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

The Tool and the Hand: Linearity in Non-Art

The Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century developed out of the explosive period preceding and immediately following the Russian Bolshevik revolution. Emanating from the Russian Futurists of the 1910s and culminating in the Soviet realism of the 1930s, this movement spawned many influential figures. Among these artists was El Lissitzky, a constructivist whose career was characterized by an unmistakable venture from the world of art without social purpose into the world of design, marked by social efficacy. Lissitzky’s mentor and founder of the Suprematist art movement, Kazimir Malevich, remarkably opposed the postrevolutionary constructivist ideology of rendering social utility from art, despite his place at the origin of Constructivism itself. Distancing his art from its traditional place as merely a service to the state and church, he created art that existed by itself for itself, originating in a place of subjective feeling rather than objective utility, as with Constructivism. Additionally, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, a Russian Futurist and co-author of a series of art books, concerned himself primarily with laying bare the device, a term, representative of the movement to which he belonged, often used to describe the Futurists’ attempts to re-sensitize the reader through the defamiliarization of artistic and literary conventions. The bridge between these artists can be found through the examination of the line by itself, whether it be a line on a page or a line of text. The following text will explore this line as it appears throughout these early art movements of the Russian avant-garde, and how, through recontextualization, the line becomes an artistic device to direct the viewer’s gaze. In the spirit of laying bare the device the artists of this time stripped away its facade and revealed to their audience the line as it is, the line as such. 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. 

The Gutenberg design is the well established convention of orienting lines of text on a page from left to right, top to bottom. When a custom becomes so ingrained in the social consciousness, expectations tend to overwrite minute discrepancies. In regards to the Gutenberg standard, all books and printed materials generally subscribe to this form, therefore the custom becomes the expectation. When this happens, convention takes over and any unique features are overlooked. This is extremely limiting to artists exploring the full expressive potential of their medium. As Janecek describes in Kruchenykh Contra Gutenberg, the Russian Futurists placed these conventions on display by de-standardizing these customs, namely the organization of lines of text on a page. A. Kruchenykh, a Russian Futurist, co-authored a series of art-books between 1912 and 1916 to do just that. In order to understand the methods they utilized in laying bare the device, the significance of the lines of text themselves must be understood. The Gutenberg design works because the lines of text direct the reader’s gaze; they guide the viewer’s eyes in order to create a linear narrative. So what happens when these lines of text are fragmented and distorted, when the reader is no longer able to rely purely on expectation for where to look next? The reader becomes aware of the device in use.

Many of the poems throughout the Futurist Art Books, poems such as Axmet by Aleksandr Kruchenykh, challenged Gutenbergian notions of page structure. If we look as the lines of text as examples of the line as such, these lines direct the reader's gaze around the page. In deviating from expectation by being written sporadically around the page and at different angles, the lines in this poem subvert the accepted principles of page structure; they force the reader to read the text in a new way allowing them to see the page as a whole, rather than just an instance of a page in a book.

Continuing with the example of Axmet, throughout the page are handprinted capital letters, scattered among letters printed by a printing press. In opposition to the handwritten capital letters the standardized printed letters call back to the Gutenberg standard, but challenge it as a whole by being interspersed with handwritten type. Making up the very structure of these handwritten capital letters, the line as such calls into question the standardization of each letter within a poem. Here the line as such is handwritten and imprecise. Looking at another example, A. Kruchenykh's short story in Mirskontsa, a similar phenomenon is present, but on a different scale. Here, in what is likely Kruchyenyk's handwriting, the mixed usage of handwritten letters in print, that is multiple individual lines creating a cohesive whole letter; and handwritten letters in script, that is one continuous line, the shape of which creates the letter.

Finally, just as important, are the lines of Rayonism. Rayonism was a style of art created by Mikhail Larionov, in which an image as a whole is constructed from lines, or "rays of light." These imprecise lines are not simply the outlines, or the components of some greater form, but rather from the imprecise messy tangle of these lines, a shape precipitates. Take Larionov's rayonism drawing for Kruchenykh's "dyr bul shchyl." The lines at the bottom of the page are said to be a picture of a naked woman. Even knowing this, it is hard to see, but norms are definitely called into question; figures are usually drawn by combining lines to create an outline or define the figure. Here, however, the lines are not part of the figure at all, but rather they are rays of light, that present the figure without representing it. Where previously convention dictated the use of lines as only to precisely outline a given form, Larionov centralizes imprecise lines, abstracted from the form.

Following the progression of the Russian avant-garde we come to its next most significant figure, Malevich. Beginning with his most famous work, The Black Square, Malevich created the Suprematist art movement and the mentor of many who would go on to become Constructivists. Suprematism took much from the art books of the Russian Futurists in that it subverted regularity and reproducibility. Instead of challenging Gutenberg's conventions the Suprematist movement challenged the conventions of formal art. Suprematist works were almost always a collection of basic abstract shapes with the only hint of formality sometimes being the title itself.

Interestingly there was not much of a presence of lines as such in the Suprematist movement, however, what precipitated from it was full of them. Many of Malevich's students went on to start the Constructivist movement, coinciding with the rise of Stalin and concerning itself with the idea of "non-art." Art, to them, had no social utility or value and therefore must be replaced by something that did. Much of the work that the Constructivists created, juxtaposed against the crude drawings in the Futurist art books and the rough hand drawn nature that was characteristic of Malevich's Suprematism, was very precise, crafted with a compass or some other mechanical tool in order to be reproducible and usable by society at large. The Russian Avant-garde had come full circle.

In the volatile time immediately surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution, cultural ideologies shifted significantly. Desiring collectively to move away from traditionalist values and conceptions of art, the Soviet people moved towards accessibility and social utility. This change affected the Constructivists as well. Beginning with creating "precise" art, that is, art which can be reproduced, their ideals manifested into "non-art." Tired of traditional art centered around aestheticism, which they considered a Bourgeois luxury, the Constructivists adopted mechanical tools to create pieces that were reproducible and therefore had social utility, in order to distance themselves from the past. If the hand is the individual, by abstracting the art from the artist, the tool becomes the collective. The tool is regularized, accessible, and reproducible.

Looking to Constructivist "non-art" and the more explicit "art" that preceded it, notable is the resurgence of the line as such, something markedly missing from Malevich's Suprematist works. In Malevich's work, any and all lines only seem to be components and outlines of other shapes. There is a marked lack of the line as such. The lines here are also notably irregular, unique. They are imprecise, and therefore irreproducible.

One of Malevich's students who went on to identify under the constructivist label was Aleksandr Rodchenko. In Rodchenko's pieces he plays with lines unaccompanied by shapes or other objects as with his peer El Lissitzky, who will be discussed below. Contrasted with Malevich, there is a radical difference in technique, made clear by the precision of the lines in addition to the very existence of a line as such by itself. Looking at Rodchenko's Construction No. 128, the most notable deviation from Suprematism is the lack of abstract shapes, like those present in Malevich's. While still overlapping with suprematism in its minimalism and abstraction, it is notably different from previous works within the genre. Important to note about these lines is that they expose the tool with which they were created, they are not unique, nor, as with Malevich's shapes, but rather they are reproducible, regularized.

Also among Constuctivist students of Malevich, was El Lissitzky, whose early pieces, called Prouns, clearly called back to suprematism; Prouns were usually three-dimensional shapes on a white background, clearly reminiscent of suprematism.The shapes and more importantly lines, however, are significantly more precise here, laying bare the mechanical tools with which they were painted, i.e. compass. In Lissitzky's Proun Vrashchenie (rotation) the curvilinear line, as with "A Proun" and "Proun 99," which will be investigated below, orients the picture and ties the discrete parts into a cohesive whole. If the Constructivists' attempts to distance themselves from art as a solely aesthetic venture by incorporating standardization and reproducibility into their processes was not clear enough, then El Lissitzky laid bare his device, the compass, in his untitled piece.

Returning to Larionov, one might wonder how the lines of Lissitzky compare to the lines of Larionov, with seemingly opposite techniques, one preferring the imprecision of handwriting, while the other prefers precise lines, whose construction is aided by a mechanical tool in order to be both reproducible and regularized. The two have a lot more in common than one might imagine. They both subvert the conventions of their particular periods, the conventions are different between them and therefore their techniques of subversion will be as well. In this piece by Larionov it is impossible to definitively say whether this shape is an ear, the Cyrillic letter "C" or both. In this case the imprecision of the line lends to its ambiguity and serves its purpose of dismantling specific signification. Lissitzky subverts norms as well, however in a much different way. In these two pieces a cube is presented; the cube is actually three smaller and simpler geometric shapes, calling back to Malevich's Suprematism. Were the piece only composed of the grid and the cube, we may not even perceive the cube as a cube, but rather a collection of three 2D shapes. However, the two curvilinear lines situate the cube in three dimensional space by orienting the cube in terms of the grid. Here he uses Malevich's motif of two-dimensional shapes on a plain background. He modifies the technique by using the line as such and the aid of mechanical tools to situate the two-dimensional shapes in such a way that they become three-dimensional, challenging convention and subverting the norm, just as Larionov does, not ten years earlier.

In comparing the Constructivists with the Futurists and establishing a progression, a disconnect between the Futurist work and the work of the Constructivists emerges. In this progression of the Russian Avantgarde, Constructivism arguably developed from the very Rayonism established by Larionov in the Futurist art-books. However due to the natural shift in art as time progressed, what was contemporary became antiquated, and therefore the techniques and the ideologies diverged significantly. The one unifying binary opposition throughout this history is the question of the hand. How does the use of a tool or the decision to not use a tool, subvert and oppose similar conventions in different contexts? The answer, like most, is complicated. For the Futurists of the early 1900's, the lack of regularity and tool use was radical in that it challenged the formal society within which Russia had existed for so long. This led the way for the revolution, exemplifying the desire for renewal. After the revolution, the Constructivists looked towards doing away with the idea of "art" all together. Aided by mechanical tools they subverted the norm by challenging the notion that art is unique and irreproducible. Although existing in different times, and utilizing different means of subversion, these Russian artists laid bare the line as a revolutionary tool in a revolutionary time.

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