New First Unexpected

AVANT GARDE WITHOUT BORDERS

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Untitled (Triptych), 1918. Oil on canvas on board, three panels.  Photo courtesy of Kunsthaus Zürich, © ARS, New York/ProLitteris, Zürich.

My review of MoMA's Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 exhibit at BOMBLOG:

According to Gabrielle Buffet, her husband Francis Picabia invented abstract art in July 1912 on a drunken drive across France with Claude Debussy and Guillaume Apoll...inaire. Mix equal parts artist, composer, and poet in a car at the dawn of the modern age, let it bump around for a while, then throw the doors wide, and out pours a brand new cocktail of color, space, and time.
 

MIND YOUR WATCH!

Raising a flag over the Reichstag, by Yevgeny Khaldei

The original photo (left) was altered (right) by editing the watch on the soldier's right wrist.

 

I'm reading Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which is utterly depressing and endlessly fascinating. Here's an interesting tidbit regarding looting by the Red Army (particularly of wristwatches) and that iconic image of the Soviet soldier raising the Hammer and Sickle above Berlin's Reichstag:

Wristwatches seemed to have almost mythical significance for Russian soldiers, who would walk around wearing half a dozen if they could. An iconic photograph of a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag atop the Berlin Reichstag had to be touched up to remove the wristwatches from the arms of the young hero. In Budapest, the obsession with them remained part of local folklore and may have helped shape local perceptions of the Red Army. A few months after the war, a Budapest cinema showed a newsreel about the Yalta Conference. When President Roosevelet raised his arm while speaking to Stalin, several members of the audience shouted: "Mind your watch!" The same was true in Poland, where for many years Polish children would "play" Soviet soldiers by shouting: "Davai chasyi"--"Give me your watch." A beloved Polish children's television series of the late 1960s included a scene of Russian and Polish soldiers during wartime, camping out in deserted German buildings having amassed a vast collection of stolen clocks.

THE NOISE OF TIME: MAJA BAJEVIC AT THE JAMES GALLERY

In 1915, the British government issued a poster to encourage citizens to “Eat Less Bread.” Far from the early stirrings of the gluten-free movement or the rise of the Nanny State, there was more compelling interest in the idea than the promotion of a healthy lifestyle choice. With the country mobilized for war and few supply ships getting through to England--not to mention that most farmers and workers had already been conscripted into military service--it was a move to both promote food rationing and to rally a flagging, mostly female civilian populace behind an increasingly demoralizing war effort. Women and other civilians could do their share For God and Country by consuming less to make sure that the lads at the front had plenty to eat.

Of course, the poster had a less overt mission: to make people feel good about deprivation--and it worked. The messaging campaign fundamentally altered the context of the food shortages from “Give in to Germany or starve” to “We must do whatever it takes to defeat the enemy.” Civilians willingly tightened their belts and they did feel good about it, channeling the discomfort of family- and self-sacrifice into a patriotic determination that helped the Empire ride out The War to End All Wars.

STARRY NIGHT

My trip through Municipal Purgatory is chronicled over at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood: Starry Night.

This morning, when I paid a visit to a large city agency in Downtown Brooklyn--let’s call it the New York City Department of Discomfiture--it was the surly Claire who indicated with a brusque nod of her head where I should sit. And while my visit was regarding my daughter, I am glad that I did not bring her here with me.

TOO STRONG A WORD

I reviewed Tomaž Šalamun's On the Tracks of Wild Game (translated by Sonja Kravanja) for Tarpaulin Sky:

Šalamun’s poems can be playful and absurd with the language toggling at lightning speed between high and low registers–no doubt proving a translator’s nightmare for Kravanja, also the translator of Šalamun’s The Shepherd, The Hunter (Pedernal Press), which won the Columbia University Translation Prize in 1992. They’re stark and often funny, but sometimes also tender and soaring in historical gravitas. The shorter poems often suggest an immediacy that just isn’t there, luring the reader into an intense identification before suddenly shutting him out. Yet, far from being left frustrated and scratching his head on the wrong side of the door, the surprising new distance invites contemplation...

 

 

FOR THE BIRDS

In Beyonsense, Eurasian artist collective Slavs and Tatars channels its inner Zaum in a celebration of the twists of language across cultures, histories, and geographies. My review of the MoMA show for Bomb, here.

THE LAST PAINTINGS

Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyi
zheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet). 1921.
Oil on canvas. Each panel, 24 5/8 x 20 11/16" (62.5 x 52.5 cm).
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow

I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over.
Basic colors.
Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.

--Rodchenko

Well, I guess that's that, then.

UNREALIZED

Dan Flavin. "monument" 1 for V. Tatlin. 1964. Fluorescent lights and metal fixtures, 8' x 23 1/8" x 4 1/2" (243.8 x 58.7 x 10.8 cm)

Dan Flavin's 'monument' 1 for V. Tatlin" (left) is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes is meant to evoke Tatlin’s colossal-but-unrealized Monument to the Third International (1920) [Right].  

ZAUM

Transrational language created by Alexei Kruchenykh.

4. Thought and speech cannot catch up with the emotional experience of someone inspired; therefore the artist is free to express himself not only in common language (concepts) but also in a private language (a creator is individual), as well as in a language that is transrational--one that doesn't have a definite meaning (is not frozen). A common language is binding; a free one allows more complete expression.

5. Words die, the world stays young forever. An artist has seen the world in a new way, and like Adam, he gives his own names to everything. A lily is beautiful but the word "lily" is soiled with fingers and is raped. For this reason I call a lily: "euy" (ehooee in Russian) and the original purity is established.

3. It is better to substitute for a word one similar in sound, rather than one similar in idea...

1. New verbal form creates a new content, and not vice-versa.

6. Introducing new words, I bring a new content, everything begins to slide (shift)...

7. In art there can be unresolved dissonances--"something unpleasant for the ear"--because there is a dissonance in our soul.

VICTORY OVER THE SUN

All is well that begins well and has no end

El Lissitsky's poster for a post-Revolution production the Futurist play "Victory over the Sun."

The original production sounds like an All Star event with a libretto by Aleksei Kruchonykh, music by Mikhail Matyushin, prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, and stage designer by Kasimir Malevich. The opera, of course, has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first "Black Square" painting (in 1915).