Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde

Artist as Collaborative Text

Collaboration operates as a fundamental element of the handmade book experience. The sharing of ideas and implementation across individuals a remarkable aspect of these texts and suggests that there was a form of literary experience in the creation of these communicative capacities that carries a further affective importance. Namely, that of Love. Take Mirskontsa for example: the text is noteworthy among other handmade books for the heavy presence of initials (mostly from Goncharova) and an artist's credit page. It is extremely notable that Mirskontsa was created in-part by artists-in-love: Goncharova and Larionov would later marry towards the end of their lives.

Further indicative of a spirit of love, Roman Jakobson importantly noted that in the occurrence of the sound-shape in language, there is an almost simultaneous emergence of divergent sexual occasions. It is no surprise, then, that Jakobson's own handmade book is iconic for its representation of a stitched-together heart on the cover. This consideration of the visceral life, the making of poetic accomplices-- all this operates as an extended instantiation of the sound (the word, the letter) and shape (the love life, the dead) of language.  



 

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