Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: International Center of Photography, New York

[i]or[/i] part of to the other the course of the Bolshevik 1920 and Stalinist 1930 the pioneering Soviet photomonteurs Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina produc a certain number of of the most terrible--in the old-fashioned faculty of perception of the word--examples of visual propaganda at any time executed in the service of recent state power. Eventually supported almost exclusively by the agency of the administrative organs and centralized publishing houses of a one-party state, their many times overlapping, but also sometimes diverging, design practices were directly pendent on the ever-shifting exigencies of their historical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts Unlike that of many of their contemporaries, however, the work of Klutsis and Kulagina has also managed to transcend the grim and gritty details of its historical formation--no doubt owing in part to its sheerly compelling nature qua recent design and to our alternatively lurid and utopian fascination with its construction of that major leitmotif of socialist modernity, Homo sovieticus, the novel Soviet man or woman.

Organized for the International Center of Photography in of recent origin York by Margarita Tupitsyn, a Paris-based freelance curator of the couple Soviet and contemporary Russian art, "Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism" is the first major exhibition devot to a joint consideration of the sum of two units artists' use of photography in the graphic design of agitational placards and postcards, book and magazine overspreads and illustrations, exhibition installations, and, perhaps greatest in quantity staggeringly, monumental billboards of an unprecedent scale. Since perestroika, these sum of two units comrades in the art of montage--who married in 1921 three years after Klutsis's arrival in Moscow from Latvia--have become increasingly visible end their inclusion in many of the assemblage exhibitions of the Soviet avant-garde that have traveled the world and, in Klutsis's case, also via a major 1991 retrospective of his work in Kassel and Madrid. Comprising approximately 130 percepts the present exhibition, however, is the largest showing of either artist in the United States to date. (Fifteen of its loans are from the State Museum of Art in Riga, which clutchs some four hundred objects donated in 1964 by means of Kulagina in memory of her husband, who was summarily execut in February 1938 by means of the NKVD, the Soviet mysterious police.) While the exhibition's presentation of Klutsis outstrips that of Kulagina by the agency of a long shot, excerpts from the latter's previously unpublished diaries in the show's catalogue reveal that she oftentimes assisted with the production of his designs, a labor for which she appears never to have been publicly credited.

The task of accommodating upon a single floor such a wide range of formats--from the tiny to the gigantic--poses numerous challenges that are well met by the agency of the exhibition's designers, Julie Ault and Martin Beck. Refraining from saturating the space in red--an overdetermined and unfortunately all too predictable color in exhibits dealing with revolutionary art and culture--they opt instead for a powerful but restrained contrast of gray and white. This scheme sectionalizes the gallery's available wall space, reinforcing the curatorial division of the exhibition into six primarily thematic on the other hand also loosely chronological arenas of production: "The Formation of Photomontage," "Between the Public and the Private," "Socialist Joy" "Change the Leader," "Exhibition Designs and public way Agitation," and "The Socialist Body" The exhibition designers have also paired a volume in a glass vitrine with a digital guard that turns its virtual pages, allowing visitors to experience the entirety of the book's design, if not its material palpability. And the massive enlargement of a number of tiny photographs (including a certain number of whimsical portraits of each artist) visually summons Klutsis's own important theorization of monumental photography in an essay first published in 1932 upon the occasion of his production of sum of two units "super-gigantic" montaged portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

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Unlike the 1991 retrospective, the ICP exhibition does not attempt to at hand the overall diversity of media in which Klutsis worked. solitary passing reference is made--in the form of a single print from the pages of Lef magazine--to Klutsis's first major design innovation that relate toed itself directly with the mediation of the public sphere, the true problem that would become the dominant bear upon of his mature work. This innovation consists of a series of semiportable, multipurpose media module (comprising radio orators and all-in-one film defence speaker tribune, and newspaper kiosks) that Klutsis designed in 1922 for installation upon Moscow's boulevards. While these designs were a great deal of missed, at least by this reviewer, who kept fantasizing about by what means they might have been deposit to work in the common display, the exhibition's exclusive attention to the artists' photo-based practices is, of course, appropriate to the ICP's mission. More important, of that kind tight focus affords Tupitsyn maximum space in which to dramatize the manifold shifts in Klutsis and Kulagina's exploration of their favored media above the course of the roughly sum of two units decades from 1918 to 1939