Kruchenykh, A. "Dyr bul shchyl," from Pomada (1913)
1 2017-02-23T10:50:44-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e 12041 12 First instance of non-referential language later called zaum, or "transrational" poetry, collaboratively designed with Mikhail Larionov, as simultaneous innovations in oral culture, visual abstraction, and book design plain 2017-04-30T09:28:49-07:00 2/25/1913 Moscow, Russia Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283abThis page has annotations:
- 1 2017-05-07T18:53:45-07:00 Taylor Robinson aa08dd3939f1f1c6162c5518ae531385e51659af Lines, abstracted from form Taylor Robinson 4 plain 2017-05-07T18:55:09-07:00 Taylor Robinson aa08dd3939f1f1c6162c5518ae531385e51659af
- 1 2017-02-23T11:19:54-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e The whole poem goes back and forth between following the conventions of the Russian language, and then breaking it. Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-02-23T11:19:54-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-02-23T11:20:38-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e Larionov's depiction of a female figure. Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-02-23T11:20:38-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-02-23T11:21:14-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e This poem is the first of three in a series by Kruchenyk. Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-02-23T11:21:14-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-02-23T11:12:00-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e In Russian, the vowel "ы" should not be used after certain consonants. Kruchenyk violates this rule with his Zaum language. Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-02-23T11:12:01-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-02-23T11:15:07-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e The final line seemingly begins with individual letters. Or are they supposed to be words themselves? Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-02-23T11:15:07-08:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
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- 1 2017-04-23T12:54:46-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab Big Bang: Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural Impacts Christopher Gilman 54 A Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural Impacts timeline 2017-05-03T07:19:11-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab
- 1 2017-03-01T14:14:13-08:00 Craig Dietrich 2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490 Timeline Craig Dietrich 2 timeline 2017-03-01T14:16:58-08:00 Craig Dietrich 2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490
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2017-04-13T11:07:32-07:00
The Tool and the Hand: Linearity in Non-Art
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by R. Taylor Robinson
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2017-05-24T11:15:34-07:00
The Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century developed out of the explosive period preceding and immediately following the Russian Bolshevik revolution. Emanating from the Russian Futurists of the 1910s and culminating in the Soviet realism of the 1930s, this movement spawned many influential figures. Among these artists was El Lissitzky, a constructivist whose career was characterized by an unmistakable venture from the world of art without social purpose into the world of design, marked by social efficacy. Lissitzky’s mentor and founder of the Suprematist art movement, Kazimir Malevich, remarkably opposed the postrevolutionary constructivist ideology of rendering social utility from art, despite his place at the origin of Constructivism itself. Distancing his art from its traditional place as merely a service to the state and church, he created art that existed by itself for itself, originating in a place of subjective feeling rather than objective utility, as with Constructivism. Additionally, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, a Russian Futurist and co-author of a series of art books, concerned himself primarily with laying bare the device, a term, representative of the movement to which he belonged, often used to describe the Futurists’ attempts to re-sensitize the reader through the defamiliarization of artistic and literary conventions. The bridge between these artists can be found through the examination of the line by itself, whether it be a line on a page or a line of text. The following text will explore this line as it appears throughout these early art movements of the Russian avant-garde, and how, through re-contextualization, the line becomes an artistic device to direct the viewer’s gaze. In the spirit of laying bare the device the artists of this time stripped away its facade and revealed to their audience the line as it is, the line as such. In the investigation of these lines a particular binary opposition emerges, concerning the way in which these lines were drawn, synthesis by hand or by intermediary mechanical tool.
The Gutenberg design is the well established convention of orienting lines of text on a page from left to right, top to bottom. When a custom becomes so ingrained in the social consciousness, expectations tend to overwrite minute discrepancies. In regards to the Gutenberg standard, all books and printed materials generally subscribe to this form, therefore the custom becomes the expectation. When this happens, convention takes over and any unique features are overlooked. This is extremely limiting to artists exploring the full expressive potential of their medium. As Janecek describes in Kruchenykh Contra Gutenberg, the Russian Futurists placed these conventions on display by de-standardizing these customs, namely the organization of lines of text on a page. A. Kruchenykh, a Russian Futurist, co-authored a series of art-books between 1912 and 1916 to do just that. In order to understand the methods they utilized in laying bare the device, the significance of the lines of text themselves must be understood. The Gutenberg design works because the lines of text direct the reader’s gaze; they guide the viewer’s eyes in order to create a linear narrative. So what happens when these lines of text are fragmented and distorted, when the reader is no longer able to rely purely on expectation for where to look next? The reader becomes aware of the device in use.
Roman Jakobson, in The Dominant, describes the concept of a Dominant within systems of values, arguing that any given system of values is defined by it. He explains this using the example of verse. “[Verse] possesses its own hierarchy of superior and inferior values and one leading value, the dominant, without which verse cannot be conceived and evaluated as verse.” (Jakobson, The Dominant, p42). The Dominant, he posits, is that which is the defining characteristic of a given system of values. What makes verse, verse? Many of the poems presented in the Futurist Art Books, poems such as “Axmet” by A. Kruchenykh, challenge Gutenbergian notions of page structure, revealing the Dominant. When the structures that organize lines of text on a page are put on exhibition, the question of what makes a book, a book, is raised. It is possible to look at these lines of text as examples of lines as such, lines which direct the reader's gaze around the page. In deviating from expectation by being written sporadically around the page, the lines in this poem call attention to the Gutenbergian organization of the page and lay bare the device; they force the reader to read the text in a new way, allowing them to see the page as a whole, rather than just an instance of a page in a standardized book.
The tool vs hand paradigm shows itself most clear in the lines which comprise the very letters on the page. The first salient feature one is drawn to when looking at “Akhmet,” is the series of out of place and irregular letters. Although they may seem to deviate from the line as defined above, It is still possible to investigate them as lines as such, for they still direct the reader’s gaze around the page. The gaze of the reader is guided from letter to letter. Making up the very structure of these handwritten capital letters, the line as such calls into question the standardization of each letter within a poem. Here the line as such is handwritten and imprecise. Juxtaposed to these handwritten capital letters, letters handprinted by a stamp are scattered throughout as well. These stamped letters call back to the Gutenberg standardization of letter type, but due to both their individual placement and the placement of the lines of text themselves, still manage to lay bare the device and call attention to the regularized Dominant of verse. The seemingly random positioning of the handwritten letters among the printed ones, guides the reader to an awareness of the standardization of letter type in the Gutenberg tradition.
In Mirskontsa, literally The World from the End, A. Kruchenykh's short story, generally referred to by its first line “i travelled for a long time” (Russian: я долго путешествовал, ya dolgo putyeshestvoval), presents a similar phenomenon, but on a different scale. Here, in what is likely Kruchenykh's handwriting, the mixed usage of handwritten letters in print, i.e., multiple individual lines creating a cohesive whole letter; and handwritten letters in script, i.e., one continuous line, the shape of which creates the letter. Although the piece as a whole takes on more Gutenbergian style, lines of text, left to right, top to bottom, what is specifically of note here is rather the text itself. There is no consistency throughout in terms of letter type. There are intermingled script letters and print letters, as well as capital letters and lowercase letters. Balancing this line between Gutenberg and non-traditional page structure is how Kruchenykh lays bare the device and in doing so, for the sake of examination, shines a light on the Dominant, the boundaries of what makes a book, a book, in these art books of early twentieth century Russia.
In addition to Kruchenykh’s non-Gutenbergian lines of text, included in the 1912-1916 art books are the lines of ayism was a style of art created by Mikhail Larionov, in which an image as a whole is constructed from lines, or "rays of light." These imprecise lines are not simply the outlines, or the components of some greater form, but rather from the imprecise messy tangle of these lines, a shape precipitates. Take Larionov's rayism drawing for Kruchenykh's "dyr bul shchyl." The lines at the bottom of the page are said to be a picture of a naked woman. Even knowing this, it is hard to see, but what is clear is Larionov’s attempt to elucidate the Dominant; figures are usually drawn by combining lines to create an outline or define the figure. Here, however, the lines are not part of the figure at all, but rather they are rays of light, that present the figure without representing it. Where previously convention dictated the use of lines as only to precisely outline a given form, Larionov centralizes imprecise lines, abstracted from the form. In his “dyr bul shchyl” illustration, Larionov also reimagines the function of illustrations which accompany text. As Janecek argues in Kruchenykh Contra Gutenberg, in refero;s illustrations within the Futurist art books, “The illustrations are not merely tied to the text—they develop and complete the poetic images or contrast with them.” (Janacek, Kruchenykh Contra Gutenberg, p45). This is another way that the art books lay bare the device. Previously, illustrations in books merely precisely and clearly reiterated the content of the text. However, in Larionov’s case this is not so. The imprecision of his Rayist illustrations and the ambiguity of what they depict causes the viewer to question the function of illustrations.
Kazimir Malevich reshaped the avant-garde art world by creating art from his own subjective experience, rather than the previous tradition of objective realism. Beginning with his most famous work, The Black Square, Malevich created the Suprematist art movement. He mentored many young artists who would go on to become Constructivists, a style which visually mimicked Suprematism and yet could not be more ideologically different. Suprematism took much from the art books of the Russian Futurists in that it made plain the utilities of regularity and reproducibility in a given medium. Instead of questioning Gutenberg's conventions, as the Futurists did, the Suprematist movement attempted to redefine the conventions of formal art. As Malevich himself described it in his Suprematist manifesto, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism, “Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without ‘things’ (that is, the ‘time-tested well-spring of life’).” (Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism). Suprematist works were almost always a collection of basic abstract shapes; it was art by itself, for itself, and, departing from the more traditional artistic tenets of the time, it was intended to explore and abstract pure artistic feeling into the paintings themselves.
The Constructivist movement spawned out of Malevich’s exploration of subjectivity in art, and opposed it. Although within his corpus of work there is a notable lack of examples of lines as such, Malevich is worth mentioning because of his immense influence on the art world and more specifically on the progression of the Russian avant-garde. Many of Malevich's students went on to start the Constructivist movement, coinciding with the rise of Stalin and concerning itself with the creation of "non-art." Art, to them, had no social utility or value and therefore must be replaced by something that did. Therefore they developed utilitarian strategies of creating art that fit into structural organization of Soviet society. They shifted from Malevich's subjective art and its attempt to express artistic feeling, and much preferred the concept of design, design with social utility. Much of the work that the Constructivists created, juxtaposed against the crude drawings in the Futurist art books and the rough hand drawn nature that was characteristic of Malevich's Suprematism, was very precise, crafted with a compass or some other mechanical tool in order to be reproducible and usable by society at large. The Russian Avant-garde had come full circle.
In the volatile time immediately surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution, cultural ideologies shifted significantly, and especially so for the avant-garde artists of the time. This change affected the Constructivists as well. Desiring collectively to move away from traditionalist values and conceptions of art, the Constructivists moved towards accessibility and social utility. Beginning with creating "precise" art, that is, art which can be regularized, reproduced, their ideals eventually manifested into "non-art." Tired of traditional art centered around aestheticism, which they considered a Bourgeois luxury, the Constructivists adopted mechanical tools to create pieces that were reproducible and therefore had social utility, in order to distance themselves from the pre-revolutionary period. If the hand is unique and representative of the individual, by abstracting the art from the artist, by means of intermediary device, the tool becomes the collective. The tool is regularized, accessible, and reproducible.
With this regularization came the notable resurgence of the line as such, something markedly missing from Malevich's Suprematist works. In Malevich's work, such as in his Supremus No. 55, any and all lines only seem to be components and outlines of other shapes; they existed to define the contours of a greater form. There is a marked lack of the line as such. The lines here are also notably irregular, unique. They are imprecise, and therefore irreproducible, and to the Constructivist mindset, incapable of performing any social function and therefore superfluous.
The precision and stark minimalism seen in the works of Malevich’s student Aleksandr Rodchenko, are quintessential features of the Constructivist ideology. In Rodchenko's pieces he plays with lines unaccompanied by shapes or other objects as with his peer El Lissitzky, who will be discussed below. The lines are as such, markedly alone on the page and usually contrasted on a bleak background. They draw in the gaze of the viewer along their lengths, the accuracy of the lines reminds one of the girders on a construction site. It is therefore very fitting that Rodchenko decided to name them his constructions. Rodchenko’s constructions, contrasted with Malevich’s Suprematist compositions, radically deviate in technique, made clear by the precision of the lines in addition to the very existence of a line as such by itself. Looking at Rodchenko's Construction No. 128, the most notable deviation from Suprematism is the lack of abstract shapes, like those present in Malevich's. While still overlapping with suprematism in its minimalism and abstraction, it is notably different from previous works within the genre. Important to note about these lines is that they expose the tool with which they were created, the device of the tool is made made visible. Their shapes are not unique, as with Malevich's, nor are they reproducible or regularized.
The lines of the Constructivists, as distinct from those of the Futurists and Suprematists, distanced themselves from aestheticism and played with the intersection of art and socially effective architecture. ts of Malevich, was El Lissitzky, whose early pieces, called Prouns, clearly called back to suprematism; Prouns were usually three-dimensional shapes on a white background, clearly reminiscent of suprematism. The shapes and more importantly lines, however, are significantly more precise here, laying bare the mechanical tools with which they were painted, i.e. compass. In Lissitzky's Proun Vrashchenie (rotation) the curvilinear line, as with "A Proun" and "Proun 99," which will be investigated below, orients the picture and ties the discrete parts into a cohesive whole. If the Constructivists' attempts to distance themselves from art as a solely aesthetic venture by incorporating standardization and reproducibility into their processes was not clear enough, then El Lissitzky laid bare his device, the compass, in his untitled piece.
Larionov, preferring the imprecision of handwriting, and Lissitzky, preferring precise lines, whose construction is aided by a mechanical tool in order to be both reproducible and regularized, utilized strikingly distinct techniques. However, the two have a lot more in common than one might imagine. They both repurposed the line in order to lay bare the conventions of their respective periods. In this piece by Larionov it is impossible to definitively say whether this shape is an ear, the Cyrillic letter "C" or both. In this case the imprecision of the line lends to its ambiguity and serves its purpose of dismantling specific signification. It makes the viewer aware of the Dominant of letter type (the suchness of a letter) and its distinctness from a any other line on the page. Lissitzky repurposes the line as well, however in a much different way. In these two pieces a cube is presented; the cube is actually three smaller and simpler geometric shapes, calling back to Malevich's Suprematism. Were the piece only composed of the grid and the cube, we may not even perceive the cube as a cube, but rather a collection of three 2D shapes. However, the two curvilinear lines situate the cube in three dimensional space by orienting the cube in terms of the grid. Here he uses Malevich's motif of two-dimensional shapes on a plain background. He modifies the technique by using the line as such and the aid of mechanical tools to situate the two-dimensional shapes in such a way that they become three-dimensional. Larionov and Lissitzky both use lines to and implement ambiguities within Dominant conventions in order to create multiple possible interpretations.
The Russian language in particular lends itself to the reordering of words, and subsequently the deconstruction of literary conventions. Unlike English, which determines syntax through a strict word order, Russian uses a complex case system to determine the parts of speech within a given sentence. This means there is little to no standardized word order in the Russian language. This is significant to the investigation of the line in that it allows for much more restructuring when laying bare the Gutenberg standard. This is perhaps why these art movements that de-standardized the structure of literature could only come from Russia. The Futurists utilized this in their poetry, structuring the page in ways that in some cases took the words completely “out of order,” without altering the reader’s ability to pull semantic meaning from it. In another piece by Lissitzky, this lack of word order is employed as well and the line of text is shattered. In his piece “strike the whites with the red wedge” (Russian: клином красном бей белых, klinom krasnom bej belykh), were the word order translated directly, the sentence would make no sense, “wedge red strike whites.” The path along which line as such guides the viewer’s gaze is ambiguous, it is completely interrupted and there is no definitive order in which to read the piece. However, because of the Russian case system, the sentence within the piece retains its semantic meaning, while also presenting the device explicitly, the Dominant for word organization on a page and the place of text within a painting.
In the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, a pattern emerges of the revealing and examination of the line as such. This line appears in many different forms across many different movements. The Futurists utilized it to reimagine page structure. Kruchenykh brought the Gutenberg standard to light through his re-imagination of the standard page design and his de-regularization of letter type, complicating the relationship between handwriting and print. Larionov used it to redefine the function of illustrations through his Rayism. Rodchenko used the line as scaffolding, and regularized it through the use of tools within his constructions. Lissitzky’s brand of Constructivism played with the line as such to direct the viewer’s gaze in ways that opened each piece to interpretation. His precise linearity regularized art and created the Constructivist movement concerned mainly with design and social utility. The motif of the line as such within the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde ties together in a cohesive whole many, otherwise diametrically opposed ideologies. These artists laid bare the device, re-contextualized the line in each respective period, and defamiliarized artistic and literary conventions. They stripped clean the line of all excess, presenting is as it is, and, putting it on display, re-contextualized it to fit within their own styles. All that remained was the line by itself, the line as such. -
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2017-04-13T11:04:35-07:00
Dyr bul shchyl and the Dominant
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plain
2017-05-13T23:43:08-07:00
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 20th 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.
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.
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The 'Deliberate Woman/Nude' in MirsKONtsa (1912) and Pomada (1913)
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Utopians Prospectus - Lewis
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2017-05-02T05:38:25-07:00
In their groundbreaking 1912 text, MirsKONtsa [WorldBACKwards], poets Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov collaborated with painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov to produce a text towards the heart of linguistic 'meaning' through opening-up new possibilities within a literary-artistic item. These texts were unique for several reasons; primarily, though, their handmade quality and collaborative stylistic produced an entirely alternative model for the representation of language.
MirsKONtsa is noted for its odd 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. Perhaps in keeping with the Neo-Primitivist tradition (Perloff 2) that existed within Russian Futurism, MirsKONsa is littered with images of the naked woman. 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.
What is interesting is the occasion for what I will call the 'deliberate nude/woman' in MirsKONtsa. This 'deliberate nude/woman' 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. Further questions on these images lead into the deeper intentions of the artists. One of the first obvious questions is simply, who painted these women-figures? Was it Natalia Goncharova or her late-in-life husband Mikhail Larionov? Was the Dryad painted in collaboration with the poetic text, or does the figure exist in complete distinctness from language?
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 the Pomada and in contrast to the "urban prostitutes" (Perloff 75) '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?
Citations:
Perloff, N. (2016). Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 2, 74-75.
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2017-02-23T10:18:50-08:00
Finding Meaning from Zaum
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Utopians, Prospectus - Blackwell
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2017-03-14T10:47:57-07:00
How does Kruchenyk's Zaum language relate to the rules of Russian? How can we extract meaning from certain characteristics of this work?
Kruchenyk's poem, as stated by the author, is written in the Zaum language, rather than Russian. Zaum, which roughly translates to "beyond the mind," fills the poem with entirely nonsensical words. In writing this piece, Kruchenyk alternates between following certain conventions of Russian, yet at the same time breaking them through his Zaum language.
In constructing the words of the piece, Kruchenyk generally sticks to the rules of Russian. However, while both "dyr" and "bul" follow the phonological patterns of Russian, but the last word of the line, "schul," does not. After a certain set of seven consonants, the vowel "И" should be used instead of "Ы."
The final line, "р л эз" is also worthy of discussion. If we understand the constituents of this line to be simply letters, then the poem seems to break down from more complex constructions to its individual parts. However, the inclusion of "эз" makes this difficult to corroborate. On the contrary, we could perceive these three to be words themselves. I choose the latter, and see this poem as an exercise in demonstrating the possibilities of the Zaum language. The sounds are more important than the printed letters.
What seems to be scribbles underneath the poem is actually Mikhail Larionov's depiction of a nude woman, a contemporary of Aleksei Kruchenyk. Similar to the construction of the poem, Larionov's creation purposefully distances itself from the conventional process of drawing and artistry.
Starting from the top, we transition from language as we know it, to dabbling in Zaum, to Zaum in artistry. The three components of the page work together to mark this transition into the practice of the Zaum language. The notion of a grammar and a lexicon is what makes the opening statement differ from the poem. I believe that Kruchenyk, unknowingly, is trying to challenge this notion through this piece.