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

Метроном (Metronome) -- 1915

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The Experience of Language in Art
In our investigations of the Russian Avantgarde movements thus far, we have communed with various works in which visual representations of language are central to their composition. This gesture seems at first unusual, as we do not often imagine paintings as containing words, but provides valuable insight regarding the ways in which we experience art through the use of these same letter-forms, similar to those which experiments with zaum poetry yielded.
Here on the left, we are presented with an example of a painting in which words take center-stage. Or maybe they're something resembling words? An almost immediate reaction to Rozanova's Suprematist painting Metronome, is to begin trying to read these words. For me, this was a futile action, they held no linguistic value, thus the easiest thing to do was to look for meaning elsewhere. Immediately, I considered the tone they may be imparting, I considered investigating meaning outside of the dictionary, investigating instead text size, color, placement, and style. However, as was pointed out by some of my classmates, these words could have in fact have their meanings in the French language. The question then becomes whether the modal reading is thus rendered insufficient by this correction, or maybe how these meanings interact.

In Metronome, we are presented with a puzzle: some words seem to lack meaning while others are clearly recognizable. However, this problem seeks to highlight something important about our experience of the art, namely, a need to read it. To call these words "nonsense", to say they lack meaning is only possible when comparing it to the systems mentioned above. Sure, they seems useless when marked against an English, French, or Russian dictionary, but what about when observed solely as a phenomenon in relation to their frame instead? After all, to attempt to read them at all, you are already contorting yourself physically, tilting your head as to observe them in some sort of "right-side-up" fashion, is it from there too much of a stretch to say then that their meaning should be observed in a similar way? Their color, their location and orientation on the page, and their varying fonts seem to imply a mood rather than convey a definition. In fact, as a result of lacking a semantic definition, these "words" are able to embody this modal quality even more so; the mood shines through, undistracted by such definitions.

Here, another example, this one a piece from the artist El Lissitzky. It is commonly known as "Strike the Whites with the Red Wedge", but it is in this title that a question, similar to those asked of the works above arises. In the Russian language, different suffixes denote a word's place in a sentence, and thus impart a certain meaning onto the word (mostly) regardless of its position in the sentence. In this "sentence", the verb is the command-form of "to strike" (БЕЙ) while the indirect object is the word for "by means of wedge" (КЛИНОМ) as well as the adjective form of the word "red" (КРАСНЫМ) and the plural direct object form of the word "white" (БЕЛЫХ). But, in a way, the audience can understand this, even without knowing the Russian. The words that describe the scene are inseparable from it. The question then becomes why include them, or rather, what to they add to this piece?

In Strike the Whites, we are presented with the opposite effect, our scene is in a very real sense narrated by words given both vocabulary and grammatical definitions. The vocabulary comes from the fact that these words resemble so closely words in the Russian language with commonly accepted meanings. The grammatical comes from the fact that Russian is a language in sentences can be written in nearly any order without losing too much meaning (though usually, this means any order in a sentence that is in-line like this one and contains proper punctuation). In this case, the words add something unexpected to the piece: temporality. By creating a "sentence" of sorts, the artist posits a world of verbs, a world where actions have starting and ending points, and thus where time as the metric of how those actions are satisfied. This addition of time makes this a dynamic piece, as now movement is implied as movement through time, and thus through space as the wedge "strikes" from left to right.
Don't read this! There is something really strange about the process of reading. Language in general often seems to be a sort of strange and unknowable thing despite being a centerpiece of daily life. There is a certain dimensionality (or lack thereof) experienced in the action of reading text in the printed verse or prose. That is to say that words and language in general have a certain quality to compel the reader to do something, whether that be to imagine a scene, to live a certain moment in a different world, or even simply to move the reader's eyes across a page from one side to another. For an unofficial term that fairly accurately addresses this quality, one might say "textuality" or "codicy". These phrases represent attempts to grasp at that certain quality of text a "bookiness" of such that one experiences in the action of reading the printed word.

This quality seems to have its roots in the Gutenbergian formatting of the page, the standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom, black on white that we are so accustomed to. One point of disruption popular among the Russian Futurist Bookartists was developing their craft in opposition this standard orientation of that text. In these examples, one is able to see how the rotation or otherwise altering of text away from the Gutenbergian feels strange and often disorienting. Given a pile of words without lines nor consistency, the reader feels their force, compelling as they did before, but now without a clear way to discern the best course of action. "Should they even be read at all?" is a question that might even be asked as it seems as though the loss of the Gutenbergian order of things had stripped the work of every last thing, it still seemed impossible not to read, maybe now more difficult than ever to resist. Maybe this readability, or rather the demand to be read, this "bookiness" was then coming not from the book, but from the language itself.

As the deviation of text from a held standard, in a sense an unexpected modification to the medium of book was a point of disruption for these artists and thinkers, so too was the addition of word to the more visual mediums. By looking at the presentation of text therefore in other mediums, one might be able to gain valuable insight regarding this question. One example to investigate might be the medium of painting, as it was a cornerstone of this entire Avantgarde movement.

In this piece by Lyubov Popova, it can confidently be said that there are words depicted upon (as) the various images in the scene. It can also be said without causing too much commotion that this is unusual, as often it is said that a "picture is worth a thousand words" or intuited that if an artist were to need to say something, they usually would do so with painterly images. Words in a painting can be distracting, the viewer becomes a reader and suddenly their attention is lost to the word instead of the painting as a whole. It is this quality of distraction that stands out. Because there are words, and because the reader is forced to read them in order to acknowledge them as such, the reader reaffirms their textuality even outside the original medium.

Upon investigation, we find these words are not very easy to read to begin with. We seem to be missing a few letters from "ПЕ Р" and the tilted newspaper-looking-object seems to read "РАННЕЕ УТРО" (early morning). These two experience of uncertainty highlight this textuality. In the first, the reader is left wondering what the word could be. The reader has to experience "ПЕ Р" to then fail to come up with an answer, to then assert that letters are missing and that to have them there would make a legible word. In the second example, the reader "fills in" the missing letters, requiring a reading of what is ("РАНН-ТР-"), a guess of what isn't, and a list of other similar-looking words to make any sense of the thing whatsoever.

We find similar movements in another piece painted two years later. Once again faced with words, the reader of the painting has a better time with this one, clearly making out words resembling "gas" (газ) and "hat" (шляп), two things which seems useful to a traveler and thus make sense as a part of this scene. If that is the case though, do these words "stand-in" for those objects which would seem so much more at home on a canvas than their linguistic representatives? And if that is the case, is it important to diferentiate these "words" from "pictures"?

Additionally, it might be worth pointing out that there are two kinds of words in this image, and that both seem to defy the conventions of linguistic presentation to similar but different ends. The most obvious are those kinds of words detailed in the paragraph above: газ, шляп, журналы (magazines), and so on. However, there is a second kind of word present on this canvass, and if it is the case that the first kind is "not to be read" as claimed above, then maybe these are even less so. These words are those present on the white geometry near the center of the painting; those words sprawled across what seems to be a newspaper. This tactic for depicting newspaper in drawing is one not uncommon to doodle artists from young to old.

The idea is that developing the full headline and story content that a normal newspaper would have takes time. Additionally, it would be difficult considering the fineness of brush and precision of hand that would be necessary to do so. But, probably most compellingly, the primary reason for using this method would seem to be that it doesn't actually matter. That is to say, without the fullness of content, the thing depicted still resembles a newspaper in form, and does so in a way that is close enough for the viewer to understand what the artist is attempting to convey. In this way, the appearance of the words seems more important than their content, and this appearance seeks to impart a feeling of "newspaperness" upon the painting, and thus the viewer. Popova has created internally to the painting a hierarchy that can be traversed up and down. The reduction of these words then to scribbles across the top of a white rectangle from things of higher linguistic value to convey a sense of "newspaperness" seems then to mirror the way in which газ, шляп, and журналы are altered to convey a sense of "travelerness" to the painting.

It would seem as if in both these paintings, as well as in other examples of her work, Popova seems to be playing with the concept of word and image as components of her painting by conflating the two and obscuring their distinctions. In doing so, a number of interesting qualities of both are revealed. For one, we see that text when not presented in the Gutenbergian style as described above inline and sequential requires a different kind of treatment from its receiver the reader. We see then that the grammatical and other syntactic components of language that is normally accepted and "everyday" (sentence structure, clauses, etc...) is not internal to the words so much as to their presentation. A sentence is read like a sentence because the Gutenbergian style lends itself to sentence as its presentation of language. Identifying the style then as the more accurate source of the language as words' true then reinforces the thought that when language is presented differently, it then should be read differently. In short, Popova's choice to present these words in this way as opposed to the Gutenbergian confirms both the fact that the Gutenbergian style is significant in the creation of a certain kind of meaning and that she intends a different kind of meaning, one that uses words more as set pieces or tonal objects reinforcing the image in the same way that their image analogues would.

This style was not exclusively unique to Popova, but rather a feature of many of the other works done during this era by her contemporaries. Other examples come from the likes of Kasimir Malevich and Olga Rozonova, artists who also worked in Russia during this time period parallel to Popova using similar methods and materials. In An Englishman in Moscow, Malevich plays in a familiar way with the reader's tendencies to explore text in a certain fashion. When viewed from afar, it seems as though the text represents a unified phrase, the Russian words for "partial" and "eclipse", suggesting that this text, like the hat or magazine in Popova's stands in the place of an actual image of a solar eclipse. However, this method of reading seems to be one of many, as it ignores the phrase "скаковое общество" (racing club?) in the same way that the text of Popova's newspaper is while also assuming a continuity to the the three word phrases "час", "тич", and "ное" which may in fact not be necessary and true.

Another example of this sort of visual wordplay comes from Olga Rozonova's piece Metronome. In it, there are a variety of possible words and word fragments in different color shades, sizes, and orientations. Yet of course, the reader is still able to read them and the effect is similar to those above. The words once again act as tonal pieces, presenting the names of countries and concepts that would be otherwise do not appear on this canvass.

A fourth artist involved with this sort of play was the constructivist to-be El Lissitzky, though his approach provides even another question to ponder on. In one of, if not his most famous example Strike the Whites with the Red Wedge, the reader is presented with text with similar intent presented entirely differently. Due to the Russian language's sentence structure, the sentence "Strike the whites with the red wedge" can be extrapolated from the picture simply by looking at the endings of the words. However, it still stands in opposition to the Gutenbergian by nature of the varying presentation of the words. In this way, the Russian speaker is able to lift from the art a tone similar to the way in which they were able to with the objects in The Traveler. The words must be read to be understood as words, and then must be made into a sentence due to the author's choice to decline their endings. In this way, reading the painting is as necessary as the phrase "Don't read this!". The words act also like those in the paintings above, and thus because it can be seen as a tonal sentence, the words in some way animate the work, adding direction and dynamism to the scene.

Throughout all of these examples, one can see that text, when presented outside of its natural territory, becomes raises quite a number of interesting questions regarding that text, but also the ways in which its readers approach both the image it is a part of and the linguistic structures it originates from. For example, can text ever go unread? Even if the language is unknown or the words lack lexical value, must they not be first "read" to be determined as unreadable? Additionally, if text can be used as a stand in for an image, or to impart a tone without calling upon an image, how does one determine how to approach it? Overall, the fact that one is able to do anything at all with these words seems to support the idea that text need not be upon a page to be read, and in fact can be read in such a way that it becomes apparent that the communicative quality belongs internally to the language first and its presentation after.