Global DIY Revisited (long)
CMacvayia
Russia in the 1910s-20s via correspondence with my friend Patra
Campeanu, inspired by the ill-destined "Global DIY" thread in
alt.zines a month or so ago. I'm hesitant to post it, not in the least
because I'm not an art critic, but what the hell... It'll be in DoG #4,
out in a week or so. It probably helps to have the graphics, too, which
show some of the handwritten covers and sketches which bare a
remarkable resemblance to some of the zines out there...
***************
RealSocialRealism
The Artist's Book and Russian Self-Publishing, 1910-1925
by Cali Ruchala and Patra Campeanu
*****
“As for us, we believe that language must first of all be *language,*
and if it is to remind us of anything, let it remind us of a saw...”
The Word As Such (Slovo kak takovoe),
Alexei Kruchenykh & Velimir Khlebnikov, 1913
*****
Between 1910 and 1919, there existed a magnificent Russian
publishing movement that defied categorization. In its own time, it
was not even given a name. It was seen by it’s creators as an
offshoot of the Russian Futurist movement (remembered today
through its greatest writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky), though it
eventually became a genre unto itself.
As a product of the avant-garde, the works themselves—initially
ignored by the Soviet régime—were later confiscated, lest the spirit
of self-publishing inspire another generation to do the same. Created
too soon to be properly called samizdat (and too firmly Leftist and
pro-Soviet, despite Lenin’s ambivalence), the movement burned out
in the fabulous ashes that devoured the flower of a generation across
Europe; even to determine its life span at nine years is a bit
generous. Most of the creators of these “Artist’s Books” (as a few
modern critics have come to calling them—despite the staid label,
we can’t think of anything better) died in hard circumstances; by the
time of Stalin’s purges and Mayakovsky’s infamous suicide, half were
dead or wasting away from illnesses incurred during the mass
famines, casualties of the “new order” they so naïvely prophesied in
painting and prose.
The first notion of the Artist’s Book, like most influences of Russian
avant-garde painting, came from Paris. But like painting, music, and
of course politics, ideas imported into Russia often spin out on their
own wild trajectories. Poverty, ingenuity, and a nihilism that the
Parisians could only affect combined to transform the Artist’s Book
into a very distant relative of the Parisian “little magazines” they
were descended from.
The Artist’s Book, in the most rudimentary terms, was a collection
of poems, manifestoes and other texts designed by or with an
artist’s eye. Often, the words were written so as to mimic the
marginalia in a kind of demented version of the Medieval illuminated
manuscript. What we would call “drawing” became inseparable from
what we would call “writing”. Pages and often entire Artist’s Books
were handwritten and then handed over to a printer, if only because
the Xerox wouldn’t be created for another fourty years.
As an example of the means and the attitudes of the creators, who
flaunted their poverty compared to the artists of the older
generation who often came from the minor nobility or the
bourgeoisie, the satirical Artist’s Book *A Trap for Judges* (Sadok
sudei), printed in 1910, was a 130 page production printed on the
reverse side of patterned wallpaper samples, with the title glued
and slapped on the front. The ethic can perhaps be summarized by the
poets Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov in their Artist’s Book *The Letter
As Such* (Bukva kak takovoe):
“Of course it is not obligatory that the *recher’* [a neologism or
'coined' word of the type Khlebnikov delighted in, meaning, in ugly
translation, 'wordworker' in the manner of 'ironworker'] also print
the book in his own hand. Instead, it would be better if this were
entrusted to the artist. But there haven’t been any books like this
before...
“Strange that neither Balmont nor Blok [two Russian Symbolist poets
despised by the Futurists], the most modern people, ever got the idea
to entrust their child not to the typesetter, but to the artist.”
And many times, the poets and essayists had no need to ask their
more visually-oriented pals for a helping hand. Unlike their Western
European counterparts, many (most) of the Russian avant-garde
writers had either begun as painters or, like Mayakovsky, worked
their whole lives in both fields.
Also in stark contrast to their Western cousins, the Artist’s Book
authors were almost exclusively the sons and daughters of peasants.
This added a more earthy dimension to even the most abstract works,
as the early and late work of Kasimir Malevich attests. Their support
for the Russian Revolution (which for obvious reasons, interrupted
their work, as the First World War did for Apollinaire, Marinetti, and
the Western avant-garde artists) came not only as intellectuals, but
as people who understood totally the tyranny of the Czar and the
poverty of the provinces outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the
case of Mayakovsky, he was a Communist at the age of 14, when he
was imprisoned for distributing social democratic leaflets—in other
words, years before he wrote a single line of verse or entered the art
academy.
The literati in Czarist Russia traditionally adopted the politics of a
Western-style liberalism—a stance they inherited after Pushkin as
educators on a national scale. Their birth station was usually quite
high in comparison with the general population. But the arts being
one of the few fields in life in which birth is totally irrelevant in
the process of creation, the status of this established caste was
challenged by a new generation of upstarts whose social roots dug
down far deeper, who did not work in sympathy with the peasants
outside the two great cities but, for the most part, called them Mom
and Dad. Of all the Russian artists and writers active in the Artist’s
Book movement, only Natalya Goncharova and the Burliuk brothers
came from what we could call “high” or even “modest” birth. Thus,
there wasn’t the radical chic so irritating in the avant-garde of
Western Europe, but an actual commitment and spiritual investment—
outside of art but acting upon it—in the new social order Lenin was
preaching.
Perhaps it was the same “authentic” radicalism of the Russian
Futurists that made their field so open to the unconventional. At a
time when female artists in Paris were little more than mistresses
or appetizers to fuel Picasso’s lack of passion, we find an amazing
diversity among the creators and collaborators of the Russian
Artist’s Books. Elena Guro and Natalya Goncharova are two of the
most talented women to have been not simply mistresses or wives,
but actual catalysts to the craze for self-publishing. When Kasimir
Malevich called for the destruction of the object in painting in *From
Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,* it seemed to completely lay
waste to the old parlor culture which had made women fit for
flitting wit and modeling for the much more “serious” men. Far too
little has been written on this topic, and on the role of women after
the so-called “Golden Age” of Russian art and literature in the
1920s, in comparison to the volumes that have been written about
Mayakovsky’s hot-and-cold love affair with the woman who was Guro
and Goncharova’s seeming antithesis, the gossipy society magnate
Lily Brik. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see a detailed
study of Goncharova’s *lubki* art and the iconoclastic passion she
shared with Kruchenykh for the legitimacy of children’s art, and
what impact having these artists-contra-concubines in such
prominent roles at the forefront of culture had for women artists in
Soviet times.
There were some fifty Artist’s Books created in the five years
preceding 1917; outside of a few notable exceptions, the movement
by and large ended with the Russian Revolution, the serious business
of their radical creators calling them into other directions. Most
were printed in extremely low circulation owing to the extreme
prejudice the Russian art critics (in the “glossy” art
magazines—note the distinction existed even then) wielded at their
creators. Because of the crudity of printing methods, Russia’s
upheavals and the short life span of their creators (Guro died in
1913; Khlebnikov of chronic malnutrition in the Great Famine of
1922; Malevich of cancer in 1935; Mayakovsky, of course, by his own
hand in 1930), many of the copies left are kept under glass outside
of Russia. Nevertheless, they played no small part in influencing the
more artistically-inclined of the samizdat writers of successive
generations, in particular Yuri Galanskov’s excellent Phoenix
publication of the Khrushchev years. The lack of access or even
thorough reprints is a shame, because to hold these cryptic,
handwritten, decorous pages in your hands must be like caressing a
flame. *
Copyright <c> 1999 by Cali Ruchala and Patra Campeanu
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Cheers,
--
Cali Ruchala
*Delusions of Grandeur* #3 -- Another Bone from the DoGHouse
100 E Walton #31H, Chicago, IL 60611
Dictator, the Communist Dictator list @ http://www.onelist.com
E-mail: cmac...@aol.com
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