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

BackWording with Booksters

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CoaRse CaLIBration 63 ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing" (Pedersen) and CSLC134/RUSN334 "Exploding Tongues" (Gilman) plain 2017-05-26T07:45:03-07:00
During the middle third of the Spring, '17 Semester, two classes at Occidental College (ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing (Pedersen) and CSLC 134 / RUSN 334 "Exploding Tongues: Language, Art and The Russian Avant-Garde") collaborated on a book making project, with printed submissions of text and design compiled in a miscellany volume, Exploding Tongues: NthOlogy, inspired by the Russian Avant-garde.

Through creative making of their own collaborative book, students explored historical literary phenomena, such as "zaum," or "trans-sense" language, a nullification or distortion of meaning through invented words, as well as visual abstraction, neo-primitivism, "Rayism," "Suprematism," "Prouns," and other visual innovations that manifest as illustrations and cover and page designs. Students took inspiration from the authors, artists and book designers from the early years of the Avant-garde, when visual and verbal "abstraction" developed simultaneously.

A century's distance from the creative ferment of the Avant-garde has given time to literary scholars and art historians to sort out radical innovations in verbal and visual cultures as if they were discrete phenomena. Time, also, has separated complex creative processes that transpired between people working in close partnership and common purpose into individuated lines of authorial credit. The scholarly impulse to conceive of cultural history on the model of scientific discovery is not, however, well-suited for understanding the ambiguous work processes and products of this brief historical moment.

As Aleksei Kruchenykh, whose "Dyr bul shchyl" (1912) is generally acknowledged as the first instance of "zaum" poetry, explained in a letter to A.A. Shemshurin, the visual and verbal elements of his book art, produced with collaborators such as Mikhail Larionov, or his wife Ol'ga Rozanova, are inextricably confused [for more on "Dyr bul shchyl" and its publication history, see Dexter Blackwell's case study on this site]:
Many have noticed that the genius of external beauty is highest of all, so that if anyone likes best of all the way, say, Te li le is written (from the painterly aspect) but not its meaning (toothless meaning, of which, by the way, there is none in zaum’ either), then it seems that such a reader is right and not a ruffian at all.
The word (letter), of course, has undergone a great change here; perhaps it has even been replaced by painting, but what does a “drunkard of paradise” care about all this prose? And I have already met persons who bought Te li le without understanding anything about dyr-bul-shchyl but who admired its painting.
On the matter of instantaneous writing:
1. The first impression (by correcting it 10 times we lose it and perhaps therefore lose everything).
2. By correcting, thinking over, polishing, we banish chance from art that in a momentary art of course occupies an honored place, by banishing chance we deprive our works of that which is most valuable, for we leave only that which has been experienced and thoroughly acquired, and all of the life of the unconscious goes to pot!
-Alexei Kruchenykh
Course readings and discussions were informed by Gerald Janecek's pioneering works on zaum, and the Russian Avant-garde artist book, as well as Nancy Perloff's most recent contribution to the topic, both of whom address the integrated nature of multimodal, collaborative arts. An "intellectual" grasp of the matter is not sufficient, however, for deep understanding. To jolt student researchers of the Avant-garde from any of their own automatic assumptions about art and literature, a hands-on, creative unit of zaum poetry writing, illustration and book-making, allowed an opportunity to view and reconstruct cultural historical processes, as it were, inside-out.
DisAttachment Anxiety: an exercise in unwitting book design and compelled collaboration The collaboration kicked off with a two-part meeting, "Backwording with Booksters," beginning with a series of introductory presentations in Scalar by CSLC 134 / RUSN 334 students on Russian Avant-garde art, literature and book arts in the Varelas Innovation Lab, followed by a spontaneously collaborative book-making activity led by Professor Pedersen at the Letterpress Studio, "(Dis)Attachment Anxiety," which is loosely based upon the "exquisite corpse" model.

In this exercise, students followed a series of disrupted steps for making an art book with artistic designs using ink and a variety of common and found tools. The purpose of the exercise was to introduce students to the convoluted folds inherent to folio production, while breaking down proprietary inhibitions to collaborative creativity. In a sequence of distinct stages, participants created designs, folded paper from a broadsheet down to a folio, and printed a single word emblematic of the effort. Their activities, however, were punctuated by unanticipated constraints, such as working with non-dominant hand, or from under the table, and the occasional instruction to abandon their own page and pass it along to a neighbor to continue work.