Don't read this!
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. Once again faced with words, the reader of the painting has a better time with this one, clearly making out words resembling "gas" (газ) and "hat" (шляп), two things which seems useful to a traveler and thus make sense as a part of this scene. If that is the case though, do these words "stand-in" for those objects which would seem so much more at home on a canvas than their linguistic representatives? And if that is the case, is it important to diferentiate these "words" from "pictures"?
It would seem as if in these examples, Popova seems to be playing with the concept of word and image as components of her painting, conflating the two and obscuring their distinctions. In doing so, a number of interesting qualities of both are revealed. For one, we see that text when not presented in the gutenbergian style as described above inline and sequential requires a different kind of treatment from its receiver the reader. We see then that the grammatical and other syntactic components of language that is normally accepted and "everyday" (sentence structure, clauses, etc...) is not internal to the words so much as to their presentation. A sentence is read like a sentence because the Gutenbergian style lends itself to sentence as its presentation of language. Identifying the style then as the more accurate source of the language as words' true then reinforces the thought that when language is presented differently, it then should be read differently. In short, Popova's choice to present these words in this way as opposed to the Gutenbergian confirms both the fact that the Gutenbergian style is significant in the creation of a certain kind of meaning and that she intends a different kind of meaning, one that uses words more as set pieces or tonal objects reinforcing the image in the same way that their image analogues would.
qualities that I believe are taken advan
This question forces us to ask then yet another: if it is taken as given that these words illicit a response of the reader and that they may be representing objects that should/could be in the frame, how do textual words on canvas communicate with us in general?
Overall, my work is still in progress. I have been looking into other artists, namely Olga Rozonova, Kasimir Malevich, and Mikhail Larionov. Each has multiple examples of this phenomenon of the appearance of text in the visual. The working theory of the project is that works from these and other visual artists suggest that it is not the medium that is the source of this experience of textual non-dimensionality, but rather that the source is the language itself, and that this experience is internal to it.
