where design is a dirty word

Am becoming increasingly aware just how differently designers sit in the public imagination here. Design is considered a bit trivial, designers very much minor characters to their clients demands.


Of course, in Soviet times industrial and product design never really got a foothold within the complexities of a poorly functioning, state-led demand economy where consumer goods were always shoddy and in short supply, and any change just meant more problems. Architectural design, meanwhile, provided a symbolic and decorative celebration of the new communist world,  as well as a criticism of modernist and functionalist architecture elsewhere which was only 'expressing the callousness of the capitalist industrial monopoly.'* 


So designers were not/are not seen as offering a valuable service as they do - or think they do - within consumer society by creating innovative and useful things; they are instead either individual (artistic) visionaries or just people who get paid too much to make things look prettier.


But, then, of course, there is also a hidden history of design; of designers who worked inventively within the state system (such as VNIITE in the 1980s) or outside of it, for example, the more famous Paper Architects of the same period. And joy of joys, one of my colleagues worked with VNIITE and has been bringing me in magazines from this time. Design (because connected to capitalism) remained a dirty word, and the subject was named aesthetic engineering or technical aesthetics - but the work is adventurous and clever; and in the brave early days of perestroika when it was possible to have your own design studio and ideas, some beautiful (and crazy) things appeared. 


Shown are examples from Vladimir Telyakov's Futurological Objects series 1983-89, taken from Constantin Boym's New Russian Design; from where the quote used here is also taken. With thanks to Alexey Sinelnikov.
 

10-of-the-best 8: Mayakovsky Museum

One reason I have been out visiting trendy restaurants is that a friend has been staying, meaning I have been a proper tourist for a couple of days, having a great time with him visiting various Moscow sights.

So finally got to the Mayakovsky museum, which is just around the corner from where I live, near Lubyanka. Mayakovsky was a futurist/constructivist poet and writer(1983 - 1930) and the museum is an extraordinary three-dimensional representation of his life and work, a four-storey sophisticated spiralling down (based on the designs of Tatlin's tower) of metaphorical constructions, and multi-layered images.

The work itself - just the sheer energy, confidence and creativity of the immediate post-revolutionary period - is astounding. All the usual suspects are there; Rodchenko, Malevich, Tatlin, Melnikov, just to name a few. There are letters, collages, photographs, paintings, sketches, notes and much else, set at all kinds of angles and relationships. It took my breath away twice, once for the glories on show; and then because these original and irreplaceable works are just stuck under glass (sometimes), jumbled up so some difficult to even see, and then cut or overpainted or generally mistreated. This might be seen either as an expression of Mayakovsky's anarchy and exuberance (ignoring the fact that he committed suicide), or of a terrible lack of concern for the long-term preservation of these precious artefacts. Or both.

The Maykovsky Museum website is only in Russian (there is an English link which doesn't seem to work, but there is always Google Translate). For a 3D virtual tour of the museum interior try here. And for some poetry and his manifesto A Slap in the Face for Public Taste visit a favouritely weird website, archiving the works of Marxists across the globe.

What do I know?

Been thinking about where I have got my knowledge of, and assumptions about, Russia over the years. It is an embarrassing mixture of John le Carre novels (Although A most wanted man is great for showing how British bankers, who think they are being clever on the edge of legality, are in fact completely out-manoeuvred by their most more dangerous Russian counterparts) and news broadcasts; leavened (perhaps) by reading historians of the Russian Revolution such as E.H. Carr and Richard Pipes.

Currently reading Jonathan Dimbleby's Russia: a journey to the heart of a land and its people which you can tell by its title is embedded in riddle-mystery-enigma thing; and having to work very hard not just to throw the book across the room. It is so self-centred, and so certain of the perspectival accuracy of a western european viewpoint.