Critical Studies

This blog is where I will be organising my research for my critical studies essays. The first essay, the review pieces were done at Christmas, and at that time i had a load of paperwork that I had to organise and carry about, so it became obvious that a blog would be a great organisational tool.

The next assignment comprises of three different questions, and we are to pick one. They all look interesting, and I think I would learn from doing any of them, so this one ought to keep me busy:

NB - THIS IS THE QUESTION

In response to the following statement by Robert Hughes discuss how art has been used in support of revolutions. You may wish to focus on the idea of the monument, or propaganda in relation to your subject or related fields of art and design.

Like the French revolutionaries before them, Lenin and Lunacharsky believed in propaganda-by-monument…His [Lenin] taste was far more conservative than Lunacharsky’s, and he did not want to be commemorated as “a Futurist scarecrow”;” but the very idea of “monumental” art was reinvented in Russia under his aegis. No state had ever set down its ideals with such radically abstract images, and that they were not actually built is less significant than that they were imagined. Reality was against them: Russia had no spare bronze, steel, or manpower. Artists were therefore employed on more immediate Agitprop jobs that have mostly perished – posters, street theatre floats, and parade décor. They designed and distributed, through the Soviet propaganda system, thousands of crude, memorable ROSTA posters. Printed in bright Image d’Epinal colours on cheap paper…They also took control of the Russian art schools, those incubators of future form. Thus in 1918 the school at Vitebsk was headed by Marc Chagall, and its staff included Malevich and El Lissitzky. Lunacharsky…created the Higher State Art Training Centre or Vkhutemas School of Moscow. It turned into the Bauhaus of Russia, the most advanced art college anywhere in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Constructivism. (Hughes 1980 rp 1991:87)

Hughes, Robert (1980 rp 1991) The Shock of the New New York: McGraw-Hill