This is Vladimir Tatlin’s “Counter-Relief,” one of the prime examples of his avant-garde Constructivist movement of the pre-Revolutionary Russian modernist art scene. One of the most prevalent inspirations for Tatlin’s work is the old Russian Orthodox iconography, also known as faktura. Now faktura, as it commonly appears before the avant-garde, is the depiction of religious figures in an iconographical way, meaning that they are central to the piece and that it is merely a representation of the figure and not the actual figure itself. So here, in this piece, Tatlin is evoking this old sense of faktura, but in a way that he twists the meaning of the word on itself (it being merely a transrational index of itself anyways). In this, Tatlin emphasizes the material as the “holy figure,” a homage to the bright future of the sweeping industrialization of the Bolshevik regime, and the heavy focus of industrialization in the Communist system. But, on that note, it is still grounded to the present in the usefulness of the material to building the revolutionary infrastructure that is so stressed in that same system. So, in this way, it is both a vision and a depiction, looking beyond and looking within.
This work actually became a point of contention between the other major “school” the Russian avant-garde, the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich. The “Counter-Relief” can be considered a direct potshot at Malevich’s “Last Futurist Exhibition,” which showed his now famous “Black Square.” Both of these artworks were placed in the corner, another direct allusion to the Orthodox iconography. However, rather than be some divine object of worship, at least in the case of Tatlin, “Counter-Relief” brought the “divine” artwork into real space, down into the earthly realm where it can be interacted with and actually invades the space of the viewer, almost in a post-modern way similar to the style of Minimalism. And, in that sense, Tatlin’s sculpture was well before its time, and speaks volumes to the true revolutionary aspect of the Russian avant-garde. It can also be considered, in some ways, to be the height of what later Western artists would conceive to be a true modernist sculpture; it existed by itself, for itself, and its being in space was a testament to its own existentialism. Yet, unlike modernists works where the individual artist is highlighted as a genius, Tatlin made this abstraction for the purpose of its societal usefulness, as though it were meant to be interacted with to build an ideal Soviet future, and it remained more collectively focused than focused on the authorial supremacy of modernism.