Wild, Flaming, Explosive

‘Zaum’ and Russian Avant-Garde Books

While most of the Getty’s collections focus on art created before the dawn of Modernism, the Getty Research Institute collects and exhibits works from the 20th century with vigor. A new show, ‘Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917,’ brings to light the birth of the modernist movement in pre-revolutionary Russia and showcases the breadth of the Getty’s holdings.   During a recent tour of the show for the Palisadian-Post, exhibition curator and Palisades resident Nancy Perloff began by explaining the title, illustrative of a quickly changing Russia: the agricultural, feudal landscape represented by the word ‘cow,’ and ‘tango,’ suggesting the new, the Western, the urban. Bring these two together and you enter the zany, quirky world of Russian poets and artists of the era, in which zaum or ‘beyonsense,’ experimental poetry with indeterminate meaning, was joined with drawing and printmaking to create an important chapter in the history of the book and of the avant-garde.   For many, the term Russian avant-garde might invoke the geometrical abstractions as evidenced in the Suprematist work of Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitsky, but the period of ‘Tango with Cows’ exhibits the artistic variety and eccentricity of a society dealing with political upheaval, famine and industrialization.   In the earliest books in the show, Perloff underscores the ‘presence of the Slavic past, both the secular and the sacred.’ The exhibition’s first section highlights the self-published book, ‘Worldbackwards,’ created by Alexei Kruchenykh, featuring the character Akhmet in drawings and described through nonsensical poetry rubber-stamped onto the pages. The book, staple-bound, exudes a handmade aesthetic, a quality that can be fully appreciated when holding the facsimile the Getty created for this exhibition.   Another figure of Russian culture, the devil, makes an appearance in ‘A Game in Hell,’ a narrative poem about a card game between devils and sinners. Every flip of the page (in an electronic copy perusable on a monitor in the show or online at www.getty.edu) reveals a slightly more absurd scene than the preceding, and playing with images of Russian icons and the mass media, an ironic clashing of the sacred and the secular.   Many of the books of this period focus on the sound of modernity and urbanism as expressed in zaum, or transrational poetry, which explodes on the page. For Kruchenykh, zaum was ‘wild, flaming, explosive,’ freeing the imagination from the narrow confines of daily speech. Fittingly, the part of the show featuring zaum poetry is called ‘Explodity,’ after a 1913 book by Kruchenykh, Goncharova, Malevich, Nikolai Kulbin and Olga Rozanova featuring nonsense words, valued for their sounds rather than their meaning.   Perloff studied Russian for two years while working on this exhibition with her research assistant Allison Pultz, a Ph.D. student in Slavic language and literature at USC. In the gallery, she played a recording of a poem and pointed to the translations, many by Pultz, of zaum poems. One page of ‘Explodity,’ for example, translates as ‘NONIES, THE DESTROYers.’   Vasily Kamensky’s 1914 book, ‘Tango with Cows,’ closes the show. It’s the first piece that resembles the work of the Italian Futurists, with its playful type and clean, streamlined look. The book is printed on wallpaper sections with the upper outside corner cut off, so as to disrupt a normal book page. The poetry is ‘ferro-concrete,’ comprising lists of objects and activities associated with modern life, from types of music to STDs. One page records the paintings and sculptures in the state art museum. After the Revolution, many of the Russian Futurists scattered, although a group, including Kruchenykh and Kamensky, continued their zaum experiments in an artists’ colony in Tbilisi. Of the group, Perloff notes the centrality of women, notably Goncharova and Rozanova. Rozanova, Kruchenykh’s wife, died from diphtheria in 1918, while Goncharova, commissioned to design stage sets by the Ballets Russes, moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death in 1962.   For Perloff, the exhibition has been part of her journey into the Russian avant-garde, which she first studied as a graduate student at UCLA. In the 1990s, she curated an El Lissitzky exhibition at the Institute that included books from the late teens and 1920s. ‘I had always been aware that these earlier books were in our collection, but that nobody had done an exhibition on those pieces,’ she said.   The presentation of the materials was important because, Perloff noted, ‘the books feature extraordinary writing, drawing and imagery on every page.’ When the curators began the show three years ago they knew they would have both facsimiles and electronic versions of the books’ pages. The sounds came later.   ’This is the first exhibition of Russian avant-garde books to bring the issue of sound to the forefront,’ said Perloff, who has long been interested in the history of sound. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology, and has recently been writing on Russian sounds poetry, which she characterizes as ‘beautiful, striking and expressive. I want to open this world up to people.’   In addition to the recordings in the show and online, Perloff has organized a reading, ‘Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sounds Poetry,’ on February 4, featuring contemporary sounds poets reading their own work as well as the zaum poetry of the Russian Futurists. The next day a symposium, ‘The Book as Such in the Russian Avant-Garde,’ will gather leading scholars and artists, many of whom visited the Getty and participated in working sessions with Perloff while the exhibition was taking shape. She notes that this interdisciplinary group will ‘find ways of reading these books through word, image and sound, and contextualizing them in different ways. One scholar reads these books in light of the popular press at the time; another examines the role of suicide in the books and in Russian society; a third looks at their reputation and reception in the book market. How did these books get into collections in this country?’   The Getty holdings were purchased from a private collector in Paris in the 1980s, before Perloff arrived at the Getty. Since then, she’s made choice purchases, including the ‘Tango with Cows,’ to give the Getty one of the strongest collections of Russian avant-garde books in the United States.   The works in the show, although nearly a century old, speak to our precarious position. Perloff said. ‘There’s something uncanny about seeing these books from the early 20th century evincing apocalyptic feelings, humorous but with a sense that everything is collapsing around us.’   ’Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917′ is on view at the Getty Research Institute until April 19. Admission is free, but reservations are required for the poetry reading on the evening of February 4 and the daylong symposium on February 5. Visit www.getty.edu or call 310-440-7300.