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Building Blocks

With an unusual mix of art and science, Vyacheslav Koleichuk resurrected a legendary 1921 exhibition of Constructivist art.

By Brian Droitcour
Published: August 18, 2006

Vyacheslav Koleichuk has been studying optics and motion for almost 50 years, both as a theorist, with a day job at a research institute, and as a practitioner, using his spare time to build moving sculptures and create optical illusions. His studio, located in a dusty basement near Kutuzovsky Prospekt in western Moscow, is littered with the results of his experiments. A shining, spiny construction hangs from the ceiling, and an asymmetrical, angular configuration of pipes sways in perpetual motion in one corner. Koleichuk's desk is lit by a spherical lamp covered with a geometric foliage of paper napkins, and behind it hangs the portrait of a man whose features switch places at the press of a button.

Though the studio looks like a mad scientist's laboratory, it is where Koleichuk made a major contribution to Russian art history and how the public perceives it. In May, when the New Tretyakov Gallery unveiled its revised exposition of the early 20th-century avant-garde, the centerpiece of it was a replica of a pivotal 1921 exhibition of Constructivist art, designed and built by Koleichuk.

Reconstructions of important lost works have been displayed at museums before, and Koleichuk has had considerable experience recreating the artistic experiments of the 1920s. He first did so in 1968, when the collector George Costakis asked him to reassemble a set of plywood ovals that the influential Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko had once used to build a hanging elliptical structure. That work is now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. But the Tretyakov's decision to feature an entire exhibition reconstructed from scratch in its permanent exposition is unprecedented.

The 1921 exhibition that Koleichuk rebuilt is widely regarded as a seminal event for Constructivism, a movement that rejected emotion and subjectivity and embraced industrial technology, seeking to balance engineering and aesthetics. In a recent interview, Koleichuk said he had been thinking for over a decade about building a full-scale reconstruction of the 1921 show in order to give a physical demonstration of its importance, in a way that photographs could not communicate. "It was a landmark exhibition," he said. "I wanted to give Russia back its geniuses."

The exhibition was put together by Obmokhu, or the Society of Young Artists, a group founded in 1919 by recent graduates of the First State Free Art Studios, a hotbed of avant-garde approaches to art. Although Obmokhu held together for only three years, it kept a prominent place in art history thanks to two photographs of its 1921 exhibition. These images preserved the innovations of Rodchenko's hanging compositions and the dynamic three-dimensional structures of the Stenberg brothers, Vladimir and Georgy, long after the works themselves were lost.

"It had a mass of inventions that found applications later on," Koleichuk said of the exhibition. He is particularly interested in the work of Karl Ioganson, a member of Obmokhu who invented the concept of tensile integrity. He introduced it at the 1921 exhibition with a composition of metal pipes and wire, held together by its own weight, which swayed fluidly when its balance was disrupted. That kind of structure -- rediscovered by U.S. architect Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s -- has been applied to objects as diverse as tents and radio telescopes for space observation; Koleichuk has used it to invent new musical instruments.

In addition to the ideas presented in individual works, the Obmokhu exhibition was influential because of its overall design, which made a strong argument for reconstructing it in full. "It was the first exhibition that had a style," Koleichuk said. "It was the first one where the artists paid attention to the space around the works. There had never been anything like it before."

For MT This scratchy photograph is one of two surviving images of the 1921 exhibition. Koleichuk used them as the basis of his reconstruction.

Koleichuk had no information on which to base his reconstruction besides the two photographs. No catalog had been printed for the exhibition, and the dimensions of the individual works were unknown. Further complicating the task, the building where the exhibition took place, located at 11 Bolshaya Dmitrovka, was undergoing renovation when Koleichuk started work on the project last fall, which ruled out the option of going inside and measuring the room. In any case, the building's interior had changed significantly in the 1930s, when two stories were added.

To overcome these obstacles, Koleichuk examined photographs of other exhibitions that had taken place in the same space, looked up measurements of works that had hung on the same walls -- Kandinsky paintings, for example -- and used that information to calculate the dimensions of the room and of the works displayed by Obmokhu.

More precise calculations were later made on a computer by laying a grid over digitized versions of the photographs. Koleichuk said that while precision was important to him, it was not the ultimate goal. "It's not like we were trying to make a counterfeit," he said. "We weren't trying to convince anyone that this was the real thing. So it didn't matter if the proportions were slightly off. The main thing was that it stand together well."

The end result of Koleichuk's painstaking labors went on display at the New Tretyakov Gallery in May, as part of the museum's 150th anniversary celebrations. But visitors to the Tretyakov can see more than just his reconstructions -- they can also see his own original artistry, in a nearby section called "Avant-Garde Movements Since 1956."

That display starts with a room of Kinetic art of the 1960s and '70s featuring several works by Koleichuk. "Transformable Cube" (1967) is a sloping seven-sided wooden object that spins against the wall in the first corridor, and much of the following room is taken up by "Sphere" (1965), a massive collection of chrome-plated tubes and strings that looks like a geodesic dome levitating in mid-air.

In his 1994 book "Kinetism," Koleichuk defines Kinetic art as "a type of artistic creation based on the idea of movement of form, not just the physical transposition of an object, but any change or transformation, any form of 'life' in a work as the viewer observes it." Koleichuk created his futuristic mobiles both independently and in collaboration with members of the group Dvizheniye, or Movement.

Koleichuk and his colleagues were inspired by the dawn of the space age in much the same way that Constructivists were by Russia's industrial revolution. Besides the attraction to technology, the movements shared ambitions for social change. After the pure experiments of the early 1920s, the Constructivists worked in design and architecture to create a new environment for the young Soviet Union. Dvizheniye's leader, Lev Nusberg, had grand ideas about building a social utopia using Kinetic art, and even made some headway toward achieving his goals. The group received several commissions for public art projects, including the design of outdoor spaces in Leningrad for celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution.

While Kinetic artists worked in cooperation with the official art system, Soviet critics dismissed their works as decoration and design, refusing to acknowledge them as full-fledged works of art. They showed little sympathy for Koleichuk's intellectual interest in motion and optics, which recalled Rodchenko's approach to each work as a scientific study of color, line, texture or structure. "I'm only interested in technologies," Koleichuk said. "I can make something beautiful, but that's not the goal."

Still, the Tretyakov's new sections on Constructivism and Kinetic art encourage visitors to find expressive power and artistic composition in these structures. And both sections place Koleichuk in a central role.

With his reconstructions and original works, Koleichuk bridges the art of the 1920s and the 1960s, two periods of burgeoning experimentation interrupted by the imposition of Socialist Realism and the crackdown on "formalism" in the Stalin years. His work straddles these two periods in the Tretyakov's new permanent display -- and offers a new way to look at Russian art in the 20th century.

Vyacheslav Koleichuk's works and reconstructions can be seen at the New Tretyakov Gallery, located at 10 Krymsky Val. Metro Oktyabrskaya, Park Kultury. Tel. 230-7788.

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