testsite 05.2 ~ Yuppies (Young Urban Proles)
Rae Culbert & Catherine Walworth
05.15.2005 - 06.26.2005
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Is art a luxury?
Luxury versus productive labor.
Leisure versus work.
Raoul Vaneigem, Situationist spokesperson, said that we are all in a state of creativity twenty-four hours a day. What if we were all allowed time and absolute freedom to think for ourselves? What if our creativity were not dulled by the overtaxing demands of wage labor? We might imagine everything differently from how it is presented to us. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfillment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence. (Vaneigem)
The setting for this discussion, couched in Communist terms, is Alexandre Rodchenko’s design for a Soviet Workers’ Club—eighty years old but still fresh in the minds of artists who continue to pine for its utopian connotations, recreating it in contemporary exhibitions across the world. Rodchenko--productivist, reductivist, man jauntily-posed in a jumpsuit made for him by his wife-—he stands for the rise and fall of an idealist within the Soviet experiment.
The USSR exported Rodchenko's Workers’ Club to outline the New Man's leisure needs at Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris in 1925. Lenin had died the year before and avant-garde artists were being excommunicated by the Communist government that had exploited their skills as propagandists.
Rodchenko went to Paris to personally install his room. He ignored most of the famous artists in Paris at the time. He wrote to his wife, the artist Varvara Stepanova, "Yesterday, watching people dance the foxtrot, I was overcome by a great desire to be in the East and not here." He is comparing those who celebrate their sleepwalking with those who work tirelessly to recreate their government.
Even his club for relaxation was not meant to be luxurious. The furniture was uncomfortable. It forced alertness as opposed to false comfort.
At testsite, central zones of Rodchenko’s design are recreated for public use. Visitors may play chess, read news items selected by the collaborators, and reflect on a little altar to Rodchenko-- a saintly representation of the disillusioned idealist.
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Artist Biographies:
Rae Culbert
Catherine Walworth
Relevant Links:
Reflection on testsite 05.2
Biographical information about Alexander Rodchenko
Rae Culbert's website
Review by Laura Lindenberger in ARTLIES