Excerpt, "The Image in Constructivism", George Rickey

(reformatted, from Constructivism, Origins and Evolution, pp.38)

After forty years of manifestos, additions, modifications, and personal development by many artists, as well as simplifications by critics and historians, the image in Constructivism still has these characteristics:

1. The subject of the work of art is the image itself—
   ...It [is] impossible for our consciousness to perceive, arrange, or act upon our world and life in any other way but through these constructions of an ever-changing yet coherent chain of images—conceptions...
   I maintain that these consciously constructed images are the very essence of the reality of the world which we are searching for.
2. The elements of a visual art—such as lines, colors, and shapes—possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world.
3. The image does not depend on any recollected experience, event, or observed object, nor on any kind of association or suggestion, nor on the projection of experience onto an evocative form.
   • The image does not result from “emotion recollected in tranquility,” nor from fantasy, “automatic” gestures, or any kind of trance or emanation from the subconscious.
   • However, it need not be regular nor geometric.
4. The image is premeditated, deliberate, and precisely adjusted.
5. The choice of the nature of the image is within the authority and free will of the artist.
   • The artist may choose geometry, intuition, or a combination of both.
   • He may delegate his determination to some mathematical expression, to chance, or even to a computer.
   • Yet, the initial choice that determines the character of the eventual image is made by the artist.
6. There is no intentional illusionism—
   • No perspective or modeling.
   • No chiaroscuro.
   • Color is flat, or, if shaded, does not create an illusion of volume, space, or mood.
7. The technique is not part of the image; thus, there is no surface “treatment.”
   • Ars est celare artem. “No handwriting, no interesting surface.”
   • “Construction, not expression.”
   • Constructivist work, therefore, usually appears clean, pure, effortless, without élan, sense of speed, or urgency.
   • The clean, quiet qualities are not a purpose but a by-product. From them comes the untouched-by-human-hand look.
   • Industrial materials are used frankly, without any attempt at enhancement, so that they reveal their own qualities—steel, brass, plastic, cement.
   • Preoccupation with materials for their own sake would be digressive.
8. There are no romantic motives for, and no romantic inferences from, the image.
9. There are no symbols.
10. The image has not been “abstracted” from forms in nature (as in Cubism) or made to echo them (biomorphic abstraction).
    • Yet, this does not rule out the visual environment as a source of images.
    • For example, the square and cube can be found in iron pyrites, the circle in the sun and moon, the rhombus in other crystals.
    • Irregular shapes, too, can be borrowed from the environment or from tradition, which serves as a reservoir of all forms.
    • However, it is the shape that the Constructivist takes, leaving behind the object and its associations.
    • The shape becomes a figure (in the sense of figure and ground), free of symbolic representation.
11. The image appears as though it had been arrived at independently of human thought.
    • It is premeditated, but no process shows.