Getty Research Institute Explodity Website
1 2017-03-15T12:07:40-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab 12041 3 Image of Website plain 2017-03-15T12:45:28-07:00 Craig Dietrich 2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490This page has annotations:
- 1 2017-10-04T06:05:50-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab Explodity Christopher Gilman 4 plain 2017-10-04T06:12:23-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab
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2017-04-17T10:03:48-07:00
BookENDS: A Working Theory of Textuality as Cultural Dominant, 1912-
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An Introduction and Conclusion to a Semester's Investigation into the Book Arts as an Avant-garde Practice
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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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Back to Futurism: Russian Artist Books
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Introductory Page by Chris Gilman
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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, and a companion interactive website with accessible translations, transliterations (from Cyrillic to Latin characters), and sound-recordings of readings.
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.