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

Kruchenykh and Larionov

These guys were friends

See:
Kruchenykh...

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BookENDS: A Working Theory of Textuality as Cultural Dominant, 1912-
Textuality and the Nullification of Dimension

This page marks both a beginning and an end. It is an introduction to the assignments, projects and resources contained in the project, as well as a summary of ideas that resulted from a semester's process of inquiry.

We began our course by considering two artifacts: Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square" (1915) and Aleksei Kruchenykh's first zaum ("transrational") poem "Dyr bul shchyl" (1913) Each is a well-recognized cultural monument in the history of modernism. The "Black Square," an unruly gesture in crudely simplified geometric form, redacts any referentiality with an overlay of thick, black, oil paint; "Dyr bul shchyl" (1913) upends language as such by substituting primordial sounds for poetry in lines scribbled hastily above a tangled thicket of an illustration. Malevich and Kruchenykh were friends and collaborators. The question was whether these two phenomena were parallel, loosely inspired by each other, or whether there was some more fundamental relationship between them, causal or otherwise.

Abstraction has been described as an idea. In a landmark 2012-13 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925," Curator Leah Dickerman assembled works representing a trans-Atlantic network of artists and theorists, whose collective efforts and social connections, more than any individual discoveries of feats of genius, were responsible for the emergent realization of abstraction as a defining feature of 20th Century visual arts. If one accepts Dickerman's reasonable presupposition, that abstraction was an idea, a shared thought that could transcend any material or formal instance, then making the connection between zaum poetry and Suprematist painting becomes quite easy: each cultural practitioner in his/her/their own way grasped the notion as it spread through their social networks, and sought in the materials, forms and processes of their own media to achieve its realization.

This course in its investigations seeks a different route between artists of different disciplines, bypassing the transmission of ideas. It is inspired by a metaphor less compelling than Dickerman's social network diagram, but one that is, perhaps, more germane to the period under investigation. The goal here is to understand how a few, focused efforts by a very small number of cultural practitioners could effect a wholesale collapse and regeneration of socio-cultural communication by strategically (though perhaps not consciously) targeting the nerve center, the most central nexus point through which the most diverse modalities of expression and communication could travel.

This approach to the general topic of modernity and abstraction has been greatly facilitated by another collection of artifacts, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (2016) a book publication by Curator Nancy Perloff of the Getty Research Institute, and accompanying interactive website and tagged materials in an online collection of Russian Futurist Books.

The scenario that emerges from inquiry is one of highly specific, almost accidental, contingencies of personal biography, idiosyncratic processes, and random found material that leverage, nevertheless, immense cultural processes to follow, because the changes occurred simultaneously on the orders of parole (speech) and langue (language). The efforts by the Russian Avant-garde to “emancipate” (words, sounds, meanings, objects, etc.) amounted to an explosion in meaning that reverberated indefinitely in emanating spherical waves in historical time and place, and impacted all things, however minutely, in its wake.

The metaphor of cultural explosion presents a much different set of tasks for researchers. Unlike a social network, which suggests a diffuse series of phenomena over time and space, the prospect of a singular moment or "big bang" event requires a reduction in time, scale, and scope, as well as material specificity as one approaches that occurrence. A period, such as 1910-1925, becomes less important than the compressed moments of late 1912 and early 1913. The global scale of cultural transmission, enabled by travel, publications, and new forms of communication, reduce to the effects of late-evening collaboration between a few people at a worktable creating irregular, limited-edition objects with their hands.
Thesis: The Codex as Language and Image
The conclusion of our collaborative work is that a strong case for significant causal connection between the verbal and visual languages of "Dyr bul shchyl" and "Black Square" is to be found in the particular materiality of the "artist books" of the 1910s, especially in the collaborative products issued by Kruchenykh himself, working with many prominent artists and writers who went on, like Malevich, to gain fame and notoriety for their respective investigations in "abstraction." The impact of this work upon the visual arts was to displace mimetic representation and the predominant understanding of a picture frame since the Renaissance as a "window on the world" with a different operative metaphor of a canvas as a page, with characters instead of images, unmarked paper instead of implied space, and margins to distinguish between significant and insignificant areas for meaning.

To grasp the significance of this narrower interpretation of the Russian branch of modernism, one must take into account a number of important scholarly contributions over the past several decades on the specificities of written and printed language, as well as the material form of the codex itself as a kind of language, since its widespread distribution and acceptance after Gutenberg.

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Cigarette Seller on Strastnaya Square