THE STRUGGLE TO BRING GOD’S BRICKS TO EARTH

The Early Soviet Avant-Garde, the Return of the Concept and the Cybernetic Poisoning against Megalopolis

There is a constant revolving interrelation and an elemental respect between the individual and the natural world.

When a person finds themselves contemplating the breadth of geologic time, they may become aware of the fact that they are inextricably involved in something that is hard to define, the scale of which is very difficult to fathom, and which starts to take on the appearance of a vast and sacred process the longer one thinks about it. You and I are implicit in the earth’s expression of itself; the agonizingly granular yet colossal drama of a mountain’s negotiation with gravity, the result of microscopic collisions…

In this state of reflection, I wonder if organic material has a soul; if it’s possible that there is an animation quietly providing the conditions for the bringing of goodness to the earth; that the human being is here to be conflicted; to be tempted, to be waged war upon by forces of evil, so that we may bring about justice on earth, thus securing the evolutionary lineage towards the instantiation of something beautiful that we cannot yet define, and to do so on behalf of the mountain.

Geologic time is difficult for me to comprehend. I try for a moment and I am soon lost in reverie. The logic I’ve been taught, so that I may understand society, disintegrates. The language that I’ve been taught now only teaches me that it is eluded by a truer language, which is comprised of a spectrum of absences. I am overcome by a sense that I am surrounded by a beauty that I might not be meant to fully understand, and that my inability to grasp it asks to be explored. I become aware of the possibility that this ineffability is only a representation or simulacrum of another, larger ineffability, nested in an endless procession of increasingly larger ineffabilities. Language and rationalization break up and crack; “the discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution; the certainties of didactic discourse are hurled into the erosion of the poetic principle. Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.”¹

This moment of consciousness could be described in more direct language as an encounter with the sublime, leading to the acknowledgement that there is an antithesis to the sublime. One could attribute to rightness concepts like growth, the right to contemplation and wonderment, the necessity to build and to imagine a beneficent social structure, to safeguard communion with land and participation in its growth and processes — in other words, adherence to the rules of the natural world.

A person might drift off, contemplating these things, and then emerge to find themselves living in a society that embodies the exact opposite of such values. One starts to wonder if this moment in time is designed to catalyze us towards a deeper acquaintanceship with our sacred place in nature, as the shepherds of the next phase towards goodness, so that we may bring an emancipatory word back into this society, back to those who have been betrayed, to those who have been cybernetically besieged with the lie that there is no alternative.

It is my intention here to bring to you an account of a time in which these ideas were attempted to be brought into everyday life, and a place in which there was a spreading excitement that a new world was being built. In this writing I will never attempt to say that I can provide the key to solving the problems we face today, but I do believe that in these times of constant ideological siege, it is a person’s responsibility to reassert and share what they know to be good, wherever possible. What follows are my notes on the bringing of a vastness back into life — including my own struggles to pierce the imagistic demiurge and the fascistic informational domination that characterizes modern life — with the intention of bringing a bit of the sublime into your life, if only just a little.

Part One: The Architecture of the New World

Technology is not inherently adversarial to the evolution of humankind: a machine is meant not for enslavement, but for liberation. This idea was propagated in the early Soviet avant-garde. Many believed that technology and industry had hitherto been coopted by the negative forces, but that the hour of redefinition had arrived — it was Engels who famously said that labor created man, and that new forms of labor (ie new technologies) would create the new man, “and that this new man will resemble the old man, ‘the old Adam’, in name only, in the same way as, according to Spinoza’s great statement, a dog, a barking animal, resembles the heavenly constellation Dog.”²

As it relates to architecture, and aesthetics more broadly, there were those who saw technology as a means of designing the everyday life and its production in such a way that it would resonate with the natural world. These echoes to nature would narrow the gap between the modern person and the sublime organic. But how this would be achieved was a matter of debate. The debate was animated mainly by the Rationalist and Constructivist architectural schools, whose differences were astutely elucidated by Alla Vronskaya as “two versions of organicism: a preeminently psychological one, focused on form, and a biological one, focused on process.”³

Rationalist concepts like energy economy, which dealt with space as a medium of energy, explored the idea that the character and form of space are inextricably linked to the modulation of the occupants’ labor-power, their ideology and its release into the world.

The Rationalists sought to design space to stimulate the growth of the individual: these architects were formulating an understanding of biology in which beauty functioned as a stimulant; one can read in their work that they believed that the natural world possessed a beauty that is objective, and that can be transmitted through aesthetics — they believed it was latent in everything, even machines. They were architects seeking to organize and promote social relations by bringing beauty into the everyday, but not an ornamental beauty — a beauty of forms, which on some level would rhyme with the beauty of nature.

The return to nature involved a dissolving of grids, a disposal of the obligation to right angles and any other “anthropocentric system of orientation based on perspective, the golden section and the anthropometric standard.”⁴ El Lissitzky noted that architecture had hitherto been designed to be viewed from the ground level, and that this is not at all a feature of the natural world. Lissitzky imagined an architecture that would not be “measured by man” but would be “measured by architecture” — a message that beautifully analogizes the city to the aesthetic indifference of the natural world. A sort of kaleidoscope of statuses, angles and orientations is in fact the organic setting. Lissitzky’s thinking stems from his belief that the Renaissance standardization of the world according to man’s perspective had been a mistake; that it had been a profane attempt to capture reality, and that it placed humankind in an exterior position, looking at the world rather than being in it.

The Rationalist project was the reconciliation of the individual and the world as means of drawing out the “true path” towards a better world, already latent in the individual. To me this idea is beautiful and true, but I do appreciate the sentiment of many Constructivists who thought that Rationalist methods relied too heavily on aesthetics to simulate organic form — Lavinski, for one “criticized the Rationalists for ‘committing the error of considering only aesthetic sensations’ and declared that ‘one should begin along functional lines.’”⁵

So the Constructivist architects, emerging out of the painting and sculptural groups of the avant-garde, had developed an ascetic and process-based methodology which was based on the notion that a “form carr[ies] in it the potentialities capable of increasing energy… Some objects have an organizing effect on the awareness, others have a weakening effect, and often objects have a physiological effect that stimulates energy and force”.⁶ They posited that because of the deliberate nature of the construction of the building, as an artwork stripped of aesthetic flourish, it would be possessed of an incentive toward production and growth in general terms, which would then be modulated by social life into a socially productive evolution.

The Constructivists were reaching towards a return to the concept, which I will explore later in this piece, but suffice it to say I am referring to a piercing through of the demiurge of the image — the reassertion of the futility of representation and the ultimate failure of aesthetics. That the resonance between individual and setting is fractured by a depiction of either. That the true power of being lies more in imagination than in perception and interpolation, and that it is drawn out by an acknowledgement of the impossibility to fully comprehend the properties of our world.

In the Constructivism of the early 1920s, simple, clearly defined geometrical forms dominated by the “aesthetic of the right angle and balanced, static, calm compositions had become the basis of artistic means of expression.”⁷ — there is no possibility of interpretation, or of discrepancy; there is only the quiet underlying buzz born from the momentum of this struggle for utopia. In my view, the projects of the Constructivists were not meant to serve as propaganda or a dictum of any kind. They were meant simply to encourage the already-existing trajectory of the human being, to provide the conditions for the realization of what already exists embryonically in the unconscious, which is to say, the realization of the path to utopia. When a person is trusted with their own development and granted freedom from oppression and constraint, it follows that the right thing (ie. love and social productivity) will emerge from them.

At this point it may be helpful to contrast two well-known projects of the Constructivist and Rationalist schools, one proposed in 1923 and the other in 1928, respectively. The first is the Vesnin brothers’ competition project for the Palace of Labour. It is generally considered the first Constructivist architectural project, and it can be read as a carrying-through of the initial revolutionary momentum, or as an attempt to re-assert the original revolutionary ideals in the contradictory and perilous economic settings of the New Economic Policy (NEP) period.

The second, Georgy Krutikov’s “Flying City”, proposed in 1928 as his VKhUTEIN diploma project, can be read as a response to the course-correction of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, a time in which the benefits of the New Economic Policy period were acknowledged and built upon, while efforts were made to correct its ideological inconsistencies, and as much of what the NEP had reaped was now directed towards Industrialization. There was a sense that, at long last, the Soviet Union was finally being built.

Neither of these architectural projects were built, however.

The first, the Vesnin brothers’ competition project for the Palace of Labour, was submitted to the Moscow City Council and Moscow Society of Architects in February of 1923. It responded to the project brief which asked that proposals “be expressed in simple, contemporary forms, without reference to any specific style of any past era whatsoever.”⁸ Their plan called for a massive auditorium able to hold 8,000 people, which was connected to two rectangular structures by way of a squat horizontal structure which did not touch the ground. The building was to serve as the house of the Soviets, congressional palace, theatre, Ministry of Culture, Urban Committee of the Communist Party, museum and restaurant.

The building was to be built out of concrete, with its skeletal structure exposed. It sought not to draw attention to itself but to emphasize the purpose of the building and the virtue of the ideology which it was built to serve.

To understand the context of 1922-23, it’s important to note that the NEP period is an example of the kind of flexibility and contradiction that a revolutionary project must embrace in order to persist: because the country that the Bolsheviks inherited was in such a desperate state, desperate measures needed to be taken, first of all to stimulate the production of food. This involved instantiating a primitive capitalism in the countryside to encourage market competition between peasant classes. Industrial production in the cities was similarly divergent from socialist ideals.

Already-qualified experts in engineering were desperately needed, and despite the fact that many were not communists, the state employed them in order to get the country productive as soon as possible. In my reading there are many examples of digressions from revolutionary doctrine being implemented at a state level — it is easy to see how “the prospect that the relative stability achieved under NEP would become normal worried many whose thirst for revolutionary transformation had been unquenched or who were simply dissatisfied with where the storms of revolutionary upheaval had tossed them.”⁹

Keeping in mind the necessity to reassert revolutionary ideals, the Vesnin brothers’ proposal is a beautiful testament to the Bolshevik project. The structures are built for a purpose — the only ideological message of the structure is ‘there is much to plan, and this building is where it will be planned’. It is just a necessary structure. It is not decorative, nor is it stark and sterile. Its flourishes simply developed in the concatenative process of its development — the flourishes developed themselves out of excitement. With much of Constructivist architecture, one can feel that “the building[’s] creation is a kind of mystery, always a miracle, the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry and the building itself is a talisman. A sacred symbol meant to influence and change the surrounding[s]”.¹⁰

The classic credo of the Constructivist, attributed to the great Vladimir Tatlin, “art into life, life into art”, illuminates the idea that only that which plays a role in life can be considered art, because only that which produces art can be considered life. The Vesnin brothers’ project is in line with the objective of building a material world which would form the basis of this cycle. In this thinking, one finds a supreme respect for the unconscious ability of the individual; that given the space to do so, a person will bring positive growth into the world.

Krutikov’s “Flying City”, the plans for which were completed in the summer of 1928 as his diploma project at VKhUTEIN, posited a mobile architecture which acknowledged that “buildings were evolving ‘from the hut to the house in the air’, reflecting ‘humanity’s aspiration to rise above the earth.’”¹¹ Krutikov dismissed profuse criticism of the project. While it was true that at the time the state was not in a position to consider such infrastructural projects, and while it was also true that the scientific bases for such a project had not yet been established, Krutikov believed firmly that “technological and scientific progress in the near future would undoubtedly allow this project to be realized”.¹² The faith that Krutikov demonstrates here is very beautiful — he believed it to be inevitable that Soviet industrialization will yield the technology to make possible something that seems fantastical. While I think that a faith in one’s neighbors and collaborators is essential, my own criticism of Krutikov’s project is that it assumes people need to be put in the sky for them to feel capable of bringing progress to earth. Personally I am much more aligned with the Constructivist view that functional production leads to elevation, and that the literalness of Krutikov’s project is inhibitive.

Here, with the issue of functional production, it is easiest to find the connective tissue between the Constructivists and the Productivists, who were concerned with designing tools, instruments, furniture; such objects of utility would “signify communist values by their reference either to communist purpose or methodical construction.”¹³ For the Productivists, who sought to pass on the Constructivist ethos to the proletariat on an individual level, aesthetic did not factor into an object’s value — in fact, an ornamented object would signal that it held a counter-revolutionary significance. In place of aesthetics, design was a “synthesis of ideological, theoretical and practical factors. The combination of purpose, technique and material formed the political process of object production.”¹⁴

Vladimir Tatlin, when he first created his Constructions in 1914, proclaimed that it was material that dictated technique, which then dictated form. This method is what unifies the world, the user and the material (architecture in Constructivism, the instrument in Productivism). From this, the Rationalist notion of transindividualism developed, wherein the division between a person and their space begins to blur, with the individual’s daily-use objects and the utensils of the creative practice being the connective tether between person and space.

While the Productivists did create some very interesting projects, mostly at the VKhUTEMAS (Moscow Higher Art and Technical Studios) under the tutelage of the head of the Metalworks Department, Aleksandr Rodchenko, there was a great disconnect between the designer and the common person (as was the case with Constructivist architecture). This was in part because of the lack of influence that the state had over production in the New Economic Policy period and also because of the absence of standardization in industry and domestic life. There was no place in society for the VKhUTEMAS students’ work, and there also wouldn’t have been enough of them for large-scale production (Rodchenko’s students constituted a mere 10% of the 1,300 students enrolled at VKhUTEMAS in 1925.¹⁵)

It would have been ideal for the Productivists to design the conditions for the making of their objects on a mass scale. But during the NEP, the state was not in a position to direct industrialization towards its ideological goals and Rodchenko himself did not wield sufficient clout to sway the aims of the small-scale producers. In 1922, the Gomza, the State Union of Metalworks Factories, was a “giant” of the semi-nationalized trusts, with 39,500 workers¹⁶, and answered to the state, but was managed semi-independently by patchwork of unions and state officials whose interest was primarily profit. There was no incentive to produce any of the Productivist designs.

But even still, the Metalworks Department at VKhUTEMAS went about their work with standardization and mass-usage of their designs in mind. They would have the best effect on society if they were used by everyone. While Rodchenko’s students developed plans for domestic objects like a bed that could collapse into an armchair, there were few common Muscovites that could have purchased an artisan-crafted singular commodity. Later, in 1928-30, Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg would build the Narkomfin housing project, the first functionalist communal housing project, the standardization of which would rely upon such inventive economic furniture design, but in the New Economic Policy period (1921-28), the construction of such objects was mostly projective and not entirely practical or functionally progressive. Personally I think the work done at VKhUTEMAS is very valuable — it was directed towards a future being built. The distinction between being and becoming is crucial in considering the value of socially productive work.

The Productivists’ efforts towards a society in which objects could regain their dignity as engines of social relations resonate in Boris Arvatov’s critique of the “contemporary bourgeoisie’s inability to act with the modern world of things [which] indicates that the commodity relation prevents these things from transforming consciousness”¹⁷ — a method of production modulated not by a market but by an interdependence between labour and social growth.

As the state pursued its aims of ‘retreat and recovery’, the inability to effect infrastructural change in the cities did hamper the Constructivists’ aim to build the new world, but there was one aspect of daily life that was affected by the theory of the Constructivists, the Rationalists and the Productivists alike — the Workers’ Club.

The Workers’ Clubs functioned as “social condensers” — spaces that would draw community members together in recreational, domestic and political activities, dissolving the space between them. Because these buildings were commissioned by labor unions (mostly railroad, textile, utility, chemical, metal and construction unions¹⁸) and not the state, many more Workers’ Clubs were built (mostly beginning in 1927) than other types of public infrastructure — bold geometric organisms that would provide a vivid contrast against their surroundings of “old world” neoclassicist architecture, beckoning the citizen into this new social world. Either to seek relief from a grocery shortage, to improve one’s literacy or competency in sewing or dance, or to attend a political lecture, the Workers’ Club was where acculturation and the search for the personal fulfilment of the new Soviet person took place.

Here, the instruments invented by Rodchenko, his wife and collaborator Varvara Stepanova and their students, would actually be used — albeit not on the mass scales for which they had been intended — and would take on their revolutionary purpose. Here, in the ‘university of culture’, the significance of the object’s role in activities towards social growth may have felt more pronounced, especially in smaller Clubs, where the practical use of space required inventiveness and care.

Architecturally, the Workers’ Club was “to become a radically new building type. Workers’ Clubs … were polyfunctional spaces and programmatic hybrids. Lectures, classes, practice sessions, collective activities, exhibitions, concerts, dances, plays, celebrations and political assemblies were a regular part of daily club activities. For the many coming from closed rural communities, this would have been a huge shift. These buildings condensed multiple programs into a single ‘architectural organism’”¹⁹ — the center of the Club was almost always a large auditorium, and often the building had been designed so that it was very prominent, rising above or existing apart from the body of the structure. This was done to emphasize the fact that the network of recreational, functional and theatrical spaces that constituted the Club would culminate in public participation in mass spectacle.

The Clubs were radically different in composition, but many sought to bring together the activity going on inside with that of the exterior space and its pedestrians. Passers-by were meant to feel involved, integrated into the motion. Some architects achieved this by way of large panes of glass and corridors that connected different areas of the Club, feeling that “the spatial articulation of movement challenged the traditional relationship between inside and outside.”²⁰

The union of material, individual and social intention that we see with social condensers is one of the major examples of the success of the architectural avant-garde. It is the project in fact. A critical argument could be made that the Workers’ Clubs are only individual buildings, rather than entire cities or even entire provinces or countries. A cynical perspective could see this as a failure of the avant-garde project, but I am of the belief that utopianism is more about becoming than being — it is a constant process towards and it involves demonstrations of faith in people and of love for a conception of what a specific future could look like. The aims of the social condensers are utopian and they happened. That is a lot.

The rationalization of artistic expression, with its right angles, realism and perspective, as discussed earlier, can be viewed as a rotting away of the ability of the spirit to express itself. Both the Constructivists and Rationalists sought to lead production away from such limitations, as the effects of these constraints radiate outward into the general population in a way that is hard to overstate. Objectivity and literality in art degenerates a person’s contact with their spirit. But where did the radical reclamation of the non-pictorial come from? Was it the revolution, or had it been gestating prior to October of 1917?

Vladimir Tatlin is considered by many to have conjured Constructivism and Productivism. In tracing Tatlin’s development as an artist, John Milner relates that in Tatlin’s early life he had worked in the Church, painting icons and frescoes — Milner says that while Cubism developed in Europe out of a rejection of rational depiction of space and form, no such tradition existed in Russia to be rejected. Icon painting and religious artwork hadn’t significantly been affected by the Renaissance malady of perspective and rationalization, and so the argument could be made that Russian culture was eminently predisposed to reclaiming pictorial space for the non-objective and non-representative.

Writing about a religious artwork dating from 1420, Milner says its elements create a “timeless and placeless context for the supernatural event, yet it also prevents the painting from functioning as a window upon a scene.”²¹ This bears significant relevance in understanding the context of Tatlin’s milieu of the early 1910’s, consisting of Malevich, Larionov and Goncharova. Except for the bourgeoisie who were drawn to the decadent portraiture and realism of their European counterparts, for many common Russians the canvas hadn’t ever been seen as a reproduction of reality. It was its own space, existing more as a conduit for accessing a concept and less than journalistically depicting an event or personage, and therefore the canvases use was much more phenomenological, as Malevich and then Kandinsky carried to its final point towards the end of the 1910’s.

By 1914 Tatlin, as referenced earlier, began exhibiting Constructions — he had moved past the image and had achieved the concept. “… Illusionistic space has now been abandoned. Aesthetic predilection, self-expression and even stylistic considerations have been jettisoned. Handling and materials produce construction; and the track of the creative person is to wrest coherence from material conflicts and contrasts.”²² — Tatlin had arrived at an acquaintanceship with objects defined by their nature as harboring long lineages of acquired meaning and use. An object absorbs its cultural purpose and the lives of those who use it. Thus, the generative agreement between an object, a designer, and the physical world became the project of Vladimir Tatlin.

“As the use of materials evolved through time, the constructor using such materials, be he poet or painter, inherited a language with its own structure and history. This was the proper subject of [Tatlin’s] investigation; it had little use for self-expression of illusion. Creative work became investigation, each object constructed became an exploration.”²³

With the advent of revolution, the application of the reclamation of the non-figurative took on colossal significance in the effort to emancipate the spirit. The construction stopped being limited to an experience to behold but rather one to be lived. In an effort to bring into being a society based on love, bold suggestions and big questions emerged.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of if you love, or have loved — it’s an unstoppable force. It’s unbreakable, it has no limits, it’s within us, it’s around us, and it’s stretched throughout time. It’s nothing you can touch, yet it guides every decision that we make. But we do have the obligation to each other to ask questions of one another: ‘What can we do?’, ‘Is this society, is this way we’re living, the only one that’s available to us?’, and when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.”²⁴

Part Two: The Return of the Concept

“Probably any medieval person would be confused at our idea of looking through something. He would assume that the reality looked through at us, and that by contemplation we bathed in the divine light, rather than looked at it.”²⁵

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan argues that the proliferation of the typed word has engendered a confinement to the visual world, in which sensory perception has been debilitated — he writes that when things were read aloud, the delivery, atmosphere and the speaker’s freedom to digress or embellish affected different senses, leading to a much richer internal experience for the listener. Before mass production of print and mass literacy, it was assumed that a manuscript would be used by one literate person to read aloud to others, and so the manuscript would involve images and illustrations to broaden the feeling of the story — this would give the orator more to explore in their telling, so by definition each telling is entirely different. Thus each telling of the story is a unique refraction of something larger, which expands infinitely with each interpretation and retelling, instead of something finite which can be read in one way by everyone, forever.

McLuhan’s main argument is that the mass-production of typed material has created a reliance on the visual as a means of extracting information from the world, rather than a sense-based ‘meeting in the middle’ between the individual and the world — a transindividualism — where there are elements of unknowability, subjective interpretation, and co-mingling of sensory information which all lead to the development of feelings that cannot readily be computed into more words.

The preamble to my writing made mention of “vast and sacred processes” which constitute our setting in this world, on this planet. In this section, I will explore a few different types of inhibitive captures we have been born into, which prevent us from acquaintanceship with these processes. The hegemony of the visual, as explored by McLuhan, is one. The other is the demotion of other people’s presence in the manufactured objects we use in our daily life.

Constructivist theoretician Boris Arvatov put considerable thought into a study of the development of mass-production and industry, and he noticed that in the early Renaissance period, something strange happened. He writes in Art and Production that prior to the Renaissance period, the term ‘artist’ referred to a member of a community who was trusted to build items which were of use to their group and which were celebrated for their beauty. What made these tools and instruments beautiful was not only their robustness, but the love and care with which they were made, and the fact that they were created by the community’s spirit, of which the artist was merely a conduit. Arvatov argues that the advent of mass-production did away with the uniqueness of the object and eventually with the artist-as-producer altogether, who was then exiled to the production of useless ornamented objects at the behest of the bourgeoisie.

The fact that the any given household object was one of many identical replicas, produced anonymously, likely in inhumane conditions, led to a divestment of the meaning of the inanimate, and a crisis of the meaning of ownership — and here by “ownership” I mean respect for the object’s producer(s), its ability to play a role in one’s own history, its absorption of one’s own life into its being, and an awareness of the object as a “possession [which] is something internalized and psychologically charged. Things in [one’s] possession are vessels filled with emotions and recollections. The history that things acquire in the course of being used for a long time gives them souls and turns them into things close to the heart.”²⁶

When we think of the inanimate material of our world as belonging to a constant process, it can be alarming to think about the level of disrespect with which we’ve been taught to treat the objects in our lives. Jean Baudrillard wrote that capitalism was a demonic enterprise bent on the destruction of value itself — as the manufactured object means less and less, so does everything else. In our current predicament, the object is also prevented from gaining value because we are prohibited from true ownership of it.

If the world is all around us, but we are divorced from interacting with it through visual capture and denied awareness of the metaphysical value of its material, where are we really? Are we born into a demiurgic inversion which numbs us to God’s world? An inversion which through informational and ideological conditioning inclines us towards contempt for our neighbor and indifference to our world?

The Russian Cosmists, who were a pre-Revolutionary philosophical group, posited that the universe was a living embodiment of God. They believed that all physical material contained “particles” of the deceased humans of the past, charged with divine power in their latency, waiting to be activated through labor. They conceived of “the great human task as one of incarnating divine love on a universal scale.”²⁷ This would be accomplished through acts of collective labour which would animate the sacred potentiality of material, currently existing in an organic state of secular suspension. There is a Constructivism to this thinking — the intention in building is not simply to create a tool but it is to birth possibility. A constructive effort is one that attempts to bring this vastness — whether or not one wants to think of it as a divine one — back into everyday life, from which it has been precluded.

The bringing of God’s bricks to earth means to build in harmony with the notion of an externalized inwardness. An effort to bring into the world material that resists the commodity form, that leads away from capture, and that leads back towards enrapture in nature’s vastness.

The incomprehensibility of nature’s vastness is exactly its power. One cannot articulate God, one cannot define the world. This is what I mean by the “return of the concept”: an acknowledgement of the necessity to engage in subjective exploration, and a respect for the fruits of that exploration. The concept itself is the fruit of this exploration and carries immense effect. The “return of the concept” is rooted in the fact-of-being’s triumph over its representation, the withering away of the dominance of the image and of aesthetic and mimetic substitutions for life. Life and its processes are impossible to define or contain — there are only mysteries and unknowabilities — this is why facticity and mimetic representations of reality are inorganic; they are purporting to have “understood” something which cannot be understood. It is the act of reaching towards an understanding that is itself the concept. Acknowledging the limit of understanding, where we encounter the sublime, is where the fuel of beauty is found. This is where we find what is true: there is a world; it is part of us; it is alive; we are alive.

“I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It pitches senselessly back and forth, but we stand firm, and so we want to be its initiative and we want to be its ends.”²⁸

Once awareness of the concept has been established, the concept asks to be used for production. What it asks for is a constructivism: that its essence to be used as a fuel for creating; that this creation be a tool, used by another. Simply, something beautiful and useful. Something that leads away from a depiction of life and instead produces life, which is imbued with potential for communion with the world and with the neighbor, with the faith that this can only lead to good things and the determination to recover what sense-abilities have so successfully been taken from us and in such gradual form, like a shifting mountain’s movement, so as to be almost undetectable.

“Occult notions of ‘concept’ are in retreat from the physical world. Heaps of private information reduce art to hermeticism and fatuous metaphysics. Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head. Language should be an ever-developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.”²⁹

The third form of capture — obfuscation of the concept — is psychological warfare and informational warfare: ideological conditioning. This is something that has been written about exhaustively but for our purposes it will suffice to state that there are extremely advanced mechanisms at work that aim to simplify history, to condition social relations, and to instrumentalize individual agency.

Anecdotally, I have always been drawn to mystery and stories. My interest in the mystery of extraterrestrial life led to a study of UFO groups, which led to the discovery of the fact that the majority of UFO sightings are in fact experimental military craft, which led to the discovery that the UFO mythologies have not only been created by government agencies as a camouflage, but that the dissemination and embellishment of these myths are ongoing projects of these agencies. The function of these aircrafts is very sinister — they are for inflicting terror and death upon innocent people. But the human imagination, I learned as a younger person, is the instrument that is used to redefine their function as one of inscrutable, fantastic and harmless wonderment. Like many people, I harboured a fascination with the infamous assassinations of the 1960s that yielded many realizations about how imperial power is maintained and how its structures are reinforced — through wanton violence and manipulation of information; or, the production of information. Those interested in the history of communism, for example, are constantly coming up against the fact that they have been misled by teachers and parents, many of whom did not understand that they themselves had been misled and transformed into instruments of disinformation. The process is one of cybernetics, which rewards reiteration of the fictions that the state manufactures in its reproduction of itself. The media and academic apparatuses ‘officialize’ these fictions, meaning that “the scholar who challenges the prevailing paradigm has a far more demanding job. His research must not only meet the demands of method — use of evidence, logic and so on — incumbent on all scholars. He must also persuade his readers to question the overall pattern of historical causation that has heretofore given shape to their vision of the past itself. He challenges them to take seriously the possibility that their whole model of history may be wrong — a challenge that many will simply dismiss, and some will denounce as outrageous.”³⁰

But here in the Summer of 2025, the veil has never been thinner. The genocide against Palestinians, committed with the support of every “first world” government, has put things in very simple terms. When a person turns on the radio, one is assaulted by the most blatant lies of the zionist occupier’s right to “defend itself” and defamatory propaganda against the resistance forces — it has never been more clear that we are born into a world of lies, tasked with bringing truth back into the world. The goal of emulating traditional revolutions will seem remote. The emancipatory task begins at an individual level, and it starts with the return of the concept — the mechanisms of capture have become so sophisticated and pervasive that “the ability to haphazardly disregard these loops and positive feedback processes is basically a redefinition or an update or an addendum to the very definition of what freedom is itself.”³¹

Part Three: Megalopolis

“But Life does not wait and the growth of generations does not stop and we who go to relieve those who have passed into history, having in our hands the results of their experiments, with their mistakes and their achievements, after years of experience equal to centuries… We say… Now no artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of Life.”³²

In her book Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man, Tijana Vujošević explores the link between the Russian Cosmists and the Russian Futurists and Constructivists, hitting upon a common notion of the dualism of byt and bytie, two differentiations of the word for “living”. The first, byt, meaning living in the mundane sense (chores, shopping, cooking), and the second, bytie, meaning the living constituted by sublime experiences such as in sexuality, religiosity or response to powerful art. It was thought that the interplay between these two “levels” is what makes a human being’s experience of life. “The relationship between byt and bytie … is a relationship between the time of earthly history — the here and now — and the transcendental state that history will reach at its end.”³³

The goal of the architect of the new life was to bring the bytie modality into everyday life. To organize byt so efficiently that it would give an individual enough time and energy to cultivate all of their higher, enlightened desires, thus raising the spiritual quality of life. It is the struggle to bring bytie into everyday life that animates the struggle to bring the world of the soul to earth — to build our world using God’s bricks.

Kamensky’s 1918 work, Ego-Moya Biografiya Velikogo Futurista (His-My Biography of the Great Futurist), in which he “preaches his affirmation of the individual, predicts the eventual abolishment of books, and rejects political freedom in the name of spiritual freedom,”³⁴ delivers to us a line that has stuck with me from the moment I encountered it in Vujošević’s book. In Kaminsky’s work, “He” represents his bytie while “I” is byt.

“He is tropical vegetation, and I am the earth. His and mine, our life, is the flight of a bird with verse.”³⁵

The relation between the two levels of being is in constant interdependence and interchange, like the relationship between that of the world and the individual, which tumble, interlocked towards the ‘state that history will reach at its end’ that Vujošević alludes to, which is not apocalyptic, but a permanently postponed arrival at an ideal horizon.

Utopianism is the articulation of a perfect world for the purpose of struggling towards it. It is more about becoming than being — the development of the conditions for its conception is its reason for being. Faith in a utopia’s viability is its own reward. That is why it’s counterproductive to dismiss utopian thinking as unrealistic. What is truly unrealistic is to delude oneself with the notion that the current state of society is better than any alternative just because it presently exists; one should resist becoming convinced by the constantly repeated lie that nothing else is possible. Anything is better than this current political and economic structure which runs on the misery of the innocent and reproduces itself cybernetically through the gradual expurgation of the bytie form.

Megalopolis is a film that verifies the possibility of bringing bytie into life through artistic creation, and what benefit that would lead a society towards. In the film an architect, Cesar Catalina, has invented an organic building material which is literally an extension of the living force of its inhabitants — a premise which presents a threat to current hegemonic political and cultural values. Formally, the film was produced the way most propaganda media is: through dominant channels, using credentialed actors etc., but it diverged substantially in that it possessed a revolutionary return to the concept, and as a result its aesthetic presentation was multi-faceted and varied, originating more from the necessity of the story than an adherence to visual didacticism. For these reasons, it’s unsurprising that an individual would be rewarded for dismissing the film as incoherent and finding ways of preemptively poisoning other individuals against it.

One of the main affronts that Megalopolis presented to the apparatuses of capture was that it treated the viewer with a great deal of respect. This is very unusual in widely-distributed cultural works. The film’s use of montage and assemblage as well as its liberal suspension of realism were all seen as evidence of its poorly considered composition. But montage and assemblages produce new associations in the mind; they are not dogmatic, they are subjective and combustive. The combination of two or more things at once will organically evoke the creation of something new and uniquely subjective and personal in the mind of the viewer. But because the film relied at many points on assemblage without directly telling the viewer what to think, the automatic feedback was that it doesn’t make any sense, and was therefore to be disregarded as a whole.

In the screening I attended, many people expressed laughter and ridicule. The climax of such ridicule was the sequence of the film that I found most moving. After Cesar’s attempted assassination, there is a depiction of his still-living body being operated on, and we can see his golden skull shining through his skin. The factually-fixated will point out that he should have died, overlooking the possibility that perhaps he is protected by some type of divine force, that perhaps his task in the story’s world grants him certain immunities. In this scene, the living material Megalon will be used to rebuild his body — this is allegorical; it is not “realistic”. It is a fable. The concept triumphs over its representation. It is natural that well-trained adherents to the hegemony of the visual would meet this with derision.

In the frames immediately following the assassination attempt, the flow of blood is overlaid with images of running rivers, showing the interdependence of the natural world and the individual: the former creates the magic incarnation that is the human idea, and the latter can then shape the world. Megalon, Cesar’s material, which will be used to build the city, is animated and responds to the internal world of the individual that is using the architecture — the loop is closed between world, person and idea. In the “rebuilding of Cesar” scene, it is the application of Megalon to his body that restores his sight. The special effects used to illustrate this point became the subject of ridicule in spaces of online discourse.

Aesthetics function to categorize symbols for usage in cultural systems. Cybernetic systems, which attach rewards to usage of these symbols in the form of social response, perpetuate themselves by encouraging discourse on those aesthetic symbols rather than the concept represented by them. The result of participation in these feedback systems is a suspension of access to one’s own subjectivity. Reacting to a reaction of a reaction, leads to an individual being positioned in a non-place which bears no relation to the world of the concept, as we have been discussing it. These feedback loops occur entirely in the realms we’ve been describing as “visual” or “representational,” and are in fact abstractions within those realms — they do not involve the elaboration of the mystery at the core of being but simulated movement within a politically inert enclosure.

A connection should be made to the political infiltration of the 1960s, in which intelligence agencies made efforts to modulate intense political focus into more innocuous and confused spaces, such as the splitting apart of the working class along lines of identity, and so on. That is still the case today — as consciousness of the demonic nature of imposed economic and political systems becomes more pronounced, a widely-felt frustration is engendered which needs to be managed. The introduction of a singular locus of debate, like Megalopolis, becomes useful for both attenuating energy and immobilizing the revolutionary thinking it contains.

With respect to the architectural vision present in the film, what is utopian about it is the shocking novelty presented by the fact that Megalon is alive. The radicalness of this fact is what is so objectionable to Cesar Catalina’s opponents. The absence of a gradual development towards Megalon is what is so utopian and unimaginable— it changes too much too suddenly. It is assumed in the film that Catalina thinks that a new architecture would itself change the world, but his project is similar to the Constructivists in that the new surroundings are only part of the new evolution. It is the first step.

In Boris Groys’ book The Total Art of Stalinism, he forms an argument on the assumption that Constructivism was itself meant to form power, when in reality it was meant to accompany a complimentary and reciprocal political program, which it built itself in anticipation of. Groys’ argument, that “the avant-garde itself renounces its right to preeminence and surrenders the project to real political power, which is beginning to take over the avant-garde’s task of drawing up the unitary plan of the new reality,”³⁶ I think somewhat confuses the independence of the avant-garde with their lack of support in the state. The point that the lack of actual building of Constructivist architecture in the Soviet Union was a result of the inability of the avant-garde to realize their will to power is more attributable to the tumultuous practicalities inherent to the building of a society from scratch. In the Stalinist period, beginning with the advent of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, promising economic conditions made feasible the centralization of infrastructural and industrial planning, which lead to massive development and the building of the Soviet Union, seemingly at the expense of the aesthetic principles of the avant-garde. In The Total Art of Stalinism, Boris Groys makes the excellent point that Stalinism’s socialist realism was in fact the realization of the avant-garde project, since “according to Stalinist aesthetics, everything is new in the new post-historical reality — even the classics are new, and these it has indeed reworked beyond recognition. There is thus no reason to strive for formal innovation, since novelty is automatically guaranteed by the total novelty of super historical content and significance.”³⁷

The point Groys makes is that the bringing into being of the conditions necessary for socialism to take shape were realized post-aesthetically, or were made aesthetic by their sheer novelty. This isn’t explicitly contradictory to the aims of the Constructivists, as their progressive ideological principles were present in the conception of the building, despite the differences in outcome. What Megalopolis offers is a vision not only of what would happen after such conditions had been achieved, but a vision of what it would look like to entirely overtake a period similar to Stalinist development.

An especially meaningful element of the utopian architecture of Megalopolis is its emulation of organic form. What I find beautiful about it is the way the buildings seem to imitate nature on their own, almost as if the necessary appearance of the world tends to the leafy, the watery, the fractal. This is one of the ways Megalopolis leaps over stages of development and brings the constructed form back to the natural. Our place in it all as caretakers of the inarticulable concept is affirmed by the utopian vision of Francis Ford Coppola, who understood that God’s bricks resemble our own, but will choose their own appearance based on the process we apply to them — when we build according to a true desire to incarnate a sacred world, we cannot help but bring more of the sublime organic into the world, and it will build us in return, as tropical vegetation does to the earth.

Epilogue

“[The Revolution] suddenly offered the radical artist such enormous scope for his activities that it will require the work of generations to fulfil these possibilities.”³⁸

The mountain looks at me. It appears to be still, but I sense it is issuing a communication, centuries long in its articulation: “… something stirs here in these stones, trying to blossom as we do, to have the life we do.”³⁹ The possibility of communication compels me to build in accordance with this transmission, which can only be deciphered through the act of construction. I open a 3D modelling software and before I know it I am faithfully rendering the Palace of Labour, roughly 103 years since the suggestion of its forms were first brought onto a page: my own rendering of the Palace is a new mirror held up in the general direction of the mountain; a new articulation of the concept’s infinity of possibilities. Bringing the rendering into Photoshop, I pause. A feeling comes to me which suggests that the expression of this process requires confetti in geometrical form; a spontaneous re-arrangement of the Palace’s structure yields a new dialogue — unique to my station in time — between the building and the process. I become aware that what is being crafted will serve as the visual representation for this piece of writing, and that these gestures towards overflowing and excitement are part of the greater schema of the bringing into being of the concept represented by the Palace of Labour —it is to be built in the spirit of celebration. But when will it come to earth? What will it look like when we build it? Where is it now?

“The route to the site is very indeterminate. It’s important because it’s an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a kind of oblivion.”⁴⁰

When the concept represented by the Palace of Labour is materialized in some form, we will have many rooms in which to unravel our dreams and our hard-won plans for a better world. In the meantime we struggle for every second of Free Time, filling those seconds by conjuring rooms of our own within invented spaces. There, precious plans are formed, and we contemplate the absence of walls in those rooms.

As I elaborate the 3D model of the Palace of Labour, I place it on a gridded plane — a single second which represents forever. Emerging on the page, without being coaxed, are new iterations of the aesthetic motifs long ago established by the Constructivist poster designers, now mingling with Megalon. The past creates a futurity on its own; a muted burst of digital light is placed haphazardly. A new angle, a contradiction and a talisman. It is a burst of light in a mirrored reflection of a mirror’s reflection and in it I feel reality looking at me. The abyss between the abstraction and the site widens: what lies within it? A future of unknown definition. We must go into it and through it, because its space is impervious to didacticism and description. We go forward knowing that all things vital and growing are there, in that waiting space.

“When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”⁴¹

Citations

1. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”
2. Lev Vygotsky, “The Socialist Alteration of Man”
3. Alla Vronskaya, “The Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism & the Human Sciences”
4. Ibid.
5. Selim Khan-Madomedov, “Aleksandr Vesnin & Russian Constructivism”
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Soviet State & Society Between Revolutions 1918 – 1929”
10. Oleg Adamov, “Geometrical Transformations & Plastic Effects in the Creative Process of Konstantin Melnikov”
11. Selim Khan-Magomedov “Georgi Krutikov: The Flying City & Beyond”
12. Ibid.
13. Viktor Margolin, “The Struggle for Utopia”
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Soviet State & Society Between Revolutions 1918 – 1929”
17. Christina Kiaer, “Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects”
18. Anna Bokov, “Lessons from the Social Condensers”
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. John Milner, “Vladimir Tatlin & the Russian Avant-Garde”
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Francis Ford Coppola, “Megalopolis”
25. Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy”
26. Byung-Chul Han, “Non-Things”
27. George M. Young, “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and His Followers”
28. Ernst Bloch, “The Spirit of Utopia”
29. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement”
30. Grover Furr, “Khrushchev Lied”
31. Barrett Avner (Contain), “21st Century Cybernetics, Part One”
32. Naum Gabo & Antoine Pevsner, “Realistic Manifesto (August 5, 1920)”
33. Tijana Vujošević, “Modernism & the Making of the Soviet New Man”
34. Vladimir Markov, “Russian Futurism: A History”
35. Vasily Kamensky, “His-My Biography of the Great Futurist”
36. Boris Groys, “The Total Art of Stalinism”
37. Ibid.
38. El Lissitzky, “Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution”
39. Ernst Bloch, “The Spirit of Utopia”
40. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of a Conversation”
41. Francis Ford Coppola, “Megalopolis” 

— Robert Voyvodic is an artist preoccupied with the non-objective. He is APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL‘s Creative Director and also practices as a freelance graphic designer and artist. He lives in Toronto.