Elements of the Revolution: The International Constructivists and the Prehistory of Artistic Research

This seminar takes the form of an open peer review and discussion of a forthcoming book to be published, Elements of the Revolution: The International Constructivists and the Prehistory of Artistic Research, which offers a critical history of the “research program” and political epistemology that emerged in the largely forgotten milieu of the International Constructivists in the early 1920s. It provides a novel narrative and theoretical elaboration of this transnational milieu, which included artists such as Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, El Lissitzky, and László Moholy-Nagy. It traces the dialectics of deskilling and reskilling that underpinned their artistic practice, thinking, and subjectivity by considering their engagement with technoscientific and epistemic issues of the interwar period.

Examining the artist’s attention to what they called “elements of the world,” such as rhythm, light, movement, and gesture, whether manifested in geometric lines and spirals on the pictorial surface, photographic abstractions, or the living images of cinema, the book tracks and conceptualizes how such an elementarism functioned as a revolutionary grammar in the “European civil war” from the late 1910s to the late 1930s. This elementarism, the book suggests, could be understood as a critique of dialectical materialism and other prominent scientific strands of the socialist and communist movement, and thus essentially as a “self-critique of the revolution” in the sense of an ambiguous and contradictory examination of what a revolutionary process would entail.

Based on archival research and detailed historical and theoretical analysis, the book thus unearths a revolutionary form of artistic research that both sheds new critical light on key figures of the “historical avant-gardes” as well as on contemporary discussions on “artistic research” and “knowledge production.”