On Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International at the Tony Sharfazi Gallery

By Daniel Solecki

The early modernist artists and writers proclaimed that modern art reflects modern life. Because of its place in the public realm, architecture both follows and reverses this declaration—modern life comes to reflect modern architecture. Architecture and urban planning represent the most explicit way that the rumblings of the artistic mind affect the structure of society. Baron de Haussmann’s neoclassical street-planning logic gave birth to the modern city, cutting away all the medieval alleys to announce the birth of the grand Parisian boulevard and the era of enlightened urbanism. Several generations later, Le Corbusier, sitting in an apartment in Haussmann’s city, dreamed of superhighways along the Seine and modernist housing blocks paving over the worlds of the Ancien Regime and the 19^th Century alike, a dream realized in Robert Moses’ redesign of New York City.

Because of the immense work that goes into each project, architecture lends itself well to theoretical, fantastical designs never meant come to fruition. Among the most famous of these projects never to be built was actually a structure that was taken very seriously in its day and wasn’t regarded as a fantastical architectural dream—Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 Monument to the Third International, a structure that represents, in the realest terms, an attempt to use art to change history.

A model of the so-called Tatlin’s tower now appears in a show of Russian Constructivist film and propaganda posters at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, an exhibition which runs until July 30. It is the first time a model of the structure has appeared in this country. Put together in 1967 by T.M. Sharpiro, Tatlin’s original collaborator, the model of the tower gives a viewer a true sense of Tatlin’s passionately hopeful utopianism. It would have straddled the Neva River in Leningrad and the route the original revolutionaries took to the Winter Palace during the 1917 uprising. The tower was planned to be 1,300 feet tall, consciously taller than the Eiffel Tower, which was then commonly seen as a monument to industrial capitalism. Seven-hundred feet in diameter at its base with three rotating levels, the tower looks like a modernist’s utopian version of the ziggurat. The first level is an annually rotating cube housing the halls of the party congress, the second is a monthly rotating pyramid housing the party bureaucracy, and the third is a cylinder housing a newspaper and a dome on top with a radio station. These forms are suspended within a spiral superstructure of glass and steel with a multi-lane highway going up the spiral.

What if the model of Tatlin’s tower went up, not in a show of Russian Constructivism, but in a contemporary gallery. It is natural to think so; many would agree that such a classic work has little place in Chelsea. Surely, if we saw it as such, we couldn’t take it earnestly. How could something so wild be sincere? Surely, we’d think to ourselves, its rotating levels, multilane highway, and Tower of Babel-style are some sort of postmodern pastiche of Las Vegas-style consumerist fervor. The supremacy of the propaganda machine atop the tower turns into a symbol of a culture that puts its own entertainment on the highest pedestal.

Of course is this interpretation of the model would be entirely feasible if it was built a decade ago and not almost a century ago. The Monument to the Third International was, of course, considered in highest earnestness in revolutionary Russia and was never built because of resource shortages during the civil war, not because its design didn’t appeal to party authorities.

To us, however, the Monument to the Third International seems like something out of a dime science fiction novel; a hokey and idealistic attempt to change history and society through architecture. Seeing this modernist classic in the Chelsea, a place synonymous with contemporary art, we can see the vast differences between Tatlin’s age and our own. We see plainly difference between an era stridently confident in modernity and scientific enlightenment and an era in which modernity is reviled and mocked as a culture coursing into barbarism.

Rather than looking at Tatlin’s model like a respite from naïve age, we should look at it as a reminder of how architecture can actually change history. While today, the idea of Tatlin’s tower seems to crush itself under its own bold, youthful idealism, we ought to be reminded of the power of bold architecture to change whole eras, just like Haussmann and Corbusier did in theirs. The Monument to the Third International is a reminder that art can indeed be used to change the structure of society—that from ziggurat-builders to the postmodernists, art has always had this potential, and always will have it. To accomplish this, however, the work probably has to start by leaving the drawing board, or in this case, the modeling studio.