Organizational Program – RODCHENKO Aleksandr

Slogans

(The discipline of construction, chief director Rodchenko)

Construction = organization of elements.

Construction is a modern concept.

Art is a branch of mathematics, like all sciences.

Construction is the modern requirement for organization and utilitarian use of material.

Constructivist life is the art of the future.

Art which does not enter into life will be put under a No. of the archaeological museum of antiquity.

It is time that art entered into life in an organized fashion.

Life organized along Constructivist lines is superior to the delirious magic art of the sorcerers.

The future will not construct monasteries for the priests, prophets and minstrels of art.

Down with art as a beautiful patch on the squalid life of the rich.

Down with art as a precious stone in the midst of the dismal and dirty life of the poor.

Down with art as a means of escaping from a life that is not worth living.

Conscious and organized life, that knows how to see and build, is contemporary art.

The man who has organized his life, his work and himself is a genuine artist.

Work for life and not for palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries and museums.

Work in the midst of everything and with everybody; down with monasteries, institutes, studios, ateliers and islands. Awareness, experience, purpose, construction, technique and mathematics, these are the companions of contemporary art.

Organizational programme of the workshop for the study of painting in State Art Colleges

1. The workshop for the study of painting has an educational and an experimental function.

a. The scientific duties of the workshop are the analysis and elaboration of problems in art and in pictorial technique. In order to carry out this part of its work the workshop will conduct experiments:

1. in the field of colour

2. in the field of form

3. following the laws of construction

4. studying the treatment of the surface layer of materials, i.e. their preparation.

b. The educational aims of the workshop involve giving students a technical and scientific preparation and practice in the various techniques of painting, independently of creative individualism.

2. The workshop is divided up into special sections for analysis of the separate elements of painting:

1. colour

2. form

3. construction

4. faktura

5. materials.

The study breaks down into:

a. elaboration of the elements taken individually

1. analysis of the fundamental characteristics of each element (on the practical and the theoretical plane)

2. observation of examples of the treatment of elements in works of art from different periods

3. analysis of elements in objects

4. practical handling of special problems in the elaboration of individual elements

b. comparison of elements

1. study of the interrelationship of different elements

2. observation of the way elements are combined in works of art

3. study of the combination of elements in objects

4. practical handling of problems concerned with the combination of elements.

Rodchenko 12 December 1920.