CONCEPT
Russian Constructivism
The 1920s Soviet avant-garde movement — whose ambition to dissolve art into life through comprehensive aesthetic design was the first articulation of what Groys calls total design, and the intellectual precursor to the AI moment's total aestheticization.
Russian Constructivism was the revolutionary artistic movement that emerged in post-revolutionary Russia around 1920 and sought to abolish the boundary between art and life by applying aesthetic principles to every domain of social existence. Its leading figures — Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova — rejected the Romantic conception of the artist as a creator of autonomous objects and embraced a new role: the designer of the social environment. Constructivists designed buildings, clothing, propaganda posters, workers' clubs, typography, theater sets, furniture, films, and books. Their ambition was nothing less than the total aestheticization of the new Soviet society — a project Groys would later identify as the first formulation of total design.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Groys's engagement with Constructivism, developed across The Total Art of Stalinism (1992) and subsequent works, identifies the movement as both a prophetic achievement and a cautionary tale. The prophetic achievement was the recognition