Revolution, they could take on the values of energy, direction, and speed. The great Constructivist artist Liubov Popova made an impressive leap to another concept of relevance in those heady times. “Organisation,” she wrote, “has become the object of the new synthesis … most attention will be given to making the artistic organisation of the object into the principle guiding the creation of even the most practical, everyday things.” For Rodchenko and his immediate colleagues the great struggle was with the concept and practice of composition, the last bastion, as they saw it, of bourgeois art. He had already practiced straight-line cutting in some free-standing sculptures made of card, in 1918. Shortly thereafter, the sharp planar incisions – painted not collaged – of his works of 1918-20 gave way to precisely painted straight lines that construct, rather than compose, the remaining fragments of the bourgeois easel picture as an object made up out of its material and technical parts. In his agonised written deliberations on the straight line in 1920 and 1921, Rodchenko reached a number of conclusions that show how artistically powerful the very nature of an edge or a boundary can be. “The work of art ceases to be painted from nature,” he insisted, “but begins to derive its structure from the nature of the problems it treats.” Line alone – he meant the straight line uniquely – “captures the kinetic and structural moments of both the whole and its parts, and in this respect line is trajectory, movement, collision, attachment, slicing apart and joining.” It was a formula he skilfully applied to graphic design, photographic collage, and hanging three-dimensional forms. Especially in the photographic collages – as when he and Varvara Stepanova turned their attention to cutting in some small experimental works of 1919 – “slicing apart and joining” based on the straight edge gave rise to aesthetic relations very different from those to be found in photomontage in the Dada and Surrealist style. They became incomparably important exercises in the analysis of material itself. A preference for the straight cut rather than the curved one has given rise to aesthetic controversy – and understandable confusion – ever since. My own view is that the straight cutting edge of the Constructivists had
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one consequence that is especially germane to today’s exponents of Photoshop cut-and-paste software. The Constructivist culture of materials taught us that cleanly cut edges cast shadows that emphasise the weight, density and thickness of material and could even reveal the mood and the speed of cutting, its urgency, deliberation and motivation. Straight-line cutting also divides the space of a photograph and renders its contiguity with other straight-edge fragments a question of function as well as style. When the great linguist Roman Jakobson visited galleries with his friend the Futurist David Burliuk, he reports that Burliuk would become obsessed with the surface-breaks of old master paintings, and became convinced that the viewer should become attentive to the “mountains, ravines and abysses” revealed by the jagged edges where artistic materials break and meet. When Jakobson as a theoretical linguist reflected on the straight-edge preferences of the Cubists, he saw an opportunity to understand collage cutting in a way that made a connection with literary style. The Cubist and Constructivist liking for the straight edge, he implied, revealed a tendency not to Surrealist metaphor but to metonymy – a relation of units of meaning to each other when placed in close or – even better – jarring proximity. “I was quite fascinated by the theme of collage,” he writes in his reminiscences on the origins of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1916. “It was this transition, from the linearity [of prose] to the simultaneity [of poetry] that fascinated me greatly.” He also knew that medical studies had long since established that meaning-production operates along two very distinct axes. Studies of warwounded patients who had developed various forms of aphasia had already suggested to Hughlings Jackson and Sigmund Freud that the distinction between metaphor and metonymy was to be found deep in the very material of the brain. War wounds showed that while the formation of metaphor goes missing in certain injuries in the guise of what Jakobson called similarity-disorder, the formation of metonymy proved dysfunctional in other injuries as contiguity-disorder, suggesting that metaphor, or substitution, is innately and not just culturally different from metonymy, that is proximity. The