Change the World and Tweak the Bourgeoisie

[Dave Monroe]

>From Holland Carter, "Change the World and Tweak the
Bourgeoisie," NY Times, Friday, March 29th, 2002 ...

   "As a final offering before going dark on West 53rd
Street for a three-year expansion, the Museum of
Modern Art has come up with a very MOMA show. Titled
'The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934,' it's a
classic combination of visual élan and radical ideas,
of art graced with a patina of age but firmly linked
to the present. 
   "The 300 books on display were produced toward the
beginning of the 20th century; the earliest dates from
1910, the year Tolstoy died....

[...]

"... many of them textbook icons of modern art
history, were designed and often handmade — printed,
collaged, painted, annotated, bound — by some of
Russia's greatest artists, which means some of the
greatest anywhere. You probably know most of them:
Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky, El
Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Liubov' Popova, Aleksandr
Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin. Here they
are all seen working in top, audacious form.

[...]

   "An early example is a pushy little book-size
manifesto titled 'A Slap in the Face of Public Taste:
In Defense of Free Art, Verse, Prose, Essays,' cobbled
together in 1912 by the the poet Velimir Khlebnikov,
the artists David Burliuk and Vasily Kandinsky, and
other members of the self-styled Russian Futurist
group. It makes loud, rude noises in its call to
'throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy overboard from
the ship of modern times,' but purely as book design,
with its plain burlap cover and blocky letters, it's a
fizzle.

[...]

   "Exactly the opposite is true of most of the other
work in the show...."

[...]

   "Multimedia books with titles like 'Explodity,'
'Learn Artists! Poems,' 'Lacquered Tights' and 'Baby
Camels of the Sky' were the collective work of several
hands. They brought together cartoons, Neo-Primitivist
narratives, abstract collages, potato-stamped
decorative designs and poetry of all shapes, sizes and
meanings.
   "Cheap production material was the norm: school
notebook paper, scraps of patterned wallpaper.
Printing methods varied from lithography to carbon
paper to a proto-mimeograph technique known as
hectography. Books seldom had tables of contents.
Illustrations were often unconnected to texts. Pages
were randomly reshuffled from copy to copy. Do you
find this confusing, the books seemed to ask? Great.
Be confused.
   "In the chaos that resulted, high and low art were
up for grabs...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/29/arts/design/29COTT.html

Yet another stop to make on the pilgrimage, then ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Greetings - send holiday greetings for Easter, Passover
http://greetings.yahoo.com/