Learning from the Russian Avant-Garde: Constructivists and their Devices of Estrangement

This paper reveals the Russian avant-garde Constructivists’ claim for a new experience of art by exploring the literary Formalist devices of estrangement developed by Viktor Shklovsky. Two case studies provide insight into the Constructivists’ approach: the collaborative publication About This (Pro Eto, 1923) developed by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, and the artist and architect El Lissitzky’s Cabinet of Abstract Art (Kabinett der Abstrakten, 1928) in Hannover’s Landesmuseum at the invitation of Alexander Dorner. Their artworks set forth a novelty in perceptual and tactile dimensions of art by moving away from a representative and symbolic approach to art. They promoted an embodied perception of pictorial surfaces and exhibition spaces. Their engaging contributions focused on destabilizing the familiar and the corporeal experience of the participants to restore the tactile dimension of the art works. This paper examines the simultaneous reading of the poem and the photomontage (publication) versus the experience of space and the installation of the abstract expressionist paintings (by Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, etc.). Both media conflated the inhabitable space with the two-dimensional abstract forms using the conceptual and cognitive device of estrangement. In Pro Eto, the fragmentation of structural materials broke the uniformity of perception and restored the awareness and the “feeling for matter.” Similarly, the destabilization of the perceptual field in the cabinet’s design elicited the engagement of visitors in exhibition spaces. This paper highlights the audience’s perception of visual art works in literature and architectural design.