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• 1 2017-04-30T20:40:03-07:00 Sound-Image Shape: Nudes, Demons, and Zaum Poetry 12 Tim Lewis - Final Course Scalar Project plain 2017-05-12T15:29:00-07:00 Mirskontsa is noted for its arresting drawings, multiple and diverse copies, and its use of zaum "transrational" poetry. However, Mirskontsa, is also marked by a prevalence of oftentimes-nude female forms. In direct accordance with the Neo-Primitivist tradition that existed within Russian Futurism, Mirskontsa is littered with images of naked women. The figures in Mirskontsa are notable in three thematics: Firstly, the female figures across the images do not look directly out at the reader-- their glances are slanted or attending some other image; Secondly, there is a repeated presentation of the 'woman' with the 'natural' and the 'woman' and the 'supernatural/angelic'; and Thirdly, there are no figures with openly observable genitals, the only deliberate nudity is in the presentation of bare breasts. 
  
  I will call this eccentric occasion the signification of the 'deliberate nude/woman.' This 'deliberate nude/woman' in Mirskontsa is noted as such because the existence of such a figure in a work that seeks to come to the limit/rule of sound-images necessarily must fit in the system. Initial insights about a 'worldbackwards' represented through a tetrad of artists center on the linkage between a naive eroticism--one that barely even attempts to call the reader into seduction, let alone sexual fervor--and sound. Following this linkage, the consideration of the sound of the sensual-- especially as it relates to the natural and the supernatural-- becomes ground for analysis. Notably, Natalia Goncharova (who late in life would marry the Rayonist Mikhail Larionov) was the artist for each of these images. Further, the drawing of the goddess Diana is painted in collaboration with the poetic text, so that the figure does not exist in complete distinctness from language. The presence of spirits as seen in Mirskontsa and demons in other handmade texts deeply underscores the seriousness involved in the meaning-making endeavor of handmade books in the collective consciousness of the Russian Avant Garde--suggesting an uncharacteristic turn towards infinitude within a movement that appears to greatly privilege the finite. As a result, it is easier to understand the importance of handmade books as artifacts for the transformative reproduction of poetry/power.
  
  These incidents of form (signified) meeting sound (poetry) recall a poetic style that was being developed simultaneously to the production of these texts: zaum poetry. Zaum, epitomized by Aleksei Kruchenykh, constitutes poetry at the margins. Written in defiance of any rationality, this poetry focused heavily on the "beyonsense" play of syllabic meaning-making.  Zaum can be understood to function as the nudity of language-- an erotic system of sounding preterdetermined to communicate Nothing and Universality as fused and bound. This is notable in later representations of the feminine-as-nude, as most visible in the paintings of Kazimir Malevich in the late 1920's.
  
  Upon examining the manifestos of those painters, poets, and writers from the time--specifically, Kruchenykh--a greater understanding of the almost sovereign female figure emerges. Kruchenykh's manifesto for Explodity, particularly expresses a need for a form of communication that exists both past and amongst traditional linguistic topographies. Echoing Nietzsche without deliberate reference, Kruchenykh suggests language-ing in a space past the death of the Old God, but still in its corpse. Otherwise said, in affect there is the the specter of Nietzsche's famous question: 'Supposing truth was a woman, what then?' 
  
  Regardless of the philosophical ends, explanations for the dominance of female figures in Mirskontsa might perhaps be well served with a more nuanced articulation of Neo-Primitivism in order to extrapolate these figures' sovereignty across handmade texts in the Russian Avant Garde.