Sunday 6 January 2013

OUGD405. Design Process. Studio Brief 2: Research, Collect, Present. Constructivism.

constructivism. primary research.



i wanted to find out what people, in general, knew about constructivism. initially i thought id just focus on peoples ability to recognise contructivist art.
firstly i asked people if they knew what constructivism was.
then i showed them 3 images of art, 1 of which was constructivist art, and asked them to tell me which one they thought was contructivist.

example.

do you know what constructivism is/ know about constructivism?

yes/no

(32 people asked in total)

which one of these images is an example of constructivist art?




answered yes:
total of 7.
5/7 got the right answer (3rd image)





answered no:
total of 25.
14/25 got the right answer.
4/5



 if it was the case that people answered yes (i.e. they did know about constructivism) i still asked them the first question but then asked them if they could recognise the difference between more similar artistic movements. 

(7 people asked in total)



constructivist art




cubist art



suprematist art.

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/kazimir-malevich/suprematism-1916-1



3/7 got the right answer (1st image)





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my next experiment was to test constructivist learning theory in the field and see how successful a method it is.

i thought for a while about how i could do this, while reading further in to the theory to help understand it and understand my role as a facilitator. 

i decided that i good method would be to try and get people to teach themselves how to skateboard. seen as im in leeds and hyde park skate park is close i used that as my environment for learning.

i took people who did not know how to skate (i asked them to demonstrate their abilities and most couldnt even stand up on the board with out my support, while some could but couldnt move while on the board) up to hyde park and first asked them just to watch the skaters. i asked them to observe their movement, their balance, their foot placement, their stance, their technique in general. while they were watching i talked to them about what they were seeing and asked them to tell me how they thought the skaters were achieving their practice. i asked them so describe how they thought the skaters were achieving success in skating. i didnt tell about my own ideas of skateboarding or instruct them about techniques, rather i got them to understand the techniques themselves and try to transfer them to their own methods and knowledge. 

after 20 minutes of watching the skaters and talking to the learner about their ideas and realisations i asked them to once again attempt to stand on the skateboard. if they were comfortable standing on the skateboard i then asked them to try and push the skateboard and ride on it.  



total of 6 volunteers as test subjects.

2/6 able to stand on board with out assistance


1/2 able ride on board while moving for short distance (6-8ft approx.., unable to push self)  

of those unable to skate at all (4/6):

after the experiment was completed each subject was asked to try standing on the skateboard, unassisted, and stay on it for 20 seconds.

4/4 succeeded in this.

they were then asked to try standing on the skateboard while moving (i pushed them while they were on the board) for 6ft.

3/4 succeeded in this.

they were then asked to try pushing themselves on the skateboard and staying on it for 6ft.

3/4 succeeded in this.




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constructivism. secondary research.

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.


The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917.
Constructivism was a post-World War I development of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be invented by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular style of work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich.
Constructivism in Moscow was represented by VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school emphasized political and ideological discussion rather than art-making. 
Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920–22.
definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. 
Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a means of participating in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova,Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.


Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', artists and designers participated in public life during the Civil War

In 1921, the New Economic Policy was established in the Soviet Union, which reintroduced a limited state capitalism in the Soviet economy. Rodchenko, Stepanova, and others made advertising for the co-operatives that were now in competition with commercial businesses. The poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and called themselves "advertising constructors".  In these works Constructivists showed a willingness to involve themselves in fashion and the mass market, which they tried to balance with their Communist beliefs

The book designs of Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others such as Solomon Telingater and Anton Lavinsky were a major inspiration for the work of radical designers in the West, particularly Jan Tschichold.

jan tchichold-the woman without a name


Many Constructivists worked on the design of posters for everything from cinema to political propaganda: the former represented best by the brightly coloured, geometric posters of the Stenberg brothers (Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg), and the latter by the agitational photomontage work of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina.

Klutsis and Kulagina


The Constructivists' main early political patron was Leon Trotsky, and it began to be regarded with suspicion after the expulsion of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1927-8. The Communist Party would gradually favour realist art during the course of the 1920s (as early as 1918 Pravda had complained that government funds were being used to buy works by untried artists).
Many Constructivists continued to produce avantgarde work in the service of the state, such as Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Stepanova's designs for the magazine USSR In Construction.



Constructivist architecture emerged from the wider constructivist art movement. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 it turned its attentions to the new social demands and industrial tasks required of the new regime. Two distinct threads emerged, the first was encapsulated in Antoine Pevsner's and Naum Gabo's Realist manifesto which was concerned with space and rhythm, the second represented a struggle within the Commissariat for Enlightenment between those who argued for pure art and the Productivists such as Alexander RodchenkoVarvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin, a more socially oriented group who wanted this art to be absorbed in industrial production.



Constructivist architecture was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced many pioneering projects and finished buildings, before falling out of favour around 1932. Its effects have been marked on later developments in architecture.





the end of constructivism
The 1932 competition for the Palace of the Soviets, a grandiose project to rival the Empire State Building, featured entries from all the major Constructivists as well as Walter GropiusErich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier. However, this coincided with widespread criticism of Modernism, which was always difficult to sustain in a still mostly agrarian country. There was also the critique that the style merely copied the forms of technology while using fairly routine construction methods.[16] The winning entry by Boris Iofan marked the start of eclectic historicism of Stalinist Architecture, a style which bears similarities to Post-Modernismin that it reacted against modernist architecture's cosmopolitanism, alleged ugliness and inhumanity with a pick and mix of historical styles, sometimes achieved with new technology. Housing projects like the Narkomfin were designed for the attempts to reform everyday life in the 1920s, such as collectivisation of facilities, equality of the sexes and collective raising of children, all of which fell out of favour as Stalinism revived family values. The styles of the old world were also revived, with the Moscow Metro in particular popularising the idea of 'workers' palaces'.




The Palace of the Soviets (RussianДворец СоветовDvorets Sovetov) was a project to construct an administrative center and a congress hall in MoscowRussia, near the Kremlin, on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The architectural contest for the Palace of the Soviets (1931–1933) was won by Boris Iofan's neoclassical concept, subsequently revised by Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh into a supertall skyscraper. If built, it would have become the world's tallest structure of its time. Construction started in 1937, and was terminated by the German invasion in 1941. In 1941–1942, its steel frame was disassembled for use in fortifications and bridges. Construction was never resumed. In 1958, the foundations of the Palace were converted into what would become the world's largest open-air swimming pool. The Cathedral was rebuilt in 1995–2000.




Rodchenko-mayak-nipple





alexander rodchenko


Rodchenko
Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova, "the first designers":
 Both artists felt strongly that ideology should form the lifeblood of their work, and nothing shows this more than Rodchenko's design for a Workers' Club, which he exhibited in the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Paris in 1925. Tate Modern will have a reconstruction of the club, direct from his designs. This was design with function that went beyond utilitarianism: it was created to enable leisure, an essential tenet of Lenin's revolutionary ideal. Labourers should use their free time outside of work relaxing – but within a context that was productive, communal, and with design at its centre. As such, there was to be a Lenin Corner of the club with Constructivist magazines and a screen on which could be projected signs. This was typical of the Constructivist movement's approach to art, as they branched out to graphic design, theatre stage sets and posters. This Workers' Club was a theatre of sorts, where each worker would play his part.









Constructivism is a theory of learning and an approach to education that lays emphasis on the ways that people create meaning of the world through a series of individual constructs. Constructs are the different types of filters we choose to place over our realities to change our reality from chaos to order. Von Glasersfeld describes constructivism as “a theory of knowledge with roots in philosophy, psychology, and cybernetics” [1]. Simply stated, it is a learning process which allows a student to experience an environment first-hand, thereby, giving the student reliable, trust-worthy knowledge. The student is required to act upon the environment to both acquire and test new knowledge.

Solo architects in a mass society' … Rusakov Workers' Club, designed by Konstantin Melnikov. Photograph: Richard Pare, courtesy Kicken Berlin


The "Russian avant garde", it's usually called, though the artists themselves didn't use the term; they were known as the futurists, then productivists, and most consistently, constructivists. Even the "Russian" is a misnomer – the individuals in question were frequently Ukrainian, Latvian, Belarussian, Georgian. "Soviet" doesn't quite work either, as they emerged slightly before the October revolution, out of the futurist cafés and cabarets of the mid-1910s.
What they created was probably the most intensive and creative art and architectural movement of the 20th century, a sourcebook so copious that there's scarcely any movement since that wasn't anticipated by something tried and discarded between 1915 and 1935 – from abstraction, pop art, op art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, the graphic style of punk and post-punk, to brutalism, postmodernism, hi-tech and deconstructivism. But the people making this work largely didn't consider themselves to be artists; they even used the term as an insult. They wanted to destroy art altogether, not as a sulky nihilistic gesture, but because they thought they'd created something better to put in its place. They are currently almost ubiquitous, but they nearly disappeared from the historical record – something almost accidentally documented in the Royal Academy show Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-35.
The bulk of the artworks in the show come from the collection of George Costakis, a Greek diplomat resident in Moscow from the 1940s until the 1980s. He created what has been called a "futurist ark", buying up drawings, paintings and sketches by artists who were dead, discredited, forgotten, prohibited, or who had moved on to the very different "socialist realism" prescribed from the 1930s onwards. Until Costakis's collection went public, there was only a vague idea that something extraordinary had happened in the former Russian empire – perhaps a couple of mentions of Kasimir Malevich or Alexander Rodchenko, usually in connection with the German artists they had inspired.
Costakis's work was aided from the 1970s on by the archaeological research of the Soviet historian Selim Khan-Magomedov and the late English architectural writer Catherine Cooke; it's no exaggeration to say that without this small group of people, the current prominence of the "Russian avant garde", which has featured in seemingly dozens of exhibitions on the heroic era of modernism over the last decade, would have been impossible. This is at least in part because it was equally useless to both sides in the cold war. For the west, with its CIA-sponsored abstract expressionism, the claim that Bolshevism led inevitably to the suppression of individual creativity was hard to square with this unprecedented visual flowering; while the Soviet bloc still clearly felt there was something dubiously Trotskyite about these internationalist, cosmopolitan art movements.
In Building the Revolution's catalogue, an essay by Jean-Louis Cohen outlines the close connections these artists and architects had with various western trends, from the Bauhaus to Le Corbusier, who was invited to Moscow to design a gargantuan office block for the Union of Co-operatives, which is still standing. No doubt this counted against them when the Soviet Union took a sharp rightwards turn towards nationalism and autarchy in the 1930s. Yet there's often a tendency to act as if the constructivists were themselves "western" in the cold war sense – that they were typical creative types who couldn't be encompassed into the "system". To paraphrase the title of a book on architect Konstantin Melnikov, they were "solo architects in a mass society", alternately either naive aesthetes or individualists who wouldn't bend to serve the new masters, whose suppression by the monolithic state was inevitable. This conception of the heroic subversive artist was one rejected by the constructivists throughout their existence, so it's an enduring irony that it is so often applied to them.
In the early days of the revolution, especially during the civil war of 1918-21, the futurists decorated the public spaces where the new power was promulgated and celebrated – the painter Nathan Altman created a temporary futuristic redesign of the Palace Square in St Petersburg, architect Nikolai Kolli symbolised the struggle with a public sculpture of a red wedge breaking a white block, while in the small provincial town of Vitebsk, the Unovis group maintained a constant barrage of quasi-abstract propaganda. The last is best represented in the exhibition by El Lissitzky's 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, a monument to the murdered communist leader in the form of polygonal forms flying around a central red circle. The futurists' paper Art of the Commune had direct state support, and though the leadership were ambivalent – Lenin was baffled and irritated by the futurists, Trotsky critically sympathetic – there was no suggestion of their being suppressed.
At every step, the artists developed their art specifically according to how useful it might be for socialism. In the early 1920s they staged an exhibition of the "First Working Group of Constructivists". A well-known photograph of this show features a series of seemingly abstract sculptures, often considered a precursor to later "kinetic art". The constructivists themselves considered this work as a precursor to going into the factories and producing useful objects, which some of them soon did, with mixed results. The intention was to move from the utopian to the quotidian (and back) – after designing the famous Monument to the Third International (a model of which sits in the grounds of Burlington House for the duration of the exhibition) sailor and Bolshevik supporter Vladimir Tatlin's next utopian project was designing a more functional stove.
Much of the Costakis collection dates from the early 1920s, when the new state was recovering from a vicious civil war, an international blockade and foreign military intervention, and facing total economic collapse. The proletariat that had participated in the revolution had been effectively wiped out, with the cities emptying and the heavy industry of St Petersburg destroyed; one delegate at a Bolshevik conference sarcastically congratulated the party on being the vanguard of a non-existent class.
Their only solution to rejuvenate the economy was to encourage small-time traders and the peasants who made up 80% of the population; the constructivists had other ideas. The drawings we see in the exhibition express the desire for a totally urban and industrialised landscape – skyscrapers, giant machine halls, mechanised bodies. Even the abstract art, the non-objective "suprematism" pioneered by the young propagandists of Vitebsk, often evokes the rectilinear precision of engineering drawings as much as it does the free play of the imagination. This was at least on some level a collective fantasy of efficiency, a dream of industry, in a country whose already fragile toehold in the 20th century had just been forcibly rescinded. When this work met western eyes, from the 1922 Russische Ausstellung in Berlin onwards, it was interpreted by people who found the industrial landscape familiar and normal. They missed the element of dreaming – but then the Soviets were often in equally furious denial of that themselves.
The manifestos of the new industrial artists, like Alexei Gan's Constructivismor Nikolai Tarabukin's From the Easel to the Machine, were unromantic, utilitarian. The flourishing of creativity happened because each competing faction of the avant garde was utterly committed and fanatical, not because of anything-goes pluralism. The most radical conceived of art as something that must abolish itself in order to become truly useful to the new society they fervently believed was being built. There wouldn't be "artists" in the old sense anymore – the Moscow art school Vkhutemas aimed instead at educating a polymathic engineer-artist-sociologist. The first casualty waspainting, and the notion of the exhibition in museum or gallery, where connoisseurs drift around a collection of individual, unreproducible art works. Former painters delved into textile design, photography, book design and, most of all, architecture.
The Costakis collection shows the temporary propaganda kiosks by the Latvian Bolshevik Gustav Klutsis that were the result of this impulse. The second part of the exhibition shows the real buildings that came later, in the second half of the 1920s. The documentation here comes from two sources. One is the Moscow Shchusev Museum of Architecture's collection of historical photographs; the other is English photographer Richard Pare's archive of contemporary captures of these buildings in a usually parlous state, previously collected in his excellent 2008 book The Lost Vanguard. What these two collections have in common is their reminder of the circumstances and context of the period, something too often lost when we gaze longingly at the utopian blueprint.
In the Shchusev collection's image of the 1926 headquarters for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, you can see the old Russia that the Bolsheviks feared would overwhelm them crowding round the building, hostile – the clean lines abutted by squat Tsarist pallazos, crenellations and Orthodox domes. Look at Pare's photographs of the same landscapes and you find that old Russia won that battle. Buildings that purport to be steel turn out to be straw; precise little machines for living in are dwarfed by Stalin's gothic skyscrapers and their ultra-kitsch post-Soviet imitations; advertising is ruthless and ubiquitous, covering every available surface. The depth of their defeat is measured here. In art, the avant garde survives; in everyday life, across the Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, its works rot.
Given the political defeat of all that its members believed in, they would perhaps have preferred their utopian buildings not to survive. What is unavoidable in any close examination of the constructivists was just how passionately and sincerely they believed in the communist project. They often faced a similar fate to other true believers in the 1930s – Alexei Gan and Gustav Klutsis were among the "purged". Perhaps the fascination that the 1920s still retains, however dimly we perceive it in such different circumstances, is the promise of another communism, unlike the one that committed suicide in 1989 – a communism of colour, democracy and optimism rather than a monochrome despotism; an analogue to the recent return of interest in the aesthetics of social democracy, whether council housing or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. That's as maybe. What is certain is that the constructivists would not have thanked us for our wistful, apolitical interest.




constructivists see the world as an ever changing concept. the world only is as it is because we agree that it is that way. if people decided it wasnt that way any more then it wouldnt be. the world is constantly being changed from the rules we have in place, by the rules we have in place. constructivists see the world as something we build out of the way we relate to each other.



constructivism says that you never learn anything from scratch; rather that everything you learn or any new idea you come across you relate to knowledge you already possess and try to construct a bigger frame work linking the two pieces of information. a successful learner is one who starts with a pool of ideas they understand and the come to a new idea and try to relate or embed it in the existing ideas. constructivists say there is no such thing as being objective, rather everything is subjective because no two people experience anything the same.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F00R3pOXzuk


people derive meaning from their own personal histories, cultural backgrounds and what they already know.


russian revolution occured in 1917 brought about by the unfair and poverty striking tsarist regime. communist revolution was the peoples revolution. the russian avant guarde was determined to reinvent art from the bourgeois easel paintings of the 19th century. to re-construct art from the bottom up. futurism was brought about post ww1 as a revolution in art and then came modernism from that. constructivism was russias answer or russias modernist movement. art was no longer for arts sake. in constructivism art was for purpose, for the people. practicality married with beauty was the main thrust behind constructivism. 





Maria Montessori’s key points contribute to both Humanism and Constructivism; however, the following quote from her emphasizes her value of experiential learning to conditionalize knowledge:
"Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society." [5]

Constructivism called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society. Ultimately, however, the movement foundered in trying to make the transition from the artist's studio to the factory. Some continued to insist on the value of abstract, analytical work, and the value of art per se; these artists had a major impact on spreading Constructivism throughout Europe. Others, meanwhile, pushed on to a new but short-lived and disappointing phase known as Productivism, in which artists worked in industry. Russian Constructivism was in decline by the mid 1920s, partly a victim of the Bolshevik regime's increasing hostility to avant-garde art. But it would continue to be an inspiration for artists in the West, sustaining a movement called International Constructivism which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and whose legacy endured into the 1950s.
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-constructivism.htm


Before we answer this question, ask yourself, "How do I learn best?" For example, do you learn better when someone tells you exactly how to do something, or do you learn better by doing it yourself? Many people are right in the middle of those two scenarios. This has led many educators to believe that the best way to learn is by having students construct their own knowledge instead of having someone construct it for them. This belief is explained by the Constructivist Learning Theory. This theory states that learning is an active process of creating meaning from different experiences. In other words, students will learn best by by trying to make sense of something on their own with the teacher as a guide to help them along the way.
Since all sensory input is organized by the person receiving the stimuli, it cannot always be directly transferred from the teacher to the student. This means that a teacher cannot "pour" information into a student's brain and always expect them to process it and apply it correctly later. For example, think of a time when you were taught something in a lecture-type class. Then contrast that against a time when you had to prepare to teach someone else something. You will probably agree that you learned the material better when you were preparing to teach the material. This is because you constructed the knowledge for yourself.
Below is a list of different methods of learning. The percentages listed represent the average amount of information that is retained through that particular learning method. Note what method produces the highest retention rate.
  1. Lecture = 5%
  2. Reading = 10%
  3. Audiovisual = 20%
  4. Demonstration = 30%
  5. Discussion Group = 50%
  6. Practice by doing = 75%
  7. Teach others / immediate use of learning = 90%
It should also be recognized that a person's prior knowledge may help or hurt the construction of meaning. People's prior knowledge comes from their past experiences, culture, and their environment. Generally prior knowledge is good, but sometimes misconceptions and wrong information can be a hindrance. Sometimes time must be spent correcting prior knowledge before new learning can occur.
http://www.ndt-ed.org/TeachingResources/ClassroomTips/Constructivist%20_Learning.htm

stenberg bros film posters:





http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/aspen/mp3/gabo.mp3


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from this initial research we were asked as a class to talk about what we had found out. we each spoke about the research we had found and picked out ten points that we thought were the most interesting we had found so far.

my ten points were:

  1. the constructivist movement strongly supported the idea of art for society and not purely for functionality.
  2. constructivism was represented educationally by vkhutemas in moscow.
  3. constructivit theory was debated and defined after the deposing of wassily kandinsky as chairman of the moscow institute of artistic culture.  
  4. constructivism is a combination of faktura and tektonika.
  5. constuctivist education allows students to experience things first hand to involve truthful learning and reliability.
  6. although branded as a russian movement, people from various eastern european and some western european nations all played an important role as well.
  7. constructivism can be seen to have major influence on all artistic movements since 1935.
  8. many constructivists didn't consider themselves artists.
  9. constructivism began as a  mainly 3d artistic practice.
  10. naum gambo, along with antoine pevsner, co-invented the name constructivism. 

we were then asked to consider which out of these 10 points were actually fact. at first i thought all of mine were facts but upon closer inspection, and with definition from the tutors, i realised this wasnt true. facts are generally quantative and so can be recorded. the tenth point can be seen as fact because it is recorded that on whatever date those two came up with the name. there are witnesses to back it up etc so it is fact. point 7, although maybe true, is not fact because there is no definite evidence to suggest this. instead people have drawn links that indicate this to be the case. someone else, however, may feel that there are a lot of artistic movements that were not influenced by constructivism. 


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http://www.gem.org.uk/pubs/news/hein1995.html



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