Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde Main Menu Back to Futurism: Russian Artist Books Introductory Page by Chris Gilman BookENDS: 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 Practice Book Case Studies Collaborative Research by Case Studies Big Bang: Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural Impacts A Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural Impacts CoaRse CaLIBration ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing" (Pedersen) and CSLC134/RUSN334 "Exploding Tongues" (Gilman) NthOlogy A limited edition collaborative book arts project by students of ARTS 227 (Pedersen) and CSLC 134/RUSN 334 (Gilman), Spring, '17 MANIFESTERS (AB & Kelly): A portfolio of process and products Appendix: A Path Through Russian Avant-Garde Books ILiADS (Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship)

Don't Read This

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In 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.

If 
The next move from there, and the focus of the project in general, would be discussing this "bookiness" of text outside the medium of book or when this medium is disrupted. For now, I am investigating pieces by Lyubov Popova 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.
 
 

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