Explodity Sound Image and Word in Russian Furturist Book Art

Nancy Perloff, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Give-and-take in Russian Futurist Book Art (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2016), 208 pp.

In 1910, artists and writers in Russia gathered around the painter David Burliuk and the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Vasily Kamensky to form the literary group Hylaea, one of the primeval iterations of Russian Futurism. Resistant to tradition and to ideological compromise, the Russian Futurists questioned the aesthetic focus on Western Europe and advocated a motility congenital on distinctly Russian sources. The grouping embraced chance, intuition, the irrational, and the unexpected, exploring an anarchic-revolutionary mode that historic art without rules. At the heart of the Russian Futurist movement was an insistence on the poetics of the absurd, of non-language and non-sense, and of alogism. Transcending linguistic barriers and structures, Alexei Kruchenykh invented zaum (meaning "across sense"), a linguistic communication constructed of Slavic roots upon which futurity Russian art could be based. Russian Futurism saw itself as an artful philosophy that could revolutionize art and life, transforming our understanding of the earth through the unexpected and new.

At the core of this rejection of the traditional and the accented lies the Futurist book, a model for deconstructing language and exploring the irrational foundations of the spoken and written give-and-take. The plethora of Futurist books produced during the period 1910-1915 reveal an artistic reaction against the perception of fine art as being homogeneous. Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Burliuk, and Elena Guro, among others, embraced zaum as a means of upending poetry and appealing to intuition. It is this Futurist volume fine art which Nancy Perloff takes as her field of study in Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Volume Art. Evolving from her 2008-2009 exhibition at the Getty Museum titled Tango with Cows: Volume Art of the Russian Avant-garde, 1910-1917 and farther research at institutions in Russia, Explodity explores, over half dozen chapters, the touch of these artists' books in terms of a cardinal reorientation of our perception of linguistic communication. Following an introduction centered around Malevich'due south relationship to nonobjective painting and the West, Chapter i addresses the lives of the poets and painters who collaborated on the book Mirskontsa, arguing that their origins in the provinces were disquisitional to the evolution of their Futurist texts. Chapter 2 investigates the importance of audio in these texts and the Futurist principles laid out in multiple manifestos, informed past Russian Ceremonial. Chapters three and 4 offer detailed analyses of Mirskontsa and Vzorval', respectively, and Affiliate Five concludes with a consideration of the global afterlife of these texts throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.

Perloff'south thesis centers around i crucial point: that Futurist books uniquely fuse the exact, the visual, and the auditory, which necessitates that they "be listened to as well as seen and read" (p. 7). The writer lends her expertise in musicology to build a detailed and thorough reading of two books in particular, Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval' (Explodity). The result is a valuable consideration of the interaction betwixt modernist music and the visual arts in Russia during the heady avant-garde flow of 1910-1915. From the offset of her study, Perloff emphasizes the of import commonalities between the Futurist books of the period under consideration. In all of them, poets and painters collaborated to produce a dialogue betwixt transrational sound poetry and imagery that tended towards abstraction. It is this interaction of sound, written word, and image that makes Futurist books so distinct. Having established this compelling premise for the book, however, Perloff engages with her subject area more obliquely, focusing in the introduction on a comparison of Russian and Western European paintings.

Perloff'due south reason for engaging with the topic in this manner is that pre-war Russian avant-garde painting "conveys the aforementioned polarities that narrate the interdisciplinarybook" (p. 3). What follows is a juxtaposition of Malevich's painting Forenoon in the Village after a Snowstorm (19120 with Vincent van Gogh's The Sower (1888) and Paul Gauguin'due south Tahitian Women (1891). The comparison serves Perloff to celebrate Malevich'southward invention of a new visual language: she notes the artist's apply of "colorful, steely trapezoids with conical heads" and "monumental, machinelike" forms with "strong and heavy torsos, heightened book and mass, and quixotic sexuality" (p. 3). In Malevich'southward paintings of the pre-Revolution years, Perloff argues, we observe a simultaneous naturalism and mechanization that foreshadows like dichotomies in Futurist books. Investigating the roots of Malevich'southward, Picasso's and van Gogh'south painterly brainchild, co-ordinate to the author, provides a framework for understanding the visual vocabulary considered subsequently in the text.

However, Perloff'southward choice to ground her report of Futurist books in an analysis of these paintings does not feel particularly successful, and the productivity of the aforementioned juxtapositions is unclear. Malevich's paintings are, every bit Perloff accurately observes, "a far cry from the romanticized peasants of Vincent van Gogh and the exotic Tahitians of Paul Gauguin" (p. 5), simply the paintings were created xx-odd years autonomously, during a period when radical innovation occurred on a yearly basis. Is a comparison between these artists, spanning decades of turmoil and innovation, truly productive? What of Fernand Léger, for example, whose paintings from the same yr share, at least superficially, a correlative visual vocabulary to those by Malevich? Does the comparing eternalize Perloff'southward thesis regarding the fusion of the verbal, visual, and auditory? I would argue not. Given Perloff's insistence, early in the post-obit affiliate, that Futurist books posed completely unlike challenges to paintings, her prolonged focus on Malevich's painterly relationship to artists similar van Gogh, Picasso, and Gauguin seems tangential.

Perchance the two about important points established in the volume's introduction are those focused on the dichotomy of East and West and on the nonlinearity of zaum. Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Malevich, among others, felt a deep connection to Russia, its roots and traditions, and became preoccupied with Slavic primitivism. These artists drew on a broad range of "primitive" fine art forms in Russia for inspiration, included kamennye baby (stone women), erstwhile Russian illuminated manuscripts, miniatures, wood carvings, icons, mitt-painted religious woodcuts, lubki (woodcuts), folk art, and embroidery. In their denunciation and rejection of Western culture, the Russian Futurists envisioned themselves as legendary leaders, channeling the mythic Russian past. Perloff explains how the illustrated book became the ideal framework within which to examine this primitivist impulse, assuasive artists to be provocative and iconoclastic while simultaneously looking to Russia'southward history for a source of identity. For Khlebnikov, the Futurist poet, the ancient Slavic roots of the Russian language became the means past which to return to the origins of language more than mostly, adapting modern Russian to a universal linguistic communication. Perloff's elucidation of these points and her emphasis on the artists' ties to the provinces, Russian folklore, and the country's "primitive" roots serves as an of import foundation for the residuum of her volume. Understanding the reason for this deconstruction of archaic myth and linguistic communication provides clarity for Perloff's later assay of Mirskontsa and Vzorval' and underscores her thesis that these texts rely on the auditory dimension of language.

The determined break of the Russian Futurists from Western models generated a series of innovations that redefined our relationship to linguistic communication and audio. Perloff advisedly explicates how zaum, a neologism congenital from the preposition za(across) and the substantive um (the mind), became a linguistic communication where sound took precedence over the written word. Sentence structures were dismantled, their linearity cleaved, and the give-and-take itself became self-referential – "A work of art is the art of the word," as Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov alleged in their manifesto "The Word as Such" in 1913. In these books, the give-and-take became the master "consequence of art," an object of creation rather than a means of advice. By emphasizing the visual and phonetic properties of words, the poets demonstrated words' existence as objects with their own intrinsic value. Kruchenykh'due south and Khlebnikov's books radically disrupted linearity (both in space and time), adamant sound as being a signifier, and introduced readers to P.D. Ouspensky'due south theories regarding hyperspace and the fourth dimension. These poets introduced nonlinearity to their poems (in which narrative had already been dismantled), allowing for free movement backwards and forrard in fourth dimension. Shifting temporality created unpredictability and stripped words of their signifying office. Thus, the concept of "worldbackwards" became a key principle of Futurist aesthetics. These aspects of Russian Futurism are, by now, well-known, but Perloff's purpose in reintroducing them is to lay the foundation for a detailed analysis of the individual words, sentences, and pages in the two texts key to Explodity.

The introduction and outset chapter of Explodity are perhaps the weakest in the book, lacking the focus and detailed analysis of Chapters Two and 3. Also, at times, the introduction feels just tangentially related to the central thesis of the volume, as information technology moves from a give-and-take of Futurist volume art to a comparison of paintings spanning the turn of the twentieth century. Explodity takes time to gain speed, providing ununiform and fractional biographies of some of the artists and poets that do piffling to eternalize Perloff'due south later statement. The author argues that the backgrounds of the artists were of import; that their working-class origins in the provinces of the Russian empire informed their Futurist ideology. However, some of the artists involved in Russian Futurism grew up in urban areas, supported by successful middle-course families. Those biographies which do not fit this statement seem rather conveniently relegated to the margins.

Perloff argues her thesis nearly successfully in the ii cardinal chapters, which investigate, respectively, the radical plays on language in Mirskontsa and Vzorval'. Mirskontsa, unremarkably translated as "worldbackwards," is a neologism composed of three words: mir (globe), south (from), and konets (the stop): "world from the end." The book was published in Moscow in Nov 1912, and was a collaborative project between Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Goncharova, and Larionov. Through close, detailed analysis of individual pages, investigating the human relationship between prototype, text, and audio, Perloff elucidates the  visual, verbal, and auditory multiplicity of the Futurist project, borrowing the term "verbivocovisual"(The term "verbivocovisual" was introduced by James Joyce in his book Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. The concept was later adopted by the Brazilian concrete poets, considered in the final chapter of this book.) to define this central element of the texts. "Verbivocovisual," a term introduced in Chapter Two but not fully defined until Chapter 5, describes a text'southward "adherence to intermedia" (p. 51) and the totality of juxtaposing text with imagery and the auditory. The lack of clarification near the meaning of this concept creates defoliation initially, only Perloff chooses to demonstrate its significant through her analysis of Mirskontsa and Vzorval', slowly revealing a complete pic of its meaning. Mirskontsa is a collage text in which the page itself becomes the site of activeness, upon which text, prose, zaum, and primitivist cartoon integrate. The handcrafted quality of these books was significant; thus, every single copy of Mirskontsa had its variations both in the comprehend design and the contents, with new poems, drawings, and typographic designs changing between iterations. The book is thus a living, changing work of art; not concretized, but fluid in its meaning and impact. Perloff notes that, as a event, "no re-create of Mirskontsa is final" (p. 100); the artists involved subverted the standard multiple of a book to create private expressions of Futurist credo.

Perloff'due south thoughtful analysis of the touch on of words, both nonsensical and real, in Mirskontsa, and their interaction with the imagery surrounding them, demonstrates the inaccessibility of these artworks to those not familiar with the sounds of the Russian linguistic communication's roots, and thus underscores the of import contribution Perloff makes to scholarship. Perloff opens up these texts for a full general audition, unpacking Futurist words and analyzing their roots on the reader's behalf. Her analysis of the linguistic communication brings to life the applesauce and comic chemical element of the volume for novice readers, while grounding the certificate contextually. Lines such every bit "Let united states all be heads of lettuce/Let the states not let knives upset us" are situated within the context of Khlebnikov'southward experimentation with Russian Ceremonial. Perloff convincingly discusses elements of the text as "evocations of the materiality of sound" (p.109) and demonstrates precisely how the Futurists created "the discussion fabricated strange." Perloff'southward emphasis on the audio quality of these works is perhaps her biggest contribution to the scholarship on the Futurist book. She argues persuasively that Futurist books must be heard as well as read and that they are thus early on examples of sound poetry. Given the centrality of sound to Perloff's thesis, and her accent on the verbivocovisual, the inclusion in the book of online links to audio recordings of numerous poems from both Mirskontsa and Vzorval', including "Spasi nozhnitsy rezhut," "Nash kochen," "Zabyl povesit'sia," and "Vzorval' ognia,"  all recorded by Vladimir Paperny, is of enormous value.

In Chapter Four, Perloff extends her analysis to a shut reading of Vzorval' (Explodity), published (in two editions) in June and Dec 1913 and including visual elements past Olga Rozanova. The author focuses on the relation of sound and prototype and the fashion in which the verbivocovisual exists partway between abstraction and figuration. She argues that in Vzorval', Kruchenykh purposely defamiliarized words, neologisms, and morphemes by placing them in unfamiliar and strange contexts, thereby producing a volume that embraces nonreferentiality to an fifty-fifty greater degree than Mirskontsa. Through the author's close assay of written words, phonic rhymes, and semantic differences, the reader understands how "audio as such" becomes the content of the work, liberating language from meaning and logic. In Vzorval', zaumembraces indeterminacy and relinquishes whatsoever connection to significant, leaving the reader free to experiment with the interpretation of sound. Once again, the necessity of beingness able to hear the audio recordings becomes clear: if sound takes primacy over text or illustration, the reader can only appreciate the "abstruse, sonic materiality" (p. 124) of the zaum words through hearing them. Perloff's accent on the phonic quality of Mirskontsa and Vzorval' raises questions nearly the longevity of these works, yet. If the verbivocovisual is so important, are the texts inaccessible to those not conversant in Russian linguistics?

Having established the innovation and singularity of Russian Futurist books, Perloff argues that the works plant a benchmark from which to consider the afterlife of the Futurist book and the impact (or lack thereof) of Thousand irskontsaworldwide. The supposed answers to these questions class the discipline of her final chapter, in which she addresses the works of El Lissitzky, the OBERIU poets, the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos, the Scottish poet and visual artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the French sound poet Henri Chopin in order to find in them echoes of Russian Futurism. The force of these tentative connections is variable; the associations with El Lissitzky'south book Dlia golosa seem tenuous, while Ian Hamilton Finlay'southward exploration of the verbivocovisual reveals a clear dialogue across time. Perloff argues that in these examples one observes shared traditions: live reading, the devastation of connections between words and their meaning, the commemoration of hybrid media on the borders of poesy, books, visual language, and sound. Perloff establishes Lissitzky, the OBERIU poets, Augusto de Compos, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin as heirs to Russian Futurism, carrying on aspects of its experiment across time.

Still, the productivity of Perloff'due south analysis of these multiple artists spanning decades and continents is questionable, and it remains unclear if her investigation bolsters the key argument of the book. While the experiments of the OBERIU poets can be seen as a direct legacy of Russian Futurism, the Brazilian concretists formulated a poesy based on the phonic dimension of transrational words without having knowledge of the Futurists. Furthermore, Perloff herself admits that the distinctive element of Futurist book fine art –with sound as an integral component – is non present in Lissitzky's piece of work. What, so, is the outcome of this analysis? Perloff argues that the lack of similarity in later art movements demonstrates the distinctness and originality of the Russian Futurist idea; in combining the visual, physical, and auditory through their verbivocovisual experimentation, they achieved something that has never since been created. This concluding idea seems to contradict much of her argumentation in the chapter, though, concluding the affiliate on a note of confusion and diminishing the forcefulness of her before chapters.

Explodity's strengths prevarication in its detailed exploration of the human relationship betwixt zaum and visual material in Mirskontsa and Vzorval'. Its weaknesses are in the discussions outside of those central focal points. In the capacity bookending Perloff's main discussion, detailed consideration of secondary points sometimes seems tangential and serves as a distraction from the (persuasive) central argument. The book is slow to build momentum and the dissimilarity between the muddled introduction and the compelling content of Chapters Two and Three indicate where the strengths of Perloff'southward thesis lie. In Affiliate Five, Perloff seems undecided on her ain conclusions regarding the afterlife of Futurist book art and this indecision shapes a sometimes-contradictory argument.

Despite these strictures, Perloff has produced an important analytical book that will serve every bit a valuable resource for time to come scholars of the subject. Her written report breaks new ground in examining the multiplicity of connections between the concrete, linguistic, and visual in Russian Futurist books and underscores the autonomy of the word as cocky-sufficient for the generation of meaning. Explodity is thus a valuable contribution to the field, elucidating the specific ways by which Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh liberated language and focused on the process of creation equally a goal in itself. Through this study, Perloff brings to life the eccentricity and radicality of the Russian Futurist aesthetic and encourages the reader to consider more closely the interaction between audio and word in Futurist fine art.

Eleanor Stoltzfus

Eleanor Stoltzfus received her Ph.D. in the History of Fine art from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2019. Her dissertation reconsidered the photography of Lucia Moholy within the context of Weimar modernism. She is an independent curator and editor currently based in London.

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Source: https://artmargins.com/explodity-sound-image-and-word-in-russian-futurist-book-art/

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