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

Kruchenykh, A. "Dyr bul shchyl," in Pomada (1912) [detail of page]

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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.
Dyr bul shchyl and the Dominant Debate over the importance of oral and handwritten components of poetry surfaced among art and literary scholars who examined the works of the Russian avant garde. Centered on the poetry included in handmade books such as Vzorval’ and Mirskontsa, scholars sought to establish a theory over a balance in the oral qualities of the poetry versus the handwritten visual design of the poems and books themselves. In terms of poetic language within these handmade books of the Russian avant garde, Gerald Janecek cites the handwriting and drawing as the important visual elements in the creation of the poems. On the other hand, Johanna Drucker’s insight into these works focuses on the qualities of the printed text instead. However, both authors evidently focus on the printed text of the poem, not its oral qualities. In order to understand the ruling force behind the creation of these works and the importance of their oral components, we can look to Yury Tynyanov’s theory of the Dominant to decipher this puzzle. Lastly, we will see that not only was the oral the preferred element, but various works also challenged our understanding of the visual in art.

As a vital component to Russian Formalist theory, the Dominant is the ruling force of an artistic work. According to Roman Jakobson's description of the Dominant, each type of work holds a system of values, which are organized into a hierarchy. The time period determines which of these values is at the top of the hierarchy, thus becoming the “dominant” feature of a work. Furthermore, one established dominant form that existed during the era of the Russian avant-garde was the textual, which began with the rise of the novel as a literary form during the Romantic period and through the poetry of Pushkin. Ultimately, the dominant can help uncover which is more important, vocal or written.

When asked to explain Anna Karenina, Tolstoy replied that he would have to re-write the whole book, exactly the same. This is to say, there is no reduction of the novel's textual form. The Romantic period created a cascade of literary styles that were focused on the individual as a subject experiencing the world. This experience through text established the dominant form of literature present in the early 20^th century and still today.

In terms of the Russian avant-garde, the works of Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov best exemplify the ambiguity between oral and visual elements of poetry. The poem “Akhmet” from Mirskontsa exemplifies the intertwining of these different values within their poems. The different qualities of the poetry, oral and visual, are at odds with each other when attempting to assign meaning to the works.

However, Kruchenyk's Dyr bul shchyl gives us insight into which of these competing poetic qualities is more important. The poem itself has at least three different textual forms created by the author, all quite different in their appearance. With this many inconsistent variants of the poem, it suggests that the textual aspect is not the dominant feature of the poem. Instead, sound has become the dominant feature of this first instance of Zaum poetry.

According to Jakobson, cultural change reflects itself through a re-ordering of values in artistic works, therefore asserting a new dominant. Pre-dating the Russian avant-garde was the so-called "Golden Age" of Russian literature. The 19th century saw the rise and acclaim of novelists and poets such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin, who remain as some of Russia's most celebrated writers. Their literary dominance, as well as the influence of the Romantic era in general, made the textual form the dominant aspect of the era.

However, the dominant form was changing amongst the Russian avant-garde. Starting in 1913, Alexei Kruchenyk authored at least three different versions of his Zaum poem Dyr bul shchyl. These three versions had varied textual presentations, sourced from the same author. The first appeared in his book Pomada in 1913. This version included an illustration of a nude woman by Mikhail Larionov, which aids to the poems’s “monosyllabic, primordial, and erotic sounds,” as described by Nancy Perloff. (Explodity, Getty Publications, 2016. pg. 75)

Furthermore, Kruchenyk asserts before the poem that Dyr bul shchyl is a work that is written “in its own language, the words have no other meaning.” However, the first word “Дыр” is actually a Russian word, being the genitive plural form of “holes.” The rest of the poem does not contain any known word forms from the Russian language, falling in line with Kruchenyk’s assertion of the poem containing its own language.

A second version was produced in the book Te li le, a written collaborative effort by Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov, illustrated by Olga Rozanova. This version of Dyr bul schul from 1914 is the richest of the three in color and is the only one to have a feminine creative influence, as Rozanova was deemed responsible for its creation. Some of the letters in this version are heavily faded on the page, which resulted in a different first reading for the class and myself. Despite this, the oral qualities of the original first printing of the work remain.

Lastly, in his 1913 essay The Word as Such (Слово как таковое), Kruchenyk printed yet another version of the poem to use as an example in the work. It is devoid of illustration and any handwritten creation, existing only in print on the page. The type in this version actually ends up further asserting the poem's oral qualities above all else.

Overall, the only things that are consistent between these three variations of Dyr bul shchyl are the authorship and the sounds of the recitation of the poem itself. The three printed versions of Kruchenyk's poem leave us unable to pin down a singular "stable" text, but maintain the same phonetic qualities in all three. This should lead us to acknowledge sound as the Dominant force of Kruchenyk's poem, rather than its textual, artistic, and physical elements.

Kruchenyk was not alone in his reorganization of traditional artistic values in the era of the Russian avant garde. Other artists of the same time period allowed their works to uphold a different dominant feature, and also contributed to undermining the concept of the visual in art. One example of this is Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph of his own apartment building.

While photography usually does not contain oral elements in its creation, Rodchenko is clearly toying with our expectations of normal visual understanding. The photo is tilted on a different axis, giving the viewer a radical perspective of an ordinary, familiar construction. Most photography is level with the eye, creating a representation similar to human vision. This leveled orientation, in my opinion, is the dominant hierarchical feature of photography in other works. It also serves in making us question the visual medium in all sources of art.

Similar to Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and its associated artistic movement, Suprematism, reflect a reordering into a new hierarchy of dominance. The painting, now cracked from age, attempts to represent the purest form of a geometric shape.

Such assertions about purity and perfection might be comparable to the still life or trompe l’oeil movements in art. Rather than depicting the real world, the Black Square reaches towards an abstract perfect form of the square. Since traditional depictions of perfection consisted of physical objects, Malevich’s painting causes his audience to reflect on the geometry and abstract shapes which make up our world.

Not only do the poems of the Russian avant garde mark the importance of the vocal, auditory qualities as dominant, but purely visual works challenge our sense of sight and our preconceived notions of art. Overall, there exists a reduction in the visual, textual form, that rules over most other artistic and literary movements. The significance of this move has primordial overtones. Before writing systems, geometry, and even language itself, there was only sound. Perhaps this is what the Russian avant garde hoped to achieve: humans envisioning a world without systematic human imposition on all things.
Prostitutes and Peasants Mirskontsa is not the only book of zaum poetry to feature nude women. In Kruchenykh and Larionov's 1913 Pomada [Pomade], the nude woman is again a unique figured occasion in the text. However, the women of Pomada are not as deliberately visible as they are in Mirskontsa. In the famous poem-painting 'dyr bul shchyl,' there is a nude woman hidden in what simply appears to be scratch marks and scribblings on the page. This nude is the only figure in either Mirskontsa and Pomada to seemingly expose their genitals. It is notable that in alternative versions of 'dyr bul shchyl,' Kruchenykh's soon-to-be wife Olga Rozanova altered the image of the nude woman to produce an image seemingly more in line with female representations in Mirskontsa.

Later on in Pomada and in contrast to the "urban prostitutes" 'dyr bul shchyl,' a peasant woman with her breasts exposed carries a basket or some other burden. As Pomada lengthens the image of the woman-as-figure becomes more oblique and it begins to discern the sex of the figure at all. In the final image of what appears to be a woman figure, the defining motif of these female nude becomes itself obscured. Is this figure-in-horror exposing their breasts, or do they raise their arm to their chest in quiet exclamation?

Contrast between representations of the city and the village seem to have centered in representations on the people who live in them-- however, in keeping with Neo-Primitivist themes, this Individual-of-Representation often took the shape of the woman (it is no coincidence that one's place of origin is often referred to as the 'motherland.' In engaging with Marc Chagall's painting Above the Town there is (while not ubiquitous) an clear demarcation between the individual and place. Seemingly caught in a saving or pleasurably embrace, Chagall's female figure connotes a concerning specter haunting the transition from the town/village to the major city/metropolis. In the same period of time (1910-1920) this concern bubbled to the forefront of Russian Avant Garde iconography: In simple landscapes, the city (Moscow) begins to shake and climb upon itself as if reaching for the heavens by creating Jacob's ladder from its own body. Also, in the costuming of women, the peasant girl is constructed as having both agency and personhood--there is a 'capability'/potentiality present in her that is distinct from the faceless scratchings of the women in Pomada.

Like a two-headed infant conjoined at birth, the rise of technology both fascinated and demanded intervention by the Russian people. From the gruesome representations of the titular Anna Karenina preparing for death via railcar decapitation to the very presence of any portrayal of a traveling female peasant, the identity of Russia-going-forward was all but submerged by the crashing wave of questions and conflicts arising from technological advancement and integration in the social.

The presence and juxtaposition of prostitutes, peasants, cities, and villages belies a theoretical stance on reproduction and collaboration--- the deconstruction/vilification of the city, functions as a collaborative stance with the production of hand-made books. Even more than what can be done in a press workshop, in the continued supremacy of the village woman over the city prostitute, Larionov reasserts the Anti-Gutenbergian stance of early Russian Avant Garde sentiments. In doing this, Larionov accomplishes the turn from a rudimentary Neo-Primitivist discourse into a complete swerve towards mystical/fused signifier-signified systems.