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

Exploding Tongues: NthOlogy (front cover)

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CoaRse CaLIBration 72 ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing" (Pedersen) and CSLC134/RUSN334 "Exploding Tongues" (Gilman) structured_gallery 2017-05-26T12:45:21-07:00
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.
Back to Futurism: Russian Artist Books Since the death of Stalin, art historians, literary scholars and museum curators have increasingly come to recognize the substantial contribution of the Russian Avant-garde to international modernism, though largely on terms fixed in Western traditions.Perceived in this manner, the Russian Avant-garde represents a broad artistic response to European modernity, as well as new scientific discoveries and inventions such as cinema, radio and x-rays, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, non-Euclidean geometry, and musings on the 4th dimension. Its historical frame, straddling the Russian Revolutions of 1917, points to unique national qualities associated with Marxism, politicized class struggle, and provocative expressions of violence.

An area of particular interest for understanding the often chaotic proliferation of artistic forms is the “artist book,” a small but particularly potent force for change in aesthetic phenomena. While early scholarly discourse followed largely along disciplinary lines, tracing literary and artistic developments independently, new research is revealing the importance of this synthetic medium both for bringing artists, theorists and writers together, and for blending affordances of meaning in ambiguous and productively unstable ways. This curriculum-based collaborative research project, “Exploding Tongues,” is positioned thematically to mine a rich trove of digitized archival materials and artifacts in the Getty Research Institute generously made available online, and showcased in a newly-published book Explodity: Sound Image and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (2016), by GRI curator Nancy Perloff.

CSLC 134 / RUSN 334 “Exploding Tongues,” a combined English-language and Russian-language course, adopts a time-backwards approach suggested by the two seminal works that serve as case studies in Perloff’s study: Vzorval’ (Explodity) and MirsKONtsa (Worldbackwards). Just as physicists study the “Big Bang” at the inception of our known universe through minute particle formation in the first nanosecond instances of conceivable time, we inspect the foundational matter of literary and visual phenomena letter by letter, line by line, and shape by shape in a few artifacts and documents of a very brief moment in history from Fall of 1912, through the Summer of 1913, and then extrapolate to a cultural explosion that resounded through the 1930s and around the world.

To test our working hypothesis, our course teamed up with a concurrent class at Occidental College, ARTS 227 “Introduction to Letterpress Printing.” Students worked collaboratively to author, design and create contributions of their own to an artist book miscellany, entitled NthOlogy. By means of artistic production in an analogous task to that facing their Russian counterparts a century before, students learned first hand the underlying principles of an emerging “language” of hybrid image, text and sound: the “verbicovisual” phenomena treated in Perloff’s Explodity.