Decon/Con Recon

Ah, the uses of random google images searches for the sleepless researcher...I'm don't know where the blogger in question found the photo you see above, but it's a pretty astonishing one. One of the greatest art-historical fictions has long been that the Russian avant-garde died with War Communism in 1921, or along with Lenin in January 1924. Architecturally, its moment of dominance was the late 20s and early 30s, and its association with the brutal turbulence of the first Five Year Plan was one (of many) reasons for its fall into public obloquy. This photo, of Melnikov's Rusakov Club used - as intended - as a dynamic, exciting backdrop for propaganda, is a rare reminder of this fact. Of course to extrapolate in Groys-style that ergo Constructivism was Stalinist would be equally idiotic, but still, some rewriting to do...



Moving from the con to the decon, once claimed by that intellectual authority Philip Johnson to be a kind of mimetic restarting of the lost avant-garde (lost partly because of his own curatorial and political inclinations, but that's another rant). If anyone doubts how much Deconstructivism (with its fetish for the unique, for the 'genius' and the individual signature) is the direct negation of everything Constructivism ever stood for (with its own fetish for the mass-produced, its attempted demolition of the mystical aura and the cult of the artist) they should have a quick look at this, and then revise their papers thoroughly.