Eye of the Teige

When the Robert Hugheses of this world talk about the sexlessness of Constructivism, other than reaching for my revolver I usually would point them in the direction of the work of Karel Teige - a Czech critic/designer who was at once a totally hardline Functionalist/Constructivist, dedicated to expunging bourgeois sentimentalism (with its 'erotic banality' as he puts it in The Minimum Dwelling) in favour of the mechanistic joys of existenzminimum, and at the same time a overheatedly Freudian Surrealist photomontageur, piecing together a sort of sinister siedlung sexuality out of porn and modern architecture photos, which I've written about elsewhere. This site showcases his utterly covetable book covers.



Teige's 1930 Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia was fairly recently reissued with a rather nondescript cover by corporate-Deleuzian waffler Bruce Mau (Massive Change my arse, etc). It's an excellent read, not only for Teige's prose, which no matter how sachlich he tries to be, always crackles with futurist excitement, but for the way in which he rates Constructivism as the wave of the future, not as an 'art movement' but as a way of approaching the world that is as totally revolutionary for aesthetics as Marxism for politics of psychoanalysis for psychology. Now that we generally titter at such things for their unreconstructed Hegelianism, Constructivism, when not in the museums is something that - to the likely horror of someone like Teige - exists as fragments of something past.



The New Constructivism that has been talked about is of course the only true solution to the general aesthetic impasse - but in lieu of that, some fragments are interestingly presented in the following places: Galinsky's photo-profiles of Narkomzem, Isvestia, Tsentrosoyuz (the names themselves have a certain thrill, do they not?), while St Petersburg's Wandering Camera documents the remnants of Leningrad Constructivism: the building above is known as 'Ispolkom'.