The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe

geometric forms in the service of the Revolution, as in the famous civil war poster of Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with t e ed Wedge (1920). Working with Malevich, Lissitzky developed more obscure connections between form and content, as in their stu y for curtains for the meeting room of the C m ittee to Abolish Unemployment. Less well-known among the pr jects of the avant-garde than either directly agitational art or the nonrepresentational art of pure forms was the shaping of a new c sumer culture. Consumption, after all, was the end goal of production. And yet, capitalist consumerism-the culture of c mmodities-had been den unced, irredeemably, as bo rgeois (meshchanskii). Rodchenko, in Paris for the 1925 International Exposition (at which his Wor ers' Club Interior was displayed), was unsettled by the masses of things displayed for sale in that city, and by the insatiable consumer desire-sensual and sexual-that such abundance provoked.23 Christina Kiaer develops his cou tertheory of the o ject: We must produce and love real things.24 Rather than being fetishes that 23. See Christina Kiaer, Constructivism and the Practices of Everyday unpublished paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Associati n, F bruary 17, 1994. Kiaer has done pathbreaking work i this field. Not only does her a chival research document the whole discussio among Constructivists of socialist consumption. Her t eoretical speculations throw new light on the more eneral problematic of commodity fetishism and commodity desire. See her forthcoming dissertation, The Russian C nstructivist 'Object' and the Revolutionalizing of Everyday Life, 1921-1932 (University of California at Berkeley, 1995). 24. Rodchenko, cited and translated in ibid., p. 2. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:33:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms