In the course of their own professional development, Hornbostel and his younger colleagues would focus less on origins and more on the cultural connections among seemingly dissonant musical forms. Rather than drawing schematic connections as direct lines or developmental series, they preferred elliptical and discontinuous forms such as parallels and circles. 77 In their 1903 address to the Berlin Society for Anthropology, for example, Abraham and Hornbostel suggested that "If we may conceive of exotic music as primitive, thus situating it parallel to earlier developmental stages of European music, it would provide us with clues as to how music actually sounded in antiquity" ("BPM," 225). This Eurocentric proposal was based on a blatant, temporal fallacy, one that fundamentally confused morphology with history. Stumpf too would commit this fallacy in The Origins of Music, conflating the appearance of formal simplicity in "primitive songs" with the chronological beginnings of music itself. Evolutionary thinking made this idea compelling, allowing comparative musicologists not only to work backwards and forwards in time, and thereby generate developmental series, but also to move "diagonally" through space, in order to draw cultural parallels or analogies. The temporal fallacy was therefore based on the notion of the primitive, but not restricted to it. Phonography, in fact, established an object that could be imagined as occupying any number of intermediate stages on an evolutionary timeline, positioned at select intervals between the origins of music and its "modern" manifestations. Abraham and Hornbostel thus located "exotic music" not as a point of origin, but "parallel to earlier stages of European music."
Here they were referring to their own "Studies on the Tone System and Music of the Japanese," based on Berlin recordings of Kawakami Otijoro's musical theater troupe starring Sada Yakko. While recognizing that this troupe was an icon of Japanese modernity, Abraham and Hornbostel interpreted its music in terms of Westernization, deploring the Japanese government's efforts to import songs, instruments, and orchestrations from Europe and the United States. 78 Here, again, they understood the price of modernization to be the loss of "charming originality," which the phonograph would nevertheless allow them to isolate, extract, and preserve for analysis ("TMJ," 67). More specifically, as a result of their studies, Abraham and Hornbostel identified "pure tuning [reine Stimmung] as the essential basis of contemporary Japanese music" ("TMJ," 33-4). This term referred back to Pythagorean intonation, a tuning of the scale in which all fourths and fifths are "pure" (untempered), thus making thirds sound out of tune to the modern ear. In locating a Pythagorean "root" of modern Japanese music, Abraham and Hornbostel felt permitted to posit a historical link to ancient Greek melody. This link, in turn, provided a basis for comparison by analogy: "It is safe to assume the common derivation of modern Europe's harmonic music and modern Japan's non-harmonic music; they are late fruits from the same tree" ("TMJ," 34-5). As Hornbostel would aver, now with conviction, "Exotic music offers astounding analogies to earlier forms of our own music, which we know only through a tradition that has gaping holes in it. We gain a better idea of how ancient Greek music must have sounded by listening to, say, Japanese musicians, than by reading the works of Classical authors" ("EM," 93).
At the turn of the century, the phonograph seemed uniquely equipped to
make evolution audible. The evolution of music would be heard not by
reading old manuscripts, but by listening to contemporary recordings
of exotic melodies. To listen in this way was to travel not simply
across generations, as Edison had imagined the use of his device, but
across the greater expanse of history and geography. In its function as
a scientific instrument, the phonograph established a tangible body of
music that could be dissected, like the re of the Hottentot Venus,
and reconstructed in a variety of forms. It shaped and reshaped the
discourse of comparative musicology, informing a succession of scientific
narratives. In this context, phonography came to serve at once as a
representational strategy for constructing the evolution of music,
and a system for traversing it. Just as the discipline of comparative
musicology would take shape by recasting the terms of evolution, its
prime instrument would render newly material evolution's sound.
Eric Ames is an assistant professor of German at the University of Washington. He is currently at work on a book about exoticism and early mass culture in Germany, with particular focus on the entertainments of Carl Hagenbeck.
1. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft" , in Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze zur Musikethnologie und Musikpsychologie, ed. Christian Kaden and Erich Stockmann (Leipzig: Reclam, 1986), 40; hereafter abbreviated as "PM." Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. An earlier version of this paper was presented at "Die Großstadt und das 'Primitive': Text, Politik und Repräsentation," a symposium held at the IFK - Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (October 2001). I am immensely grateful to Jessica Burstein for her advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this essay. Special thanks go to Jennifer Bean, Tony Bennett, Glenn Penny, and Pamela Potter for their helpful comments and questions. I also wish to thank Artur Simon for access to the Phonogram Archive at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Susanne Ziegler for her generous research assistance there, and Peter Bolz (Curator of Native American Ethnology) for making the photograph available to me for reproduction.
2. See Frank Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation c. 1550-1800, Source Materials and Studies in Ethnomusicology, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Knuf, 1973); Joep Bor, "The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c. 1780-1890," Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 : 51-73; Philip V. Bohlman, "Missionaries, Magical Muses, and Magnificent Menageries: Image and Imagination in the Early History of Ethnomusicology," The World of Music 33, no. 3 : 5-27.
3. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Über die Bedeutung des Phonographen für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft" , Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 36 : 225; hereafter abbreviated as "BPM."
4. Bernth Lindfors, "Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 208.
5. Ibid.
6. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 85-8.
7. See on this point Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 35.
8. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
9. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 38.
10. "PM," 57; italics in original. Alexander Rehding has recently traced the search for origins in German musicology around 1900 through the context of the philosophy of origins (Ursprungsphilosophie). He argues that origins should be understood not as a chronological category, but rather as an "ontological" one, from which the temporal aspect has been evacuated (pace Martin Heidegger). Yet these categories were never so neatly separated as Rehding would seem to suggest. A wholly appropriate emphasis on essentialism and ontology cannot adequately account for the empirical methods and evolutionary theories of comparative musicologists in particular. Nor can it explain the crucial role that a temporal medium like the phonograph played as a scientific instrument for the study of non-European music. At the turn of the century, comparative musicology co-opted the search for origins in the context of scientific positivism, and transformed it with the tools of modernity. This transformation can only be seen if we veer from the center of academic musicology and explore its periphery—that is, the discursive contexts in which non-Western music circulated around 1900. These contexts frame comparative musicology as a historical project that I understand as an attempt to render evolution audible. See Alexander Rehding, "The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900," Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 2 : 345-85; hereafter abbreviated as "QO."
11. While film historians have recently begun to analyze the dynamic interaction of anthropology and early cinema, they have thus far paid relatively little attention to ethnomusicology and early sound technology. (That project has been undertaken, I hasten to add, by scholars of folklore and ethnomusicology, though mainly in a conventional mode of disciplinary history.) Facile distinctions between the visual and the acoustic do not suffice to explain this disparity in film studies, especially in light of recent attempts to reconceptualize the history of early cinema in terms of sound technology. Ironically, when seen against the backdrop of Anglo-American anthropology and its vexed relationship to the moving image, the case of German comparative musicology appears extremely compelling. There are at least three reasons for this: First, comparative musicologists held recording technology to be a necessary condition for the possibility of conducting their research. Second, this technology was crucial to the rise of comparative musicology as an institution, evinced by the Berlin School and its phonogram archive, which I will discuss in detail. Third, comparative musicologists commonly affirmed the epistemological status of the phonographic record as "acoustic evidence." Each of these points suggests that, in contrast to early cinema's peripheral (if fascinating) relationship to anthropology, the phonograph occupied a central position in comparative musicology. Even while engaging the connections between Anglo-American anthropology and the moving image, Alison Griffiths' important study demonstrates the elision I here address. See Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For more on anthropology and early cinema, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001). On ethnomusicology's relationship to the phonograph, see Kay Kaufman Shelemay, "Recording Technology, the Record Industry, and Ethnomusicological Scholarship," in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 277-92; Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). On sound and early cinema, see especially Rick Altman, "The Silence of the Silents," Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (winter 1996): 648-718; Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); hereafter abbreviated as ST; Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
12. Comparative musicology had, of course, a diversity of theoretical and methodological concerns, addressing as it did questions of perception, cognition, ethnology, transcription, and analysis; it also encompassed the study of musical instruments (organology). For a concise overview of its historical emergence, see Albrecht Schneider, "Germany and Austria," in Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, ed. Helen Meyers (New York: Norton, 1993), 77-96; hereafter abbreviated as "GA."
13. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (1987; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
14. On the archive's history, see Susanne Ziegler, "'Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Klang': Zur Geschichte und Erschließung der historischen Tondokumente des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs," Jahrbuch Preußisches Kulturbesitz 31 : 153-67. In English, see Artur Simon, ed., Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000: Sammlungen der traditionellen Musik der Welt (The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000: Collections of Traditional Music of the World) (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), 25-46. This dual-language volume includes a catalogue of the archive's holdings, a rich selection of previously unpublished materials, and an extensive bibliography of archival publications.
15. Quoted in H[einrich] Pudor, "Das Phonogramm-Archiv der Wiener Akademie der Wissenschaften," Phonographische Zeitschrift 2 : 60.
16. Leo Hajek, Das Phonogrammarchiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien von seiner Gründung bis zur Neueinrichtung im Jahre 1927 (Vienna: Hölker-Pichler-Tempsky, 1928), 10. In English, see Walter Graf, "The Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna," The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 4 (winter 1962): 1, 5-6. Between 1901 and 1914, phonogram institutes of various kinds would be established in cities across the West, including Budapest, Cambridge, Chicago, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Lübeck, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Washington, and Zurich.
17. For more on Hornbostel's intellectual and professional life, see the essays and documents in "Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns": Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler: Studien und Dokumente, ed. Sebastian Klotz (Berlin: Schibri, 1998).
18. See Mark B. Sandberg, "Ef and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 320-61.
19. This analogy is intended to suggest neither that the audible and the visible were interchangeable, nor that their institutions were disconnected from one another. In fact, the sound archive needs to be located adjacent to the museum, the cinema, and even the department store, for each of these institutions shaped the practical as well as the imaginary work of comparative musicologists.
20. Stumpf acknowledges the problematic nature of commercial recordings: "many betray a clearly European influence." Carl Stumpf, "Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv" , trans. Rosee Riggs, in Simon, ed., Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 69; hereafter abbreviated as "BP"; trans. rev. throughout.
21. "BP," 83. In another context, Thomas Richards has argued that "the imperial archive was a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire." Indeed, Stumpf envisaged the Berlin Phonogram Archive as uniting disparate imperial agents and activities: "The new empire is proud of its colonies and does everything in its power to exploit them materially. It is our duty to combine that with scientific exploitation, i.e. with research on the nature and the indigenous culture of the new territories. Other colonial empires have not neglected this nobile officium. We too have made an excellent start, but wherever the culture of indigenous peoples is to be described exactly, comprehensively, and scientifically in scholarly works, phonographic records should not be lacking. And what then? Should they be squandered and destroyed? No, they must of course be collected and stored. Such an institution is a necessary corollary of our colonial aspirations in the highest sense." Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 6; hereafter abbreviated as IA; "BP," 83-4. On the imbrication of technology and empire, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
22. The names, dates, and locations indicated here come from various sources, including phonogram labels, correspondence papers, program brochures, newspaper and journal articles. Of particular importance is a 6 June 1910 letter from Hornbostel to an impresario by the name of E. Holz, which can be found in the papers of the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin ("Archiv Somali," Wahlsammlungen des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs, Musikethnologische Abteilung, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin).
23. The comparative method and its rich tradition in the German sciences surely help explain why Stumpf and his assistants conducted their research in Berlin, whereas their American colleagues more often recorded music "on location" (e.g., at Indian pueblos). At the same time, I would suggest, the proliferation of ethnographic entertainments in Berlin represents another (mass-cultural) context in which this preference for comparison should be understood. On the comparative method, see Philip V. Bohlman, "Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of Ethnomusicology," Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 : 26-42.
24. Carl Stumpf, "Musikpsychologie in England: Betrachtungen über Herleitung der Musik aus der Sprache und aus dem thierischen Entwicklungsproceß, über Empirismus und Nativismus in der Musiktheorie," Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 : 261-349; hereafter abbreviated as "ME." Alexander J. Ellis' pioneering study from the same year, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations," is generally acknowledged as the starting point of comparative musicology because of its exemplary empirical method (tonometric analysis) and its influential assumption that many non-Western scales exhibit equal temperament. Stumpf made this study accessible to German-speaking scientists by publishing a review of it in Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2 : 511-24. But it was his earlier survey of "Music Psychology in England" that helped establish evolutionism as a theoretical framework for ethnomusicology. Here it is worth noting that Georg Simmel had already offered his own theory of the origins of music based on a critique of Darwin. Simmel's study is also prescient in that it combines psychological and ethnological approaches, anticipating the interdisciplinary strategy of comparative musicology. If Stumpf was aware of Simmel's precedent, he did not refer to it. See Georg Simmel, "Psychologische und ethnologische Studien über Musik," Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 13 : 261-305.
25. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, The Modern Library (New York: Random House, n.d.), 878; hereafter abbreviated as DM.
26. In 1909, Stumpf distilled the major elements from this critique and recast them in a popular idiom for a series of public lectures on "The Origins of Music," an abridged version of which was first published in Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 3, no. 51 (18 December 1909): 1593-616; the lectures were later reprinted in full as a monograph. I here quote this latter source and simply note the corresponding page number from the earlier, 1885 review: Carl Stumpf, Die Anfänge der Musik (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 9; hereafter abbreviated as AM; cf. "ME," 300. Rehding seems to present this conceit ("In the beginning . . . ") as if it were his own, then proceeds to rehearse Stumpf's review of the literature without giving him due credit. See "QO," 350-1; cf. AM,9-21.
27. Carl Stumpf, "Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie" , in Leib und Seele: Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Barth, 1903), 57.
28. See Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 91-4; hereafter abbreviated as PSC; Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19.
29. For extensive documentation of this troupe and its reception, see Wolfgang Haberland, "Nine Bella Coolas in Germany," in Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed. Christian Feest (Aachen: Rader, 1987), 337-74.
30. Working in the tradition of Hermann von Helmholtz, Stumpf understood human perception to be embodied, and therefore subject to measurement and control, but also deeply subjective and contingent. He was particularly fascinated with the organization of psychology around sound, with the ways in which sound is saturated with psychological data. His 1883 monograph Tonpsychologie traces the impact of sound waves on psychological functions in terms of aural perception, judgment, and attention. On psychology and its relationship to early ethnomusicology, see Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst," in Bericht über den 4. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie in Innsbruck 1910 (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 256-69; for a more recent account in English, see Albrecht Schneider, "Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology," in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Brunno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 293-317. On attention theory, see especially Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
31. Carl Stumpf, "Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer," Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2 : 406; revised and reprinted in vol. 1 of Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, ed. Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (Berlin: Drei Masken, 1922), 87-104; hereafter abbreviated as "LBI." The reprint includes the photo that I reproduce here ( 1). An English translation of Stumpf's original essay can be found in Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ed., A Century ofEthnomusicological Thought, The Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology, vol. 7 (New York: Garland, 1990), 45-61.
32. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1854; reprint, Leipzig: Barth, 1902), 183-4; italics in original.
33. As Albrecht Schneider has commented on Hanslick, "Without comparative research, and from a strictly European point of view, such music had to be incomprehensible as there was no methodology available to properly analyze and understand them" ("GA," 79-80).
34. "LBI," 406. The singer's name is typed on the troupe's employment contract (reproduced in Haberland, "Nine Bella Coolas," 339) as "Isk-Ka-lusta." A studio portrait of Isk-Ka-lusta, wearing a suit and tie, and his German girlfriend is also reproduced in Haberland, "Nine Bella Coolas," 365.
35. In 1886, Stumpf received further confirmation of his transcription from the young Franz Boas, who attended the same troupe's performance in Berlin, transcribed two of their songs by hand, and published his own linguistic studies of the Bella Coola. In 1893, Boas made the first field recordings of Kwakiutl Indians—recordings that he would later deposit at the Berlin Phonogram Archive. Boas became, of course, the preeminent scholar of Northwest Coast Indians and one of the founders of cultural anthropology in the United States. See "LBI," 408-9; Ira Jacknis, "The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas," in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 185-214.
36. "LBI," 426. Stumpf and his assistants would employ such terms as "wild" and "uncivilized" in a self-conscious, strategic manner. Sometimes they offset the word "primitive" in quotation marks so as to restrict the range of its meaning. More often they used the (no less problematic) term "exotic" in order to describe non-Europeans as well as their musical productions (as in exotische Melodien). In so doing, comparative musicologists were not quibbling over terminology, but making an argument about the legitimacy of their emergent discipline. Their use of "exotic" was meant to counter the received idea that non-European music was "primitive" (a term which had recently taken on such pejorative connotations as "childlike" and "backward"), while stressing the complexity and confirming the alterity of their object of study. They likewise retained the term "natural peoples," but inflected it to denote non-Western peoples in a historical sense. See, for example, Hornbostel's dictionary entry on the "Musik der Naturvölker," in the annual supplement to vol. 24 of Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1911/12), 639-43.
37. See AM, 64-72.
38. See Carl Stumpf, "Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen" ; reprinted in vol. 1 of Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, ed. Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (Berlin: Drei Masken, 1922), 129; hereafter abbreviated as "TMS"; "BPM," 227; AM, 70.
39. See on this point Carl Stumpf, "Phonographirte Indianermelodien," Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 8 : 143.
40. ST, 29; italics in original. For more on the discourse of phonography, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
41. For an account of Hagenbeck's foreign people shows, see my "From the Exotic to the Everyday: The Ethnographic Exhibition in Germany," in Modernity and the Nineteenth Century: A Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
42. On the historical emergence of fieldwork, see Henrika Kuklick, "After Ishmael: The Fieldwork Tradition and Its Future," in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47-65; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 52-91.
43. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
44. Adolf Bastian, Die Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 64.
45. See Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
46. In a 1911 newspaper article on "The Preservation of Unwritten Music," Hornbostel claimed that donating money to the Berlin Phonogram Archive was a "national debt of honor," the price that Germany should be willing to pay for the eradication of colonial peoples. Erich Mortiz von Hornbostel, "Die Erhaltung ungeschriebener Musik" , trans. Rosee Riggs, in Simon, ed., Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 91; hereafter abbreviated as "EM"; trans. rev. throughout. For an account of the ethnological museum and its role in the changing context of the public sphere around 1900, see H. Glenn Penny, "Bastian's Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology," in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
47. Albert Schweitzer to Carl Stumpf, 4 April 1914, trans. Michael Wells, in Simon, ed., Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 55, trans. rev.
48. "PM," 57. "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-É" was a popular song written by Henry J. Sayers and copyrighted in 1891. "The Beautiful Song of Little Cohn" presumably refers to a popular German recording, which Hornbostel imagines being played in the German colonies ("in the South Seas"). James J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk, 3d ed. (New York: Dover, 1985), 570-1.
49. "PM," 51. For a wider account of this "problem" in anthropology, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).
50. Thomas Alva Edison, "The Phonograph and Its Future," The North American Review 262 (May-June 1878): 527.
51. Mark Bennion Sandberg, "Missing Persons: Spectacle and Narrative in Late Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1991), 20.
52. Though Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, it would not become available to consumers until 1888. See Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877-1977, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1977); Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1977).
53. Cheryl Bauer and Randy McNutt, Talking Machine Madness: The Story of America's Early Phonograph Shows (Fairfield, Ohio: Hamilton Hobby, 1985).
54. The Phonoscope 1, no. 1 (November 1896): 10.
55. Together with the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan, Stumpf made several attempts to convince expert audiences of the phonograph's scientific potential. They apparently succeeded with members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but failed to convince those of the Prussian Ministry of Culture. Felix Luschan to Carl Stumpf, 15 February 1905, Inv. Nr. 308, Acta betreffend phonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 - 31 December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl.; 30 November 1906, Inv. Nr. 1301, item 14, Acta betreffend phonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 - 31 December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl., Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin.
56. Non plus ultra Phonograph by W. Bahre, advertisement, Der Kurier 6, no. 17 (22 February 1896): 297.
57. Edward H. Johnson, "A Wonderful Invention: Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition From Automatic Records," Scientific American 37, no. 20 (17 November 1877): 304.
58. "Wonders of the Graphophone: Proposition to Preserve Accurate Records of Nineteenth Century Life," The Phonoscope 4, no. 4 (April 1900): 6. In the early 1900s, the discourse on the gramophone, a medium primarily concerned with music, would similarly concentrate on famous individuals, e.g., celebrities like Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso.
59. Edison, "Phonograph," 533-4; italics in original. This notion of a family record also appears in the first German manual on the Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines . See Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1986; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 55.
60. "Voices of the Dead," The Phonoscope 1, no. 1 (15 November 1896): 5. For more on the phonograph as a kind of technological hedge against death, see Tom Gunning, "Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear," in Abel and Altman, eds., Sounds of Early Cinema, 13-31.
61. "EM," 91. This idea circulated internationally, throughout the early discourse of ethnomusicology. See, e.g., Jesse Walter Fewkes, "On the Use of the Phonograph in the Study of the Languages of American Indians," Science 15, no. 378 (2 May 1890): 267; Charles S. Myers, "The Ethnological Study of Music," in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his 75th Birthday, October 2, 1907, ed. H. Balfour, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 235; Benjamin Ives Gilman, "The Science of Exotic Music," Science n.s. 30, no. 772 (15 October 1909): 535.
62. Quoted in Erica Mugglestone, "Guido Adler's 'The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology' : An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary," Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 : 6, trans. rev.
63. Ibid., 4.
64.
65. In 1931, the Berlin Phonogram Archive issued its first commercial record collection, Musik des Orients, compiled and edited by Hornbostel. It was re-issued in 1963 by Kurt Reinhard and George List as The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv on 2 LPs, Ethnic Folkways Library, FE 4175. This set includes four tracks recorded at ethnographic exhibitions in Berlin: "Siam II" , "Japan" , "India" , "Pueblos" [Hopi] , "Samoyed" . Some of these tracks, along with more recent digital recordings, were released in 2000 on a 4-CD anniversary set, titled Music! 100 Recordings - 100 Years of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000, Wergo SM 1701 2.
66. Kittler, Gramophone, 16.
67. See, for example, AM, 103.
68. I here take issue with the view expressed in Andrew Zimmerman's Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Cf. PSC, 109-11.
69. In fact, comparative musicologists acknowledged that "cultural lands" (Kulturländer) such as India, China, and the Middle East had their own musical documents (e.g., histories, theories, notation systems) and experts (such as the Indian scholar S. M. Tagore). Yet even as Hornbostel and his colleagues consulted some of these sources, they reaffirmed the priority of phonographic recordings by stressing the methodological difference between a "philological-literary study" and a "musical study," such as their own, based on sound recordings. This emphasis on recording was clearly announced by a series of articles, each of which was titled "Phonographed [non-Western] Melodies." See, e.g., Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Phonographierte indische Melodien" , trans. Bonnie Wade, in vol. 1 of Hornbostel Opera Omnia, ed. Klaus P. Wachsmann, Dieter Christensen, and Hans-Peter Reinecke (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 115-82; Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Phonographierte tunesische Melodien" , trans. Israel Katz, in Wachsmann et al., eds., Hornbostel Opera Omnia, 1:323-80.
70. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Formanalysen an siamesischen Orchesterstücken," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 2, no. 2 (April 1920): 320.
71. This "medical" mode of perception emerged in comparative musicology against the backdrop of physical anthropology, which was a medical science in nineteenth-century Germany. The founder of that discipline, Rudolf Virchow, was an ardent opponent of evolutionism, as mentioned earlier. If Abraham and Hornbostel (the one a practicing physician, the other a trained natural scientist) took their perceptual model from medical science, they transformed it not only for music, but also for an evolutionist paradigm of comparative musicology. For more on Virchow and medical science, see PSC, 51-5; Benoit Massin, "From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and 'Modern Race Theories' in Wilhelmine Germany," in Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method, 79-154. For a wider account of medical discourse and perception, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1994).
72. Here too the affinities with modern medicine and visual technologies are notable. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 22-46.
73. For this reason (among others), it is important not to assign too much power to recording technologies like the phonograph. See on this point Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (winter 1986): 9, 16.
74. Darwin was keenly aware of the problems that vision and narrative posed to representing evolution. See James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Tony Bennett has recently explored such problems in the context of evolutionary museums. "Evolution and the Politics of Vision" (paper presented at the symposium "Die Großstadt und das 'Primitive': Text, Politik und Repräsentation," IFK - Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, October 2001).
75. AM, 26-30, 33. Stumpf's theory of origins was based on his original notion of "tone fusion" (Tonverschmelzung). See "QO," 352-3.
76. See on this point Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
77. The key context here was, of course, the "theory of cultural circles" (or Kulturkreislehre). At a 1904 meeting of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, the young museum curators Fritz Graebner and Bernhard Ankermann publicly challenged the discipline's elder statesmen, Bastian and Virchow, by advocating a "culture-historical method" based no longer on the "universal" foundations of humanity, but on particular differences between cultures. The so-called theory of cultural circles aimed to chart the "diffusion" of particular "cultural traits" as people migrated across the globe and intermixed with other groups of people. It also allowed curators such as Graebner and Ankermann to introduce evolutionary narratives into German museum exhibits. Woodruff D. Smith has analyzed this shift in German anthropology as "the diffusionist revolt" (see PSC, 140-61). I would argue that comparative musicologists also heralded this scientific revolution, while attempting to ride into the university on the coattails of anthropology. See Albrecht Schneider, Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: Zur Methodik und Geschichte der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1976); for a brief summary in English, see "GA," 88-91.
78. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, "Studien über das Tonsystem und die Musik der Japaner" , trans. Gertrud Kurath, and reprinted in Wachsmann et al., eds., Hornbostel Opera Omnia, 1:54; hereafter abbreviated as "TMJ"; trans. rev. throughout.
If the attempt to disentangle itself from the museum was characteristic of much experimental art in the 1910s and 1920s, and again in the 1960s and 1970s, then we might describe our present historical moment in terms of the attempt by the museum, as it approaches the condition of the multiplex entertainment center, to disentangle itself from the project of experimental art altogether. This is not simply a matter of what goes around comes around. Nor does it have to do with the ways in which museums are increasingly devoting more and more space to the arts of shopping, dining, web surfing, tourism, and so forth. Rather, it is driven by the fact that museums have oversold the notion, as Brian O'Doherty once put it, of the assimilation of art without effort. 1 A major force in the promulgation of this notion, particularly with respect to the organization of exhibitions, is the dramatic reconration of curatorial practice that has taken place over the last several decades. Where once it was primarily curators who called the shots—on account of their subject expertise and disciplinary judgment—these professionals now routinely serve on box office-driven curatorial teams composed of marketing specialists, public relations personnel, education curators, exhibition evaluators, and project "managers." The attempt to embrace the differing and often directly competing priorities represented by each team player often leads to a leveling of critical ambition; perhaps nowhere has this leveling proved more detrimental than in the exhibition of new and difficult art.
With this problem in mind, I would like to turn to consider an earlier moment in the history of the acquisition and exhibition of contemporary art, wherein an alternative model of curatorial practice was advanced, and to a considerable extent realized—in Russia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. Involving as it does the interventions of artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Vasily Kandinsky, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and David Shterenberg, and critics like Osip Brik and Nikolai Punin, this alternative model gives the lie to the standard assumption that Russian vanguard artists and critics—in their pursuit of the dissolution of the division of art and life—simply turned their backs on the museum. On the contrary. The former Suprematist painter Malevich, for example, was among the many vanguard voices calling in 1919 for the state's construction of a vast network of museums of contemporary art across the new Republic. This network was to be interconnected by a "superhighway" (magistral') for the smooth circulation of traveling exhibitions, and anchored by a central museum in the new capital, Moscow. 2 Like the electrical engineer Gleb Krzhizhanovskii's adventurous contemporaneous plan for state electrification, Malevich's proposal followed the structural principle—the arterial linking of city to countryside—of most utopian visions formulated under the Bolshevik government's Civil War-period (1918-1920) policy of War Communism. This policy comprised a highly centralized command economy—or, at least, fantasy of a command economy, if we are to share Tim Clark's wise skepticism 3 —with a putatively totalizing control over the Republic's even most far-flung reaches.
As it was to turn out, the vanguard project for the state "museumification" (muzeefikatsiia) of contemporary art was both undertaken and substantially realized by the new cultural bureaucracy established in January 1918, the People's Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, or, as it is usually known (by its Russian acronym), Narkompros. In March 1920, the first of Narkompros's new contemporary art museums opened as the Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei Zhivopisnoi Kul'tury [MZhK]), in a suite of eight galleries on Volkhonka in downtown Moscow. 4 Its definitive installation took place in June 1920. 5 According to a Narkompros guidebook, some thirty such museums were founded by 1921, with a centralized Museum Bureau in Moscow functioning as an acquisition and distribution center for the shipment of work to Petrograd and provincial cities. 6
With the Bolsheviks' nationalization of private property in 1918 and the abolition of the private dealer system—a system that the expressionist painter Kandinsky criticized as "more or less accidental, capricious, and arbitrary," 7 and that the constructivist Rodchenko condemned as oppressive and coercive ("The patrons have oppressed us, have forced us to carry out their whims") 8 —the Moscow Bureau became the new Republic's sole patron of contemporary art. In his official capacity as head of that Bureau, Rodchenko reports in June 1921 that "for the past three years the best contemporary artists, both in Moscow and the provinces, have lived exclusively from the sale of their work to the Bureau, and the Bureau has supplied the provinces generously with contemporary art." Chiefly through a process of studio visits, the Bureau had acquired the work of over four hundred artists who would otherwise have been left stranded by the dismantling of the market economy. Such state support for contemporary art, Rodchenko continues, "is unprecedented anywhere in the world," and, as such, "is an achievement of which the commune ought to be proud." 9 With the 26 million rubles spent on contemporary art between 1918 and 1921, the state purchased some 1,336 paintings, 404 drawings, 121 graphic works, 54 sculptures, and 11 spatial constructions. 10 About a hundred of these acquisitions were selected for display in the Moscow MZhK, while the rest were earmarked for redistribution across the Republic.
Until recently, the new Russian contemporary art museums were rather little known or studied beyond—or even by—specialists in the field. 11 It is thus worth underscoring the fact that they preceded by a decade, and in part encouraged, the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which is often cited as the ur-example of the genre. With a single exception, the Russian museums represent the very earliest instantiation of a phenomenon that has since rapidly proliferated in many parts of the world, particularly in the postwar period and especially since the 1980s. At the time of their foundation during the Civil War, however, their single precedent was the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, which, in 1818, had been transformed by government decree into an institution devoted exclusively to the work of "living artists," and thereby differentiated in function from the Musée du Louvre, the so-called galleries of the dead. 12 While calls had been made as early as 1912 for a Russian "museum of living artists" 13 —as the Luxembourg was nicknamed—the notion of a network of such museums fed by a centralized Bureau handling all acquisition and distribution, with its underlying principle of centrifugal circulation, was at the time entirely unprecedented. (Though its basic principle was soon popularized elsewhere: In 1931, for example, A. Conger Goodyear asserts that MoMA—of which he was first president—"should be a feeder, primarily to the Metropolitan Museum, but also to museums generally throughout the country." 14 A comparable principle structures André Malraux's mid-century proposal in France for a nation-wide network of cultural centers, the maisons de la culture, while the late twentieth century witnesses the Guggenheim's global expansion out of New York, and the national spiraling of the "new Tates" out of London.)
Unique to the Russian case, however, is the fact that its Republic-wide network of museums of contemporary art was proposed, established, organized, and administered by artists themselves (in concert with a number of critics), rather than museum professionals. For the division of Narkompros responsible for overseeing the museum project—the Department of Fine Arts, IZO (hence: IZO Narkompros)—was staffed predominantly by artists, the majority of whom were leftists and otherwise known as Futurists. This alliance between state and vanguard had had to be fought for. Honoring art's new-found autonomy from Tsarist regulation and censorship, the Futurists had initially refused to collaborate with the Bolsheviks in the reinstitutionalization of Russian culture. Within months, however, a realpolitik concerning the control of the Republic's newly expropriated cultural heritage emerged amidst their ranks. By mid-1918, Futurists had joined in droves the state's official if still fledgling cultural bureaucracy. 15
My subject is thus the emergence between 1918 and 1921 of a theory and practice of what might be called Futurist museology. Before turning to unpack this at first glance somewhat oxymoronic phenomenon—with its simultaneous movement forward into the future and backward into the past—the meaning of the terms leftist and Futurist in the present context should be clarified. While sharing the Italian Futurists' vitality and iconoclasm, the Russian Futurists were a more diffuse lot, comprising not only the various groups of Futurist poets and Cubo-Futurist painters that formed around 1912, but also most experimental practitioners working in the visual and literary arts in the 1910s and 1920s. Generally speaking, Futurist was used wherever we would tend to say avant-garde, the latter expression being significantly less common in Russia at the time. After 1917, and no doubt in part because of the key role of the Futurists in IZO Narkompros, the term Futurist came to be used more or less interchangeably with leftist—in opposition to centrist and rightist. None of these terms necessarily inferred any particular party political affiliation—though they could and sometimes did (as in the case of the critic Brik, who was a member of the RKP[b])—but rather referred chiefly to the perceived radicality, or lack thereof, of one's mode of production.
The appellation Futurist was more than merely nominal, however. If one had to say what made certain strands of Russian culture both before and after 1917 Futurist, it was their shared and unyielding commitment to, and absolute privileging of, the notion of formal or technological invention in the arts and the sciences alike. A broadsheet manifesto issued by the poet Velimir Khlebnikov and his merry entourage in 1916 textualizes this commitment in a sententious formulation that became, over the course of the next decade or so, something of an all-purpose Futurist battle cry. Announcing the operative terms of a "new holy war" against "that fat caterpillar, the freight train of elders," Khlebnikov trumpets: "LET THE MILKY WAY BE DIVIDED INTO THE MILKY WAY OF THE INVENTORS [IZOBRETATELEI] AND THE MILKY WAY OF THE CONSUMERS [PRIOBRETATELEI]." 16 The term priobretatel'—consumer or acquisitor—was rather new in Russian, and the poet's usage of it utterly pejorative. In the context of the broadsheet, Khlebnikov's call for the division of our galaxy into a vanguard who invent, discover, pioneer, and produce culture, on the one hand, and a rearguard who acquire, amass, possess, own, and consume it, on the other, was a key part of an ingenious repackaging operation undertaken by a small group of Futurist poets led by Nikolai Aseev, who remodeled themselves as Martians after those in H. G. Wells's novel, The War of the Worlds.
But Khlebnikov's putative antinomy of invention and consumption was to have a much longer shelf life than the poet himself might have countenanced, given his Futurist commitment to a vastly accelerated temporality. Numerous iterations of it are found in vanguard texts published after the Revolution. It serves to frame, for example, the project of Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the commune), the state-funded weekly newspaper published by the IZO Futurists between 1918 and 1919 that quickly became the staple reading matter of all cultural leftists. In its third issue, the critic Punin—a major player in the vanguard museum project in general, and in the organization and administration of the Petrograd museum in particular, as Jennifer Cahn has recently demonstrated 17 —invokes Khlebnikov's galactic division as an explanatory gloss on the current division of contemporary artists into left and right. 18 In Iskusstvo kommuny's nineteenth (and final) issue, the IZO Futurists march Khlebnikov's battle cry across the breadth of the front page, directly under the masthead—a parting shot at their comrades higher up the Narkompros food chain, who had just ordered the newspaper's closure on account of its unrelenting attacks on Russia's cultural heritage. 19
A few years later, the Futurist poet Sergei Tret'iakov turned multitasker in the 1920s returns to Khlebnikov's antinomy in his attempt to define, historicize, and futurize Russian Futurism's first decade of production in the inaugural issue of the constructivist journal Lef: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (Lef: journal of the left front of the arts) (March 1923): "'The creators are set apart from the consumers' (Khlebnikov)." 20 A few years later again, in an extraordinary eulogy written in the wake of Vladimir Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, the linguist and Futurist proselytizer Roman Jakobson conjoins Khlebnikov's binary with speculative philosophy's antinomy of "I" and "not-I." He thus reads Mayakovsky's hostility to the "stagnating slime"—the accumulated conventions and habitual rhythms of "everyday life" (byt)—which "stifles life [zhizn'] in its tight, hard mold": "Th[e] terrible 'double' of the poet is his conventional and commonplace 'self,' the purchaser and owner whom Khlebnikov once contrasted with the inventor and discoverer." 21 For Khlebnikovian Futurism, as for the contiguously formulated Shklovskian project of defamiliarization, the mundane, repetitive world of byt was everything that the vanguard discourse of zhizn'—"life" as defined within the elevated realm of philosophical and aesthetic speculation—sought to repress. 22
I dwell on Khlebnikov's holy-war cry and its successive iterations in order to pose the problem—even the paradox—that lies at the heart of Futurist museology. It goes without saying that the Futurists' march against the priobretatel' was driven by their longstanding hostility—fully endorsed by October—to the increasing role of the marketplace in cultural life and the inevitable imbrication of their practice within the economic structures of capitalism, an economy that had accelerated rapidly in the late nineteenth century and to which the avant-garde had been indebted for its survival (precisely the kind of structural dependency which Clement Greenberg famously described as an "umbilical cord of gold"). Against all evidence to the contrary, the utopian Futurists posited the inventor as exempt from capital. But the Futurists' march against the priobretatel' was driven also and, in the present context, more significantly, by their campaign against the past and the suffocating burden of tradition. Khlebnikov's antinomy reiterates the raw terms of this campaign as it had been originally set forth in 1912, in the now famous inaugural manifesto of Russian Futurism: the right of poets to "feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time," to "throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, [and] Tolstoy . . . overboard from the Ship of Modernity." 23
One is prompted to ask, therefore, what is the antipasséist doing in the museology business? What is the significance of the fact that the inventor him- or herself now becomes a priobretatel', in the sense of an acquisitor or collector of a fast-becoming-past present? What does it mean when, despite all Rodchenko's protestations to the contrary ("We will not give in to . . . the intelligentsia that has taken the place of the former bureaucrats"), 24 the Khlebnikovian Futurist became precisely that, a bureaucrat? In what ways did such inversions, reversals, and transformations inflect the Futurists' negotiation of the museum question? Was the project of Futurist museology ultimately a contradiction in terms? And what happened to the concept of history in the landscape of museological revolution? A preliminary sketch of the historical and institutional context in which Futurist museology developed will help to ground these and related questions.
For both diplomatic and domestic reasons, museological policy was a highly sensitive matter for the Bolshevik government, still vulnerable in the first year of its administration. Rumors had circulated abroad—as reported by the critic Felix Fénéon, for example—that Anatoly Lunacharsky (the first Commissar of Narkompros) would not intervene to prevent the muzhiks "from cutting boots out of the Rembrandts in the Hermitage." 25 Along with the destruction of imperial monuments during October, and the state seizure of private collections in its aftermath, such rumors had done little to convince skeptical European nations of the new government's credibility. Since everything had to be done to hasten diplomatic recognition of its legitimacy, the Bolshevik leadership was obliged to take immediate steps to secure Russia's cultural heritage.
To this end, Lunacharsky established within Narkompros two separate departments for cultural affairs. The first was the aforementioned IZO, the responsibilities of which included the foundation of open-entrance art schools (after the abolition of the quota-bound imperial academy), the inauguration of an exhibitions program, and the organization of a division for publication on the arts. In Petrograd, the key positions in IZO's Collegium were held by leftists such as the modernist painter Shterenberg (who served as director), the artist Natan Altman, and the critics Punin and Brik. A parallel Collegium was established in Moscow by Shterenberg's deputy, Tatlin, who invited on board radicals like Malevich and the nonobjective painter Ol'ga Rozanova, as well as more moderate res such as Kandinsky. 26 The second body within Narkompros was the Department of Museums and the Preservation of Cultural Monuments, to which Lunacharsky granted exclusive jurisdiction over the reorganization and administration of the Republic's cultural patrimony. Unlike that of IZO, its Collegium was dominated by conservative artists and museum professionals.
In February 1919, IZO decided to challenge the Museums Department's jurisdiction, particularly with respect to contemporary art. It convened a week-long conference on the "museum question" in the Palace of Arts (formerly the Winter Palace) in Petrograd, to which it invited artists, art historians, museum directors, curators, and conservators. Among the members of the Museums Department's Collegium who traveled from Moscow were Pavel Muratov, an art historian, and Igor Grabar, an impressionist painter, art historian, and director of the Tretiakov Gallery since 1913—both conservative res much maligned within Futurist circles. IZO's purpose in convening the conference can be gleaned from its "Declaration," which was read to the assembled delegates by Punin and circulated at the conference as a broadsheet, later appearing on the front page of Iskusstvo kommuny in one of two special issues devoted to the proceedings. 27 Its key premises were also further reinforced by conference papers by Punin, Brik, the neoprimitivist painter Aleksei Grishchenko, and the graphic designer and ceramicist, Sergei Chekhonin. 28
IZO's "Declaration" made three main demands:
First, that the Russian state should henceforth entrust artists
rather than scholars and museum professionals with the acquisition
of contemporary art: "The business of the acquisition of works of
contemporary art is exclusively the province of artists. . . . As the
only ones competent in questions of contemporary art, and as the force
which creates artistic value, [it is] artists alone [who] are able to
carry out acquisitions."
29
While IZO's first demand—with its insistence that artists
should or even could maintain control over the evaluation of their
practice—sought to strip existing museum directors and curators
of their purchasing powers, its second endeavored to force them to
relinquish their individual fiefdoms: IZO proposed the centralization
in a single state reserve (Gosfond) of all existing museum collections
(including, for example, the former Shchukin and Morozov collections of
modern French painting in Moscow), as well as all new acquisitions. It
would then be IZO staffers who would have the exclusive right to
select from Gosfond works of art to supply—and this is the
declaration's third demand—a network of "Museums of Artistic
Culture" (Muzei Khudozhestvennoi Kul'tury).
30
The idea was that these museums would then be replenished on a more
or less continuous basis by the latest selections from the central
reserve.
31
As one conference participant put it, "such . . . museum[s] will
prove to be . . . living organism[s], pulsating together with the
pulsations of artistic life."
32
IZO proposed a single criterion for the selection of work for the new museums, namely, whether or not a given work manifested "artistic culture" (khudozhestvennaia kul'tura). 33 In a separate position statement in the same issue of Iskusstvo kommuny, IZO defined this concept in terms of labor and invention: "The concept of 'artistic culture' contains within it—in accordance with the very meaning of the word 'culture' as active work—a creative moment; creativity presupposes the creation of something new, an invention; artistic culture is [thus] nothing other than the culture of artistic invention." 34
With their redefinition of culture as invention, the IZO Futurists promulgated formal, stylistic, or technical innovation as the exclusive criterion of aesthetic value, thereby situating their museological project firmly within the camp of Khlebnikov's vanguard of inventors. A "Museum of Artistic Culture" would be, accordingly, a museum devoted to (the history of) artistic invention. Layered over IZO's Futurism was also a new concern, however, to redefine culture in terms of labor. In the aftermath of October, the Futurists drew upon the revolutionary rhetoric of the dissolution of the division of labor in order to promote the artist's accession to the realm of the so-called practical worker, as opposed to parasitical intelligent. IZO sought to de- or remythologize the Khlebnikovian model, rebuffing the class position of intelligentsia with which the Futurists, notwithstanding their own protests, were typically associated. By setting forth a history of artistic invention as a history of "'culture' as active work," the new museums were to document what Lunacharsky describes as the "evolution of labor in the field of art." 35
How did IZO's demands fare at the conference?
More tolerant of the Futurists than any other Bolshevik leader of the
period, Lunacharsky endeavored to play the role of mediator between
the museum workers and their IZO antagonists by making concessions to
both sides. On the one hand, he agrees that in the past scholars and art
historians had indeed exercised too much control over acquisitions, and
he thus endorses IZO's demands for the right of artists both to control
acquisitions of contemporary art and also to establish Museums of Artistic
Culture. On the other hand, he rejects without hesitation IZO's demand
that, in order to supply such museums, artists be granted the right to
rummage through existing collections or a centralized reserve.
The Commissar's objections to this last are twofold: Most fundamentally, Lunacharsky rejects as too reductive IZO's definition of the history of art in terms of a history of invention: its "professional and technicizing formalism," he argues, neglects equally important questions such as the role in art of "inspiration" and "imagination." It ignored art's capacity to express "ideas," reflect "human culture," and provide "humanity's autobiography." According to the Commissar, IZO's narrowly professional history of art was incapable of realizing the enlightenment function of all museums as it had been decreed at the Third Congress of the Soviets in 1918: to educate a public broader than just specialists (artists and connoisseurs) so as to facilitate the proletariat's access to its newfound cultural wealth. "It must be remembered," he points out, "that the Museum exists neither for scholars nor for artists, but first and foremost for the people [dlia naroda]." 36 In addition, Lunacharsky argues that if IZO's demand to select at its will were granted, a precedent would be established that could lead to tremendous instability (not to mention administrative nightmares)—with every changing of the guard, a new history of art would have to be written.
Lunacharsky's response to IZO's demands guided two major resolutions passed by the Petrograd conference. First, the desirability of establishing a Museum of Artistic Culture was unanimously ratified—although, significantly for our purposes, "without resolving the question of the form of its organization." Second, it was agreed that "a united state reserve must be decreed, in principle," but with the proviso that "each individual collection may defend its right to inviolability [neprikosnovennost']" from forced centralization. 37 The upshot was that the existing individual fiefdoms were to stay intact, which meant, in turn, that the proposed central reserve—and thus also the museums themselves—would have to be supplied entirely through new acquisitions. Thus, while these (qualified) ratifications represented significant gains for a developing Futurist museology, they nevertheless presented IZO Narkompros with new problems: What principles would guide the organization of the new Museum of Artistic Culture (and also, therefore, of the museum network overall)? What principles would shape its acquisitions policy?
In the following sections, I turn to consider the two most important—and in the end antagonistic—theoretical models advanced on the museum question in the wake of Petrograd: on the one hand, that of Kandinsky, a vanguard painter who was, however, neither a Khlebnikovian Futurist nor particularly committed to October, and, on the other, that of Rodchenko, a Futurist engagé. Each artist played a crucial role in the initial organization and administration of the new museums: Kandinsky from a position of considerable authority, Rodchenko as his insurgent young comrade and eventual antagonist. While predominantly speculative in their scope and ambition, each model was nevertheless formulated within and in response to the concrete historical task of establishing and running the very first of the new contemporary art museums—that in Moscow. In the course of differentiating how each artist imagined this museum and, by extension, the entire network of such museums, it will become evident that the dialectical struggle between Kandinsky and Rodchenko that came to dominate the Moscow avant-garde in the early 1920s—and that led directly to the emergence of constructivism—was first played out within the context of sustained museological experimentation.
Shortly after the Petrograd conference, Kandinsky was appointed founding director of both the Moscow museum and the museum network overall, as well as a key member of its Purchasing Commission. As such, his responsibilities included overseeing acquisitions, distribution, and the organization and administration of the museums themselves. 38 In this labor-intensive task, Kandinsky was assisted by a Museum Bureau, which carried out the onerous administrative work of registration and storage. In 1919, this Bureau was run by the Latvian painter Aleksandr Drevin, with the assistance of his compatriot Karl Ioganson as its "technical specialist," and from February 1920 onwards by Rodchenko. 39 As mentioned at the outset, the Moscow museum opened in early 1920, but not as a Museum of Artistic (Khudozhestvennoi) Culture—as IZO itself had initially proposed—but of Painterly (Zhivopisnoi) Culture. While the adjectives "artistic" and "painterly" were often used interchangeably, the former was much broader in its encompass, abrogating the traditional distinction between high and low, while the latter was restricted to the fine arts, and thereby reinstantiated it.
Given that Kandinsky was no Futurist engagé, his appointment may perhaps seem somewhat surprising. Having spent most of the preceding two decades in Germany, Kandinsky had returned to Moscow after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1918, he accepted an invitation to join the Moscow Collegium of IZO Narkompros, but without committing himself to the politics of the new government. In retrospect, it seems plausible to suggest that Kandinsky was appointed in 1919 as the Bolsheviks' chief arbiter on the museum question not only on account of his considerable international success and reputation abroad, but also because his own formation as an artist had been largely removed from the iconoclasm and internecine rivalries of the Russian avant-garde. In other words, Kandinsky represented a voice of moderation that could be entrusted with the difficult task of mediating the conflicting agendas of radical leftists such as Malevich, on the one hand, and of conservative artists cum museum professionals like Grabar, on the other.
In a long essay published in January 1920, Kandinsky discusses IZO's museological agenda as it had been shaped under his direction over the course of the year or so since the Petrograd conference ("MZhK," 18-20; "MCP," 1:437-44). He envisages the Moscow museum as setting forth the history of painting from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including not only Russian but also French works, the latter drawn from the former Shchukin and Morozov collections. By history Kandinsky does not mean chronicle. The MZhK, he writes, will avoid a merely chronological account in which the position of a work of art within the museum is a function of its date. Such chronicling—or "historical sequencing" as he puts it—is an utterly "chaotic" way in which to track art's development over time. Unfortunately, however, it remains the most pervasive approach to museum organization, both in Russia and abroad:
Museums divide art up into period after period, century after century, regardless of whether one period has any relation to another, apart from that of historical sequence. Thus the usual type of museum is reminiscent of some chronicle that draws its thread from one event to the next, without seeking to penetrate their inner meaning. Such art historical museums have a definite value as a treasury of artistic production. . . . [But] the evident deficiency of this kind of museum is . . . its lack of any guiding principle or system. ["MZhK," 18; "MCP," 1:437]
In faulting the presentation of historical sequence as lacking in guiding principle or system, Kandinsky appears to be speaking to the positivist dilution over the course of the nineteenth century of a famously paradigmatic model of the modern museum—Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum (1823-1830) in Berlin. Controversial in its time, Schinkel's design for the Altes Museum had overturned the then-prevailing academic model for museum display, wherein a canon of great masterpieces of painting and sculpture was assembled to provide exemplars for imitation, irrespective of their particular place within a historical sequence. The latter model, predicated upon a concept of normative beauty, had dominated museum organization during a period when museums were directly connected to the pedagogical functions of art academies. In the Altes Museum, by contrast, Schinkel confined the academic model to a single space—a rotunda filled with exemplary works of classical sculpture—while designing all the remaining galleries in such a way as to accommodate a chronological narrative of the history of art.
But this narrative was to be no merely positivist chronicle. As Douglas Crimp has argued, Schinkel's design enshrined a new notion of the museum that was indebted not only to the art historians on his advisory committee, but also to his friend G. F. W. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics (which the philosopher read in Berlin during the very years of the museum's construction). The galleries of the Altes Museum were to constitute the physical realization of the progressive and teleological narrative of history itself; they were to "march" the visitor "through the history of man's striving for Absolute Spirit." 40 From Kandinsky's point of view, it was precisely such a guiding principle or system that the typical nineteenth-century art-historical museum lacked. (In fact, as Yve-Alain Bois has suggested, the narrative ordonnance of the Altes Museum did not become the dominant model for museum organization until the twentieth century.) 41 Kandinsky was not seeking a return to the academic model, but rather contrasting two different models for historical construction: one, the merely "chaotic, historical sequence," the other a Hegelian model in which the "inner meaning" of art's historical development might be systematically explicated.
What, then, would be the guiding principle of Kandinsky's Museum of Painterly Culture? As discussed above, the IZO Futurists had redefined aesthetic value in terms of formal invention, 42 thereby proclaiming their relative disinterest in the broader ideological or historical conditions informing artistic production. In accordance with IZO's position, Kandinsky proposes that the Moscow museum showcase the "invention . . . of new artistic devices [priemov]" and the "development of purely artistic forms, independent of their content." 43 Like his colleagues, Kandinsky hypostatizes the technology of the work of art—the formal or technical aspects of its making—as the guiding principle for the construction of a new narrative of the history of art as a history of pure invention.
One of the main functions of Kandinsky's proposed organization of the MZhK was to provide a history—in the sense of a historical pedigree—that would authorize, as it were, the explicitly formal preoccupations of contemporary art, such as the compositional concerns of his own series of large-scale "Compositions" of abstract or quasi-abstract forms that he had completed in Munich in 1913 to great acclaim. From Kandinsky's point of view, the formal problems of composition and relational balance constituted the main problems of artistic production, and while their resolution was for him primarily the means to an expressive end—the communication to the viewer of the "state of his soul"—these problems nevertheless directly shaped his ultimate objective for the MZhK, which was to foreground the history of art as a history of "composing," as opposed to "transcribing."
As such, Kandinsky's new organizational model sought to dislodge from center stage the darling of museum professionals in the early twentieth century, namely, the mid-nineteenth-century Russian realist painter Il'ya Repin. Kandinsky considered realism, which had arisen in Russia in the 1860s in protest against the idealism with which the academic doctrine of imitation had tempered mimetic illusionism, an aberration within the history of art. The slavish imitation of appearances leads, he asserted, to weak draughtsmanship and the neglect of composition. 44 Kandinsky proposed, accordingly, a drastic reduction in the quantity of realist works to be included in the MZhK. In their place, he hoped to narrate the longue durée of composition, by presenting a teleological narrative of the history of painting which one could potentially imagine as culminating—not in a positivist sense but rather in terms of the realization of history's "guiding principle"—in the Munich Compositions.
By the time the MZhK finally opened in late March 1920, however, the historicizing ambition of both IZO's original proposal and its theoretical revision and expansion by Kandinsky had been abandoned. Instead, the new museum was devoted exclusively to the work of living artists. This substantial modification did not bother radical leftists on IZO's payroll, such as Rodchenko, who were vastly more interested in shaping the present and the future than in constructing past pedigree.
Over the course of 1919, Rodchenko and Stepanova had developed a close friendship with Kandinsky, and since September of that year had been living in the house of Vasily and Nina on Dolgii pereulok. 45 But Rodchenko's increasing involvement with the Museum through the course of 1920—in February 1920 he replaced Drevin as Bureau Head—coincided with his growing impatience with Kandinsky's artistic and museological priorities. While Kandinsky had attacked the typical historical sequence as but the dilution of art history into mere chronicle, Rodchenko went much further.
In a paper presented to a conference of the regional directors of
IZO Narkompros, Rodchenko proposes stripping IZO's museums of any
historicizing function whatsoever. The art-historical museum of the
past, he asserts, bears "the form of an archive"—within the
vanguard imaginary, an archive being that place to which things are
consigned once they have been brought to resolution or have otherwise
come to an end, a repository for those things with which one has already
finished. As such, the art-historical museum is built only for the benefit
of connoisseurs, amateurs, and ethnographers, Rodchenko continues,
and never for the benefit of artists themselves. Its universalistic
ambitions are encyclopedic and indiscriminate:
to collect anything and everything without observing any kind of
evaluative criteria other than the artist's degree of notoriety. The
archival character of such a museum is underscored by its installation
practices, particularly its "custom of carpeting the walls from top to
bottom" with paintings arranged in chronological sequence.
46
To this art-historical museum of the past, Rodchenko contrasts IZO's new museum which, in being "built upon living [zhivushchikh] works of art not yet possessing the quality of 'historical value' (in the narrow sense of this word)," constitutes a "cultural agent" (kul'turnyi faktor), a dynamic force in the shaping of the present and the future. The new museum of living works rejects any hagiographic function: It is built upon works (formal inventions) rather than authors (a museological reformulation of Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen). Its collections are selected according to two main criteria: First, the degree to which an "inventive factor" is present in a given work, this factor being that which drives art forward, destroying any possibility of the latter's transcendence of its chronotopical specificity: "Everything exists in time and space, including the work of art." All "dogma," "classical canons," and notions of "eternal beauty" must be jettisoned, therefore. The second criterion is a given work's degree of technical or professional skill (masterstvo). Works are to be grouped and sequenced according to their respective stages in the development of a particular form or method, regardless of their author or date of execution. In terms of installation, the museum's walls will serve as calm and neutral surfaces upon which paintings will be hung relative to the viewer's eye level and with adequate room to breathe. 47
In a long diary entry of 15 June 1920, Rodchenko begins to flesh out a model of the museum as a laboratory, prefacing his thoughts with a note that he had been wanting to write on the subject of "A Museum of Experimental Technics" (Muzei Eksperimental'noi Tekhniki) ever since the winter. 48 According to his own testimony, therefore, the inception of Rodchenko's thinking about the foundation of such a museum thus roughly coincided with his February 1920 appointment as Bureau Head and Keeper (Khranitel') of the MZhK's collections. It coincided also with his production around this time—in explicit rivalry with Malevich's 1918 White on White canvases—of a series of Black on Black paintings, wherein faktura ("texture," or the "working of the material") 49 became the very subject of the work of art, and the art of painting a self-reflexive laboratory operation. Rodchenko was not alone in this concern. In a March 1920 diary entry, Stepanova remarks upon the recent emergence of a group of artists who are engaged in "experimental-analytical" work—including, besides Rodchenko, also Ioganson, Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, and Konstantin Medunetsky (in other words, the soon-to-be constructivists)—who "talk about the future liberation of art from painterly culture." 50
While both Kandinsky and Rodchenko shared a commitment to formulating a museological practice which would emphasize the procedural aspects of art making, they did so for quite different reasons. If Kandinsky sought to construct a historical pedigree for his own preoccupation with composition as expressive means, Rodchenko believed that the museum should foreground making as the subject itself of art. Accordingly, Rodchenko's ambitions with regard to his hypothetical Museum of Experimental Technics were much grander in both scale and media than IZO's original provision for a small "section" within the MZhK to be devoted to "experimental technics in painting" (eksperimetnal'noi tekhniki zhivopisi). 51 While Kandinsky had agreed that the MZhK would collect "pure" experiments in form ("to collect all essential and significant experiments with the treatment of raw materials—[e.g.,] faktura"), he insisted that such objects were for study purposes only (rather than for exhibition). Acquisitions earmarked for a technics-specific section began in February 1920—again, the same month Rodchenko became Head of the Bureau. The first acquisition for the technics section was a spatial construction by Ioganson; works by Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers soon followed. 52 But for Kandinsky, anxious about the incursion of the positive sciences into the realm of art, the value of such experimental works lay only in their redress of the previous neglect of the problem of form in Russian art. They did not, in his opinion, constitute works of art per se because their forms, he asserted, "clothe" no "pictorial content." 53
By contrast, Rodchenko seeks to expand the museum's section of so-called pure experiments into a full-blown Museum of Experimental Technics, in which the very air will have "the coldness of a laboratory corpse. . . the dryness of mathematical formulae . . . the analyst's sharp, unrelenting realism," wherein "everything [will be] invented, broken down, measured, dismembered, calculated, deliberated, reduced to pure formulae." 54 In a related text entitled "Everything is Experiment" (October 1920), Rodchenko declared the abolition altogether of the traditional disciplinary distinction between the experiment and the work of art, declaring all his work to be but "experiment." 55 Written to accompany his contribution of some fifty nonobjective paintings and spatial constructions to the Nineteenth State Exhibition—an exhibition to which Kandinsky also contributed—this wall-mounted manifesto was one of a series of interventions by which Rodchenko announced his "aversion to [Kandinskian] emotion," and the coming to an end of his alliance with his former mentor. That same month, Rodchenko and Stepanova moved out of the Kandinskys' building and into the living quarters of the Museum Bureau. 56 This split had been a long time coming. According to Stepanova—who began working in the Bureau in October 1920—Rodchenko was already aware as early as January 1920 (that is, at precisely the moment when Kandinsky's essay on the MZhK appeared in print and just prior to Rodchenko's becoming Bureau chief), that easel painting was exhausted, and that new media and methods of art making "besides canvas and brush" were needed. Hence, Stepanova suggests, the strength of Rodchenko's conviction as to the necessity of founding a Museum of Experimental Technics precisely in order to accommodate new pigments (enamel and metallic), new tools (rollers instead of brushes), and new methods (the ruling of lines instead of free drawing), and the constructing rather than the carving or modeling of sculpture. 57
The difference between Kandinsky's and Rodchenko's respective theorizations of museum organization—museum as history of composing versus museum as laboratory—was further demonstrated by their approach to the problem of installation. Although no photographs of the MZhK have been found, 58 Stepanova's diary contains information apropos its installation from which we may infer the general tenor of the way in which the disagreement between Kandinsky and Rodchenko played out in practice. With the MZhK's definitive installation taking place in late May or early June 1920, their disagreement became glaringly evident. A sole point of agreement between the two, according to Stepanova, was on the issue of abandoning the traditional principle of hanging an artist's entire oeuvre within a single gallery; beyond that, their approaches radically diverged.
Stepanova reports that Kandinsky and the painter Robert Fal'k installed one gallery "without any system" whatsoever, proceeding instead "simply by feeling." The result was analogous to "the composition of a painting." "It's good," she admits, "but very emotional." To Kandinsky Stepanova attributes a so-called eclectic approach to installation, wherein the main objective was supposedly to create the most pleasing composition of the overall ensemble of exhibited objects. By contrast, she continues, Rodchenko's approach was totally "systematic": "from the start he had in mind a connecting thread [nit'] for the [whole] gallery." This thread was none other than faktura. One commentator, the painter V. F. Franketti, described Rodchenko's installation of the "faktura-gallery" as "incisive." According to Stepanova, Rodchenko's principle of a connecting or guiding thread was adopted for the installation of the remaining Volkhonka galleries. 59
Whether or not Stepanova's comments merely caricature Kandinsky's installation, it was certainly the case that the latter's museological model—a museum that would articulate a teleological narrative of the history of painting culminating in, say, the Munich Compositions—had been thwarted by the restriction of the MZhK's collection to recent Russian art only. While no less pitched toward conring the MZhK as a conduit for his own artistic agenda, Rodchenko's museological model severed this fundamental connection between history and the museum. Rodchenko not only undermined Kandinsky's faith in the expressive function of the work of art but also evacuated the latter's concern with the problem of history, by elaborating an entirely new function for the museum—that of a historyless laboratory of "living forms," wherein the subject of art was its own production. As such, Rodchenko's model of the museum as laboratory reprises the substance if not the inflamed rhetoric of Malevich's initial response to IZO's museological agenda as it had been presented in Petrograd a year or so earlier. Having sat through the entire conference, Malevich had protested in the pages of Iskusstvo kommuny IZO's emphasis on museums devoted to the history of invention, demanding instead the organization of "laboratories of a world-wide, creative, building apparatus." 60 Thus while it was Malevich who was the first to test the very limits of the concept of museability by suggesting the reconration of the museum as a laboratory, it was his young rival Rodchenko and his circle who first attempted to instantiate this idea in practice.
In December 1920, Kandinsky resigned as the director of the MZhK in order to take up a new position in the recently established Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, whereupon the museum was placed under the authority of the Bureau, and Rodchenko appointed as its new director. 61 But while Rodchenko's ambitions for a Museum of Experimental Technics shaped his input into the organization of the MZhK, they were not ultimately realized on the scale he had intended. Instead, in November 1920, Rodchenko and his laboratory comrades had to settle for a single gallery within the museum overall, and even this space seems to have been difficult to secure. 62 Among the works included in this gallery were relief constructions by Tatlin, a black faktura painting by Rodchenko, a spatial construction by Konstantin Medunetsky, and a painting entitled White Circle by Vladimir Stenberg. 63
In this gallery, Rodchenko and his circle of soon-to-be constructivists sought to abrogate the traditional conception of the space of exhibition as an arena for contemplative and sensual pleasure in order to transform the viewer's relationship to the practice of viewing along the very same lines as the inventor's relation to production had been transformed. In order to grasp the conceptual path of the artist's experiment, viewers would have to adopt an "analytical method" which, as Stepanova put it, was based not on contemplation but on "experimental cognition," "active thought," and "laboratory work." 64 The laboratory artists did not seek to eradicate consumption so much as to rescue it from the realm of leisure and contemplation for that of labor, thereby adumbrating a model wherein consumption was stripped of its former association with acquisition and newly reconred as the perceptual activity of an activated, revolutionary subject. The consumption of art, in other words, was retheorized as a mirror of its production, and Khlebnikov's galactic division thereby called into question.
The ultimate ramifications for Futurist museology of this quest for an activated mode of consumption were set forth by Stepanova in her catalogue entry for a group show held in September 1921 at the Poets' Union on Tverskaia—the so-called 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition:
Composition is the contemplative approach of an artist in his creative work. Technics and Industry have presented art with the problem of construction as active work and not as contemplative fine art. The "sacred" value of the work of art, as a singular, unique object, has been destroyed. The museum, as the repository of this unique object, turns into an archive. 65
The connection between this little known declaration of the loss of aura—the destruction of the sacred value of the work of art as a unique object—and Walter Benjamin's more than famous "Work of Art" essay was first drawn by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in 1984. 66 If aura was defined by Benjamin as the "unique phenomenon of a distance," a remove or separation between the viewer and object of his or her gaze, "however close it may be," a kind of psychological inapproachability or authority that results from the object's rootedness in tradition ("The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition"), 67 then it was precisely this distance that the laboratory practitioner sought to overcome by replacing a traditionally passive, contemplative gaze with an activated, productive one. Stepanova's concern, then, was the desanctification of not only the unique object, but also the act of perception itself.
Its aura destroyed, its "pull" extinguished, the work of art, from Stepanova's point of view, no longer had the power to enthrall, absorb, stupefy; and the museum, as its storehouse, was thus no longer a locus of enchantment. Redundant, the museum became an archive, the place to which one consigned that which has already reached its end. The archive was now the condition of all museums—including the museum as laboratory—Stepanova seems to suggest, and not just that of the traditional art-historical museum to which Rodchenko had earlier referred. While one might read Stepanova's declaration as indicative of her conception of the museum of the future as an archive—and hence, perhaps, as encapsulating a kind of institutional critique avant la lettre ("FF," 90-2)—such an interpretation would seem to depend upon a conflation of the laboratory model of "active consumption" with the notion of the "museum as archive," a conflation unwarranted by Stepanova's text as I read it. The archival condition of the museum was instead an emphatically negative one for Stepanova—it was precisely that which rendered that institution a now altogether irrelevant vestige of the past. Although she does not refer to any particular examples in her brief catalogue statement, it seems to me that the Moscow MZhK would certainly not have escaped this condition, for at least two reasons:
The first has to do with the situation of the MZhK itself at the time of the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition. In July 1921, Narkompros had closed the Volkhonka galleries and the Museum's collection had been packed into crates while new premises were sought. The Museum's closure and relocation seems to have been mostly connected to the 1921 restructuring of the Narkompros bureaucracy, but the Bureau had also been subject to an extremely hostile audit by state authorities (Rabkrin) in May of that year. 68 These various developments appear to have been extremely demoralizing for Rodchenko and Stepanova on account of the sheer amount of energy they had expended on the Museum. Although Rodchenko was still nominally its director until March 1922, he and Stepanova seem to have refused any involvement with its administration after August 1921. 69 At the time of the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition, the Museum was in boxes and its future uncertain.
The second, and more important, reason for the reorientation of Stepanova's thinking about the museum in September 1921 had to do with a radical shift within the constructivist camp itself. Over summer and fall 1921 the constructivists had become increasingly dissatisfied with what they derided as "easelism" (a pejorative neologism for the arts of painting and sculpture). In November 1921, as is well known, they collectively abandoned easelism altogether, consigning to this category also their laboratory experiments of the previous year, and, in the name of securing their own passage from the realm of the aesthetic into that of the real, announced the transformation of constructivism into an art of production (i.e., productivism), wherein all energy would be dedicated to the designing of everyday life. The 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition was an important step en route to this major shift. Although Stepanova's thoughts were evidently moving faster than her work (she exhibited rative paintings), among Rodchenko's contributions to 5 x 5 = 25 was his troika of monochromes, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, and Pure Blue Color.
For the constructivists, Rodchenko's monochromes signified that the history of art, as it had been conceived in the eighteenth century with the birth of aesthetics and art's isolation from its ritual or religious function, had reached its end. But this coming to an end resulted from the expiration of not only its internal dynamic (its self-reflexive pursuit of painting's irreducible materiality), the critic and constructivist apologist Nikolai Tarabukin argues, but also of its external dynamic: the "democratization of the social structure in Russia" that had eradicated the very class that had fostered the growth of easel painting since the late sixteenth century. The constructivist group's subsequent collective call to production was theorized not as the beginning of yet another aesthetic movement, but as the advent of another cultural epoch altogether, in which the needs of the new "mass viewer" (massovyi zritel') would replace those of the erstwhile "class consumer" (klassogo potrebitelia). 70 The immediate ramification of this shift for Rodchenko and Stepanova's museological enterprise was that, having theorized the MZhK as a laboratory (a site of active rather than passive production and consumption)—a model partially realized in the designation within the MZhK of a separate gallery devoted to experimental technics—they discarded this model altogether in 1922 in favor of the factory floor, the designer's workshop and, eventually, the darkroom.
From 1922 on, the constructivists no longer sought to orchestrate the active consumption of works of easelist art, therefore, but rather the consumption of the bytovoi (the realm of everyday life), as opposed to the zhivoi (the realm of aesthetic and philosophical speculation). The "stagnating slime" of byt—the conventions and habits of everyday life—was thus no longer to be repressed, but instead dynamically activated by the reinvigoration of the objects with which, and environments within which, everyday life was carried out. Rodchenko's design for a Workers' Club, for example, installed in the Soviet Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, reconred proletarian leisure as a dynamic, active, propaganda-consuming activity. 71 But if the Moscow constructivists abandoned their now erstwhile ambition to activate the space of the museum as a laboratory, their contemporary and chief rival El Lissitzky took up precisely this ambition in his extraordinary Demonstrationsräume realized inDresden in 1926 and Hannover in 1927-28: If the viewer had once been "lulled . . . into a certain passivity" by conventional exhibition practice, Lissitzky writes, "[my] design should make the man active." 72
What was the ultimate fate of the MZhK, once Kandinsky and the constructivists had left it behind? In December 1921, Kandinsky headed off to the Weimar Bauhaus on a cultural mission on behalf of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. He never returned. Stepanova and Liubov Popova became involved in textile production at the First State Textile Print Factory (formerly the Tsindel'), Ioganson in the design of production apparati at Krasnyi Prokatchik, and Rodchenko in, among a great many other things, graphic design for the state trust for agricultural products, Mossel'prom. In the meantime, the MZhK remained in storage for nearly a year, reopening only in April 1922 in smaller premises on Povarskaia Street under a new director, Petr Vil'iams, a middle-of-the-road painter who championed precisely those easelist values that the constructivists had rejected in fall 1921. To raise funds, Vil'iams even sought to sell the Museum's collection of three-dimensional work on the grounds that such work was incompatible with its profile as a museum of painterly culture. 73 In 1924, the MZhK moved to the former Stroganov school on Rozhdestvenka in 1924, 74 where it remained until 1928, when it was made a branch of the Tretyakov Gallery, and then a department within the latter and finally, in 1929, abolished altogether. What the Tretyakov's custodians deemed "museum-worthy" in the MZhK (e.g., Kandinsky's abstract compositions) was then merged with its collections; the rest (e.g., the laboratory constructivists' experimental technics) was sold or otherwise "liquidated."
But there is a further chapter to the story of the Russian museums of contemporary art. During the winter of 1927-28, the future founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, spent two months in Moscow and Leningrad scouting out recent developments. In his diary, Barr records a visit to the Moscow MZhK on Rozhdestvenka where he "found the best collection of the finest twentieth-century Russian painters, better by far than the Tretyakov. . . . The cubists, cubo-futurists, and suprematists were there in serried ranks, also the postexpressionists." 75 Two days later he was in the studio of Rodchenko and Stepanova. Rodchenko, apparently, answered Barr's questions "in a rather disgruntled manner, insisting that the past bored him utterly and that he couldn't remember at all when he had painted this way or that. . . . [but he] showed much satisfaction at having delivered the death blow to painting in 1922 [sic]." To which Barr retorts smugly in the privacy of his diary that new groups of Russian easel painters "have thriven" since 1922 ("RD," 125), thus evading the historical significance of Rodchenko's declaration of the death of painting—namely, the constructivists' shift into industrial production, and their adoption of technologies of mechanical reproduction and collective distribution. 76
One of the last entries in Barr's diary recounts his visit to the Russian
Museum in Leningrad, into which had been folded in the summer of 1926 some
five hundred works from the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture. Its
curator Punin—"perhaps the finest of Russian critics of modern
art," according to Barr—walked the latter through the modern
galleries, which then comprised what was known as the Department of New
Tendencies. The collection on display was small (about fifty paintings)
but well chosen—"exactly the sort of collection which we lack in
any American gallery except Duncan Phillips's" ("RD," 136). In 1929,
the year that the Tretyakov liquidated the Moscow MZhK, Barr played a
crucial role in MoMA's foundation. Before any account of the genealogical
connection between Futurist museology and Barr's own enterprise can be
attempted, however, a fully diachronic history of the former between the
years 1919 and 1929 would need to be written. Suffice to say, in closing,
that the form in which Barr saw those collections in 1928 in the Russian
Museum bore little resemblance to the museological ambitions—the
laboratory of living forms that would activate the viewer and thereby
constitute a new, revolutionary subjectivity—that Rodchenko's
circle had had for them in the aftermath of October.
Maria Gough is William Wilhartz Assistant Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Among her forthcoming publications are "Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume " and The Artist as Producer: Constructivism in Revolution, 1920-1926 .
1. Brian O'Doherty, "Introduction," Museums in Crisis, ed. Brian O'Doherty (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 4. An earlier version of this essay was presented in April 1998 at the "Public Showing" conference held at the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Warm thanks to the conference organizers Leslie Bellavance and Marina Pérez de Mendiola, and all participants, especially Doug Ashford, Herbert Blau, Jane Gallop, Roxana Marcoci, and Marcia Tucker, for their questions and comments, and to Stephen J. Campbell for his suggestive reading of the revised text.
2. "Sozdanie staticheskikh muzeev sovremennogo iskusstva po vsei strane. . . . Sozdanie magistrali po vsei Rossiiskoi Respublike dvizheniia zhivykh vystavok iskusstva tvorcheskogo. . . . Osnovanie Muzeia Tsentral'nogo sovremennogo tvorchestva v Moskve." Kazimir Malevich, "Nashi zadachi," Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, no. 1 : 27.
3. Timothy J. Clark, "God Is Not Cast Down," in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 245.
4. RGALI [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva] f. 665, op. 1, d. 6, l. 89.
5. Varvara Stepanova, diary entry (2 June 1920), in Chelovek ne mozhet zhit' bez chuda: Pis'ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski Khudozhnitsy (Moscow: Izd-vo Sfera, 1994), 119; hereafter abbreviated as Ch.
6. Otdel IZO Narodnogo Komissariata po Prosveshcheniiu, Spravochnik (Moscow: IZO, 1920), 121; see also Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let: Materialy i dokumentatsiia, ed. Ivan Matsa (Moscow and Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933), 102.
7. Vasily Kandinsky, "Muzei zhivopisnoi kul'tury," Khudozhestvennaia zhizn', no. 2 (January-February 1920): 18; hereafter abbreviated as "MZhK." Translated by Peter Vergo as "The Museum of the Culture of Painting," in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Peter Vergo and Kenneth Lindsay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 1:443; hereafter abbreviated as "MCP."
8. Aleksandr Rodchenko, "Khudozhnikam-proletariiam" (11 April 1918), in Opyty dlia budushchego, ed. O. V. Mel'nikov and V. I. Shchennikov (Moscow: Grant", 1996), 63; hereafter abbreviated as ODB. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
9. Aleksandr Rodchenko, "Raport," 7 June 1921, typescript, GARF [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii] f. 2306, op. 23, d. 180, l. 28; emphasis in original.
10. Matsa, ed., Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, 102.
11. No substantive history of the Moscow MZhK has been written; the present discussion thus draws together scattered archival and other primary sources such as conference proceedings, polemical essays, diaries, and contemporary guidebooks. Over the course of the last decade, Svetlana Dzhafarova has been researching the fate of contemporary art sent by Moscow to provincial cities; see "The Creation of the Museums of Painterly Culture," in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 474-81, and "Une Politique de diffusion de l'art moderne: Les musées de la culture artistique," in L'Avant-garde russe: Chefs-d'uvre des musées de Russie 1905-1925 (Nantes: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 1993), 51-61. More recently, two major studies of the Petrograd museum have appeared: Irina Karasik et al., Muzee v muzee: Russkii avangard iz kollektsii muzeia khudozhestvennoi kul'tury v sobranii gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia (St. Petersburg: Gos. Russkii muzei, 1998), and Jennifer Cahn, "Nikolai Punin and Russian Avant-Garde Museology, 1917-1932" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1999).
12. See Geneviève Lacambre, "Introduction," in Le Musée du Luxembourg en 1874 (Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1974), 7-11.
13. See, for example, Josev Shkolnik, "Muzei sovremennoi russkoi zhivopisi," Soiuz Molodezhi, no. 1 (April 1912): 18-20; trans. Tatyana Schmidt in Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1930: The G. Costakis Collection, ed. Anna Kafetsi (Athens: National Gallery & Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1995), 2:455-6.
14. A. Conger Goodyear in Creative Art (December 1931), as quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., "Chronicle of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture," in Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, 1929-1967 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 622.
15. On this matter, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 110-29; Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism, 1917-1921 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1976); and Hubertus Gassner, "The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization," in The Great Utopia, esp. 299-308.
16. The original reads, "Pust' mlechnyi put' raskoletsia na mlechnyi put' izobretatelei i mlechnyi put' priobretatelei." Velimir Khlebnikov et al., Truba marsian (Moscow: Liren', 1916); trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle as "Trumpet of the Martians" in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 104; trans. rev.
17. Cahn, "Nikolai Punin."
18. Nikolai Punin, "Levye-Pravye," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 3 (22 December 1918): 1.
19. Iskusstvo Kommuny, no. 19 (13 April 1919): 1. On the forced closure of Iskusstvo kommuny, see Fitzpatrick, Commissariat, 125-6.
20. Sergei Tret'iakov, "From Where to Where? (Futurism's Perspectives)," Lef, no. 1 (March 1923), trans. in Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 207.
21. Roman Jakobson, "O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov," in Roman Jakobson and D. Sviatopolk-Mirskij, Smert' Vladimira Maiakovskogo (Berlin: Petropolis, 1931), trans. Edward J. Brown as "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets," in Roman Jakobson, Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 277-9.
22. See Aleksandar Flaker, "Byt," Russian Literature 19, no. 1 (January 1986): 1-13.
23. David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, Vladimir Maiakovskii and Victor Khlebnikov, "Slap in the Face of Public Taste" , trans. in Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 51-2.
24. Rodchenko, "Iz manifesta suprematistov i bespredmetnikov" , in ODB, 67.
25. Felix Fénéon, "Les grands Collectionneurs: M. Ivan Morosoff," Bulletin de la vie artistique 1, no. 12 (15 May 1919): 330.
26. David Shterenberg, "Otchet o deiatel'nosti Otdela Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv Narkomprosa," Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, no. 1 : 51-2.
27. "Deklaratsiia Otdela Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv i Khudozhestvennoi Promyshlennosti po voprosu o printsipakh muzeevedeniia, priniataia Kollegiei Otdela v zasedanii 7 fevralia 1919 g.," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919): 1. (Since my drafting this essay, Irina Karasik has gathered and reprinted several of the documents cited here, along with numerous other primary sources, in Muzee v muzee, 351-400.)
28. See "Doklady Otdela Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv na konferentsii po delam muzeev 11 fevralia 1919 goda," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919): 4.
29. "Deklaratsiia," 1, and its reiteration in "Doklady," 4.
30. "Deklaratsiia," 1, "Doklady," 4. While the declaration gives the museum's name as "Museum of Creative Art Culture" (Muzei tvorcheskoi khudozhestvennoi kul'tury), I have followed its citation in all other conference documents as "Museum of Artistic Culture."
31. "Doklady," 4.
32. A. A. Miller, quoted in "Preniia po dokladam O. M. Brika, N. N. Punina i V. A. Grishchenko," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919): 4.
33. "Deklaratsiia," 1.
34. "Polozhenie Otdela Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv i Khudozhestvennoi Promyshlennosti po voprosu o 'Khudozhestvennoi kul'ture,'" Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919): 4; emphasis added.
35. Lunacharsky, "Rech' A. V. Lunacharskogo," in "Konferentsiia po delam muzeev," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919): 3.
36. Ibid. For the purposes of proletarian enlightenment, fourteen small "proletarian museums" were established in outlying districts of Moscow (although only one of these—in the former residence of the collector I. S. Isadzhanov—included contemporary art), as well as a host of "supermuseums" located close to factories so that workers could stop in after work (see Dzhafarova, "Creation," 475-6).
37. "Preniia," 4.
38. Spravochnik, 119.
39. GARF f. 2306, op. 23, d. 180, l. 26, and d. 90, l. 128; RGALI f. 665, op. 1, d. 6, l. 24.
40. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 301-2; see also 291-3.
41. Yve-Alain Bois, Susan Smith's Archeology (New York: Margarete Roeder Gallery, 1989), 6.
42. "Polozhenie," 4.
43. "MZhK," 18; "MCP," 1:437; trans. rev. See also "Polozhenie," 4.
44. "The major preoccupation of all art [from antiquity to modern times]—composition—was . . . pushed into the background by [the] materialistic-realistic aims [of the mid-nineteenth century]: pictorial composition was to be derived from nature. Deprived of [composition], its most important foundation, painting ceased to be an autonomous art of expression and became instead an art of representation: all the painter's skills were directed exclusively toward depiction, the almost mechanical rendering of natural phenomena" ("MZhK," 19; "MCP," 1:440-1).
45. Stepanova, diary entry (7 January 1920), in Ch, 93.
46. Aleksandr Rodchenko, "O Muzeinom Biuro: Doklad na konferentsii zaveduiushchikh Gubsektsiiami IZO" (n.d. [ca. 1920]), in ODB, 98-101.
47. Ibid.
48. Aleksandr Rodchenko, "O Muzee Eksperimental'noi Tekhniki," diary entry (15 June 1920), in ODB, 84.
49. See Nikolai Tarabukin, Opyt teorii zhivopisi (Moscow: Vserossiiskii proletkul't, 1923), 33.
50. Stepanova, diary entry (5 March 1920), in Ch, 106.
51. "MZhK," 19; "MCP," 1:440; trans. rev.
52. RGALI f. 665, op. 1, d. 11, ll. 3, 10.
53. "MZhK," 19-20; "MCP," 1:441-2. On Kandinsky's anxiety about the incursion of the positive sciences, see his "Programma Instituta khudozhestvennoi kul'tury" , trans. John Bowlt in Vergo and Lindsay, eds., Kandinsky, 1:470-1.
54. Rodchenko, "O Muzee Eksperimental'noi Tekhniki," 84-5.
55. Rodchenko, "Vse-opyty" , in ODB, 92.
56. Stepanova, diary entry (23 October 1920), in Ch, 137.
57. Stepanova, diary entry (12 January 1920), in Ch, 96.
58. The single photograph published by Svetlana Dzhafarova documents the work of the Museum Bureau only (rather than the MZhK), showing its walls hung with paintings designated for transfer in January 1920 from Moscow to the city of Penza; see Dzhafarova, "Creation," 474.
59. Stepanova, diary entry (2 June 1920), in Ch, 119-20.
60. "I don't think we need to build sarcophagi of treasures, to build Meccas for worship. . . . Any collection of old stuff is harmful. . . . We must not allow our institutions to be platforms for the past. Our task is always to move toward the new. To live in museums is not for us. . . . Instead of collecting all kinds of old stuff, we must organize laboratories of a world-wide, creative, building apparatus, and from its axes will emerge artists of living forms [zhivykh form], not of dead representations of objects.  While we will bring I-beams, electricity and the fires of colors." Kazimir Malevich, "O muzee," Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 12 (23 February 1919): 3.
61. RGALI f. 665, op. 1, d. 15, l. 27. Kandinsky continued on as the MZhK's "scholarly consultant" (although Rodchenko complained bitterly that he only showed up for work once or twice a week); see GARF f. 2306, op. 23, d. 180, l. 27.
62. RGALI f. 665, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 210, 211.
63. RGALI f. 665, op. 1, d. 6, l. 207.
64. Stepanova, "On Constructivism" , trans. Wendy Salmond in Alexander Lavrent'ev, Varvara Stepanova: The Complete Work, ed. John Bowlt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 173-4.
65. 5 x 5 = 25: Vystavka zhivopisi (Moscow: Klub VSP, 1921), n. p.
66. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" , in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-51; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," October, no. 30 (fall 1984): 90-1; hereafter abbreviated as "FF."
67. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 222-3; see also Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 168-9.
68. GARF f. 2306, op. 23, d. 180, ll. 24-8.
69. Stepanova, diary entry (23 August 1921), in Ch, 150; and RGALI, f. 664, op. 1, d. 1, l. 130.
70. Nikolai Tarabukin, Ot mol'berta k mashine (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1923), 16.
71. See esp. Leah Dickerman, "The Propagandizing of Things," in Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 72-8.
72. El Lissitzky, "Exhibition Rooms," trans. in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 366; emphasis in original. See also Maria Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume," in Situating Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 77-125.
73. RGALI f. 664, op. 1, d. 4, l. 114; and d. 11, l. 192.
74. Petr Pertsov describes the MZhK in its Rozhdestvenka location in his 1925 guidebook to the museums of Moscow; see Khudozhestvennye Muzei Moskvy: Putevoditel' (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. Izd-vo, 1925), 81-8.
75. Alfred Barr, "Russian Diary," in Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York: Abrams, 1986), 123; hereafter abbreviated as "RD."
76. On the conflicted character of Barr's perception of this rupture, see "FF," 83-5.
"Now, children, let's see how perfectly we can pronounce the words we went over yesterday."
On the board I wrote, S-I-N-G.
"Aby! Pronounce this word."
"Sing-gha," said Aby.
"Sing," I corrected.
"Sing-gha," came from Aby again.
—Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers 1
I love to sing-a
About the moon-a, and the June-a,
And the spring-a
I love to sing-a
—E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen,
"I Love to Singa" 2
Before we get to this essay's main feature, let's start with the cartoon. In July 1936, Warner Brothers released a lively Merrie Melodies short directed by animator Fred "Tex" Avery called "I Love to Singa." 3 It borrowed its title song from The Singing Kid, a recent full-length Warner vehicle for Al Jolson and Cab Calloway. But it borrowed plot and nearly everything else from The Jazz Singer . Alluding to this earlier, more celebrated Warner Brothers/Jolson teaming, the cartoon crystallized and replayed as farce the role that ethnic "novelty" once had played in shaping the language of American entertainment, particularly the language of jazz performers and jazz performance. 4 Like The Jazz Singer before it, "I Love to Singa" played commercial jazz as a New World form shot through with the accents of a transnational America, accents whose dissonance within the imagined nation had troubled the would-be 100 percent Anglo-Saxonist harmony of 1920s nativism. What's more, "I Love to Singa" sounded this dissonance, not as something distinct from the commercial mainstream, but as something inherent to it, a modernist effect generated and sustained by the make-it-new imperative that drove the entertainment industry's cycle of innovation—novelty—and planned obsolescence.
For the post-Great War decade, jazz had resonated as a style in which transnational ethnicity and mass-mediated novelty could intersect to unsettle standard ideas of American national identity and the language through which it was being imagined. These connections could be quite explicit in a pop song such as Frank Silver and Irving Cohn's Tin Pan Alley jazz smash of 1923, "Yes! We Have No Bananas"; the frankly commercial register worked by the song's vaudeville Greek linked a novelty chorus to a counternativist vision in its verses—a remaking of American business, language, and national identity in New Immigrant accents to which I'll return (see 1). 5 That same resonance served the literary work of a wide range of writers; I'll concern myself particularly with the early work of Samson Raphaelson, a writer of short stories, plays, ad copy, and screenplays. For Raphaelson, commercial jazz served as a powerful re and production model for a mass-directed, transnational "Americanese" challenging nativist harmony; first, in his story "The Day of Atonement" and, later, in the stage version of The Jazz Singer to which Raphaelson adapted it. 6
And this brings us back to the dissonant sounds that structure the economy of ethno-national identifications in "I Love to Singa." Inside the eminently respectable-looking tree from which "Prof. Fritz Owl" has hung his shingle—"Teacher of 'voice piano & violin,' but"—separate shingle—"NO JAZZ"—we find the good Professor wearing out the carpet (literally, of course) waiting for Mrs. Owl's brood to hatch. He taps each egg apprehensively; three dutifully deliver a sweet bell tone, the fourth resounds with the tinny crash of a jazz drummer's sock cymbal. What hatches confirms this rather heavy-handed cymbalism. To the Professor's admiring estimation emerge, in turn, a "Caruso" belting out an aria, a violin-playing "Fritz Kreisler" and a flute-playing "Mendelssohn." But from that last egg—oh!—steps a red-jacketed, blue-bow-tied, hand-clapping, apparently already well-seasoned vaudevillian who salutes his parents with a "Hello, Strenzer!" and goes into his dance singing the title tune. At his first singing lesson in the next scene, the unwilling student intones "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" in the most nasal, sarcastic voice he can muster, but interpolates enthusiastic, hushed snatches of "I Love to Singa" into the breaks when his mother turns the pages of her piano accompaniment. The song-a that this "Owl Jolson" loves to sing-a is a parodic compendium of Tin Pan Alley clichés and moon/June rhymes about love, spring, blue skies, bluebirds, tea for two, the South, mom, and the flag. Inevitably, the Professor walks in on his son getting hot. "Enough is too much!" he bellows. Throwing his son out on his ear, he sputters, "You hot-cha! You crooner! You falsetto! You jazz singer! You. . . You . . . You . . . Phooey!"
The scene, of course, echoes one in The Jazz Singer in which an Old World father walks in on his son jazzing up "Blue Skies," meeting the spectacle with a horrified bluster that drives the son into the open arms of commercial entertainment, for good maybe. The scene also invokes the ethnically inflected model of generational conflict of the earlier film, a conceit almost overburdened by the multiple fictive and metafictive levels at which it is reinforced: in The Jazz Singer, a cantor's son named Jakie Rabinowitz chooses not to follow in his Old World father's footsteps, instead Americanizing his name and entering show biz as "Jack Robin"; Jack Robin is played by a cantor's son named Asa Yoelson who chose not to follow in his Old World father's footsteps, instead Americanizing his name and entering show biz as "Al Jolson"; Jolson sings a tune by a cantor's son named Israel Baline who chose not to follow in his Old World father's footsteps, instead Americanizing his name and entering show biz as "Irving Berlin." Even the tune Owl Jolson sings was penned by a cantor's son named Hyman Arluck who (you guessed it) chose not to follow in his Old World father's footsteps, instead Americanizing his name and entering show biz as "Harold Arlen."
But the cartoon does not exactly follow through on the "set of conventions for narratives about race and Oedipal conflict" that Krin Gabbard has argued were inaugurated through The Jazz Singer, narratives "in which the white hero transcends his ethnic background through success as a popular entertainer imitating African Americans" (JM, 37). In one of its details, the cartoon seems to do just that: Owl Jolson's song links "a cheer for Uncle Sammy / With another for my mammy," Americanization with minstrelsy. But his jazz voice never "transcends" ethnicity, never asserts a national identity that whites out intra-Euro-American distinctions by assuming a stance of shared racial difference from (or identification with) blackness. His salut au monde—"Hello, Strenzer!"—would have been recognizable as a catchphrase used by Sam Hearn's Schlepperman on Jack Benny's nationally popular radio show, a character whose stage Yiddishisms allowed the show to indulge in an ethnicness that Benny downplayed in his own comic persona. Deploying this greeting, Owl Jolson announces a break with Old World (and trans-European) "seriousness" in order to pledge allegiance to a mass-media aesthetic simultaneously American and ethnic. Indeed, the lyric hook of his signature song is built around the same signifying "ga" that, in novelist Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, marked young Aby's continuing distance from a linguistic mainstream defined by his teacher according to Anglo-Saxonist standards. In its vocal cadences—sing-a/spring-a, moon-a/June-a—the song gently parodied Al Jolson's way of singing—a style, as Gilbert Seldes once observed, in which the perfunctory blackface mask Jolson adopted "goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents." 7 Seldes's observation was common in contemporary accounts of Jolson and other Jewish writers and performers such as Fanny Brice, Irving Berlin, or Sophie Tucker: a trope that red their success as due to, and not despite, their perceived difference within the imagined national community. Moreover, the trope red ethnic dissonance as part of entertainment's nation-defining role, its contribution to the gospel of novelty that made American mass culture what it was.
In response to his father's "Enough is too much," itself Yiddishized English, Owl Jolson picks himself up, dusts himself off, and starts all over again in direct, emphatic address to the camera—"That's mein 'pop.'" This three-word masterpiece of dialogic construction embodies the cartoon's sense of a self-conscious, densely multivocal American style: one that like Owl Jolson's signature song artfully, ludically combines high with low, Old World with New, proper English with Damon Runyonesque slang. As you might expect, the young entertainer's family eventually learns to stop worrying and to love to sing-a too: for the final scene, they even join the chorus line. That their hybridized utterance earns a first prize on the "Jack Bunny" radio amateur hour places "I Love to Singa" in the belated company of the feature presentation to which I'll turn now: those early soundings of jazz that heard in the music's commercial drive for novelty the potential for a transnational style of sustained dissonance.
In The Dialect of Modernism , Michael North has noted that writers from Joseph Conrad through Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston took on a "black" voice at key moments in the development of modernism. North argues that "linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade were not just shallow fads but strategies without which modernism could not have arisen," black dialect—at least what was imagined to be black dialect—a technical model for challenging standard ways of putting black on white on the page. 8 But while North clarifies this dialectic—illustrating particularly well the tangled position into which it put black modernists—he obscures the extent to which American modernism brought other ethnic, regional, occupational, and institutional uses of English into dialogic, oppositional, and revisionist play with shopworn standards.
This play was important because the nativist policing of language was central to policing ideas of nation. The equation of language and loyalty often was quite blunt: the first sentence learned by Ford English School students was "I am a good American." And in 1919 Congressional hearings for an Americanization bill, Woodrow Wilson's Special Assistant Herbert Kaufman asserted, "If a hundred million of us must stand together, we must think together, and think without a foreign accent." 9 In 1921, H. L. Mencken mused about the dithers into which the official institutions of American letters were likely to be thrown by a recent British embrace of the controversial (if now unknown) Welsh Irish American writer, Frank Harris: "One imagines the painful sensation in the New York Times office, the dismayed groups around far-flung campus pumps, the special meetings of the Princeton, N.J., and Urbana, Ill., American Legions, the secret conference between the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Ku Klux Klan." 10 The scenario paid specific tribute to several members of the American Academy (an upper chamber for the National Institute of Arts and Letters): editor John H. Finley of the Times, Henry Van Dyke at Princeton, and Stuart Sherman at the University of Illinois. Through his inimitable hyperbole—linking literary reputation brokers to the American Legion and the KKK—Mencken suggested how debates over American language and the literature that would exploit it were often framed in Romantic philology's racialist terms.
North shows both defenders and challengers of standards—both those Mencken called "Anglomaniacs" and those Sherman called "literary Mohawks"—buying into the Herderian assumption that "language is the surest representation of a people to itself." 11 Thus debates over American literary language tapped deeper wells of debate over melting pots and miscegenation, reversion and restriction. If James Oppenheim could argue in the February 1920 Dial that modernist poetry was "Our First National Art" precisely because it used "our American speech, the resultant of a new environment, mixture of races and new experience," then Royal Cortissoz equally could warn against the "Ellis Island Art" such a mixture was likely to produce. The prominent art critic wrote darkly that "the United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperilling the republic of art in the same way." 12
The same repulsed reaction to the language of othered ethnic
groups—or to difference itself coded as ethnically
other—fueled the writing of critic Stuart Sherman. Sherman,
the English department chair at the University of Illinois, was a
self-proclaimed antimodernist conservator of the "Puritan" spirit in
American letters after the war. Early 1920s immigration restrictionism
was paralleled in the fine distinctions Sherman drew around those
writers who might count as Americans and around those
kinds of writing that could be assimilated into "The National Genius"
or The Genius of America . In "The National Genius,"
Sherman argued through "a little series of neglected truisms" for an
inherent connection between aesthetic conformism and national worth: "An
artist is a man living in society. A great artist is a great man living
in a great society. When a great artist expresses himself completely,
it is found that he has expressed, not merely himself, but also the
dominant thought and feeling of the men with whom he lives."
13
Given the apparent distributive property of greatness,
Sherman's syllogism leads, logically, to the Eliotic
conclusion—twenty-three years before "What Is a Classic?
"—that to be a writer of national importance was to be "in a benign