CONQUERORS OF THE SUN

In 2010, Anna Baumgart invited Andrzej Turowski, an art historian and expert on the avant-garde, to collaborate with her on a project about agit-trains in post-revolutionary Russia. They were a propaganda tool of the Bolsheviks; the first one left Moscow for Kazan in 1918 with a bookshop, library and printing house in its cars. It was the successor to the by then decommissioned mobile Orthodox churches.

The collaboration resulted in the book The Locomotive of History, on the basis of which Baumgart produced the video Conquerors of the Sun. It tells the story of an agit-train that purportedly set off from Moscow heading to Berlin in 1920, loaded with propaganda material, avant-garde artworks – allegedly selected by Kazimir Malevich and Władysław Strzemiński and intended to be “the beginning of a future museum of modern art” – as well as weapons. It is believed that due to political and economic perturbations, the train got stuck in Poland and reached Berlin only some years later. From there it was sent back, and Strzemiński, who was living in Łódź at the time, discovered that it had stopped in Koluszki, where it most probably exploded.

The Conquerors of the Sun video has the form of a mockumentary. Baumgart uses excerpts from films featuring Vladimir Mayakovsky, Soviet newsreels, pictures of the Kremlin and images of Lenin speaking, shots of people catching leaflets thrown from an agit-train and processions of day-trippers heading towards it, as well as the evocative image of a man striking a chained globe with a hammer. Into this narrative, she inserts snapshots of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, showing the revolution in a longue durée perspective. Turowski reports on his research carried out in Russia in the late 1990s, when he was allegedly able to gain access to secret documents from the 1920s for a bottle of whisky. Although there are more gaps than hard data here, the film is made credible by the statements of experts, the convincing voiceover and the wealth of archival material.

Baumgart and Turowski consider the issues of the modernist past, the relationship between art and the revolution, and the construction of historical narratives. They show that there are no clear-cut answers and that the history of the avant-garde has yet to be written. Turowski’s persona is important here, since he is a scholar who co-creates and demystifies the myth of the revolution, but also undertakes a critical self-reflection on his earlier attitude and the research perspective he had adopted.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

ANNA BAUMGART, CONQUERORS OF THE SUN

In Conquerors of the Sun, Anna Baumgart showcases the process of fabricating an archive by infecting it with fake news. (Footnote: the film title references Victory over the Sun, a futuristic opera by Mikhail Matyushin, Kazimir Malevich stage and costume designer for the first 1913 staging. Malevich incorporated a Black Square embryo in the scenography by placing a square in perspective view onstage and dividing it diagonally into two triangles, black and white. The premiere of the opera would prove a complete flop while becoming a pre-figuration for John Cage’s or Mauricio Kagel’s experimental musical performances). A jumble of fact and fiction and quest for an official version of history, Baumgart’s mockumentary tells the story of an agitprop train filled with avant-garde artworks selected by Malevich and Strzemiński, a train carrying notions of revolution and never reaching its destination; obliterated by an explosion, it becomes – as described by Andrzej Turowski in Locomotive of History, the book accompanying the film – a public spectre, rattling amongst yellowed documents, akin to a lifeless apparition.

Michał Łukaszuk

translated from Polish by Aleksandra Sobczak

An excerpt from the essay ‘Images Condemned’ by Michał Łukaszuk, published in the exhibition catalogue Kradzieże i zniszczenia / Theft and Destruction, Galeria Arsenał w Białymstoku 2020