Grimspound and Inhabiting Art by Rod Mengham

Author:Rod Mengham [Mengham, Rod]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784105938
Publisher: Carcanet
Published: 2018-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

The Real Avant-Garde

I first walked into Kettle’s Yard shortly after arrival in Cambridge in 1973. I had come to study English and to try to write. For me – as for anyone concerned with experimental art – the house by the church gave spatial form to an historical problem. You could say it enshrined the paradox of the twentieth-century avant-gardes: the pursuit of new forms, the discovery of organising principles specific to the medium, and the vexed question of how these formalist goals relate to the society that has produced them. In Kettle’s Yard, the question of how we actually live with experimental art was given practical form – and a very English character – in Jim Ede’s arrangements, but the full scope of the question has been addressed and readdressed in a series of temporary exhibitions. To my mind, the value of these exhibitions was epitomised in the Polish Constructivism show of 1984. This was typically farsighted, bringing Polish Constructivist paintings, sculptures and publications to Britain for the first time, and typically overarching, exhibition and catalogue together encapsulating an entire history of debate around issues echoed in the more familiar wrangles of western art movements.

Polish Constructivism between the mid-1920s and the late 1930s was essentially a series of arguments about the relationship between art and twentieth-century production processes. There were three overlapping phases, each associated with different artistic groupings and group publications. The first, Blok, was the earliest and most shortlived, initiated in 1924 and succeeded in 1926 by Praesens, which lasted until 1939, despite a major change of direction and of personnel. Both of these movements involved collaboration and rivalry between artists and architects. The distinguishing feature of the third phase, which led to the formation of a group calling itself a.r., was a series of joint projects involving both artists and writers. The initial letters a.r. stood alternatively for awangarda rzeczywista [the real avant-garde] and for arstysci rewolucyjni [revolutionary artists]. The obvious protagonist in each of these three scenarios was Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the most radical formalist in the history of Polish Constructivist painting, and the busiest controversialist. The reason Blok was so shortlived was intransigence on the part of both Strzeminski and Mieczyslaw Szczuka, who clashed over the theoretical subordination of art to questions of social utility. Szczuka wished to place art at the service of town-planning and industrial design, while Strzeminski believed in its independence from existing forms of urbanism as the basis for imagining entirely different social structures in the future. Praesens started harmoniously with the idea of promoting collaborations between artists and architects, seizing opportunities to impose abstract painted designs on existing buildings, and to interpose abstract sculptures in the spaces between buildings. However, after three years, Strzeminski left the group, together with the painter Henryk Stazewski and the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, convinced of the need to replace these partial measures with a unified programme of urban design, where the emphasis was on the composition of the entire architectural environment according to the same principles.

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