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

Leftward-Leaning: The Diagonals of Communism

INTRODUCTION
In the Baroque era, painters and sculptors sought a visual language that would allow them to strike through the Renaissance ethos of stability and reflect a new era of drama, tension, and emotional dynamism. They found their answer in the diagonal line. Whether projecting upwards or slanting downwards, diagonal lines draw the viewer’s eye in a particular direction, simulating a feeling of movement. However, is movement always progress? Mathematically, diagonals are considered in terms of positive or negative slope. Positive slopes indicate that as x increases, y also increases. This is shown on a graph as a line with its lowest point in the left, increasing in height toward the right. Negative slopes go in the opposite direction, where y decreases as x increases. This gives the impression of a “downward” trajectory, beginning in the top left and moving toward the bottom right. While positive and negative may be neutral descriptors of direction, culturally they take on a moral significance. Positive=good, Negative=bad. Upward=good, Downward=bad. Progress=good, Regress=bad. Fittingly, in compositional analysis, positive diagonals are commonly referred to as “Baroque diagonals,” and negative as “Sinister diagonals.” This terminology may originate from heraldry, which uses the Latin words “dexter” and “sinister” to indicate the right and left sections of a coat of arms. The evolution of the word “sinister” in the English language clearly indicates the conception that anything leftward-leaning is evil or unlucky. Given this culturally and historically-steeped reading of diagonals, what might we make of the fact that directional lines—specifically right-to-left diagonals—appear so frequently in Russian visual culture as a symbol of futuristic progress? …Is a world that launches toward the left a “world backwards”? 

READING LANGUAGERA(Y)DIATE 
From here we launch an inquiry into the socio-political implications of the directional line in Russian visual culture. A directional line may be more accurately referred to as a "ray," or a line that begins at a definitive point and extends infinitely into one direction. The word ray derives from Latin radius, meaning "beam." As with all things that radiate, from light to sound ("radio" derives from the same root), there is an origin point- a source of projection. For Russia, this is Lenin. 

Trajectile Tendencies in Russian ArtPROJECTILE POLITICS: MOVING SOUND, OBJECTS, AND IDEAS THROUGH SPACE ​1, 2, 3, 41, 2, 3, 4

 

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