







































32

δι
αν

οι
α

PRAXIS OF THE SOVIET AVANT-GARDE
LEAH HASDAN

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno discuss 
how the culture industry is backed by a noncommittal vagueness of ideology, 

which, in turn, influences the production of art. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that, 
like the culture industry1, art is bound to its struggle with tradition and is unable 
to transcend a new reality—or give way to a new cultural identity. The authors 
look towards autonomous art, recognized in the presentation of the avant-garde, 
to transcend the milieu of the culture industry. Yet, as they argue, “the claims of art 
are always also ideology”2—this holds especially true for avant-garde art. Even in the 
midst of society’s attempting to sever itself from tradition (in hopes of striving for a 
new identity), avant-garde art does not transcend reality, for it is nonetheless backed 
by the instrumentalization of ideology and places the artist’s identity into crisis. 

Art is understood as the presentation of truth claims that reveal the current condition 
of the social order. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that art is able to transcend reality 
when it breaks from its tradition or its style; however, style is shaped by tradition, 

1 “The culture industry has abolished the rubbish of former times by imposing its own perfection, by prohibiting 
and domesticating dilettantism, while itself incessantly commiting the blunders without which the elevated style 
cannot be conceived” Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic Of 
Enlightenment. 1st ed. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press. 108.

2 Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic Of Enlightenment. 1st ed. 
Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press. 103.



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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

and a work of art can only break from its tradition when it has developed a new 
style. In order for a work of art to develop a new style—to break from tradition and 
transcend reality—it must expose itself to the failures of culture. Yet, if a work of art 
does not expose itself to the “necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity” 
that marks the discrepancy between tradition and style, then the work of art reverts 
to immanence, relying on its similarity to others, which marks, for Horkheimer 
and Adorno, the “surrogate of identity.” If art fails to diverge3 from its style, then it 
submits to the “obedience of the social hierarchy.”4

If art is the presentation of truth claims that expose the condition of the social order, 
then it is always ideology if it does not contest the social hierarchy. Therefore, good 
art, determined by “what the Expressionists and Dadaists attacked in their polemics, 
the untruth of style as such,”5 is that which contests its own cultural identity. In 
order for art to challenge its identity, or break from its tradition, it calls for artists 
to develop their own style. The greatest artists, then, according to Horkheimer and 
Adorno, are “those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression 
of suffering, as a negative truth.”6 A good artist is one who indirectly communicates 
suffering by means of inducing a pleasurable, moving experience. An artist with good 
style indirectly develops his style by means of contesting the guise, absence, or lack of 
presentation, of suffering. Therefore, in the realization of his style, developed out of 
the artwork itself, the artist does not obey the social hierarchy, but always challenges 
its claim to truth.

In this notion, we recognize revolution. The Soviet Avant-Garde movement is one of 
the best examples of artists’ demanding a change in the social hierarchy and producing 
work that embodies the experience of suffering. The newly revolutionized Soviet state, 
however, invariantly politicized the artistic Avant-Garde movement of its time: it 
enforced the ideology of the revolution—through a scientific method of organization 
at its forefront—where the venerated reality of the revolution remained trapped 
by the instrumentalization of its own ideology. For the Constructivist movement 
in particular, this meant abandoning all a priori conceptions and iconographical 
elements to investigate the metaphysical contradiction between building materials. 

The Constructivists sought harmony in the least amount of excess necessary for 
construction. Perhaps this is best recognized in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Oval 
Hanging Construction No. 12 (1920), which was constructed out of a single sheet of 
plywood. This deductive structure was then coated with aluminum, cut into various 

3 Although the authors use “divulge” in the initial text to argue that the culture industry exposes style as 
conformity, “[the culture industry] being nothing other than style, it divulges style’s secret: obedience to the 
social hierarchy,” they are really stressing that style must break from culture if art is to transcend reality (Adorno, 
Horkheimer and Schmid Noerr 2009).

4 Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic Of Enlightenment. 1st ed. 
Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press.103-104.

5 Adorno, Horkheimer and Schmid Noerr 2009
6 Adorno, Horkheimer and Schmid Noerr 2009



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

concentric geometric shapes, and positioned in such a manner to form a geometric 
three-dimensional volume that would plicate into its original planar condition. The 
Oval Hanging Construction demonstrated a pedagogical directness by showcasing its 
bare process of production. This method of construction implements a dialectical 
approach to the integrity of the materials by posing a contradiction to the identity 
of the transient art object: the construction, or the art object, therefore operates as a 
motivated sign, whereby its composition is arbitrarily limited by its relationship to its 
materials. Whereas a composition is merely arbitrary, the Constructivist’s art objects 
are motivated by its integrity of material, and by the least amount of excess necessary 
for its construction.7

Operating as a motivated sign, the constructions ultimately stress the discontinuities 
in temporal and spatial elements of experience, also introducing the artist’s work as 
an intervention towards the social practice of mass cultural representation.8 Yet, this 
intervention of mass cultural representation is precisely what is at stake here. The 
Constructivist’s pedagogical directness did not contest mass cultural representation; 
rather, they used it as a means to re-constitute a collective identity. Mediating 
the transcendence of a new identity by embodying the power of mass cultural 
representation, the Constructivists dismissed the authentic experience of the viewer, 
which establishes the validity of the art object. The Constructivist’s logical method 
of production induces an absence or loss of experience for the viewer, such that the 
artist imposes a manufactured reality onto the art object—leaving no room for the 
viewer to authentically reflect and establish a connection to the art object.

The loss of experience, according to Adorno, occurs when ideology or preconceived, 
a priori concepts mediate the essential moment of objectivity. The essential moment 
of objectivity occurs when the object or thing-in-itself is not falsified by mediated 
concepts; the object must be experienced for what it is as intention recta9, and must 
“prove itself in that it qualitatively alters the opinions of reified consciousness.”10 
The viewer’s loss of experience is recognized in the Oval Hanging Construction’s 
discontinuities in temporal and spatial elements of experience. The Oval Hanging 
Construction denies the possibility of an essential moment of objectivity because 
it cannot disentangle its temporal and spatial elements of experience from the 
ideological framework in which its very form and materiality are constituted. 
Therefore, the Oval Hanging Construction cannot be considered a thing-in-itself 
outside of its ideological framework. As such, the Oval Hanging Construction is 
arbitrarily limited as a motivated sign. In its demonstration of the least amount of 

7 Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. Vol. 184.
8 Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Thames & 

Hudson, 2004. Print. 183.
9 The state of consciousness which focuses upon the true object, rather than on an image of the object within the 

intellect.
10 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 

Columbia University Press. 252.



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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

excess of materials, the Oval Hanging Construction holds captive the experiential 
reality of production by staying true to its representation of efficiency. The viewer’s 
experience of the deductive materiality in the Oval Hanging Construction is entirely 
mediated by the motivation—the interjection of ideology on behalf of the artist. 
Presenting its ability to be reverted into its original planar condition, the thing-in-
itself is robbed of its essential moment of objectivity, for it is only suggestive of a fixed 
manufactured experience and cannot be recognized as such—as its true object. Yet 
what guides the residual notion of objectivity it not necessarily the thing-in-itself, but 
rather something man-made entirely: 

[I]t is the model of the profit that remains on the balance sheet after all 
production costs have been deducted. Profit, however, is subjective interest 
limited and reduced to the form of calculation. What counts for the 
sober matter-of-factness of profit thinking is anything but the matter: it 
disappears into the return it yields.11

The subjective viewer’s interest towards the art object reflects what is common to 
the community and its forms of visibility, thereby marking the residual notion of 
objectivity within the capitalist framework. The basic level of production suggests 
that subjective interest does not recite quantifiable value, whereas in a heightened 
sense of production (induced by the capitalism system), subjective interest obtains a 
relationship to the quantifiable value of the profit-gain return model. 

 The quantifiable abstract value inherent to capitalism demands the subject to regard 
the world with an interest that is fundamentally quantitative. Something may be 
valued, such as the Oval Hanging Construction, the viewer’s experience is in fact 
mediated by the capitalist profit-thinking: fundamentally quantitative mentality. 
It is not so much that the viewer looks towards the art object as a literal form of 
quantifiable value; rather, it is that the viewer enters an organized method of social 
programming—that of the capitalist regime—where he forfeits the spontaneity of 
his or her own contemplation for the sake of a quantifiable, tangible operation of 
contemplation where “ideology […] makes life initially easier for the spectators.”12 

In the same sense that the art object is trapped by the predetermined framework of its 
own ideology, the experience of the art object as such is set up in advance to determine 
the viewer’s experiences as nothing but the culture industry’s object, which is to view 
the art object as a cyclical invariant of the production.13 In this sense, the loss of 
experience is predicated on the notion of “the ideal of depersonalizing knowledge 

11 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 253.

12 Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic Of Enlightenment. 1st ed. 
Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press. 117.

13 Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic Of Enlightenment. 1st ed. 
Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press. 113.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

for the sake of objectivity.”14 The loss of experience occurs when ideology determines 
thinking for us. When the essential moment of objectivity for the construction falls 
prey to mediated a priori concepts, the separation between theory and praxis emerges 
in the loss of experience and knowledge. 

Perhaps the Constructivists developed a new style at best. If reinforcing ideology 
by giving it aesthetic form can been regarded as style, then their art objects alluded 
to the idealized transparency of the political state. It is clear that Rodchenko’s Oval 
Hanging Construction presents theory in operation: his construction lays bare the 
process of production and calls the experience of efficiency into question for the 
viewer. However, if thinking is a form of doing; and theory is a form of praxis,15 then 
is the articulation of theory successful here? 

Both the art object and the viewer exist within a revolutionary moment of passionate 
striving for a new cultural identity. If the construction is a motivated sign, does the 
Oval Hanging Construction confront challenges of production? The failure to do so 
strikes the revolutionary moment as incomplete, for the viewer enters the artistic 
space in search for a direction, anticipating an answer to the revolutionary call. 
Yet the viewer operates under the profit-thinking model that renders them docile, 
forfeiting the spontaneity of their own contemplation for the ideology presented 
before them. The articulation of theory is quite relevant here, for if the viewer is 
confronted with a ready-made cliché defined by the cultural schema within which it 
operates, then to what extent does cliché answer the revolutionary call by suspending 
a sense of reflection within the viewer? Does theory carry out its goal in the Oval 
Hanging Construction if the construction reinforces the hierarchical representation of 
production rather than posit a form of alterity? 

The Constructivists’ pedagogical directness demonstrates a loss of experience that 
is necessary to prologue the revolutionary fervor for both artist and viewer. The 
revolutionary experience sparks the guiding ideology of the revolution is extinguished 
when every phase of artistic production and choice of material is planned. This loss of 
revolutionary experience isolates theory from its praxis by collapsing the distinction 
between the artwork and its message:

What since then has been called the problem of praxis and today culminates 
in the question of the relation between theory and praxis coincides with 
the loss of experience caused by the rationality of the eternally same. Where 
experience is blocked or altogether absent, praxis is damaged and therefore 
longed for, distorted, and desperately overvalued. Thus what is called the 

14 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 253.

15 “A consciousness of theory and praxis must be produced that neither divides the two such that theory becomes 
powerless and praxis becomes arbitrary […] thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis.” Adorno, Theodor 
Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: Columbia 
University Press. 261.



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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

problem of praxis is interwoven with the problem of knowledge. Abstract 
subjectivity, in which the process of rationalization terminates, strictly 
speaking can do just as little as the transcendental subject can conceivably 
have precisely what it is attested to have: spontaneity.16

What induces the artist’s disconnect from the spontaneity of the revolutionary 
experience is his preconceived commitment to the artistic material, precisely because 
the construction is a motivated sign, where the form of the art object communicates 
a truth limited in its interpretation. The art objects obey the social hierarchy by 
presenting truth claims that have been manufactured by the politicization of the 
state.

The separation of theory from praxis is most evident in Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument 
to the Third International (1920). Originally crafted in wood within a scale of 18 
to 22 feet, the finished monument was intended to be a 1300-foot metal-and-glass 
sculpture (which, at the time, would have surpassed the world’s tallest building [the 
Eiffel Tower] by one third) that aimed to embody the new ethos of the Revolution. 
Tatlin’s celebrated design consisted in two dovetailing conical spirals contained 
within a web of oblique and vertical slats, which framed four geometric glass volumes 
stacked on top of each other within the structure’s slanted core. 

The four glass volumes were intended to rotate at specific paces—each representing 
a branch of the Comintern, or the Soviet organization in charge of spreading the 
revolution abroad. The revolution regarded with the slowest pace was the largest 
volume, symbolizing the International’s “legislative assemblies,” intended to rotate 
for the length of a year. The second volume would house the executive branch and 
rotate for a month; the next volume, the propaganda services, would take a day; 
the uppermost volume was added as a late edition to the project and would have 
presumably lasted an hour.17

A construction built off of the cyclical rigid invariants developed out of the social 
disorder of the revolution, Tatlin’s art object presents a harmony that was guaranteed 
in advance. Intended to rebel against the cultural complacency left over from the 
monarchical tradition, the material form of Tatlin’s construction quite literally obeys 
its own hierarchy in the new Soviet order. Although there were several arguments 
made in favor of the production, Tatlin’s design was never realized. He failed to 
justify his formal use of a spiral, and its appeal to an age-old iconography, reducing 
his construction to a cultural, traditional invariant of the same. The Working Group 
of Objective Analysis, established by Rodchenko, regarded Tatlin’s monument as a 
fetishization of artistic production—a romantic affair: “by a lone artist in the secrecy 
of his studio and with the traditional tools of his craft; its formal organization 

16 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 260.

17 Foster et. al 2004 p.183



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

remained an indecipherable secret that reeked of ‘bourgeois individualism’: it was 
not a construction but an authorial composition.” 18 

Through his logical method of production, Tatlin isolated himself, as well as his 
work, from the Constructivist community precisely because he was detached from 
the theory of the revolutionary fervor. The unembroidered material representation of 
the Soviet social hierarchy in the Monument to the Third International destroys any 
opportunity for the essential moment of objectivity because the construct cannot be 
viewed as anything other than its literal representation. The absence of spontaneity in 
Tatlin’s artistic processes, the concrete memorialization of a suffering void of actually 
inducing a moving, reflective experience for the viewer, demonstrates his inability to 
articulate theory and therefore isolates praxis altogether. 

The absence—or loss—of an experience that may stimulate reflection and generate 
knowledge, rooted in the complacency of profit-thinking, constitutes the artist’s 
failure to incite an authentic connection with his work: “the lack of self-reflection 
[…] is the mark of a praxis that, having become its own fetish, becomes a barricade 
to its own goal.”19 In the attempt to respond to the call of the revolutionary fervor—
to strive for a new cultural identity—the Constructivist movement organized its 
revolutionary theory within the efficiency of production. Initially emerging out of the 
platform of autonomous art, the Constructivist movement should have challenged 
itself, contested the social order, and promoted a social alterity. Since it failed to 
stay true to its roots, it did not produce works of art that challenged themselves or 
instigated spontaneous reflection necessary to carry out its own goal. The art object 
should not answer a call to what should be done, but present an aesthetic experience 
that gives space for critique.

Though the Constructivist movement did not succeed in its autonomous intent, such 
failure does not exist because of theory’s failure to prescribe praxis. The distinction 
between theory and praxis does not suggest a temporal continuity: “the relationship 
between theory and practice after both have once distanced themselves from each 
other is that of qualitative reversal, not transition, and surely not subordination.” 
20The disenchantment of the Constructivist movement is due to the loss of identity 
on behalf of the artist. Trapped by the constraints of ideology, the Soviet Avant-Garde 
artist did not successfully critique his tradition, and therefore lacked a presentation 
of style such that it ultimately failed to induce an aesthetic experience that would 
promote the passionate striving for an alterity, or a new cultural identity. 

18 Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Thames & 
Hudson, 2004. Print. 182.

19 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 262.

20 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 277.



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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

Theodor Adorno specifies that successful action arises out of engaging in the art of 
critique. Addressing the oscillation between theory and praxis yields the spontaneity 
of imagination, which presents the possibility for change. In this respect, Adorno 
believes that art should be autonomous. Insofar as art compels change through the 
dialectical approach of critique, “art is the critique of praxis as unfreedom; this is 
where the truth begins.”21 Moreover, Adorno mentions that praxis embodies a sincere 
and intense conviction, which is broken when praxis liberates itself out from the 
interplay between the sensuous and the rational movements of the intellect, which 
are expressed in Friedrich Schiller’s play drive. 22

It is true, nonetheless, that Schiller proposes if man were to achieve change successfully, 
then “he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is 
only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” 23 In order for theory and 
praxis to succeed—for the interplay between the sensuous and rational to remain in 
balance—the artist must induce an aesthetic experience, which would stimulate the 
inherent reflection—the spontaneity of imagination necessary for change. Because 
the free play of the imagination mimics the intellect’s capacity to conceive of a 
political alterity, Schiller calls for a historically situated intellectual reflection. 

This is what makes Schiller’s system attractive to Adorno: the fact that Schiller 
diagnoses his historical moment, and attributes its corrective task to an aesthetic 
experience, incites freedom’s capacity to keep itself in check through the active 
interplay of the imagination. The dialectical procedure of the aesthetic experience, 
developed out of the sensual, instigates the imagination to posit an alterity that may 
then be grounded and articulated in a reasonable local manner that tailors the current 
condition of the social order. Schiller’s system offers a similar operation of theory and 
praxis in the sense that freedom induced by reflection is not removed from its actual 
practice: rather, it opens up a space to critique, to preserve intention, and to give way 
to a proper form of practical freedom. 

What remains of interest here is that Schiller emphasizes a critique of the historical 
moment, where his response to the revolutionary call stands in accordance with an 
aesthetic self-reflection, and where the viewer is able to generate knowledge and 
earnestly partake in a form of praxis. In respect to Soviet Avant-Garde art, praxis was 
isolated from theory when the artist produced constructions that preserved the Soviet 
identity by trapping representation in material form, as opposed to producing works 
of art aimed at inciting spontaneous reflection—which would develop a space for 
critique and the production of knowledge. 

21 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 262.

22 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 262.

23 Schiller, Friedrich von, Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O Dahlstrom. 2005. Essays. New York: Continuum. 90.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

 It is as if the Soviet artist conceived of himself as a mere agent of ideology, solving the 
historical moment through its preservation, executed via efficient assembly. What is 
there to be said about the lack of self-reflection, perhaps on the part of the artist, in the 
ever-changing contextual moment? We may come to recognize that the transparency 
of the artist’s pedagogical directness reveals a silencing on the artist’s part—sacrificing 
the identity of his own narrative to present the logic of collective assembly. Yet, in the 
historical moment of striving for a new identity, the logical method of organization 
lays bare the complacency of profit-thinking where the artist is only valued based on 
the efficiency of his assembly. The Soviet artist cannot but help face isolation as he 
anticipates losing true value in his commitment to rigid ideology: 

…in the eyes of those who nourished the all too abstract and illusory 
hope for a total transformation might have appeared justified—that is, 
violence—after the experience of the National Socialist and Stalinist 
atrocities and in the face of the longevity of totalitarian repression is 
inextricably imbricated in what needs to be transformed […] Whoever 
does not make the transition to irrational and brutal violence sees himself 
forced into the vicinity of the reformism that for its part shares the guilt 
for perpetuation the deplorable totality […] Dialectic is perverted into 
sophistry as soon as it focuses pragmatically on the next step, beyond 
which the knowledge of the totality has long since moved.24 

Although the Constructivist movement may be read as a call for order in the 
lingering moment of revolutionary fervor, the crisp delineation of geometric lines 
erects borders around empty space, which operate as mere frames that hug an 
unknown, undefined territory. If the art objects of the Constructivist movement were 
to bear meaning outside of their initial ideology, they would be seen as memorials 
to the insecure struggle, and collective loss of identity. In his logical presentation of 
material, the Soviet artist bears witness to the violent nihilism of constructing value 
out of mechanical assembly. 

Insofar as theory is a form of praxis (“if thinking bears on anything of importance, 
then it initiates a practical impulse, no matter how hidden that impulse may 
remain to thinking” 25), then the artistic vision and its aesthetic experience are also 
productive. Schiller believes that the practical impulse in the artistic process depends 
on the artist’s handling of the subject matter—specifically that the artist obtains the 
power to manipulate form so that it may destroy and consume material. The more 
seductive the material appears in itself, “the more it seeks to impose itself upon us, 
the more high-handedly it thrusts itself forward with effects of its own.”26 Artistic 
production, according to Schiller, carries with it the capacity to transform, destroy, 

24 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 268.

25 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical Models. 1st ed. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 264.

26 Schiller, Friedrich von, Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O Dahlstrom. 2005. Essays. New York: Continuum.151.



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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

and give shape to materials based on our susceptibility to its sensuousness. This 
process of production is precisely how The Working Group of Objective Analysis 
constituted Tatlin’s romantic affair in the secrecy of his own studio: “in contrast with 
the bourgeois artist’s studio secrets, the sculpture’s ‘logical’ mode of production and 
deductive structure where heralded as a means of opposing the fetishization of artistic 
production.”27 

However, the logical mode of production lacks the susceptibility to sensuous 
materiality present in Schiller’s system, and the aesthetic experience altogether. The 
material appears sensuous through artistic production: the artist realizes his artistic 
vision through the process of destroying material—of giving it form. Through this 
process of creation, the art object appears sensual because it serves as a vestige of this 
artistic consciousness. The viewer seduced by the sensuousness of material because 
artistic production has rendered it as a presentation of the artists’ consciousness: the 
material now embodies an inductive experience that validates the existential existence 
of the viewer. 

It is the viewer’s experience of recognizing the power of the gaze that reflects the 
violence of artistic production back to itself. The viewer is receptive to the art object’s 
raw material. With the power of the art object’s gaze, the viewer must destroy 
its aesthetic organization, for reflection causes the viewer to examine and dissect 
forms of detail, dismantling the visual. However, Adorno mentions that the Soviet 
artist, through his violence—in enforcing the pragmatic direction of reformism 
and in moments where Constructivist art merely reverts to industry of pedagogical 
directness—creates an impositional alterity that severs their art from its autonomous 
roots. A manufactured experience that links alterity with a dependency on ideology, 
“a work of art, which expresses intelligence more than anything else, can never strike 
us as noble, any more than it is beautiful, since it emphasizes a relation of dependence 
(which is inseparable from purposefulness) instead of concealing it.”28

F 

 

27 Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Thames & 
Hudson, 2004. Print. 184.

28 Schiller, Friedrich von, Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O Dahlstrom. 2005. Essays. New York: Continuum. 155.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2009. Dialectic 
Of Enlightenment. 1st ed. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Henry W Pickford, and Lydia Goehr. 1998. Critical 
Models. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 2nd ed. 
Vol. 1. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Print.

Schiller, Friedrich von, Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O Dahlstrom. 2005. Essays. 
New York: Continuum.


