Art - is serving the people, but the people are being led goodness knows where. I want to lead the people to art, not use art to lead them somewhere else. [...] Art must be separate from politics.
Alexander Rodschenko
It is a very important sentence for what I'm researching. I've stated some posts ago that every act of culture is a political act. Now I quote this one by Rodchenko, Russian artist as well as Soviet artist, that seems to reflect the opposite. Or maybe not.
The idea of art as a lead for the people is an innered consequence of marxist-leninist philosophy and praxis. It was a great opportunity for those avanguardist artists who were experimenting so fast new possibilities in artistic language: escaping from their studios and joining a new idea of society in which they should have been the leaders of a new and greater spirit. But we don't have -as belonging to the West- to think that it was a failure of real socialism: the sentence by Rodchenko is still a positive and looking-forward point of view, in which politics has to relate to the power. The contradiction lays into the one between intellect and power. The Soviet artists thought to solve it joining marxism-leninism -believing really in it- misunderstanding that its relation -as Plato's life teach us- is a permanent contradiction.
That's the political sense of art.
A Rodchenko's collage and photography exhibition is taking place at Martin Gropius Bau till August 18 in Berlin.
