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• 1 2017-02-23T11:38:06-08:00 The Experience of Language in Art 58 uTOPIAN Prospectus -- Ian R. Lehine image_header 2017-02-28T22:16:58-08:00

  In our investigations of the Russian Avantgarde movements thus far, we have communed with various works in which visual representations of language are central to their composition. This gesture seems at first unusual, as we do not often imagine paintings as containing words, but provides valuable insight regarding the ways in which we experience art through the use of these same letter-forms, similar to those which experiments with zaum poetry yielded below, I will be presenting two separate pieces accompanied by two very different arguments that mirror ways in which language was utilized by these artists.

  Here 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.
  
  Here, another example, this one a piece 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.