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October 15, 2005
Rodchenko
The Rodchenko reading wasn't so much a reading as it was a dry narrative of Rodchenko's career. Though there wasn't much to read, the photographs of his work pointed to a clear vision of simplicity and structural integrity. It's as if he was stripping away every-thing, maybe even the thing itself to show the foundations.
That's why it was difficult for me to do this week's assignment. Every time I put something together, it seemed to be too much. I was overdoing it, providing to much detail or context and not exposing the underlying structure. My end result should have been viewed as a starting point, a foundation for many directions but I felt that my attempts were creating too much interference. The raw structure was no longer available.
I decided on a minimal structure composed of the hammer and sickle communist logo. Rodchenko's career is intertwined with the 1917 communist revolution. At the same time, I took the hammer and sickle apart so they would loose their combined imagery and rearranged them into an abstract structure. There are three columns, each comprised of two hammers and one sickle. The three components of each column are on pivots and can be titled in either direction. A movable structure, which with one turn conveys a different idea, moves away from the particular and into the realm of the abstract. It becomes a starting point for an idea. An opening, not a closing.
Posted by Bukhin, Mike at October 15, 2005 01:43 AM