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

Square One: Production

Context: Book Arts of the Russian Avant-garde
Course syllabus
Square One: Production

Group projects will require collaborative work to conceive, author, design and print page contributions to a class edition of poetry, inspired by examples from the Russian/Soviet Avant-garde. Text can be composed in any of a variety of styles, from traditionally rhyming and metrically regular to zaum. Layout, design and distribution of text are similarly freed for expression or provocation. 

In order to manage project work, you may select an option from any of the three project "types": 
  1. A simulated lithograph, using the more current technology of flexography. This method enables free-hand writing and illustration, of the sort exemplified in the famous early zaum poem, "Dyr bul shchyl," by Aleksei Kruchenykh, illustrated by Mikhail Larionov. 
  2. Suprematist-inspired graphics, using geometric and semi-regular shapes to compose letters, designs, and scattered decorative fragments, such as "Nash marsh" (Our March) from Dlia golosa (1923), a collection of poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, with typographic/illustrative design by el Lissitzky. 
  3. Moveable type. This approach allows free and expressive arrangements of consistent or mixed type blocks, such as Tango with Cows (1914), a collection of "ferroconcrete" poetry by Vasily Kamensky, with illustrations by David Burliuk, or lidandtIU FarAm (1923), a "Dra" (dramatic play) by Il'ia Zdanevich. 

For each of these methods, limited hybrids and decorative hand-work (such as rubber stamped elements), etc. can be proposed and pursued, with time, equipment and materials considered. 





 

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