Page 132 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 132/146
Lazar Mankovitch Lissitzky (El Lissitzky): Soviet Pavilion Pressa Cologne 1928.
Lissitzky was the master of three-dimensional display and exhibition design at this time of many modernist masters emerging from the constructivist period of Russian revolutionary art (1919-1929). His work integrates all the communications media of the time in a utopian fant- asmagoria of messages - in images, in objects, in moving displays (like the ‘conveyor-belt’ mes- sages and propaganda visible in these two images of the Soviet Pavilion, and of course powerful graphics. He has materialised these graphic and filmic messages in a dynamic three-dimensional structure based upon his visual synthesis of Russian star and a symbolic mechanical man - the whole (as he said) ‘living and breathing’ with motion displays, films, lighting and sound. If anyone needed to fully understand the potential of the Soviet revolution, it was Lissitzky who made it real - symbolising the achievements of communism. The exhibition is important, as it breaks out of the usual mould of display cabinets, objects on stands or plinths, explanatory captions and labels into a freeform constructivist creation that is integrative and uses multiple media not only to carry messages, but to indicate and illustrate the idea of the USSR.
https://monoskop.org/El_Lissitzky
The combination of scaled photographs, the mixture of display typography, the motion exhibits - the whole visual feast, the Soviet Red Star, the lighting - the non-conformity of the displays, make this a breakthrough of avant garde exhibition-design.
El Lissitzky + Sergei Senkin: Unstoppable! montage for Pressa 1928.
Senkin was a talented Suprematist artist-designer who worked with the other originator of photo- montage, Gustav Klucis, and collaborated with Lissitzky on this monumental frieze for Pressa.