For all the increasingly broad interest, scholarly and general, in the eastern European avant-gardes, the radical art of late Czarist and early Soviet Russia (and surrounding states) remains a challenging web of internal contradictions and external improbabilities. The achievements and lessons of such figures as Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandra Exter, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velemir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, and others who anticipated and/or led the revolution with their “slap in the face of public taste” come down to us now as impossibly inventive, irrepressibly imaginative, and illustriously illogical. Spirituality, radical idealism, poetic irreality, the conflation of disparate artistic practices into off-kilter Gesamtkunstwerk, and above all the normalization, even rationalization of the irrational – the harnessing of impulsive energy to the overarching task of perception change, in audience as in artist – characterize a time and place in which the old order was collapsing and rival minds were struggling to define and impose a new order, or at least their idea(s) of one.

In other words, artists felt called upon to rebuild the world, in any way possible, and to redefine life they had to redefine art. They had to break the bounds of the picture, of the performance, of speech. They had to project their present madness(es) into, indeed towards, the future. The blazing ideas about painting, poetry, and the stage that were coming out of western Europe kindled a wildfire in eastern Europe, and as the former exploded, the latter imploded.

How does a contemporary artist look back on such developments of a century past? Indeed, how does an audience? Recent political events may color our understanding, but the reconsideration, scholarly and otherwise, of Russian avant-garde practice predates these – notably when essayed by an artist born and educated in the Soviet Union. The work of Mela M has reflected her appreciation for and curiosity about her avant-garde forebears since even before she came to America, while in art school in Minsk. Mela’s dedication to the formal language of constructivism – cubism-derived, futurism-charged – employed by Tatlin, Popova, et. al., has been unwavering, as has her embrace of the phantasmagorical rhetoric employed by Russian avant-garde poets and painters alike. For Mela, as for Mayakovsky, the future consists of new words no less than of new worlds, new phrases as well as new phases.

For all her verbal flights of fancy hurtling into the cosmos, Mela’s prior commitment is to the positing of a new visual order, one rooted in the art of her avant-garde ancestors but urgently calling to present-day humanity. Her elaborate, even feverish descriptions of structures and cities growing almost organically from their essences are more, much more, than breathless hyperbole; they, like the objects and models they illumine, are signals to would-be dreamers and architects that the future needs them – that the future is them.

This call to both the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses of cultural expression, awakening them into a complementary partnership, can be witnessed with redoubled force in the things Mela fabricates physically – sometimes seeming, however elusively, to illustrate the coherent incoherencies running through her writing, sometimes seeming to inspire them. This resolution, or at least betrothal, of contradictory, even inimical entities, a dialectical synthesis of what in the days of high cubo-futurist modernism were experiential as well as theoretical opposites, results not in a neutralizing of radical and reactionary – or, more accurately, idealistic and pragmatic — forces, but in a recognition of their shared dynamic. The ideas in ideals, Mela demonstrates, can be revealed to practitioners of the practical, while models for addressing the overarching concerns of our time can be designed on the basis of examples set a century ago.

As a neo-modernist Mela sets standards – for herself and her world – that, in celebrating and at the same time harnessing vision, exemplify attitude rather than impose structure. Clearly, structure is at the aesthetic heart of her work. But it is a perceptual tool in this context, not just an aesthetic goal. The futurists of a century past sought to build, not just propose, the future; but the skills and technologies they needed to realize their conjurations, from new architectural devices and materials to the new literary genre of science fiction, were only then beginning to be refined. The modernist imagination could point vaguely at the digital universe to come but could not have fathomed it. Deep into the first digital age – or perhaps at the lip of the second – our imaginations, not to mention expertise, struggle to stay au courant; but an artist like Mela masters the spirit of the age even as she refuses to exploit its technologies. Rather than drown in it, she mirrors the visual language of pixels and bytes without surrendering to its superficial effects or the lure of its mechanisms. In developing both her concepts and her designs, Mela addresses the digital age from the outside in, relying on her own skills rather than the computer’s to project a digital – indeed, post-digital – future.

Many contemporary artists seek to bridge this gap between the virtual and the actual, and most seek in the process to articulate the fact they are doing so. Such cybernetic self-consciousness can speak to the audience’s own awareness of its digitized existence, but it can also get in the way of proposing substantive, era-appropriate artistic discourse and production. Mela resists this urge to admire the technology, avoiding such distraction by tempering it with her native sensitivity to (not to mention faith in) the analog delirium of her cubo-futurist/constructivist predecessors – a delirium that for the most part did not lose itself in technological minutiae but surrendered instead to the real-life possibilities manifesting out of the singular (artistic) and collective (social) imagination.

We can thus comprehend Mela’s climactic Omegatropolis, for instance, as futurist space in digital time, an endless column à la Brancusi whose components replicate indefinitely so as to accommodate the evolving needs of our species. It is a fantasy, of course, or more accurately a metaphor for the self-perpetuating organism that humankind is on the brink of betraying. But if it speaks in the grand language of futurist hope, it speaks to a civilization that at this point can survive only through fantasy, and through the improbable achievements of those who, as ever, regard fantasy and metaphor as the seedbed of actual innovation.

The parts-to-whole relationship of form defining Mela’s universe, an aesthetic of segments, has driven her artistic output for at least three decades at this writing, and has come to dominate concept, form, and facture alike. In the last several years alone, she has produced a cascade, a veritable army, of objects, part painting, part sculpture, that are assembled out of so many discrete, vividly hued elements (normally wood, the larger works hand-sawed and -refined, the smaller fashioned with hand tools). This dogged and elaborate hybridization of two and three dimensions, based on the interaction of color and volume, emerged as such in 2018 but followed nearly 20 years of similar investigation which in retrospect she conceptualized as what she has named “PaSColor.” Typically bridging the material and the metaphysical, but also the pictorial and the volumetric, Mela defines “PaSColor” as “an integration — more accurately a bona fide transmutation —of painting and sculpture through shape and color.” The PaSColor principle thus seeks — or perhaps presumes – an indissoluble intermedium between painting and sculpture, and by extension architecture. Not incidentally, with PaSColor – the notion and practice of solid form modified by color –Mela widens the scope of her modernist antecedent, evoking not only Russian Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism but Western European proponents of a color-dynamized space for living, such as proposed by de Stijl and the Bauhaus

The individual formations Mela realizes both from her PaSColor approach and from more broadly architectural – and narrative – projects such as the expansive, dazzling light-and-structure installation The Rising Wall (a permanent sculptural installation on the rooftop of the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster CA) are at least as diverse as the segments comprising them. Their archly intellectual wit would seem to belie their depth, but a sense of urgency animates even the least of them, as does a sense of magic. They entertain the eyes but also inflame them; they appeal to the body, but they beckon us towards at least the lineaments of a changed perception. They invite speculation on unseen dimensions. They propose an unbroken continuity between macro- and microcosm. They are the most intimate of monuments, and the most docile of machines, but what Mela means for them to be are talismans and portals leading towards…

… leading not towards utopia, whether Soviet workers’ paradise, capitalist jackpot, or dream of a world without war or hunger, but towards the reinterpretation, the reconsideration of today’s actualities. Mela is as fervid an idealist as the modernist artists she has long emulated; but for her the perfect world is always out of reach and always just achieved – for societies no less than for individuals, for art’s audience no less than for its creators. As a neo-modernist, she regards art as exemplary, a proposed mode of thinking that calls to other modes, a context for comprehension that at once changes and reifies perception. Mela M’s future is always present.

Los Angeles

June-August 2022