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

The Tool and the Hand: Linearity in Non-Art

Lines, so often, are metonymic with some greater form. Generally, lines signify something more abstracted, such as an image or a letter. Rarely are we confronted with a line, which is not a component of some greater form, but in fact exists by itself; the line as such. These lines as such are found throughout the many subversive new art forms, which precipitated during the explosive period preceding and immediately following the Russian Bolshevik revolution. The following text will concern itself with this line, specifically how it is portrayed in the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, more specifically the the Russian Futurist neo-primitivist art books of the 1910s and the Russian Constructivist “non-art” of the 1920s and later. In the investigation of these lines a particular binary opposition emerges, concerning the way in which these lines were drawn, synthesis by hand or by intermediary mechanical tool.

how do they direct the viewer’s gaze?

binary opposition between mechanical and hand
gutenberg mechanical, but regularized ~ the dominant

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