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• 1 2017-05-14T21:37:27-07:00 Poetic Form: Suprematism as Jakobsonian Poetry 9 Josh Medina pg 1 image_header 2017-05-14T22:17:06-07:00
  
  Suprematism is a departure from convention made manifest as a return to form. This may sound like a stroke of irony. You return to form, and you go back to the basics. Principle elements are so often  reduced to an origin or a conclusion only in completeness. But the Suprematists, with typical Futurist fervor, asserted that their return to form was more of a transcendence than a regression. 
  
  They saw it as a return to faktura, the visual emancipation of essential, rudimentary pieces from their cumulative whole. Indeed, the distilled purity of elementary objects was held up as “supreme,” suprematism itself referring to and reminding us of the "supremacy of pure artistic feeling." But what makes pure, artistic feeling supreme? What has distracted us from this purity of form, and how are we returning to it? These are questions the suprematists answered in their own ways and work. There were many commonalities in the answers, made evident intuitively through the work. Many efforts to  communicate the point, through art and speech and manifesto. 
  
  I found my answer in the writings of Roman Jakobson. And though his answer was more inferred than obligatory, its basis in theory is underpinned by personal experience, and even collaboration, with the artists of the avant garde. In 1913, a teenage Roman first heard the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky first speak of poet and playwright Velimir Khlebnikov. By the end of the year, he had read and memorized the entirety of both men’s work, and ended up meeting and befriending Khlebnikov by the end of the year. He was even invited to contribute his own Zaum poetry to Zaumnaiga gniga of 1914/1915, which he did so under the pen name Aliagrov. He spent much the the rest of his life ruminating on and directly commenting on this association.
  But its Jakobson’s indirect commentary, rather than direct contact, that most interests me. Especially his commentary, stemming from his linguistic forbearers, about Poetry. “All poetry, according to Jakobson, is characterized by ‘a structural and functional dependence upon the material, non-signifying elements of language’ – indeed, ‘poetry is indifferent to the referent of the utterance’ (Bradford, Roman Jakobson, 26-27. )
• 1 2017-04-30T20:41:15-07:00 Artist as Collaborative Text - Towards Liber Viscus 7 Tim Lewis - Final Course Scalar Project plain 2017-05-12T17:14:57-07:00 Collaboration operates as a fundamental element of the handmade book experience. The sharing of ideas and implementation across individuals a remarkable aspect of these texts and suggests that there was a form of literary experience in the creation of these communicative capacities that carries a further affective importance. Namely, that of Love. Take Mirskontsa for example: the text is noteworthy among other handmade books for the heavy presence of initials (mostly from Goncharova) and an artist's credit page. It is extremely notable that Mirskontsa was created in-part by artists-in-love: Goncharova and Larionov would later marry towards the end of their lives.
  
  Further indicative of a spirit of love, Roman Jakobson importantly noted that in the occurrence of the sound-shape in language, there is an almost simultaneous emergence of divergent sexual occasions. It is no surprise, then, that Jakobson's own handmade book is iconic for its representation of a stitched-together heart on the cover. While it is unclear the depth/intent/role that Jakobson had in the production of the cover, what is abundantly evident is that notions of love as meaning-making were essential in the articulation of transrational notions of language. This consideration of the visceral life, the making of poetic accomplices-- all this operates as an extended instantiation of the sound (the word, the letter) and shape (the love life, the dead) of language.  
  
  The artists of the Russian Avant Garde were not simply in collaboration with each other, language/sound, and their hand-made texts. In the creation of their books, they constructed a new way of seeing/hearing a text--- a text with necessarily physical/finite properties (lacunae, failure, decay, and uniqueness). The integration of individuals, texts, and processes represented the next step in the journey towards and through this language of nonknowledge; indeed, the art of El Lissitzky strongly em-bodies and em-braces this analytic. Burst from its seams and stitching new meaning across un-mappable landscapes, the beyond-ness immanent in the Russian Avant Garde handmade book opened the possibility for passage into a new map of reason--where our current temporality intersects and parallels art from the early twentieth century in Russia is still yet to emerge.