Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917

[Dave Monroe]

Tango with Cows takes its title from a book and poem by the Russian
avant-garde poet Vasily Kamensky. The absurd image of farm animals
dancing the tango evokes the clash in Russia between a primarily rural
culture and a growing urban life. During the years spanning the
revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Russia was in spiritual, social, and
cultural crisis. The moral devastation of the failed 1905 revolution,
the famines of 1911, the rapid influx of new technologies, and the
outbreak of World War I led to disillusionment with modernity and a
presentiment of apocalypse.

This exhibition explores the way Russian avant-garde poets and artists
responded to this crisis through their book art. Often working
collaboratively, poets and artists designed pages in which
rubber-stamped zaum' or "transrational" poetry shared space with
archaic and modern scripts, as well as with primitive and abstract
imagery. The Russian avant-garde utilized such verbal and visual
disruptions to convey humor, parody and an ambivalence about Russia's
past, present, and future.....

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/tango_with_cows/

E.g., ...

Portrait of Akhmet, Mikhail Larionov, in Worldbackwards (Mirskontsa), 1912

Download a PDF version of the book (PDF, 41 pp., 5.48MB)

http://archives.getty.edu:30008/getty_images/digitalresources/russian_ag/pdfs/gri_88-B27486.pdf