Sound-Image Shape: Nudes, Demons, and Zaum Poetry
What is interesting is the occasion for what I will call the 'deliberate nude/woman' in Mirskontsa. This 'deliberate nude/woman' is noted as such because the existence of such a figure in a work that seeks to come to the limit/rule of sound-images necessarily must fit in the system. Initial insights about a 'worldbackwards' represented through a tetrad of artists center on the linkage between a naive eroticism--one that barely even attempts to call the reader into seduction, let alone sexual fervor--and sound. Following this linkage, the consideration of the sound of the sensual-- especially as it relates to the natural and the supernatural-- becomes ground for analysis. Notably, Natalia Goncharova (who late in life would marry the Rayonist Mikhail Larionov) was the artist for each of these images. Further, the drawing of the goddess Diana is painted in collaboration with the poetic text, so that the figure does not exist in complete distinctness from language. As a result, it is easier to understand the importance of handmade books as artifacts for the transformative reproduction of poetry/power.
These incidents of form (signified) meeting sound (poetry) recall a poetic style that was being developed simultaneously to the production of these texts: zaum poetry. Zaum, epitomized by Aleksei Kruchenykh, constitutes poetry at the margins. Written in defiance of any rationality, this poetry focused heavily on the "beyonsense" play of syllabic meaning-making. Zaum can be understood to function as the nudity of language-- an erotic system of sounding preterdetermined to communicate Nothing and Universality as fused and bound. As for the dominance of female figures in Mirskontsa, perhaps a more nuanced articulation of Neo-Primitivism will be extrapolate their sovereignty across handmade texts in the Russian avant garde.
