An Early Staging of Media. Gustav Klutsis’s Loudspeaker Stands
An Early Staging of Media. Gustav Klutsis’s Loudspeaker Stands

Summary/Abstract: Gustav Klutsis’s “radio-orators,” “agit platforms,” and “loudspeaker stands” from 1922/23 are more than the multimedial objects they seem to be at first sight. They build a stage for the new media film and radio. The utilitarian design of the platforms combines loudspeaker and projection screen. But in contrast to Constructivist stage design, as we know it from the Russian theatre of those days, the beauty of these stands goes far beyond a mere glorification of machines, which still remained “a workbench ” for actors. The Constructivist Klutsis insists on revealing the construction mode of the platforms: “laying bare the device” is the Constructivist credo. Furthermore, the so-called “radio-orators” not only show how they are made, but demonstrate the inherent mediatic energies of their apparatuses: a media environment on stage which takes over all human cognitive abilities – replacing man completely. The mise-en-scène of the apparatus thus produces media self-reflexivity. The essay shows that Klutsis’s staging of the media is an early intermedial attempt which, in its elementary aesthetics and epistemological exuberance, makes no difference between past, presence, and future.

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