The Critic as a Revolutionary
Ernst Neizvestny, forty-three, the Soviet Union’s leading sculptor, is officially condemned as being both decadent and unpatriotic. John Berger, forty-three, the foremost Marxist art critic in the West, has in the past condemned Picasso as “an example of a failure of revolutionary nerve” (Success and Failure of Picasso, 1965).Art and Revolution, while purporting to be a book on Netzvestny and the role ot the artist in the U.S.S.R.. actually is a brilliant chapter in Berger’s continuing inner debate on the social role of the artist and his obligations to society.
The fact is that Berger uses Neizvestny as a tool to expound his own theories. Neizvestny is convenient because Berger believes that the sculptor has remained faithful to the idea of the revolutionary role of the artist. Why does Neizvestny make the grade whereas Picasso fails? Partially, it would seem, because Berger believes that the Russian artist has been preoccupied throughout history with truth and purpose rather than with aesthetic pleasure. The Russians have always expected their artists to be prophets, writes Berger, and he is firmly convinced that art and art alone can “express and preserve the profoundest expectations of a period.” Picasso no longer is concerned with such expectations; Neizvestny is presumed to retain his prophetic outlook.
Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R.
by John Berger (Pantheon, $5.95)
To understand what this book is all about, we must look at it from Berger’s point of view. He believes that art criticism, at its best, is a form of intervention between the work of art and its public. Thus his essay on Neizvestny becomes a creative “intervention.” One might imagine that Art and Revolution would show the course of artistic rebellion against the strictures of socialist realist dogma, that Berger
would trace the interaction between Neizvestny’s development as an artist and the changes in Soviet art Mine Stalin. Not at all. Berger provides little insight into what it means to be a nonconforming artist in the Soviet Union today.
Berger freely admits that under Stalin’s rule the arts were subverted, that the belief in the prophetu quality of art was subtle, but disastrously, transformed into the belict that art was a means of definitively deciding the future. Berger rejects socialist realism totally and turns to what interests him: the notion that cubism and futurism, as revolutionary tonus in art, foreshadowed the political and economic revolution in the Soviet Union. Malevich. Lissitsky, Kandinsky. Tallin. Pevsner are his true heroes. They all believed in the social role of art and saw themselves as representing the liberated future. They served notice that the role of the artist in the coming world would be very different. And Berger would have us believe that Neizvcstny is continuing this movement.
Judged by current standards, one might readily think that Neizvestny’s works dated from the 1917-1923 period, that they are at least forty years behind the times. Berger, however, argues that this is the result of a conscious effort on Neizvestny’s part: that he wants to continue where such revolutionary artists as Malevich and Kandinsky were lotted to stop. Berger believes that a new style in art evolves to meet the problem of treating new content born of social change. Neizvestny’s work is important, he declares, primarily because of its relevance to the emerging third world. The sculptor’s muscle-bound figures protest against human exploitation. And when freedom from exploitation has been achieved, the artists of tomorrow “will produce art unimaginable by us today.” Neizvestny’s sculpture is thus seen as an interim monument to the endurance necessary for this struggle.
Neizvestny is not a rebel; he just stubbornly refuses to conform. Apparently he believes in Marxism, in the anti-imperialist struggle, in the revolutionary role of the artist. He disapproves only of the methods adopted by Communism since the death of Lenin. Berger maintains that Neizvestny is not opposing “private” art to “public" art, that like his academic opponents he creates monumental sculptures for the public, for crowds. 11ms Neizvestny’s dilemma parallels Bergers. One is trying to maintain his integrity as a Communist sculptor, the other struggles to maintain his integrity as a Marxist critic.
There is no doubt that Neizvestny is an exceptional figure. As a lieutenant in a platoon of commandos, he was dropped behind the German lines in World War II. Gravely wounded by a bullet which entered his chest and exploded in his back, he was left for dead. Incredibly, he survived. This familiarity with death rendered him insensitive to the threats which were to follow.
It is virtually impossible for a Soviet sculptor today to create independently. The conditions under which Neizvestny is forced to work are almost unbearable: a disused shop measuring about 15 by 21 feet in a back street of Moscow serves as his studio. Real ateliers are reserved for official artists working on official commissions. Because the state foundries accept works for casting only via the official art bodies, Neizvestny installed a tiny furnace in which he can make small casts. A large figure has to he cast in many parts, and their quality is coarse because even the metal has to be purchased on the black market. Thus the academic system in the Soviet Union forces the independent sculptor to become a petty criminal.
Neizvestny rose to international fame in November, 1962, as a result of a debate he conducted with Nikita Khrushchev in the Moscow Manege. Khrushchev applied such epithets as “Filth!" and “Disgrace!” to the works on display, which included sculptures by Neizvestny. When two security men seized Neizvestny’s arms and threatened him with arrest, he directly addressed Khrushchev: “You are talking to a man who is perfectly capable of killing himself at any moment. Your threats mean nothing to me.”Khrushchev seemed convinced. When he later asked Neizvestny how he could withstand the intense pressures from the state
for so long, the sculptor answered: “There are certain bacteria—very small, soft ones—which live in a super-saline solution that could dissolve the hoof of a rhinoceros.”
What repelled and simultaneously attracted Khrushchev was the sexual energy of Neizvestny’s work. Like so many Soviet citizens, Khrushchev combined extremes of vulgarity with extremes of puritanism. And it would seem that Neizvestny’s focus on the inextinguishable power of sexuality is the prime factor which alienates him from the puritan academicians in Moscow. Berger, however, does not make this point.
He generalizes by charging that Neizvestny challenges official Soviet art by contesting its right to its own claims.
What are Neizvestny’s views on this subject? What do his colleagues, both within and without the good graces of the all-powerful Academy, think about Neizvestny’s particular rebellion? The reader is left to guess for himself. Berger may never have talked to Neizvestny at any length because the book does not contain a single direct quotation from sculptor to author. However, given Berger’s frame of reference, it hardly seems important what Neizvestny thinks, how he lives, or how he relates to his colleagues. Instead of letting Neizvestny or his friends talk, Berger attributes thoughts to him. The artist himself becomes irrelevant to the critic’s theories. What really concerns Berger are the needs which art answers.
Berger’s analytical brilliance shines through when he examines the spirit and theme of Neizvestny’s work. For Neizvestny, as for the classicists, the human body is the field of all possible metaphors. It represents the quintessence of all that is not death. And Berger believes that the poles of Neizvestny’s imagination are life and death. Neizvestny’s early sculptures reflect his progress from death as a starting point: they concern those who have passed or pass very close to death, such as war survivors, the wounded, the maimed, and suicides. His later works are progressively infused with life, sexual energy, and extremes of muscular vigor. This is partly because Neizvestny visualizes the contradictions of the forces of life and death as modifying the structure and workings of the human body.
Berger claims that Neizvestny’s theme, by virtue of which he can be considered an epic artist, is that of endurance (in the sense that Rembrandt’s was a preoccupation with individual aging). Endurance, insists Berger, is the order of the day:
The Vietnamese people have been fighting for their independence for twenty years and are prepared to fight for another twenty. We can no longer think of courage in terms of exceptional deeds or heroic moments of personal decision. Courage becomes the obstinacy of victims who resist their victimization; it becomes their ability to endure until they can put an end to their suffering.
Rather sensibly, Berger himself ponders toward the end of this book whether he is not relegating sculpture “to represent a phase in the world struggle against imperialism.” And he answers in the next sentence that “I believe that nothing is more important than this struggle.” As a Marxist, Berger reads like a character out of Darkness at. Noon. He generalizes about Neizvestny’s antiimperialism, but he cannot come to
terms with the intolerable situation of the visual artist in the Soviet Union today.
My own view is that the anti-imperialist campaign is really beyond the scope of Neizvestny’s immediate concerns. This great sculptor’s creativity. his genuine humanism, are counterforces to the suffering and brutality he and his fellow Russians have experienced for so long. Neizvestny has been fighting against the pettifoggers, the dogmatists, the neoStalinists at home—not in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His sculptures clearly show a trend toward inner liberation. As much as wc may be attracted to Berger’s fascinating personal conflict, he ultimately loses out by failing to come to grips with the very basis of Neizvestny’s revolutionary consciousness. Berger’s premises may be preposterous, his pompousness grating, his lack of objectivity extreme, but he has nevertheless produced a provocative, engrossing essay, if only because his very didacticism sparks such a broad dialogue of disagreement with the reader.