Aperto Game Over, 2016 [selected]

Greenberg vs Kemenov: The Irrelevance of Two Cultures

The Cold War was one of the most sophisticated and dangerous games humanity has ever played. It was impossible not to be involved in it, because its primary rule was total involvement. It defined the confrontation between two political and socio-cultural systems over the course of several decades. The organizers of the game had quite specific names.

In terms of cultural policy, the key players were the American art critic Clement Greenberg and the Soviet art scholar and functionary Vladimir Kemenov. Kulturträgers, ideologues, and social commentators, they largely determined the course of the Cold War and laid the foundations of the mutual antagonism between the Soviet Union and the United States.         

Vladimir Kemenov belonged to the generation of Stalin’s so-called falcons, whose careers depended directly on the number of jobs that were freed up after the Purges. Launched in the mid 1930s, the campaign against formalism and naturalism in art facilitated Kemenov’s rapid career growth. His 1936–1937 articles in the newspaper Pravda gave rise to the persecution of Soviet artists and critics. In 1940, however, Kemenov himself nearly fell victim to a denunciation of a group of literary critics led by his teacher Mikhail Lifshitz. Consequently, the culture desk at Pravda was restructured, Lifshitz’s closest ally Georg Lukács was arrested, and the magazine Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic) was shut down. Kemenov, though, was responsive to changes in government circles, so he not only avoided punishment, but even strengthened his position. Over a long career, Kemenov held nearly all the key Soviet cultural policy posts, and yet he always remained in the shadows.

Kemenov made a name for himself in the early 1930s. After graduating from Moscow State University, he lectured in the capital’s universities and collaborated with the Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR), which advocated realist art. In 1931, AKhR’s official magazine, Za proletarskoe iskusstvo (For Proletarian Art), published Kemenov’s article on socialist realism, “Enough of Metaphysics”. However, Kemenov was unable to define the new artistic method, relying on vague verbiage. He chose the opposite tack, seeking and exposing the antipodes of socialist realism. Thus, in 1932, the 24-year-old Kemenov edited a collection of articles, 10 Workers Clubs of Moscow, in which he criticized buildings designed by Konstantin Melnikov. “The meanness and reactionary nature of [Melnikov’s] architectural thinking,” wrote Kemenov, “is varnished over by the raiment of a rotten constructivism.” The same year, Kemenov was involved in a number of discussions about Soviet art criticism, organized by the spatial arts section at the Institute of Language, Literature and Art. The polemic ballooned into a full-fledged crackdown on the first generation of Marxist art theorists, who were accused of “rightist opportunism” and a “departure from Leninist principles”.

Meanwhile, in the US, Clement Greenberg was frequently published by the Partisan Review, a journal focused on New York intellectuals; he was appointed the journal’s editor-in-chief in the early 1940s. In 1939, he published his article Avant-Garde and Kitsch, a key text for twentieth-century western art criticism. In the article, Greenberg seemingly echoes Lenin’s argument that every national culture has both progressive elements and reactionary, decadent, and backward elements. But instead of contrasting “progressive socialist” and “decadent bourgeois” cultures, the American critic suggested there was a dichotomy between the “avant-garde” (modernism) and “kitsch” (socialist realism).

Similar in their intransigence towards each other’s cultures, Kemenov and Greenberg led different lifestyles. Kemenov was obliged to attend various international events and official receptions. Greenberg, on the contrary, avoided officialdom and contact with high-ranking officials, preferring the company of American and Western European artists and rich patrons willing to support contemporary art financially.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the influence of Greenberg, who wrote for American bohemians, was negligible compared to the authority of Kemenov, who shaped the Soviet Union’s domestic and foreign cultural policy and was a favorite of the Party leadership — Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Molotov. In 1938, Kemenov was appointed director of the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1939, he became secretary of the Stalin Prize Committee, a post he held until the leader’s death. Kemenov ran the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) from 1940 to 1948, i.e., during the height of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West”. In 1952, he headed the visual arts section of the Soviet Central Committee’s Agitprop Directorate. In 1954, he was named Soviet deputy culture minister. In 1956, Kemenov was transferred to the post of the Soviet Union’s permanent representative to UNESCO. In 1960, he was made chair of the contemporary foreign art department at the Institute of Art History and, in 1966, vice-president of the USSR Academy of Arts.

Due to his official duties, Kemenov often traveled abroad — to Italy, Spain, France, Japan, India, East Germany, West Germany, and the US. We can assume he could have met Greenberg at an international conference. Because of the Cold War, however, representatives of the Soviet Union and US tried not to cross paths even at academic and cultural events. Moreover, each new international event was a response to the active efforts of one’s rival. The most striking example was the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, sponsored by the Soviet Union in 1948. With the assistance of the CIA, the US responded by founding the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose members included artists Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock. And while Kemenov, theoretically, could have been involved in the pro-Soviet peace movement, Greenberg was a member of the CCF until 1953.

Kemenov preferred to be published in serious Party periodicals. He published his articles in the newspapers Pravda and Sovetskoe iskusstvo (Soviet Art), and the magazines Bolshevik, Kul’tura i zhizn’ (Culture and Life), Iskusstvo (Art), and Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). Kemenov’s bailiwick was books on socialist realism’s advantages over “decadent bourgeois art”.

The geographical scope of Kemenov’s publishing career expanded considerably after World War Two. Adapted translations of his articles and theoretical essays were published in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. VOKS was responsible for spreading Soviet ideas in the capitalist west. Its main press outlet was VOKS Bulletin, published in English, French, and German. Kemenov served as its editor-in-chief until 1948. In 1947, VOKS Bulletin published the article Aspects of Two Cultures, in which Kemenov, pointing to Henry Moore and Jacques Lipschitz’s sculptures, and Picasso, Dali, and Roberto Matta’s paintings, argued that contemporary western art was “false, anti-democratic, inhumane, reactionary in content and decadent in form”. Kemenov was concerned that western artists emphasized the animal principle and literally reduced human nature to this principle. The alternative to this perspective was, of course, socialist realism.

What did the Soviet leadership hope to accomplish by distributing VOKS Bulletin in the US? Translations of bland propaganda articles were doomed to failure among average Americans, distracted from the class struggle by the bright world of Disney and Hollywood. Although Kemenov’s aggressively honed style set him apart from other panegyrists of Stalinism, the American working class did not greet his appeals enthusiastically. Still, thanks to the fact Aspects of Two Cultures was published in English, a striking example of Soviet cultural propaganda was made accessible to western critics.

From 1947 to 1951, Greenberg wrote a column entitled Art Chronicle in the Partisan Review. At the height of the Cold War, in 1948 and 1949, the magazine began publishing monthly rather than quarterly, as it has before. Greenberg’s articles were featured in nearly every issue. In 1948, Greenberg published a short piece entitled Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility, in which he polemicized with the British poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, comparing him to Vladimir Kemenov. Greenberg also briefly analyzed Aspects of Two Cultures, expressing dissatisfaction with Kemenov’s anti-American outbursts. Ironically, in some of his articles, Greenberg unwittingly echoed Kemenov’s conclusions, noting European modernism’s “decadence”. Thus, in the article The Decline of Cubism (1948), Greenberg basically rehearses the arguments Kemenov makes in Aspects of Two Cultures. The only difference is that the American critic opposes the wholesome paintings of the New York school, rather than socialist realism, to European art.

Was Kemenov aware of Greenberg? Theoretically, he could have been aware of him. Translations of the American critic’s articles were published in Western European magazines, circulated with the CIA’s assistance: Der Monat, Kontakte, and Preuves. But for such an influential functionary as Kemenov, Greenberg was small fry. At the time, other critics had international standing: André Malraux and Germain Bazin, in France; Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read, in England; Werner Haftmann and Will Grohmann, in Germany; and Alfred Barr, in the US. Greenberg really only made a name for himself in 1961, when his famous essay collection Art and Culture was published, and his lecture Modernist Painting was broadcast by the Voice of America.

On the other hand, Kemenov had an excellent nose for trends and was well informed about what was happening in the specialist press. He hardly would have missed Greenberg’s articles in Partisan Review, Horizon, and The Nation. At any rate, in his own works, Kemenov frequently cited articles in such foreign journals as Art News, The Studio, Horizon, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Art in America. He was even aware of the American illustrated magazine Life.

In October 1948, Life held a round table on contemporary art, inviting fifteen leading American and European theorists, critics, and museum curators. Greenberg did his part as well: during the discussion he defended Jackson Pollock, since he saw in him the “true spirit of free American art”. A year later, Life published a piece on Pollock, making him famous all over America. The article was entitled “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The article mentioned a “formidably high-brow New York critic”, that is, Greenberg, one of the first to recognize Pollock’s talent.

In contrast to Greenberg, Kemenov never published in Ogonyok, the Soviet equivalent of Life, preferring academic journals. The most popular Soviet magazine, however, did not ignore Kemenov’s ideas. Alexander Gerasimov, a Stalin-era painter and the first president of the USSR Academy of Arts, relayed them. In 1949, he published a short article entitled The Collapse of Bourgeois Art in Ogonyok’s satire pages. Most likely, Aspects of Two Cultures was the model for Gerasimov’s lampoon. First, Kemenov’s article was initially published in Russian in 1947 in the journal Iskusstvo, where Gerasimov then worked as an editor and writer. Second, the rhetoric of the article in Ogonyok was clearly borrowed from Kemenov. Third, the article was illustrated with the same reproductions of Henry Moore’s Family Group and Roberto Matta’s Man Trembling as Kemenov’s article had been.

After Greenberg, the next person to pay attention to Kemenov’s article was the German-American bibliographer and rare book expert Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, who in his book Art under a Dictatorship (1954) compared the cultural policies of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In 1968, Kemenov’s article was included in the anthology Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book. It finally became part of the academic canon when excerpts from it were reproduced in the landmark anthology Art in Theory: 1900–1990. Several generations of foreign researchers have formed their opinion of postwar Soviet society on the basis of the excerpts in this anthology. In the early 2000s, Russian art scholars also decided to turn to the “dark side” of the venerable Soviet scholar’s legacy. There were instances when the English translation of Aspects of Two Cultures was translated back into Russian. The researchers were unaware of the Russian version, published in the journal Iskusstvo.

Aside from these two versions, there was a third version of the article, published in Bolshevik in August 1947, in which Kemenov considerably revised and expanded on the original article. The new piece was entitled The Degeneration of Bourgeois Art and it corresponded even more closely to the National Socialist style. But this version did not escape the notice of Kemenov’s American contemporaries, either.

This issue of APERTO features excerpts from the first Russian translation of Greenberg’s article Irrelevance versus Irresponsibility and Kemenov’s Aspects of Two Cultures, as originally published in VOKS Bulletin.

Author: Sergey Fofanov
Translation: Thomas Campbell

Ann Veronica Janssens is a Britain-born Belgian artist who ingeniously works with light and space. She is best known for her light installations with mist that turn the exhibition space into a neuro- playground and make viewers daydream. Besides perception experiments, Ann Veronica creates objects that resemble minimalistic sculptures. We have talked with Ann Veronica about The Hedgehog in the Fog cartoon and hyperperception of the superspaces.

Elena Yushina: Dear Ann Veronica, when I saw the image of a man standing in front of the window in Bathing in Red Light, I thought about Vladimir Mayakovsky. It was just an image in my mind, as there were many references: the window, the red color, the figure… I wonder what kind of thoughts people have in the mist? In the Soviet cartoon The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) the hedgehog dreams a lot, and his imagination is spurred by the mist. Is it the same with your installations?

Ann Veronica Janssens: The fact that you don’t have any sense of space is probably the same. You don’t know where are you going. In the cartoon, they are looking somewhere; in my works people are looking into their own feelings, perceptions, colors, and the fact is that they don’t see. It’s more about the issue of vision. In the cartoon, they try to get out of the situation: it’s a fantastic cartoon, I really like it. But I think when you deal with such work as Bathing in Red Light, your perception of time changes. The audience is looking not for the exit, but for the intense experience of what has happened to them.

When I read the book of Mieke Bal about your works, in the article about “playing” there was a quote that in your mist installations we play the role that we have never played before. Which role would you like to play to enter the mist?

I do not deal with the issue of narration in the installations; it is more abstract. If there is a narration, it’s only the question of balancing the natural light and the color together. There is no narration and when I am there, I can’t really talk about psychological aspects.

So you are experiencing your body?

The body and the nervous activity, my brain and what it produces, some kind of hyper-perception. It can even be very cinematic, and in this abstract situation you see the context, but for me it is not like this.

The situation in which you create a perception: the narrative thing can be created as a reflection of your brain. As in the Hedgehog in the Fog, when the hedgehog was thinking about the horse…

That’s a dream.

Could it be that Bathing in Light is where dreams come from?

Yes, of course. It’s your nervous connections. You open a door to the abstract world.

And talking about the “super spaces”, as you named your works. Could it be that people enter the “super spaces” in real life, or this is an artificial artistic reality?

It does not exist solely in artistic context. Super space is a different kind of particularity. It can be produced by display, the way where the brain can move. How the light could move, even under the door or the water infiltrating the space. When I meant the display, I tried to open the things into reality and more reality. And this “more reality” is the super space.

In this super reality, you experience yourself at the verge of the visible and the invisible. Is it important to you that people see more in the invisible situations?

The visible effect is connected with the invisible. We are quite complex. We are trying to find a way to enter the invisible reality.

I’ll return to the playing models and the definition of “game over”: what it is for you?

We play games all the time. I don’t see how “game over” is possible. I have a feeling that during our life the game is never over, all the time it is the question of temporality and provisions. All games are part of the machines that move. You have a temporal context inside a constant one.

I mentioned a “game over” as a form of changing the direction in the game, not the real end. It’s more how to find a way when we make mistakes.

Mistakes are an interesting thing to continue. In fact, this is the same in the mist installation when you hear something and move in another direction. There is a multiplicity of possibilities.

What are you working on now?

I am working on the tests for a musical project together with L’Ensemble intercontemporain with light and music piece From the Canyons to the Stars. Besides, I am editing the film, teaching at the University, experimenting and reading books on science and philosophy.

The combination of your works and music is so exciting. Can you imagine music in the red mist installation?

That’s a good question. I have never used music except for the 48th Venice Biennale, where a child played a song. It happened only for 45 seconds every 5 minutes. This little song was a piece of light for me. In the red mist, I don’t see any music, that’s too much of a narrative.

So let’s leave it in silence.