Leningrad 2012

The capitalist colonization of Utopia


Why Tatlin's tower fascinates Londoners,what is so charming about the unbuilt monument of the Third international?


Gazing at the 1:42 model of the red spiral tower in the courtyard of the Royal academy of Art's didn't help at all, on the contrary a feeling of sickness and disappointment mixed with sadness and melancholia paralysed me. For a few seconds I was standing there looking at it, confused perplexed.A "small" tower in the middle of the courtyard of a Palladian mansion, expressing the ideas of modernism(?). The model was bright red, small enough to flatter the proportions of the open space around it and big as well to celebrate the fusion of sculpture and architecture, at least as an anecdote. At that moment the banality of the whole atmosphere reminded me the  quote of Karl Marx, History repeats itself first as a tragedy second as farce.(which in turn is reproduced with the same triviality over the last years.)


The seemingly intrigued subjects around it were merely the authentication (for me and my present) that it is a model made for an exhibition, the ultimate acceptance of the defeat. Not the  defeat of Tatlin and constructivism (or the soviet revolution and its spatial projections) through oblivion, but ironically through exhibition and transformation of it to a permit table(?) consumption.


The scale, the colour, the detail and the atmosphere all perfect instrumented for the capitalist colonization of Utopia...


However, inside the main building on the ground floor, there is a small space between the toilets and the cafe, where usualy the institution install small events and expositions. In that small transitional space-corridor, there were visualizations of the project(the modelling of Tatlin's tower). 


Hurrah!! From the frozen banks of Neva, behind the white thick smoke(elaborately placed so as to balance the shape of the tower), the 400meter tall monument dominates the skyline of Leningrad. On the canvas of that picture Tatlin's tower is not a enigmatic toy for the bourgeois.In front of my eyes lies  the synechdoche of Leningrad,the revolutionary "version" of 2012 Leningrad, and therefore a possibility of a new tradition. Where Tatlin's tower has a significant role to play.