Back to Futurism: Russian Artist Books
An area of particular interest for understanding the often chaotic proliferation of artistic forms is the “artist book,” a small but particularly potent force for change in aesthetic phenomena. While early scholarly discourse followed largely along disciplinary lines, tracing literary and artistic developments independently, new research is revealing the importance of this synthetic medium both for bringing artists, theorists and writers together, and for blending affordances of meaning in ambiguous and productively unstable ways. This curriculum-based collaborative research project, “Exploding Tongues,” is positioned thematically to mine a rich trove of digitized archival materials and artifacts in the Getty Research Institute generously made available online, and showcased in a newly-published book Explodity: Sound Image and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (2016), by GRI curator Nancy Perloff.
CSLC 134 / RUSN 334 “Exploding Tongues,” a combined English-language and Russian-language course, adopts a time-backwards approach suggested by the two seminal works that serve as case studies in Perloff’s study: Vzorval’ (Explodity) and MirsKONtsa (Worldbackwards). Just as physicists study the “Big Bang” at the inception of our known universe through minute particle formation in the first nanosecond instances of conceivable time, we inspect the foundational matter of literary and visual phenomena letter by letter, line by line, and shape by shape in a few artifacts and documents of a very brief moment in history from Fall of 1912, through the Summer of 1913, and then extrapolate to a cultural explosion that resounded through the 1930s and around the world.
To test our working hypothesis, our course teamed up with a concurrent class at Occidental College, ARTS 227 “Introduction to Letterpress Printing.” Students worked collaboratively to author, design and create contributions of their own to an artist book miscellany, entitled NthOlogy. By means of artistic production in an analogous task to that facing their Russian counterparts a century before, students learned first hand the underlying principles of an emerging “language” of hybrid image, text and sound: the “verbicovisual” phenomena treated in Perloff’s Explodity.
