Happy New Year to you all! Tardy harbinger of bad news that I am, I have to break this to you gently. The festive season is lamentably over. Put down that mince pie and back away from the cracker, you greedy bugger.
Did you all gorge yourself on rich and juicy foodstuffs? Did you endlessly fumble to liberate sugary chocolaty hits from their gaudy cellophane wrappers and trough down big wobbling mounds of trifle, spooned into your mouths with garden trowels? Did you pile high endless mounds of stodgy goose-fat sodden vegetables torn from god’s green earth and drown them in the thick igneous blubbery gloop man calleth gravy? Did you suck the last fatty residues from the broken remnants of a well-picked turkey carcass, punctuating each greasy slurp with a meaty burp?
Me too. But for the record, you disgust me.
And so Christmas is already but a distant memory. With some portentous fanfare 2012 has arrived, bringing with it in its little travel suitcase the forthcoming Mayan Apocalypse and the London Olympics. As the Yum Yums once sang, “It’s gonna be a big thing”, if you have any credence for the teachings of Mayan pseudoscientists. Or Sebastian Coe.
For Old Rope, the year began as well as any other. I awoke on January 1st to find myself in C-Boats’ bed along with Danolo Vanz. Had C-Boats himself been there, in all his Scottish hungover morning glory, it would have suggested that New Years Eve had gone with rather more of a bang than would be desirable.
Having risen whilst the rest of the night’s revellers remained sleeping, out for the count and strewn across sofas or other people’s beds, Danolo Vanz dragged me halfway across London, right through the middle of the Lord Mayor’s parade, to see an exhibition of Russian Soviet Constructivism.
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, at the Royal Academy, was actually rather good, though my appreciation was hampered by a hangover and the inability of a gallery attendant to tell me where the toilets were.
“The exhibition starts here and goes in that direction,” the deaf old bat informed me, uselessly. “Yes, I know – can you tell me where the gents are please?” No joy. Great, I thought. The first day of the year and already I’m going to shart my pants in front of a photograph of the Moscow Rusakov Workers’ Club designed by Konstantin Melnikov.
Still, it was worth enduring the brass bands, trussed up children and fake Royal Family parade floats that our nation’s capital seems to think is an appropriate way to pass the time on the first day of the year, to see Danolo Vanz enacting his tribute to Tatlin’s Tower, aka Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Or at least, his tribute to a model of the tower. This could get complicated and self-referential.
The tower, for the uninitiated, was designed by the architect Vladimir Tatlin after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was intended to house the Comintern, or Third International. This enormous metal building was to have four large suspended geometric structures, each revolving at a different speed (the cube base, housing the conference centre, would complete its rotation in one year; the middle pyramid, containing the executive committees, in one month; and the top cylinder, replete with a radio station, would complete its spin in a single day). Its tilt was to mirror the Earth’s 23.5 degrees and, standing at 400 metres tall, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower by a third of its height.
It was, in short a brilliant idea. Unfortunately it would also have required more steel to construct than existed in the whole of Russia.
Meanwhile, Danolo Vanz’s homage to a model tribute to the Tower, itself a tribute to the Revolution (and wearing a jacket in ironic tribute to the recently deceased Kim Jong Il), involved lots of standing on one leg and trying not to fall over. Unfortunately it required more balance than existed in the whole of his body. It was a feat almost as insurmountable as the construction of Vladimir’s vision.
Standing before this large model, trying to envisage the size and scope that the ‘real’ thing would have entailed, was a powerful and humbling way to begin the new year. Tatlin’s vision may have gone unrealised, hampered by such trivialities as full blown civil war, housing shortages, a starving population and insufficient steel to make the bloody thing, but all this seemed irrelevant on a cold Sunday morning in the courtyard of the Royal Academy London.
This design was audacious and crazy, must have been doubted even at a time of new-found optimism in the wake of the world’s first people’s revolution – surely it couldn’t be built? Could it?
But the idea alone is Vladimir’s real gift. And ideas are powerful things as we all know. Indeed had the tower somehow miraculously been built, maybe it would now be synonymous with the disappointments, betrayals and horrors that would later unfold in Russia. As it stands (pun intended), the tower can remain an optimistic ideal.
The fact that a building that was never constructed, not even begun, could be discussed nearly a century later – have exhibitions, Wikipedia entries and so forth in its honour – as if it were a tangible thing, is incredible.
The scale and ambition of what Tatlin wanted to achieve was admirable, nay inspirational, and it still serves to remind us to dream big.
I hope I can be inspired by old Vlad to dream a little bit bigger in 2012, safe in the knowledge that, even if the dream doesn’t come to fruition, the idea was a brilliant one.
Happy New Year!
Wonderful. I am extremely jealous that I did not get to spend my New Years Day seeing such an exhibition. How awesome. As was your telling of your friend’s balance failure. I consider that due homage to the original. Which I actually knew nothing about, so thank you for the delightful history lesson!