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Abstract
This article explores how designers and artists working in Soviet Estonia sought to assess and rethink the relationship of the man to his/her surrounding environment. At the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s various attempts to imagine a new kind of humane environment appeared as a response to modernization. The creation of a new integral living environment—the main task of Soviet design proclaimed by VNIITE—included aspects of social agency, and of educating and empowering the user. The conceptions of integrity and humanity, central to these new designs, were developed against the background of a return to the early writings of Karl Marx as well as to the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s.
Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by Estonian Ministry of Education Grant IUT32-1. I am grateful to Serguei Oushakine for the invitation to contribute to this special symposium on the “Landscapes of Socialism,” for his attentive reading of an early draft of this essay, and for his insightful suggestions. I am thankful to Yulia Karpova and Tom Cubbin for inviting me to present a paper at the workshop, “(De)constructing Utopia: Design in Eastern Europe from Thaw to Perestroika” (2–3 May 2014), which took place at the University of Sheffield, and gave me the initial idea for this essay. The first part of my essay, the discussion of the exhibition series Space and Form, is based on the manuscript of this presentation. My special thanks to Helen Ikla for her excellent and accurate translation of the sections “The Socialist Culture of Things,” “Humanism as Practice” and “A Synthetic Environment” from Estonian. I also wish to thank my reviewers for their intelligent and precise comments, Kaia Lehari for valuable remarks, and particularly Rethinking Marxism editors, Serap Kayatekin, Jared Randall, and Ceren Özselçuk, for their constructive and professional assistance. I am indebted to Kai Lobjakas for her help with obtaining the visual material, and I am thankful to the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design and to the Estonian Museum of Architecture, as well as to all the artists for their permission to use images.
Notes
1 Translated by Helen Ikla. Quotations from Glazychev 1972, Brecht 1972, Lehari 1976, Lapin 1975, 1997, and Lapin and Lapin 1997 are translated by Helen Ikla.
2 Soviet design had a double role: emphasis was placed, on the one hand, on being different from Western design, and on the other, on the improvement and competitiveness of Soviet products. Learning from the West was thus justified and recommended, because the Soviet economy was dependent on foreign currency and thus on growing exports.
3 In 1956 Nikolai Bulganin, then premier of the Soviet Union, had announced the launch of the “scientific and technical revolution.” Industrialization of housing alongside other key sectors was one of the important engines of Soviet modernization after Stalin (Pavitt and Crowley Citation2008, 167).
4 For many architects, this would have without a doubt seemed like a turn backward, but as recent studies have shown, this (re)turn was very ambivalent and debatable (see Bocharnikova Citation2014, 84–106). Also, terms like “modernism” and “functionalism” were generally not used. Until the end of the 1960s, only “contemporary style,” “contemporary Soviet architecture,” or “socialist architecture” were mentioned. These terms were used because of a need to retain a crucial difference from the West. Regarding the term “socialist modernism,” see Reid (Citation2009).
5 In November 1955, the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroi) published the Resolution of the Central Committee and USSR Council “On elimination of excesses in design and construction.”
6 The rhetoric used during Khrushchev's time to legitimize modernism included several ideologically and aesthetically loaded terms such as contemporaneity, purposefulness, youthfulness, openness, freedom, and democracy (Reid Citation2009, 101).
7 Unlike in the earlier era, the debate during the 1950s and 1960s was not focused on the complete dissolution of the domestic sphere (Buck-Morss Citation2000, 190–205). For the dematerialization of Soviet daily life and domestic sphere see Cubbin (Citation2014).
8 In the 1960s, the constructivist avant-garde of the 1920s had been rehabilitated step-by-step as the predecessor of Soviet design. This point of view was represented, for example, by VNIITE (Vsesoiuznyi nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut tekhnicheskoi estetiki or All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics), which claimed to be the inheritor of the traditions of VKhUTEMAS. The institute played an important role in the revival and study of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde.
9 Marx himself operated within two conceptions of art. While typical artistic production practiced in a society was instrumentalized and stood (like religion, politics, and morality) at the service of said society and power, “true” art was characterized by the opening of human nature, and by free self-realization. True art could only exist in such a way in a society without divisions of labor. Also, it would not have been practiced by people who specifically chose to be artists but rather by those who painted, among other things. The emancipatory utopia of this kind of society (communism) is the multifaceted person (Marx and Engels 1990, 33).
10 In art history “plastic” indicates that it is a model made by using the means of art–forms, color, light, rhythm, and so on. A broader notion would be visual model, or artistic model.
11 For an account of Kantor's theory of socialist design see Cubbin (Citation2015, 89–129, and especially 115–20).
12 The concept of “good form” originates with the Swiss artist and architect Max Bill (Citation2008), who had studied at Bauhaus Dessau.
13 Several articles propagating design raised the issue of true and illusory needs. For example, Bruno Tomberg (Citation1961), interior architect, designer, and founder of the design department at the Estonian State Art Institute, demanded that committees be created in larger department stores that would control the quality of products on sale—to minimize their fetishist characteristics by eliminating all indecent/inappropriate products that could lead the consumer to satisfy the “wrong” needs.
14 Hilde Heynen has described the process of institutionalizing and integrating modernism, which took place both in the West and to the east of the Iron Curtain. According to her, after World War II, modernism became an architectural style spreading examples of “good taste,” but not social ideas.
15 Every participating artist-designer was assigned to one “cubicle” and some artists worked in teams. That said, the level of collective activity varied greatly, with some teams engaging in true collaborative design or conceptualizing and others using the shared space to exhibit works by several different people. The minutes of the interior-design section meetings show that although a jury was present, artists were mostly left on their own regarding the nature of their contributions. Proposals were rarely discussed and, if at all, mostly to analyze the feasibility of executing the work and its materials.
16 Although the initial idea was not to showcase finished samples of a practical and beautiful spatial setting, in reality the furniture and object samples outnumbered the rest of the exposition. The display structure took up only half of the exhibition. The more distant rooms displayed furniture and object samples, produced especially for the exhibition. Later, the furniture was bought by the Ministry of Culture in order to help cover the exhibition's expenses.
17 Ivask (Citation1971) compared such systems with children's building blocks, which can be aligned or placed on top of one another to create an endless number of combinations. When furnishing his own home, Ivask based everything on a sixty by sixty by thirty centimeter “modular box.” Ordinary veneer-covered boxes made of blockboard and stained dark brown were combined to make tables, shelves, seating, and beds.
18 Warnings against entropy in the everyday artificial environment—the proliferation of “visual noise” that dulls the senses and diffuses attention—along with the criticism of the chaotic disorder and formless nature of modern life, were the backdrop for the new design discourse. The designers saw their task as controlling and managing this chaos.
19 This also meant that the working methods of designers had to change. The design curriculum composed by Tomberg emphasized the modularization and flexibility of form. Starting off from one simple form, the students moved from the planar level to packaging, from a simple everyday object to complete environmental solutions (Sarapik Citation2014, 337).
20 The involvement of the consumer/user was also fostered by the insufficient quality of the apartments, which required reworking along with completing the interior decoration. Tips for this were published in magazines like Kunst ja Kodu (Kurg Citation2014, 118).
21 Such design exhibitions would have been dangerous in the Soviet context. Modern furniture and commodities were scarce in the distributive network, so it would have created confusion had viewers started to demand them for the decoration of their own homes (Gens Citation1972a).
22 Guy Debord (Citation1996) adapted Marx's theory on the fetishism of consumer goods in his analysis of contemporary societies using the concept of “spectacle” to stand for the mass media. Spectacle is a self-sufficient control mechanism of contemporary society that places people in the role of the passive consumer, becoming the basis for alienation. However, Gens understood spectacle differently: he saw it as performance that has been inscribed with estrangement, and therefore as a means to entice the audience and create participatory interest. It is thus more similar to the theatrical “situations” that Debord saw as an adequate political practice for interrupting the “spectacle.” Debord and Gens recall what Sergei Tret’iakov (Citation2006) had outlined decades previously when he called for a regime that breaks down the barrier between the artist as creator and the spectator as consumer.
23 Tomberg himself expressed that he wanted to design a chair that did not dictate how one should sit in it (interview with the author, 2 June 2005).
24 Regarding the development of estrangement from an initially aesthetic and formal concept into a socially engaged “new way of seeing,” see Lachmann (Citation1984).
25 This type of “artistry” that creates estrangement is similar to Brecht's V-effect. Gens must have been aware of Brecht's work, as Brechtian theater was eagerly propagated in Estonia during the 1960s. There was high demand for changing these experiences into something more immediate and intense (Epner Citation2010, 18).
26 To avoid, as Tomberg (Citation1972) observed, such common negative situations as buying a desk to decorate the living room even though no one in the family is involved with writing, or decorating the living room as a dining room although the family eats in the kitchen.
27 The shift from the first exhibition's rational user-space relationship to the more experimental, disorienting, yet engaging spaces of the 1972 exhibition reflects the transformation in ideology as a consequence of the wider crisis of modernity in Soviet Union in the early 1970s. Rationality and positivist reasoning, as well as the narrow focus of Soviet modernization policies on technical criteria, did not come in for severe criticism until the 1970s. The technocratic belief in scientific progress as the best mechanism for resolving social problems, including the organization of people's daily environment, dominated the 1960s. But eventually this tenet came to be seen as the problem. The idea of the artist taking command over industrial production then gained even more relevance and was reframed as the idea of the artist who disrupts the rationality and functionality of the modern environment (Lapin Citation1973).
At the same time, the real potency of design was significantly diminishing in the early 1970s, as a consequence of the economic crisis. Tom Cubbin (Citation2015, 193–4), in his recent study on Senezh Studio, has pointed out that the retreat from economic reforms (introduced in 1965 by Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin in order to promote limited market competition between enterprises) had a noticeable effect on designers’ status, marginalizing their already fairly extraneous roles in production and forcing them to withdraw from industry into experimentation. For Estonian designers, it became attractive to work not in industry but at the State Cooperative of Art Products (ARS), which designed and made only unique objects. This shift toward individuality was the reason Tomberg, the main initiator of the above-mentioned exhibition series, distanced himself from the series after its third edition in 1976. For him it became “too experimental,” moving away from “real concerns” into subjectivity and thus arbitrariness (from an interview with Tomberg, 2 June 2005).
28 The results of the program were modest for several different reasons. Apart from the rather meagre means for executing the project, it was also hindered by a lack of communication between artists and architects. For an architect, art was a threat to the architectural whole. Artists however were often led by the misconception that they had been brought in to correct architecture (Tolli Citation1984, 24).
29 The art nouveau concept of Gesamtkunstwerk was also propagated by the journal Art and Home, to which Leonhard Lapin was a frequent contributor. This idea had a particular meaning within the context of the Eastern European private sphere. The 1970s were characterized by a withdrawal into privacy, which compensated for adapting to the system. The home became an expression of singularity not different from art nouveau. The role of everyday life and the “culture of objects” as a place of creativity and liberty was thus ambivalent.
30 Runge can be seen following Archigram. For the sake of the context of this essay, I will limit my discussion to certain aspects.
31 This understanding of humanization is characteristic of environmental psychology introduced during the 1970s (e.g., Heidmets Citation1978, 4).
32 Indeed it is the artist who, in McLuhan's (Citation1964, ix) vision, helps raise critical consciousness by creating “anti-environments,” or “counter-environments,” “that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself.”