Exhibitions
In Form: Popov and the Lost Constructivists
Julie Ewington
Who was Popov? And how did the constructivists come to be lost? Was he lost too or merely misplaced? How can we ever know? Every day we work alongside Australians who have come here from other countries and we try to imagine those other worlds they have left behind them. A 'foreign' name alerts us and accented English signals a different life, another culture. A kind of closed door. And multitudes of lost stories.
Each decade—each war—brings fresh waves of newcomers. After World War II, when immigrants began arriving again in Australia from Russia, many settled in Brisbane, coming by way of Harbin and other settlements in the Russian Far East on the Pacific coast. They brought with them their language, their icons, their silver, their memories. Suppose though, as Robert MacPherson does here, that some brought with them the relics of Russian constructivist art; fragments of those great experiments in the first three decades of the twentieth century? Is it possible that some small remnants of this utopian flowering have been here in Australia all along, lying dormant, waiting to be found?
It's hard to imagine now, post-Perestroika, post-Glasnost, post-Chechnya and possibly post-Putin, when events in Russia are in the news every day, that only 50 years ago the country was impossibly distant. After its tumultuous history in the early 20th Century and long closed to the West under communism, Russia was a mystery. Publications about its avant-garde art slowly began to appear in the 1960s. For a long time, only Camilla Gray's pioneering book The Great Experiment in Russian Art 1863–1922, first published in 1962, gave any sense of the extraordinary energy with which Russian artists across every field had greeted the dawning of the modernist age.
Back then, we peered at furry black and white photographs of lost constructivist sculptures and distant avant-garde exhibitions, evocative but unsatisfactory relics of disappeared art and artists—and we did know about Stalin's labour camps and the ruthless suppression of experimental art in the USSR from the mid-1930s. Today, the National Gallery of Australia holds one of world's finest collections of Russian revolutionary period art—wonderful paintings by Malevich, Natalia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay; prints by El Lizzitsky; photographs by Rodchenko; books, posters and exquisite ceramics embellished with traditional and suprematist emblems; a wealth of relics from Diaghilev's legendary Ballets Russes—all the brilliant joyous heartbreaking evidence of a moment of astonishing artistic invention in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Here, now, in Robert MacPherson's Popov and the Lost Constructivists (1982–2007), are fifty-nine sculptures in the constructivist idiom. Individually unassuming, collectively splendid, this array speaks of a host of different artists and styles. Clearly this is an entire school or style of art making, a kind of conversation. The basic elements of their shared language are a flexible set of geometric shapes and a strict code governing the size of the reliefs: each might be held in the hands and might have been made on a table-top. The scale is deliberately unheroic, quietly modest; the colours are controlled but intense; the overall effect is sprightly and playful. Taken together, the inexpensive found materials used and the elegance of the formal repertoire suggests how rich complexity may be born out of stringent denial. If you look more closely, you will see certain clusters of sculptures suggest the stylistic differences found in a broad group of like-minded artists. Look at the shifts and changes in colours. Some prefer white (as did Kasimir Malevich when he made his famous suprematist painting White On White in 1918); some delight in strong reds, greens and yellows; others elicit a spare elegance from the rough textures of unpainted cardboard and plywood.
All this is in the spirit of those distant constructivist studios, where artists hung their sculptures on the walls in informal flights that belied the strict formality of their individual designs, sometimes seeking to unleash the potential of the new non-objective languages of art by experimental arrangements, sometimes recalling the traditional placement of icons high in the corner of Russian rooms. So too is the use of a wealth of found materials. Between around 1910 and 1920, Russian avant-garde artists looked to the cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque in Paris (Vladimir Tatlin visited Picasso's studio in 1914), making wall reliefs from everyday materials. In that same spirit, MacPherson's materials are an improvised archaeology of Australian daily life: see the fragment of an old cane linen-basket, look for the plastic fly-swatter, observe all the little dialogues between textures and colours and sizes that recall the quotidian inevitability and familiar cadences of daily working life.
I invoke language deliberately. The second extraordinary part of Popov and the Lost Constructivists is a collection of thousands of death notices, originally taken from Brisbane's Courier-Mail and later from other Australian newspapers. MacPherson started collecting notices recording the passing of members of Brisbane's Russian community, as the post-war generation died out. Later, he chose death notices featuring nicknames, invented names that suggest particular histories and special affection. To receive a nickname is to be specified and classified, to be marked through linguistic invention. (As the vernacular has it, these folk evidently had form.) In the daily columns of the death notices, we are all simultaneously permanently lost and still to be found. Serendipitously, one finds family, friends and acquaintances in these registers of the lost.
Importantly, the form of the newspaper death notice is exact and unchanging. Small, spare and modest, each notice compresses a life and a lifetime of affiliations into a column inch. Its peculiar pathos consists in this reduction, which is the certain destination of us all. Within its own conventions, the death notice is poetry of a sort. In the context of contemporary literary genres, its humdrum majesty abuts both the graven solemnity of the tombstone and the antic invention of post-war concrete poetry, and supplements the increasing popularity of formal newspaper obituaries. Again, I invoke the great Russians of the early twentieth century. Looking at the reiterated square form of death notices, each almost identical yet profoundly different, I think of the rigorous method of Russian formalism, that school of literary criticism which insisted that we carefully note the exact structure of each piece of writing; that we understand that while each is irreducibly individual, at the same time it participates in a wider conversation set in train by shared literary genres. (In this spirit, I note that the newsprint fragments are mounted on long hanging scrolls of cash register paper, each accounting for many lives.)
The exact forms and shapes of things. These matter. Let us observe the precision with which MacPherson has constructed this enormous work from myriad small elements. On the left side of the room, so that we naturally read from left to right, the long sober wall of death notices; on the other walls, the lively host of sculptural reliefs. Yet in spite of or perhaps because of their radical differences in form and material, and especially because they have been amassed across a span of time, these two groupings speak to each other across the space. Taken together, they remember. Popov and the Lost Constructivists may be read as a memorial for the legions of the as-yet unsung. It is a joyous gathering; a testament to everyday lives; to ordinary things; to work; and to working at art against the grain, whether in Stalinist Russia or liberal hedonist Australia. Each life is remarkable, all love extraordinary. All of which is noteworthy.
All the formalities have been observed. All the necessary observances. Robert MacPherson always tells us that he is a formalist. And in the forms of correct observance, some sort of consolation is to be found.
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For Elizabeth Senior.