Inhabiting the Present: Constructivist Projects ca. 1930

This paper reexamines the work of Soviet avant-garde artists, in particular Aleksandr Rodchenko, during early Stalinism, arguing that in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet avant-garde moved away from a futurological and linear understanding of modernity’s (and with it, Revolution’s) progress to embrace the socialist potential of the coexistence of different temporalities. Drawing on the little-known work of Soviet theorist Ieremiia Ioffe, the paper shows how, far from a turn to the past often associated with the retrograde politics of socialist realism, Rodchenko’s photography during this time explored slowness, retrospection, and suspension as potentially emancipatory values. While in 1918 Rodchenko had proclaimed that the future was the vanguard’s “only goal,” a decade later his photographs offered a different view of Soviet contemporaneity: one in which multiple times and cultures coexisted, and where the balance between the old (the village, the individual) and the new (the city, the collective) was not simply the elimination of the former in favor of the latter, but a new working through spatial and temporal categories and their interdependence. In particular in Rodchenko’s photographs of Moscow, this embrace of multiple temporalities—what Ioffe described as the strata of contemporaneity—is explored through the spatial metaphors of urban architecture, offering a different kind of revolutionary world-building.