevik Party traveled around the country to get
acquainted with problems and challenges first handedly, and make decisions on the
spot. Agit-trains also included a bureau of complaints, which accepted complaints
and petitions from citizens. The information section organized lectures and distributed
brochures, and controlled the most important piece of equipment carried on the train
the film projector. Screening on the trains included short propaganda films that were
produced for the agit-trains, newsreels and films for children. For most of the peasants
in the villages an agit-train stopped in, it had offered the first ever experience of
moving image. The success of this medium as a tool of propaganda encouraged Lenin
to spend precious foreign currency on the acquisition of film material and projectors
abroad.
28
Each train also carried a printing press, which made each train a traveling
newspapers and leaflets publishing house, and a radio station, which enabled it to
keep in touch with the capital. There were about 16-18 carriages in every agit-prop

27
Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, England, 1985. P. 59.
28
Ibid, p.60.
18
train, one of which was a garage for small automobiles and motorcycles, allowing
activists to visit villages far from the railroad line. The decoration of the trains started
with modernist paintings, but as Kenez states, this was clearly a mistake, for the
peasants did not care for abstract art.
29
The trains were therefore repainted, this time
with pictures of heroic soldiers, peasants, and workers, and with bright slogans. For
many peasants, as Kenez remarks, agit-prop trains often were the first representation
of Soviet power they had encountered.
30

29
Ibid.
30
Another agit-prop traveling innovation was the agit-ship. Krasnaia Zvezda [Red Star] was an agit-ship sailing on
rivers. Since its destinations included large minority population, and there were not enough agitators who could
address those people in their native languages, film became an especially important tool. Krasnaia Zvezda should
forever be remembered for the barge she pulled, which was a floating cinema capable of accommodating 600-800
people.Cf. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, Thames and Hudson, London, 1962. P.225
19
c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk
Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda
Gustav Klucis
Design for Propaganda Kiosk
1922
Ink and gouache on paper, 26.3 x 17.4 cm.
The George Costakis Collection
Why am I fascinated with Klucis Kiosk?
20
First of all, it is the bold inscription Down with art, long live agitational propaganda.
It is wild and insolent. It is also quite unfashionable. How can one feel sympathy with
this image, knowing what we know today about the horrors of the Soviet regime?
How can an aspiration for justice be encouraged and inspired by a drawing serving an
authoritarian regime? Is agitational propaganda worth revisiting at all?
One has to admit that something of this attraction is a feeling of solidarity with an
artist who wants to take part in a massive shift in his society, a move towards what he
sees as a better place. if were not among the cynics, well always be among the
Klucises of the world. Yes, it is the uncomplicated manner in which the clarity of the
mission is set in front of an artist, it is the articulated, common dream that one takes
part in, that I long for and envy. It is also a childish urge, an inclination to what
Poggioli named the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action, a sportive enthusiasm,
and the emotional fascination of adventure. Suddnely it doesnt sound so bad. It
sounds like youth. Im thirty. Should I know better?
It is also an attraction to power. This kiosk represents state power, and the alliance of
artists and rulers. Down with art was not sprayed on a downtown wall or sticky-
vinyled on a gallery wall. It was legitimized and validated by a concrete political
reality. It was commissioned by the future of the world, sole representatives: The
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, c/o Lenin. In a way, the author of this kiosk is not a
rebel artist, but an emerging new social order. Is it the teenager shouting, or his dad
giving him the car keys? To a certain extent, Klucis is empowered here by an idea, an
aspiration and a voice of an emerging culture, a developing society. Along with the
annihilation of the bourgeois institution art, this image wants to abolish the romantic
21
myth of the artist as a solitary, tormented, marginal figure in society. it is strong, full
of the joy of creation, saturated with the erotic of the new, celebrated in common.
This is very attractive, dont you think?
In the essay God Is Not Cast Down,T.J. Clark points out the difficulty for a
contemporary mind to imagine the historical situation in the early years of the
October Revolution, in which a social imaginary coalesced with an abstract artistic
practice.
31
In a way, both the abstract forms of the Russian futurists and the political
aims of the Bolsheviks were difficult to perceive and comprehend, and required a kind
of education (philosophical, political or artistic) that had to be transferred from an
elite to the masses. Lenin and Malevich, although their apparent mutual dislike, were
functioning similarly in their respective fields. The revolution in art that Malevich
was teaching and writing about and Lenins Socialist revolution went together, but
only so far. After all, there was an incommensurability of the totalities that each of the
two men stood for in the unified field of art and politics that emerged in Russia in the
second and third decades of the 20
th
century. It is a conflict that ended in the withering
of the purity of Suprematism, towards the usage of its forms by the state. Political
power has prevailed in the battle that seems to always have the same results. What
complicates this narrative of State wins, art loses or Politicians make reality, artists
make art, is the immanence of the spirit and forms of Russian futurism in the further
development of revolutionary avant-garde art in Russia, and the practices that
appeared, stretching the boundaries of traditional art.

31
TJ Clark, Farewell to an Idea, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999.
22
Euphoria and desperation. These are the two emotions that TJ Clark uses to describe
the mood of Modernism in 1920. Clark posits Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky as
two elements in Modernism, that are in a struggle. The two recurring images in the
essay are a propaganda board in a Vitbesk street, by Lissitzky, and Malevichs Black
Square. The text on the propaganda board reads The Workbenches of the Depots and
Factories are Waiting for you. Let Us Move Production Forward.
32
I join Clark in
his insistence that work of propaganda and suprematist paintings belong to the same
discussion, and complicate each other and our overall articulation of the concept of art
emanating from that period in history. He maintains, importantly, that it is not clear
what each of them stands for: Which of the two men is the materialist, and which is
the idealist or idealizer? Whose art is more revolutionary, or even the more
extreme?...whose art is the more inward-turning? I would ask whos more inward-
looking. who comes across as focused the hardest on sheer procedure, or the
calculation of effects? Which set of images is most open to contingency to the
unknown and predictable, the ebb and flow of circumstance, the vagaries of politics?
Which art most confidnetly refers?
33
These questions are unanswerable, Clark
says, because the distinctions they rest on are what art practice puts in doubt
34
. Clark
acknowledges the high artistic value of Lissitzkys propaganda Board, or, as he says,
the board goes on (and will go on, I think) having aesthetic life. This valuation
results from its perception as fiercely juxtaposing, causing and manifesting a clash
between the two organizing ideas Clark finds in the art of revolutionary Russia:
Nihilism and answerability. Red Square versus Black Circle, Stanki depo
35
versus the
crackling of the movement of non-objectivity. Joining the two is a third element, the

32
Clark, p. 229.
33
Ibid, p.288-9.
34
Ibid, p.289.
35
The factory benches, a part of the text on Lissitzkys propaganda board.
23
state, argues Clark. Thus, in a Mayakovsky-like sentence, Clark expresses the
importance and the legacy, both political and aesthetic, of Lissitzkys propaganda
board and of the agit-propical dangers every avant-garde faces. It shows us the state
shouting (as it usually does) through the revolutions mouth.
36
Clark complicates the
discussion to the benefit of the important, multi-faceted work that we are talking
about, to the detriment of a bi-polar ethical debate that seems to be taking place in art
historical discourse over the Russian avant-garde. Christina Kiaer provides a rough
outline of this kind of debate: many Russians cannot dissociate the avant-garde from
its collaboration with the violent Bolshevik state. many Westerners, on the other hand,
are more willing to imagine a genuine socialist sincerity in the avant-garde that did
not consciously or willingly participate in the violent aspects of the regime.
37
Clarks important problematization of the ethical reading of the Russian avant-garde,
and especially agit-prop practices is what Id like the readers to take with them while
we move to look at Klucis Kiosk.
Gustav Klucis was born in Latvia in 1895. After 5 years of artistic training, he fought
in crucial battles leading to the October revolution as rifleman and a machine-gunner.
He studied with Malevich, and showed work in an exhibition together with Gabo.
Klucis made non-objective paintings (probably influenced by Malevichs
Suprematism), reliefs and constructions (considering materials, space and volume)
,and later moved to utilitarian work. He made significant experiments with
photomontage and developed this technique considerably. My interest is in the series

36
Ibid, p. 297.
37
Christina Kiaer, Boris Arvatovs Socialist Objects, October, Vol. 81 (Summer 1997), p. 117.
24
of designs for agit-constructions he made in 1922 .As Vasilii Raitkin says, it was then
he felt that once and for all art had advanced into the street.
38
A year later, in
Vkhutemas he proposed the organization of the Workshop of the Revolution,
replacing traditional art departments with a studio of experimental agitational art, for
train artists, agitators and Productivists.
Raitkin shows a special affection to Klucis (and we know he had catalogued Klucis
many works in the George Costakis collection). He writes: a confirmed
revolutionary, Klucis lived honestly and openly. For him world revolution was a
concrete reality, not a dream. He believed that an Americanized socialism, a kingdom
of technology, science, and reason would come to peasant Russia.....he paid no
attention to actual contradiction and, consequently, he was a happy man...revolution is
the style of life, the means of action is experiment.
The intersting remark on the Americanized socialism sheds a special light on my
pursuit of the contemporary relevance of this work, and on Russian mass-media-
avant-garde. It complicates the reading of Klutsis work, of Productionist
Constructivism and of agit prop practices. It is important to challange the prevalent
perception, that is attributed almost automatically to any Russian avant-garde,
specifically agit-prop, according to which it feeds of a monolithic, Soviet ideological
ground. There is another statement Klucis made, which we should bear in mind in
preparation for a productive and prejudice-confusing new look at the legacy of

38
Vasilii Raitkin, Gustav Klucis: Between the Non-Objective World and World Revolution, in The Avant-Garde
in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Jeanne DAndrea and Stephan West, Eds., Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, Los angeles 1980. p. 60.
25
Russian avant-garde: We need Marxism+Americanism.
39
Here we should read
further in Christina Kiaers important research on Boris Arvatov. In her essay on the
utilitarian productionist Arvatov, who was one of the founders of the Lef group
(with whom Klucis was associated), Kiaer proposes a new look on his ideology and
ideas, which may have been more radical than thought before.
Kiaer argues that Arvatov imagines a socialist form of modernity that would equal
the West in technology and consumer abundance, but without the harmful effects of
the commodity form. Retrieving his model of an alternative socialist modernity today
will contribute, I hope, she writes, to contesting the current triumphalist claims that
the demise of the Soviet Union has definitively proved the failure of the socialist
idea.
40
Raitkin encourages us to follow that path, and to trust Klucis to be more than a
Bolshevik advertizer: like any artist, even in the most confining situation, Klucis
retained his artistic independence. This was not the independence of the jester at a
medieval court, but a fanatical belief in the necessity and strength of the new art.
41
And again, let us be very suspicious of the equation of good art with liberal political
values.

39
Written by Nikolai Bukharin, this was one of the mottos in Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klucis project for a
Studio of the Revolution, the aforementioned studio of experminetal agitational art (agit-art or propaganda art),
presented in Masterskaia Revoliutsii, Lef, Moscow, No. 1, p. 5. Quote from Raitkin, p.60.
40
Kiaer, p.106.
41
Raitkin, p.63.
26
Revolution demands from art forms that are absolutely new, forms that have not
existed before.
42
The agit-constructions series was designed for the streets and squares of Moscow, that
was about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, and to host the
Fourth Congress of the Comintern. It included radio-orators,radio-tribunes and
cinema-photo stands constructions functioning as supports for loudspeakers,
screen, and/or a rostrum for public speakers- and Kiosks -constructions made to
function as a covered stand or small pavillion for books, newspapers, or flyers. The
agit-constructions also served, as Christina Lodder notes, to give a spatial and audio-
visual presence to revolutionary slogans.
43
Lodder also comments on the color of the
wooden structures (only two of the designs were built): to emphasise the active and
passive elements of the structures, loudspeakers were red, stands were often black.
44
The structures stem from a function-oriented planning, resulting in light, collapsible
piece of street furniture, which nevertheless bears a heavy semiotic weight.
They are bursting with the energy of several, compressed functions. They were meant
to be installed in the street as sculptures/furniture/public media outlets, and should
have functioned even when they were silent, when they exuded no information. The
stands were made of wood, canvas and cable, materials which were available in
Russia at that time of great material poverty. Made of minimal strips of wood,
economic contraints seem to have determined their form and material. Fragile,
unopressive, not monumental, built on a human scale, I could almost call them
democratic. Klucis agit-constructions seem to be as far from an armoured cash

42
Gustav Klutsis, from rough notes for his Autobiography, 1930s. Quoted in Raitkin, p. 62.
43
Lodder, p. 163.
44
Ibid.
27
machine or an anti-terror police unit as they are far from easle paintings. I wouldnt
attribute them to state power, but rather to education and the attempt to contribute in
good faith to the proliferation of the great message of their epoch: the message of
communism. Maybe this is already uncritical of me. But this is only one aspect.
What does Klucis want from me? Why am I looking at a propaganda kiosk from The
Soviet Union? Can I not see how horrifyingly similar it is to the US army recruitment
center in Times Square, NY? Why dont I reject it and detest it on account of its
precedential status in relation to marketing stalls in shopping malls that propagate the
use of make-up to women interested in beauty? Yes, its contemporary equivalents
might be an Ikea wallbracket, or a giant video monitor in Piccadili showing only
McDonalds ads, or the Evening Standard Stall near your tube station, shouting
headlines.
28
So Why do I bother? Why am I still in front of the kiosk?
Because still, something is not clear. Interestingly, for an artistic construction
designed for mass communication, there is something undeciferable about it. How
should it function? It is a double x-shaped structure, on its center axis an octagonal
drum which might be revolving, with words and patterns on it. at the top end of the
two x-structures we see something like two propellers, also carrying words. the words
compose the text Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda.
45
Suddenly it
emerges as a self-referential agit-prop device. An obejct whose purpose is bluntly and
openly expressed generates a moment when it transcends its proclaimed function,
silences the rattle and hum of the city streets, and starts radiating a certain
purposelessness. This is not to say that Gustav Klucis did not want to make objects
for the streets, supporting and promoting the revolution. This is only to emphasise a
complexity that is revealed in this specific object/design. Remember: the street-object
were looking at is a design. A drawing, Ink and gouache on paper. It is 26.3x17.4
cm. On something like an A4 sheet, Klucis was dreaming, living a future, a dream
that coincided with a collective dream emerging in the society he lived in. There is an
author, and there is a mystery. And when I look again at this specific design I see in it
both functionality and oddity, both sheer praise of the regime and commitment to its
methods for gaining power - and an artists idiosyncracy, hallucination, disgust and
contempt for art. It appears like a bird that cannot fly. An engine without a car.
46
Raw power and only words. a movement devoid of space.

45
Margit Rowell and Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George
Costakis Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1981. P. 268, fig. 226.
46
Somehow I think now of The Atlas Groups work My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair (ongoing), in which an
engine of a Fiat 127 car is hovering, suspended in the air, 15 meters above the car. In both works I read a trauma,
an hysterical public sphere and an artist, an authorial autonomy trying to generate a change.
29
a slogan is a theme, but it must become a fact of art if it is to work.
47
Back to TJ Clark, for a reality check. Clark demonstrates the importance of a wide
historical and social background to the judgment and reading of a work of art. He
explains the elaboration of historical and political context in the need to catch the
tone, to understand a work from the perspective it was made from and through the
situation that is enabling and conditioning it. In the case of the Soviet Union and the
propaganda board, we are asked by the image to build into our reading of it a sense
not just of absence and abstention, but of actual violent disagreement about who could
speak to, or for, the people no longer at the factory benches speak in what language?
Speak in whose name?
48
Clark wants to emphasize the bad faith and tensions that
surrounded artists speaking in the name of a collective, to that collective. The
Bolshevik policy of accelerated self-organization Bukharins term- meant at the
time hunger, unemployment, inflation, and prosecution of political rivals. It would be
easy to claim that in the mix of euphoria and desperation that characterized that
moment, artists were on the side of euphoria.
Will you ever understand that to write of a storm from newspaper knowledge Is not
to write about a storm?
49

47
Raitkin, p.62.
48
Clark, p. 290.
49
Whom is LEF Alerting?, p.321-2.
30
3. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing?
a.Deferred action
Hal Foster introduces his book The Return of the Real by emphasising the
contemporary relevance of the construct of the avant-garde, and the need to revisit it.
He warns against the premature dismissal of the avant-garde, arguing that The avant-
garde is obviously problematic (it can be hermetic, elitist, and so on); yet, recoded in
terms of resistant and/or alternative articulations of the artistic and the political, it
remains a construct that the left surrenders at its own loss.
50
Foster, like many of the
writers on avant-garde art, especially those who value the political and critical
potential of its legacy, seems to be coming from a leftist point of view.
51
Nevertheless, Foster keeps a critical distance from the primordial leftist political art,
and points out The familiar problems of the avant-garde.
52
Sounds like a poem to
me:

The ideology of progress,


The presumption of originality,
The elitist hermeticism,
The historical exclusivity,
The appropriation by the culture industry,

50
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. And Lonon, 1996. p. xvi.
51
It does become difficult to avoid arguing the logical relation of leftist politics to the avant-garde. True, the big
exception is Italian Fururism with its relation to Fascism and technocracy, but the legacy of the avant-garde seems
to draw its contemporary political meaning mostly from Revolutionary Russia. For a shrewd account of a
contemporary neoliberal-corporate appropriation of the historical avant-garde, Cf. Matthew Jesse Jackson,
Managing The Avant-garde, New Left Review 32, March-April 2005.
http://www.newleftreview.net/issue32.asp?article=04
52
familiar problems could mean problems in the family, which makes sense given Fosters admitted partiality
on the subject.
31
And so on.

53
Looking at this list of problems -read not as problems in the philosophical sense of
aporia, (as Enzensberger put it)
54
, but as hindrance- one wonders which of the listed
notions is the worst sin or faux pas in contemporary art discourse, and what can be
most easily forgiven, for the sake of being, having, or supporting a contemporary
avant-garde art. This list can be a useful key, or index to the conventional sensitivities
active in this discourse, it seems.
For Foster, the avant-garde remains a crucial coarticulation of artistic and political
forms. Thus, he sets off to suggest new genealogies of the avant-garde that
complicate its past and support its future.
55
Looking for new genealogies, Foster criticizes what is indeed a central text on the
subject, Peter Brgers Theory of the avant-garde. He finds it pessimistic and
limiting (if not annihilating) the potential of avant-garde to be an active, relevant
political vector in culture. Foster names several of Brgers shortcomings and faults,
such as the lacking selection of referred work and the presumption that one theory can
encompass such variety of practices. Nevertheless, according to Foster, Brgers
theory is most problematic in its dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as merely neo,
as so much repetition in bad faith that cancels the prewar critique of the institution of

53
Foster, p. 5
54
In 1973 Hans Magnus Enzensberger published The aporias of the avant-garde, in which he argues that the
avant-garde was coopted by the culture industry and that the historical avant-garde had failed to deliver what it had
always promised: to sever political, social and aesthetic chains, explode cultural reifications, throw off traditional
forms of domination, liberate repressed energies.
55
Foster, p.5.
32
art.
56
Foster objects the categorization of the historical avant-garde as an absolute
origin whose aesthetic transformations are fully significant and historically effective
in the first instance.
57
According to Brger, writes Foster, to repeat the historical
avant-garde is to cancel its critique of the institution of autonomous art: for Brger
the repetition of the historical avant-garde by the neo-avant-garde can only turn the
anti-aesthetic into the artistic, the transgressive into the institutional. Brger can
only see the neo-avant-garde in toto as futile and degenerate in romantic relation to
the historical avant-garde, onto which he projects not only a magical effectivity but a
pristine authenticity.
58
When Brger says no movement in the arts today can
legitimately claim to be more advanced as art than any other
59
, Foster replies this
conclusion is mistaken historically, politically, and ethically.
60
Foster proposes a different look on the issue. He advocates the importance and
political relevance of the neo avant-garde, while insisting on the deferred temporality
of artistic signification
61
. Based on Freud and Laplanche, Foster suggests the notion
of deferred action, borrowed from the psychoanalytical discourse, as the historical-
cultural dynamic of the neo avant-garde. Instead of the unequivocal failure of the
avant-garde, and the triumph of the culture industry that Foster is reading in Brgers
story, Foster wants to establish a complex relation of anticipation and reconstruction
between the historical and neo avant-garde. He claims that neo-avant-garde has
extended the historical avant-gardes critique of the institution of art, and created new
aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections, and political interventions. He askes:
Might the neo-avant-garde comprehend the historical avant-garde for the first time,

56
Ibid, p. 8.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid, p. 11.
59
Brger, p. 63.
60
Foster, p. 16.
61
Foster, p.11
33
not cancel its project? The neo avant-garde, or for that matter any avant-gardist
contemporary work is an act of creative critique, says Foster. Creative critique is
interminable (stated positively), which posits avant-garde as political art that is an
ongoing endeavor, rather that a distant and irrelevant historical phenomenon. The
relation of historical and neo-avant-garde is one of anticipated futures and
reconstructed pastsin a deferred action that throws over any simple scheme of
before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition.
62
What was not understood
or is considered to have failed historically functions traumatically, as a hole in the
symbolic order. This traumatic element that was repressed institutionally appears
again, either hysterically as anarchistic bursts of resistance- or worked through more
laboriously, as an attempt to revisit modernist political concerns in art through a
critique of the institution rather than the conventions of art. Describing the avant-
gardes function as aiming to destroy the autonomy of art in order to reconnect art and
life is actually predisposing it to failure, says Foster, with the sole exception of
movements set in the midst of revolutions. In a remark that is received by the writer
of this essay as addressed to him, Foster adds that this is the reason why Russian
Constructivism is so often privileged by artists and critics on the left.
63
In Fosters view, an avant-gardes strategy that is still worth employing is the attack
on the degraded world of capitalist modernity that contains a mimetic dimension
showing how ugly it is- and a utopian dimension, focusing on what cannot be as a
critique of what is. For the most acute avant-garde artists, concludes Foster, [their]
practice is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life
but a perpetual testing of the conventions of bothSustaining a tension between

62
Foster, p. 29
63
Foster, p. 15
34
them. At its best avant-garde is contradictory, mobile and otherwise diabolical, rather
than false, circular and otherwise affirmative.
64
b. The new media avant-garde
A self-proclaimed contender for the title of The 21
st
Century avant-garde is what
artist and writer Lev Manovich calls a new avant-garde for the information society.
In his essay Avant-garde as Software, Manovich argues that the development of new
digital technologies in the 1990s (the new media revolution) is comparable with the
development of new media in the 1910-20s, but he does not compare the usage of
new media in both historical cases on the basis of their potential for political change.
The avant-garde becomes software is Manovichs conclusion, meaning that the
formal techniques of the historical avant-garde are today codified and naturalized by
software, and that the new software techniques of working with media represent the
new avant-garde of the meta-media society. The latter claim is, I think, the more
substantial and therefore presumptuous of the two. This kind of comparison of new
media with historical avant-garde disregards or at least marginalizes the political
context and impetus lying in the foundations of historical avant-garde practices,
especially those in revolutionary Russia, which are Manovichs main reference when
writing about the 1920s avant-garde. Moreover, this equation between the two
movements or cultural phenomena reduces the concept of avant-garde to its
technological and formal elements and implications, and seems to abandon the social
aspirations and the political program involved in the project of Russian avant-garde.

64
ibid
35
In a footnote, Manovich does mention the political question involved in a discussion
on avant-garde. He acknowledges the relation between a new socio-economic regime
and a new cultural language, and admits that no revolution in aesthetic forms was
prompted by the new information age. The conclusion of this argument accentuates
the abandonment of the political aspects in such a digital avant-garde: Despite
pronouncements about the new net economy from Wired magazine, we may still be
living in the same economic period that gave rise to Human Comedy and Gone With
the Wind. In short, net.capitalism may still be the same old capitalism as before.
65
Manovich does somehow manage to prove that radical techniques and avant-garde
strategies of the 1920s became materialized in a computer, and are now standard
computer technology. One example is the collage, which evolved to the prevalent cut
and paste procedure of data that one can easily perform on any computer nowadays.
Indeed, the diminishing shock value and dissent-factor of early avant-garde
techniques and strategies have already been diagnosed (and lamented) by many. But
the question remains, in face of the technological and cultural phenomena of the
digital age: how can new media technologies contribute to the making of art that is
politically conducive of change?
According to Manovich, post-modernism naturalizes the avant-garde; it gets rid of
the avant-gardes original politics and, through repeated use, makes avant-garde
techniques appear totally natural. Although not put in the most precise of terms (it is
not a naturalization but rather a trivialization), Manovichs impression seems to be
correct. One of the problems in the legacy of Russian avant-garde however diverse
its articulations and the lessons this legacy can teach us may be- is the uses made of

65
Lev Manovich, Avant-garde as Software (2002)
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002.html
36
its forms, disregarding their political content or context. It is the problem of the
repetition of a form that is devoid of its content, and specifically the appropriation of
avant-garde forms and strategies by a capitalist consumer culture.
66
Manovichs
position on the political implications of these appropriations is not clear, but he claims
that post-modern culture..does not only replay, sample, comment on and echo old
avant-garde techniques; it also advances them further, intensifying them and
overlaying them on top of one another. He gives a few examples for this
advancement of the techniques: A few photographic fragments brought together in a
Rodchenko photo-collage become hundreds of image layers in a digitally composited
video; the quick film cutting of the 1920s is similarly speeded up to the extreme, with
limits set by the temporal resolution of our visual system simply to register individual
imagesthe images which originally belonged to the incompatible aesthetic systems
of constructivism and surrealism are brought together in the space of a single music
video.
67
In an absolutely striking disregard of the political meaning of the term
avant-garde as resistance, Manovich goes on, maintaining that hypermedia,
databases. Search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, simulation
are the techniques of the new media avant-garde which is about new ways of
accessing and manipulating information. He succeeds in providing an analysis of
new media technology in the information age, but fails in explaining his choice of the
term avant-garde, and seems to be complacent with the postmodernist rendering of
the term as part of an affirmative culture.
Furthermore, Manovich seems to disregard the political potential that does exist in
new digital communication mechanisms. An attempt to estimate the potential for new

66
Cf. Hal Foster, Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism, Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism
1914-1931, Rizzoli, New York.
67
Manovich, ibid
37
means of resistance in the digital age of information would lead us to projects like
www.indymedia.org, a global network of local and independent news organizations.
Using the WWW, based on the notion of the net, which stems from post-structuralist
theories and anarchist philosophy, Marxist theory and left-wing political strategies,
this organization produces news that are supposedly free from the constraints and
limitations of corporate and state Media organizations, and provide the news one does
not hear, in a language that is uninhibitedly (leftist) ideological. Its de-centralized
structure is enabled by the popular availability and access of new media technologies
like the Internet and portable word-processing, digital video and communication. This
leads to the existence of an independent, low-budget, voluntary news operation that is
freely accessible online and its potential contributors are non-professional users of
these technologies, which are committed to a truth they do not find in the mainstream
media, and to an idea of progress.
38
c. TV CHANNEL (2004-)
TV CHANNEL was born from a desire to combine artistic, political and media
practices. In February 2005 It proclaimed itself:
TV CHANNEL aspires to function as a conglomeration of the following forms: A
producer and distributor of public television; A laboratory for experimental television;
A permanent media installation; A curatorial space propagating the making of
television as art; A cultural center organizing presentations and discussions. The
proclaimed horizon of its current activities is a digital television channel that will be
broadcast to homes, public areas and galleries around the world.
68
From September 2004 to June 2005, TV CHANNEL was transmitting at least one
new image a day, on a short-range transmission system. Based in a studio at the Slade
School of Fine art, TV CHANNEL was received in monitors installed in public areas
of the school. The broadcasts included video, audio, photography, performance,
discussions, text, and live events and non-events.
TV CHANNEL is evaluating and performing the possibilities of televisions function
as art/medium/political device today. Several visions, dreams and ideologies from
different avant-garde moments have left their mark on it. TV CHANNEL is
comprised to some extent of signs and strategies of avant-garde art from different

68
TV CHANNEL, Norwich Gallery, 2005
39
moments in the 20
th
century. Articulated with contemporary media conventions, those
signs now demand the viewer a subjective evaluation of the meaning and potential of
such practices in todays reality. TV CHANNEL is a media hope which broadcasts a
contemporary melancholic self-nullification of an artwork wanting to make a political
change, while facing the dropping rate of the currency Utopia. Its structure implies a
complex relation of hope and despair, and this complexity does not cancel itself as a
contradiction, but is articulated as an attempt to soberly generate a future. It is a
nostalgic fantasy and a concrete plan. It heats up a think tank with the energy is
wishes to produce out of the failure of its precedents. Like petrol is made of ossified
life, TV CHANNEL is made of failed avant-gardes.
Rather than a factory of dreams, as Boris Groys calls the art of Socialist Realism,
which developed from the Russian avant-garde, TV CHANNEL is a factory of
questions. Socialist Realism was the attempt to create dreamers who would dream
socialist dreams.
69
It would be exaggerated (although somewhat true) to say that TV
CHANNEL ultimately sees as its aim a new socialist culture. It does, nevertheless,
demand its viewers to examine their own convictions, attitudes and practices in
relation to the social and political status quo.
How does one read a sequence of video images that calls itself television? the
utopian impulse is a major force in this work. Reality can be different. Art is a place
to negotiate that change. If a red square with white margins is broadcast from a studio
and thus appears on several, distant TV monitrs, something happens. this pre-
revolutionary moment, Malevichs Red Square (pictorial realism of a peasant

69
Boris Groys, Utopian Mass Culture, in Boris Groys, Max Hollein, Eds., Dream Factory Communism, Schirn
Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Hatje Cantz, 2003. p. 24
40
woman), wishes to appear as an omen, an icon (similar to the way it was hung in the
last futurist exhibition, 0.1., in 1915 on the top corner of a room, like Christian-
orthodox icons typical of Russian homes). It is the re-revelation of TV as a means for
change. It is a means to look inwards. A meditational device, like a blank spot in the
wall in front of you, or like a church by Mark Rothco. If the TV set is the apsis of the
house, if it is the cornerstone of our public life, then let it be.
One of the TV CHANNEL works is France. It is a Final Cut Pro animation piece:
along the duration of a minute three moving rectangles colored red, white, and blue
enter the black frame and organize themselves vertically prallell, as a tricolor. Then
appears at the center of the screen three consecutive expressions, each of them
replaces the previous one after a short break. Temporary Autonomy, Distributive
Justice, and Sorority.
TV CHANNEL is motivated by the construtivist call to the factory! Like agit prop,
It is interested in public places where consciousness is constructed and its factory is
the world of mass media. Avant-garde artists began investigating mass-reproduction
techniques, and the dissemination of new ideas in the public sphere, ideas that oppose
the existing social order. A visit to the museum is a video piece documenting an
intervention in the space and time of the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, as
the first episode in a TV series. Planned as a series of coin throws in museums, it is a
pocket-poem, a dance, a sound installation, an act of personal empowerment in face of
powerful meaning-generating mechanisms. A situation constructed by little means, an
attempt to hijack an institutional art environment, ends with a silent retreat to the exit.
Micro-utopia, anyone?
41
4. Appendix: Tommorrows Television

A producer and distributor of public television;
A laboratory for experimental television;
A permanent media installation;
A curatorial space;
A cultural center;
A model for a digital television channel that will be received in
homes, public areas and galleries around the world.
TV CHANNEL produces live television, video works, public actions,
music, prints, discussions and documents.
42
TV CHANNEL invents, appropriates, creates, reclaims, remixes,
authors and authorizes public images and sounds that construct
collective consciousnesses.
TV CHANNEL appears as a daily experience, journalism of a kind
1.Television is a video monitor connected to the world.
2.Television constitutes a public sphere
3. Whatever can happen in art can happen in television
3.1 there is an animosity between the artworld and the Media,
especially television.
4.1.Television educates people
4.2. Art entertains people
5.1. Televisions authority is something to study and learn from
5.2. Ideology is everywhere.
43
5. If art can be everywhere, it can be on TV.
6. art is one of the places in which progressive thinking about
society has got to take place.
6.1. in a barbaric world, art has no meaning
6.2. we produce meaning
6.3. Am I one of you or one of them?
6.4. The production of meaning and its implementation in culture is
related to mechanisms of validation and dissemination.
6.5. Power is in the eye of the beholder.
7. TV is a tool, a platform
7.1 Whos tool? Whos platform?
8.1 From the standpoint of (-)no political power, conflict is always
better than consensus
8.2. From the standpoint of (+)political power, consensus is always
better than conflict.
9. The concept of progress still has meaning.
44
10. Political television
10.1 do you have an opinion?
10.2 dont just tolerate me, argue with me
11. Abstract television
11.1 Abstraction is an extreme way of looking at the world.
11.2. it enables a close examination of things and their materiality.
11.3. it makes space for people
11.4. it slows things
12. Slow television
12.1 machines create speed
12.2 slower, please
12.3. inhale
12.4. exhale
45
5. Bibliography
1. Bowlt, John E. (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-
1934, New York, The Viking Press, 1976.

2.Clark,T.J., Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London, Yale University Press,
1999..
3.DAndrea, Jeanne, and West, Stephan (Eds.), The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-
1930: New Perspectives, Los angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980.
4.Fer, Briony, Russian Art and the Revolution, Milton Keynes, The Open University
Press, 1983.
5.Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press,
1996.
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6.Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Dream Factory Communism, Hatje Cantz,
2003.
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Hudson, 1962.
46
8.Groys, Boris, On the New,
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html
9.Harrison, Charles, and Wood, Paul (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Oxford UK and
Cambridge USA, Blackwell, 1992
10. Jackson, Matthew Jesse, Managing The Avant-garde, New Left Review 32,
March-April 2005. http://www.newleftreview.net/issue32.asp?article=04
11.Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass
Mobilization, 1917-1929, Cambridge, England,Cambridge University Press, 1985.
12.Kiaer, Christina, Boris Arvatovs Socialist Objects, October, Vol. 81, Summer
1997.
13. Lef, No. 1-2, Moscow, 1923,
14.Lodder, Christina, Russian Constructivism, New Haven and London, Yale
University Press, 1983.
15. Manovich, Lev, Avant-garde as Software (2002)
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002.html
16.Norwich, Norwich Gallery, TV CHANNEL, 2005.
47
17.Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald,
Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1968.
18.Poggioli, Renato, Avant-garde and Politics, Yale French Studies, No. 39
(Literature and Revolution), 1967.
19.Rowell, Margit and Zander Rudenstine, Angelica, Art of the Avant-Garde in
Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection, New York, The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, 1981.
20.Washington, Seattle, Henry art Gallery, Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism
1914-1931, New York,Rizzoli,1990.
21.Woodward, Kathleen (ed.), The Myths of Information: Technology and
Postindustrial Culture, London and Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
22. Zizek, Slavoj, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No.2,
Winter 2002.
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