Art, Idleness and Food: The Ethics of War Communism and the Origins of Production Art, 1918–1919

The article examines the impact of the discourses concerning idleness and food on the formation of “production art” in the socio-political context of revolutionary Petrograd. The author argues that the development of the theory and practice of this early productionism was closely related to the larger political, social and ideological processes in the city. The Futurists, who were in the epicenter of Petrograd politics during the Civil War (1918–1921), were well acquainted with both of the discourses mentioned, and they contrasted the idleness of the old art with the dedicated labor of the “artist-proletarians” whom they valued as highly as people in the “traditional” working professions. And the search for the “right to exist” became the most important goal in a starving city dominated by the ideology of radical communism. The author departs from the prevailing approach in the literature, which links the artistic thought of the Futurists to Soviet ideology in its abstract, generalized form, and instead elucidates ideological influences in order to consider the early production texts in their immediate social and political contexts. The article shows that the basic concepts of production art (“artist-proletarian,” “creative labor,” etc.) were part of the mainstream trends in the politics of “red Petrograd.” The Futurists borrowed the popular notion of the “commune” for the title of their main newspaper but also worked with the Committees of the Rural Poor and with the state institutions for procurement and distribution. They took an active part in the Fine Art Department of Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education). The theory of production art was created under these conditions. The individualistic protest and “aesthetic terror” of pre-revolutionary Futurism had to be reconsidered, and new state policy measures were based on them. The harsh socio-economic context of war communism prompted artists to rethink their own role in the “impending commune.” Further development of these ideas led to the Constructivist movement and strongly influenced the extremely diverse trends within the “left art” of the 1920s.