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Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition**

Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition** Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition* CARL EINSTEIN Translated and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen This text marks the end of a seven-year period during which, with the exception of a single short essay on Rudolf Schlichter (1920), Einstein had ceased writing on contemporary art; his art criticism from 1914 suggests weary disillusionment with the art world. In a brief text, “On Primitive Art” (1919), written in the wake of the German revolution, he had declared that only revolution and participation in social reconstruction could give art a purpose.1 Evidently unimpressed with Berlin Dada’s blend of art and politics, he now believed—at least for a time— that he had found such an art in Russia. The Russians “practiced absolute painting like they practiced absolute politics,” he writes. The “destruction of the object” by the artists of the Russian avant-garde was not a merely formal affair, but the destruction of both a social and epistemic order, a bourgeois order founded on possession, individualism, and the fiction of stable subjects and objects. Soaring on the wave of revolution, Einstein proclaims a dictatorship—not of the proletariat but of vision, a dynamic, functional vision, unfettered by objects, that can create a new http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition**

Einstein, Carl; Haxthausen, Charles W.
October , Volume Winter 2004 (107) – Jan 1, 2004
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/016228704322790944
Publisher site
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Abstract

Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition* CARL EINSTEIN Translated and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen This text marks the end of a seven-year period during which, with the exception of a single short essay on Rudolf Schlichter (1920), Einstein had ceased writing on contemporary art; his art criticism from 1914 suggests weary disillusionment with the art world. In a brief text, “On Primitive Art” (1919), written in the wake of the German revolution, he had declared that only revolution and participation in social reconstruction could give art a purpose.1 Evidently unimpressed with Berlin Dada’s blend of art and politics, he now believed—at least for a time— that he had found such an art in Russia. The Russians “practiced absolute painting like they practiced absolute politics,” he writes. The “destruction of the object” by the artists of the Russian avant-garde was not a merely formal affair, but the destruction of both a social and epistemic order, a bourgeois order founded on possession, individualism, and the fiction of stable subjects and objects. Soaring on the wave of revolution, Einstein proclaims a dictatorship—not of the proletariat but of vision, a dynamic, functional vision, unfettered by objects, that can create a new

Journal

October – MIT Press

Published: Jan 1, 2004

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