Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-gardeMain MenuBack to Futurism: Russian Artist BooksIntroductory Page by Chris GilmanBookENDS: A Working Theory of Textuality as Cultural Dominant, 1912-An Introduction and Conclusion to a Semester's Investigation into the Book Arts as an Avant-garde PracticeBook Case StudiesCollaborative Research by Case StudiesBig Bang: Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural ImpactsA Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural ImpactsCoaRse CaLIBrationARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing" (Pedersen) and CSLC134/RUSN334 "Exploding Tongues" (Gilman)NthOlogyA limited edition collaborative book arts project by students of ARTS 227 (Pedersen) and CSLC 134/RUSN 334 (Gilman), Spring, '17MANIFESTERS (AB & Kelly): A portfolio of process and productsAppendix: A Path Through Russian Avant-Garde BooksChristopher Gilman1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283abDexter Blackwell92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79eZoe Foster-La Duc1c8954189fb3ee4ab6e36bfb90fae86777eab97Stephen Heim7069d17c035042745c96bc6c7619096cd7b33da4Kelly Kirklande1805e502570d093d70f00df18f145c99290d0a3Ian Lehineb028c384a69e4b92166e7791b002fa3f2cee5818Timothy Lewis13880d3d99b4b71ce85be63e69a6d44e38853d68Jmedina29ac3fc10003fb639ac412984b59b01a5b826e161Taylor Robinsonaa08dd3939f1f1c6162c5518ae531385e51659afEvan Sarafian042e10782d9a6d3f0001a4b35abb02f58ad84684Craig Dietrich2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490ILiADS (Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship)
Metronome (Метроном)
12017-02-27T23:39:34-08:00Ian Lehineb028c384a69e4b92166e7791b002fa3f2cee5818120411Suprematist work by Olga Rozanova (1915)plain2017-02-27T23:39:34-08:00Ian Lehineb028c384a69e4b92166e7791b002fa3f2cee5818
12017-02-23T11:38:06-08:00The Experience of Language in Art69uTOPIAN Prospectusplain2017-03-15T14:44:20-07:00Here on the left, we are presented with an example of a painting in which words take center-stage. Or maybe they're something resembling words? An almost immediate reaction to Rozanova's Suprematist painting Metronome, is to begin trying to read these words. For me, this was a futile action, they held no linguistic value, thus the easiest thing to do was to look for meaning elsewhere. Immediately, I considered the tone they may be imparting, I considered investigating meaning outside of the dictionary, investigating instead text size, color, placement, and style. However, as was pointed out by some of my classmates, these words could have in fact have their meanings in the French language. The question then becomes whether the modal reading is thus rendered insufficient by this correction, or maybe how these meanings interact.
In Metronome, we are presented with a puzzle. Do we read the "words" it presents us? And if so, are we ill equipped to read them without a knowledge of the French language? Further more, because this is a work of art and because these words cannot be separated from it, does this mean that we are ill equipped also to read this art? Can one be ill equipped for art? The argument does seem trivial, I admit. After all, they are words, and they are French (Right?). What is not trivial, however, is the world that this logic implies. If it is the case that without knowledge of French, the observer cannot appreciate this piece "correctly", then it would stand to reason that there would be a "correct" way to appreciate it, and thus, a correct and incorrect binary of interpretation that could be applied to art in general.
Additionally, to attempt to read them at all, you are already contorting yourself physically, tilting your head as to observe them in some sort of "right-side-up" fashion. Is it from there too much of a stretch to say then that their meaning should be observed in a similar way? Their color, their location and orientation on the page, and their varying fonts seem then to imply a mood as mentioned above. To confine these letter-forms to only one of these meanings seems reductionist to say the least. I believe that keeping this piece in mind is the key to begin comporting oneself to some of the other pieces from the Russian Avantgarde, as similar gestures are made across mediums, especially in the books of trans-sense (or nonsense) poetry.
The next piece is from the artist El Lissitzky. It is commonly known as "Strike the Whites with the Red Wedge", but it is in this title that a series of questions arises. In the Russian language, different suffixes denote a word's place in a sentence, and thus impart a certain meaning onto the word (mostly) regardless of its position in the sentence. In this "sentence", the verb is the command-form of "to strike" (БЕЙ) while the indirect object is the word for "by means of wedge" (КЛИНОМ) as well as the adjective form of the word "red" (КРАСНЫМ) and the plural direct object form of the word "white" (БЕЛЫХ). But, in a way, the audience could potentially posit something like this, even without knowing the Russian. The words that describe the scene are inseparable from it. The question then becomes why include them, or rather, what to they add to this piece (if of course, they mean lexical at all).
In Strike the Whites, we are presented with the opposite effect, our scene could be narrated by words given both vocabulary and grammatical definitions. The vocabulary comes from the fact that these words resemble so closely words in the Russian language with commonly accepted meanings. The grammatical comes from the fact that Russian is a language in sentences can be written in nearly any order without losing too much meaning (though usually, this means any order in a sentence that is in-line like this one and contains proper punctuation). In this case, the words add something unexpected to the piece: temporality. By creating a "sentence" of sorts, the artist could be seen as describing a world of verbs, a world where actions have starting and ending points, and thus where time as the metric of how those actions are satisfied. This addition of time could make this a dynamic piece, as now movement is implied as movement through time, and thus through space as the wedge "strikes" from left to right.
12017-04-13T11:06:07-07:00Don't Read This12plain2017-05-02T01:39:49-07:00In the class, we investigated the dimensionality (or lack thereof) experienced in the action of reading text in the printed verse or prose. That is to say that words and language in general have a certain quality to compel the reader to do something, whether that be to imagine a scene, to live a certain moment in a different world, or even simply to move the reader's eyes across a page from one side to another. We have officially come to call this quality "textuality" or "codicy" in our discussions (and as such I will continue to use these phrases intermittently throughout this project) however we have also used another phrase casually that might better relate the meaning: "bookiness".
Additionally, we have discussed how this experience is shaped by Gutenbergian formatting of the page and that how one point of disruption popular among the Russian Futurist Bookartists was developing their craft in opposition this standard orientation of that text. In these examples, we were able to see how the rotation or otherwise altering of text away from the Gutenbergian felt strange and often disorienting. Given a pile of words without lines nor consistency, the reader feels their force, compelling as they did before, but now without a clear way to discern the best course of action. "Should they even be read at all?" was becoming a more and more plausible question to ask and, while on one hand it seemed as though the loss of the Gutenbergian order of things had stripped the work of every last thing, it still seemed impossible not to read, maybe now more difficult than ever to resist. Maybe this readability, or rather the demand to be read, this "bookiness" was then coming not from the book, but from the language itself.
As the deviation of text from a held standard, in a sense an unexpected modification to the medium of book was a point of disruption for these artists and thinkers, so too was the addition of word to the more visual mediums. One example that I have been investigating has been the medium of painting, as it was a cornerstone of this entire Avantgarde movement. I began by with the works of Lyubov Popova, a painter of this time in communication with many of the artists visited in the other projects and closely associated with the Constructivist and Suprematist moments.
In this piece, it can confidently be said that there are words depicted upon (as) the various images in the scene. It can also be said without causing too much commotion that this is unusual, as often it is said that a "picture is worth a thousand words" or intuited that if an artist were to need to say something, they usually would do so with painterly images. Words in a painting can be distracting, the viewer becomes a reader and suddenly their attention is lost to the word instead of the painting as a whole. It is this quality of distraction that I seek to pursue. Because there are words, and because we are forced to read them in order to acknowledge them as such, we reaffirm their textuality even outside the original medium.
Upon investigation, we find these words are not very easy to read to begin with. We seem to be missing a few letters from "ПЕ Р" and the tilted newspaper-looking-object seems to read "РАННЕЕ УТРО" (early morning). These two experience of uncertainty highlight this textuality. In the first, the reader is left wondering what the word could be. The reader has to experience "ПЕ Р" to then fail to come up with an answer, to then assert that letters are missing and that to have them there would make a legible word. In the second example, the reader "fills in" the missing letters, requiring a reading of what is ("РАНН-ТР-"), a guess of what isn't, and a list of other similar-looking words to make any sense of the thing whatsoever.
We find similar movements in another piece painted two years later
and Olga Rozanova and how even in this medium (or especially in this medium) something of the bookiness is maintained. My working theory is that pieces like this suggest that it is not the medium that is the source of this experience of non-dimensionality, but actually rather that the source is the language itself, and that this experience is internal to it.