Monumental propaganda. Part 2
A person with a muscle vector is more adapted to the perception "on display" - you can explain to him for a long time what needs to be done, but it is easier to demonstrate … "A peasant or a worker will understand a revolutionary picture easier and sooner than a book", a picture - with its easily recognizable images of revolutionaries and symbols of labor.
Part 1
The revolutionary movement has an urgent need to express itself through art.
Diego Rivera, Mexican painter
In the 1920s, there was a temporary bias towards the NEP. Art in its own way reacts to some economic stabilization and a barely noticeable return to the old bourgeois-aesthetic norms.
The same period awakens interest in wall painting, because art had to enter the life of the working class and peasantry through the streets and squares. The ideas of bright, with a powerful ideological non-religious accent of frescoes, huge mosaic panels exalting the "new man" were borrowed from another continent - in revolutionary Mexico. They were created by the Mexican communist muralist artist Diego Rivera, the founder of the Mexican school of monumental painting. In the mid-1920s, Diego visited the Soviet Union, having stayed in Moscow for several months. He hoped to receive an order from the Soviet government to create a cycle of frescoes on the theme of the Russian revolution. But that did not happen. A generation of its own muralist artists has already grown up in the Soviet state. They had more confidence in their own people, and the demand from them was stricter.
A person with a muscle vector is capable of perception “on display”, such is his special natural muscular organics. You can explain to him for a long time what needs to be done, but it is easier to demonstrate. "A peasant or a worker will understand a revolutionary picture more easily and faster than a book", a picture with its easily recognizable images of revolutionaries and symbols of labor. In the countryside, “when a European toiler of the fields took a heavy flail, a Polish one took a scythe, and a Russian one took an ax, the weary hand of a Mexican or Cuban usually stretched out to a machete,” and a cobblestone became the weapon of the proletariat.
Monumental decorative art, having gained its popularity in the USSR thanks to Diego Rivera, has become a powerful propaganda tool addressed to the masses, because monumental painting and sculpture "speaks in a language that is easy to understand for workers and peasants around the world."
Turning to monumental art as a spectacular method of propaganda in a country where 80% of the population was illiterate, could not read and write, was the most accurate method to show and explain to your people the tasks and goals of the Bolshevik Party.
Perception in workers and peasants occurs at a particular muscular level. It is possible that the memory of the Great Patriotic War is preserved in generations of Soviet people, and now Russians, thanks to the urethral-muscular mentality and all the same muscle memory, the psychological “phantom of pain”. The existing concept of "muscle memory" is associated with the memory of the muscles of the degree of external load on them and their contraction, that is, tension. For the muscle, in which the erogenous zone of the muscle, the act (movement, dynamics) is easier to remember in action, through the tension of the muscles of the body or face. Muscles are monotonous, but not static.
Each vector has its own understanding and choice of different types of art. In painting, only spectators are able to be enchanted by religious leaf paintings under the domes of churches, deep thoughtful or sly images in portraits, clarity of composition and jewelry technique of the Little Dutchmen, admire the mysterious haze of impressionist cityscapes.
Anal people will most likely give preference to Savrasov's "Starlings" who have already arrived, "Bears in the Woods" and "Hunters at Halt", and the muscles will choose a splint - a simple uncomplicated picture. But in order to move the muscle from its place, tear it away from a patch of native land, anger, provoke, bring out of the initial state of monotony, you need an impulse in which there is an expression of the urethral leader, like the Bronze Horseman, and the dynamics of a skin commander.
Muscular "we" have always accurately been able to display the great sculptors of all times and peoples. Almost every monument of monumental art in the Soviet Union depicts muscle muscles, since these works were created for and about them. For the purpose of positive psychological suggestiveness, whole memorial complexes were laid. One of the most powerful in terms of impact and expressiveness was the sculptural ensemble, laid in memory of the Battle of Stalingrad on the Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd. Its compositional center is one of the tallest monumental structures in the world - the sculpture "The Motherland Calls!"
The image of a woman as a motherland is perhaps characteristic only of Russians. The Germans have the concept of "vaterland" (Fatherland), and the French, during their revolution, had their own female symbol - the girl Marianne in a Phrygian cap. Although you can find a bust of Marianne in any state institution, one would not be tempted to call her the mother of the French land.
Linking in the monumental propaganda of the concepts of "homeland", "mother" and "earth" occurs, most likely, in the first days of World War II, when on the streets of cities and villages appeared posters "Motherland calls!"
In folklore and rituals of Russia, the earth is the personification of birth and death and is associated with the mother by the muscles: "mother of cheese is the earth", "earth is mother", "from the earth I have come, to the earth I will go." These eternal concepts carry the algorithm of immortality, incorruptibility and constant rebirth. The Russian muscular people - a warrior and a plowman - have always felt a special sense of responsibility towards mother-nurse earth. A lot of work needs to be invested to grow a crop in the special geographical conditions of Russia, and then save it.
So the muscular people had to become the defenders of the Russian Land in order to preserve the grain that fell into the ground, and to protect the piece of land that was cultivated with such difficulty and raised an ear from enemies. “Mother earth feeds, gives water, dresses, warms with her warmth” - with the understanding of this peculiarity of the Russian mentality, the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “Land for the peasants”.
Lenin's plan of monumental propaganda, although associated primarily with sculptural monuments, implied a synthesis of different types of art: literature, music, theater and even sports (parades of athletes, workers' solidarity, organized in mass spectacles, and in Victory parades after the war).
In the late 19th - early 20th centuries (as part of promoting a healthy lifestyle), not only around the world, but also in belligerent Russia, there is a massive interest in sports. "The need for alcohol, for a poisonous, for an artificially stimulating drink, is very strong in the cities among the workers … If we do not resist alcoholism, starting with the city, then we will drink socialism and drink the October Revolution," wrote L. Trotsky in 1926.
The thirties were marked by active monumental promotion of a healthy lifestyle. This is reflected in the famous sculpture by Ivan Shadr "Girl with an Oar", installed in the center of the fountain on the main thoroughfare of the park named after Gorky.
The sculpture has caused a lot of criticism and creative envy. However, I liked the idea so much that soon the whole country began to mercilessly copy the "sports Galatea". Each city park of the USSR "registered" its own "Girl", and the degree of cover of her forms completely depended on the degree of chastity of her sculptor. But the skin-visual muses, who posed for their sculptors, did not have time to grow old, as they had to change the oars for rifles, and sports canvas shoes and white socks - for tarpaulin boots and soldier's footcloths.
In the early Soviet Union, team sports began to develop actively, and even theatrical performances included elements of acrobatics, gymnastics, weightlifting and athletics. And the theater itself is undergoing a serious reform. His task is to create laconic performances, with a simple series of events and uncomplicated text, understandable to every illiterate soldier and peasant. The emphasis was not on the artistic value and dignity of the work, not on the acting, but on the ideological propaganda of unpretentious but effective draft campaigns. "Live newspaper" with acrobatic performances under the friendly command "Do it once! Do two! " instantly rebuilt into "living monuments and sculptures" easily recognizable by the people. "Drama work with a politically sensitive theme" - this is how Alexander Solzhenitsyn defined this genre.
Continue reading (part 3)
