What is it about the Russian Revolution that keeps pulling us back to October 1917? Not one but two major Chicago museums marked the centenary of the world’s most idealistic — and devastating — upheaval this past year. The Art Institute’s architectonic presentation of Soviet art and design closed earlier this week, but “Revolution Every Day” at the Smart Museum remains open through the end of the month. Perhaps the only other major cultural-political turn that captivates American viewers more is the homegrown one of the 1960s, connecting the struggle for civil rights to the Summer of Love. On that, the Block Museum hosts “William Blake and the Age of Aquarius” through March.
The pull of revolutionary thinking is hard to resist, even now. It’s designed that way, from the bold slogans to the utopian programs. Every cook must learn to govern the state, as Vladimir Lenin put it in an iconic poster of 1925, and who but the most conservative bourgeois or inbred aristocrat wouldn’t want that? Yet “Revolution Every Day,” though it includes dozens of examples of rousing Soviet graphic art from 1917-41, plus clips from Dziga Vertov’s films of the era, is no straightforward exhibition of historical propaganda. For one, it isn’t entirely historical; a handful of works on video made since the demise of the USSR in 1991 reflect on the afterlives of revolution. For another, copious wall texts, derived from contemporaneous diaries, memos and mass publications, seem to contradict their graphic subjects at every opportunity. Even the catalog, arranged as a daily tear-off calendar, challenges how we think scholarly material ought to be presented and received. The overall effect is surprisingly offbeat and bracingly fresh.
The show is arranged in thematic clusters pertaining to different aspects of daily life, from work to leisure, child care to celebrations. Nearly all of it was directed at the women subjects of the vast Soviet Union and about half was also designed by female artists like Valentina Kulagina and Mariia Bri-Bein. Women then — as women now — bore the brunt of the quotidian, and when the Russians sought to rebuild the very structure of life, they had much to exhort of the female half of the population. One hundred years later, in the era of Trump and Putin, many of those messages remain depressingly unmet: The Soviets Defend Women’s Rights! Women, Go to Civil Aviation Schools! Let’s Construct Nurseries! Working Woman, Fight for a Clean Canteen and Healthy Food!
But it’s the subtler content that really sticks: The women in these mass posters appear courageous and smart, deeply absorbed in their work, strong and in command. Nowhere are they objectified. Just about the only flesh on view is that of Liudmila Vtorova, a champion swimmer shown throwing a discus on a placard extolling physical culture. Meanwhile, posters featuring coquettish or tentative women received harsh reviews in internal documents of the time. Contrast this with everything we know of advertising today or, better yet, with Olga Chernysheva’s cheeky “March,” a 2005 video shot improvisationally on the streets of Moscow, where the artist encountered a marching band, little boys in black military uniforms, and a bevy of cheerleaders. The occasion remains vague but, regardless, the women are scantily clad.
Rare is the revolution presented without 100 percent dead seriousness. By contrast, “Revolution Every Day” provokes a wry chuckle at every turn. An excerpt from Vertov’s documentary film “The Three Heroines” includes outtakes where one of its stars, the female aviator Marina Raskova, cracks up and flubs her lines. Adjacent to an advertisement touting the glories of ice skating at the Park of Culture and Recreation runs a snarky article from a Moscow daily newspaper detailing the interminable hassles of actually trying to do so. Alongside a series of posters celebrating International Women’s Day appears a magazine editorial detailing the lack of public child care, food service and laundries, plus helpful husbands, that would equal real emancipation.
My favorite wild card of the show is “Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache,” a charmingly handmade 2008 video by Lene Berg that tells the story of a drawing that Pablo Picasso made to commemorate the Soviet leader upon his death in 1953. The portrait and its artist were subsequently condemned by the Communist Party — due to the picture having been deemed too feminine. This from the rulers of the USSR, who believed their state to be the most egalitarian in the world!
These and other dynamic ironies are the achievement of a whiz-bang curatorial team: Slavic languages scholar Robert Bird, curator-artist Zachary Cahill, Smart Museum curator Diane Miliotes, and Christina Kiaer, an art historian specializing in Russian and Soviet art who also worked on the AIC show. Intent on immersing viewers in what they describe as “the textures and tempos of everyday life,” they painted the exhibition walls mint green, pale pink, lavender and red — colors that might be characterized as the palette of institutional communist feminism.
They included, as well, evidence of the Soviet government’s radical alterations of time itself. After an overdue shift from the Julian to the Gregorian system, the nepreryvka, or unbroken workweek, was introduced to maximize productivity: weekends were eliminated, and each person assigned one day of rest out of every five. Later this was changed to a six-day period. To keep track, bizarre color- and shape-coded calendars were printed up, but this hardly solved the problem of labor time and social life being out of sync — as noted in the diary of a student, who complains that because of a recent change, her sisters and mother will have their day off while she is at school. Together with a friend, she decided to write a letter of protest and gather the signatures of her classmates.
Revolution every day, indeed!
“Revolution Every Day” runs through Jan. 28 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
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