Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures @ SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE University of Queensland

Animating Modernism: The Affective History of Soviet Monumentality in the 1960s

Collaborators: Kate Malaia & Manu P. Sobti

In his influential 1936 essay, entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin questions the relationship between mechanical reproduction and the piece of art, or in other words, the affective relationship that such reproduction undeniably creates. Benjamin explains that the phenomenon of Fascism, and more broadly, war in general, via the alienation of a beholder from an observed aesthetic subject. For Benjamin, therefore, repetition is an insidious, if not dehumanizing attempt to mediate aesthetics, rather than facilitate its very experience. The aestheticization of politics or the politicization of art - the inability of a viewer to experience affective or emotional states caused by art, inevitably leads to war. However, what happens after this war is over? The new aesthetics of post-WWII, the return to the surgical minimalism of the pre-1930s modernistic style with its ubiquitous repetition both in the arts and architecture mixes up the cards of Benjamin's straightforward dichotomy. However, it does not in any way devalue the importance of Benjamin's discovery of the connection between politics of aesthetics, the aesthetics of politics and a contingent emotional response produced by an individual observer of art and architecture. In fact, it exaggerates it.

In the Soviet, post-Stalinist era architects and artists were complicit in the arguably the greatest project of urban mechanical reproduction known to the humanity. This involved post-Stalinist attempts to construct mass (public) housing in face of a chronic housing shortage and discrepancy with the high ideals of socialist future. However, because of the permanent parsimony on civil projects and a ban on pompous Stalinist aesthetics, these new housing projects turned out to be largely identical and devoid of any architectural personality. The official response of the Communist Party and its affiliated artists was therefore to implement specific cycles of facade decoration. Artists and the bureaucrats appealed to Lenin’s Plan of “Monumental Propaganda”(1918) to justify the continuation of the use of monumental art, even though it was a survivor from Stalin's era aesthetics. The murals, only occasionally used in the past, now became omnipresent frequently as wall-reliefs or attached sculptures and occasionally as freestanding artifacts. What started as ‘wall decoration’ developed into a new cultural expression. With some emulation of the past, the methods, narratives and themes of decorated facades changed radically. In fact, the transformation in the monumental art was so profound, that it is necessary to analyze the monumental murals of the post-Stalin era as a separate phenomenon cardinal to and characteristic of its time.

However, the Soviet and post-Soviet academia showed an unfortunate lack of effort in finding alternative ways to analyze this sudden outburst of 'facade' monumental art. Clearly restricted and censored in expressing their readings and ideas; the post-Soviet and international researchers unfortunately did not pay too much interest to this topic. This research suggests that there existed a framework, which allows us to revisit the knowledge we have about Soviet monumental murals of the post-Stalin's era. The method proposed for the study is the affect theory and emotional history of urban fabric. Such an approach would allow for a return to the phenomenon of Soviet facade art of the 1960s in order to answer the following questions - first, what was and is the role of the murals in urban fabric then and now? Second, what is the relationship between individual emotional reaction to art and the state machine that throws a political regime on art and, and conversely, pulls art out of a political regime? Finally, what is the present and the future of these monumental art pieces after the aesthetic and political regimes have so drastically changed in recent decades - where shall this expressive monumentality go? To what extent shall its social alienation continue unchallenged?