Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/80

72 However, the connection between modern art and "Bolshevism"-assuming there is such a connection——has never been straightforward or at all points self—evident. This has been above all because, by the very nature of their art, the artists concerned have tended to be form—conscious, paying to the question of ideological content little if any attention. Picasso's paintings——with the notable exception of his "Guernica"—were not intended to express an ideological content or message. And the Russian futurists distinguished themselves from previous literary schools precisely on account of their own repudiation of literary "themes" of any kind. For this reason, the "destructiveness" of Futurism has often been thought of as purely negative, directed as much against socialist culture as against bourgeois art——an expression, in Miller—Budnitskaya's words, of "an anarchic desire to destroy, to turn the universe into chaos..."

There is some truth in the accusation that the Futurists wanted to destroy art—all art as such. But the Futurists themselves—when it came to theorizing about such problems towards the end of their movement's life—justified this by pointing to the fact that "art", in all recent literate or civilized societies, had been thought of as a world of beauty of its own, and as something separate from life. "Why,‘ asked Mayakovsky,


 * should literature occupy its own special little corner? Either it should appear in every newspaper, every day, on every page, or else it's totally useless. The kind of literature that's dished out as dessert can go to hell.

Even the most extreme "modernist" art of the period—Malevich's white square on a white background, for example—can only be