art again: the red wedge

It seems a bit unsung, at least in the corridors I've been skulking along lately; but the Tate rehang is quite wonderful. The upside-down piano is indeed gone for the moment, but it was never my absolute favourite thing anyway... and the other day I had an experience there which has stayed with me, the way a dream can stay with you, over subsequent days.

Like so many things that lodge themselves, it had three parts. One: Howard Hodgkin at Tate Britain. Two: Kandinsky at Tate Modern. Three: a whole room of covers and spreads from the 30's Soviet magazine, USSR in Production, which strangely intermixed Stalinist-era propaganda and cutting-edge (and intensely beautiful) graphic design.

First, the Hodgkin - an artist I admit I've always loved. Even his small paintings hit the eye and the brain as if they were large - and even the large ones are intensely intimate. Personal, yes, but invitingly personal rather than excluding. Hugely direct. And this directness, that invites the viewer in, makes the intimacy acknowledged, involves the viewer in the project of expression.

Next, Kandinsky. Ms B crosses the river in the Tate boat, ready for the next expressionist colour hit. Now, Kandinsky is one of those artists everyone says they love. I was fond of him myself as a child and even into my twenties. So, although I was aware of having moved on, I went in with an open mind and ready to be wowed.

So what happened? These paintings strike me as almost unbearably whimsical. The colours are wrong. Even according to the notes they are theoretical constructs, based on "ideas about art" which Kandinsky shared with Shostakovich, eg, and with titles like "Construction" and "Improvisation," seemingly designed to allow nothing in but their ideas of origin. I do resent being made to stand in front of a painting and engage in the juvenile activity of going, "that's a mountain, and that line there represents a person, and look! That must be the cossacks, because there, those blue lines must be their guns!" The colours struck me as being - despite the constant reminders of Kandinsky's insistence on "the spiritual in art" - emotionally unconvincing. I know it's just me, but I found none of the authenticity of experience you find in, say, Hodgkin. Never mind for a moment that Hodgkin couldn't have had his career without the precedent of Kandinsky.

Anyway, it caused a little crisis in me, a turbulence of doubt as to my relationship with an entire period of art history, and with an entire body of artefacts. Did I, unbeknownst even to myself, dislike the 1920's? Had I renounced a peculiarly Russian sensibility which I had always previously thought I loved? Was I a hypocrite without even knowing it??

Enter - me, that is, I entered - one of the newly-hung galleries, an entire room hung with the covers and spreads from USSR In Production. And then I knew. With design input from the leading lights of Revolutionary and post-revolutionary art, like El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, the magazine - produced in five languages, all the better to spread the word of Stalinism - ran from 1930-1941. It featured huge fold-outs and cutouts and inspiring scenes from the fantasy life of the Soviet Union.

Here is a quote from the introduction to an exhibition at Howard Schickler Fine Art, in Brooklyn: "USSR in Construction appeared soon after Stalin denounced Constructivism as a bourgeois art form and proclaimed Social Realism to be the only acceptable style of art. Displaced artists of the avant-garde turned to photomontage as an alternative. Exploring the relatively new mediums of photography and photomontage, these artists and others managed to successfully fulfill the demands placed upon them by the government, while continuing to experiment and to shape new artistic conventions." The New York Times said this in 1996: "How effective it was in selling Communist doctrine abroad is unknown, but even today it is thoroughly convincing propaganda for the revolution in design that Soviet artists helped foment and spread across the world." - Vicki Goldberg

All at once, looking at spread after spread, and cover after amazing cover, I knew it had not all been a lie: I do still know what I love. These photomontages are intensely beautiful, and the typography still looks daringly fresh. Just looking at these pages, I could feel great waves of the creative energy and dedication that went into their creation.

Now: I realise how ludicrous it is, decrying the deeply felt art of one man for inauthenticity whilst saying I loved the art of a group of people who believed in nothing but their own forms (though arguably Kandinsky... but no, I won't go round in circles.) However, this is purely and only an exploration of a dilemma of personal taste, and as such must be justified.

So: as my love grew, in that room, looking at luminous rotogravure images of huge useless dams being built under forced labour, I also began to feel the sickness of the lie. There is a huge poignancy in almost everything to do with the Russian Revolution. The disjuncture between the pictures and what they purport to represent came to feel like the source of much of their emotional content - if not by any means all. The beauty-out-of-evil paradox (which is the story of the twentieth century - or is it?). Where does art begin, where does the evil end? This is art that grew out of the need of a certain group of people, being suppressed if not actually oppressed (unlike the dam workers), to engage in the creation of visual forms of meaning under difficult conditions. Or is it? Did the art grow precisely out of the tension caused by the lie? Is the art world really so disingenuous? (Puh-lease!) So my confusion flowered into horror. Just at that moment, a woman who had been standing looking at a wall of covers (including the Lissitzky one above, which demonstrates the love of the regional peasant for the protecting Soviet soldier) turned and looked right at me - for maybe a full second - and I suddenly wondered what she had seen in my face.

Whatever it was, it won't let go.