Utopian Visions: Week 6 Outline: Avant-gardes in visual culture: definitions Examples: - cubo-futurism - suprematism - constructivism etc.

Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions A group of individuals? A set of institutions? A style? A doctrine? A historical conjuncture?  All of the above

Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions What were the avant-gardes against? Mimetic representation Bourgeois art for art‘s sake, aestheticism, non-engagé art Divisions of high vs. low art, everyday vs. non-everyday art etc. Explicit metaphysics, emotional psychologism

Cubo-Futurism Reduce reality to geometrical shapes and primary colours Complete abstraction? Not yet French cubism (main interest: reduced forms), Italian futurism (main interest: movement)

Cubo-Futurism Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913

Cubo-Futurism Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-1913

Cubo-Futurism Liubov Popova, Portrait of a Woman (relief), 1915

Cubism in France Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910

Futurism in Italy Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912

Futurism in Italy Gerardo Dottori, Benito Mussolini ‚Il Duce‘, 1933

Suprematism Basic geometric forms (vs. triangles) Basic colours Surface texture (e.g. paint on canvas) Art serves neither state nor religion, nor does it represent objects  opposed to constructivism‘s emphasis on (industrial) usefuleness Non-objective reality, ‘supremacy of pure artistic feeling’  find ‘zero degree’ of painting  ’fourth dimension’  esoteric geometry of Petr Uspensky and Georgii Giurdzhiev

Suprematism Also absurdity, as represented by other media, e.g. poetry, written in ‘transrational language’ Zaum Дыр бул щыл убещур скум вы со бу р л эз Dyr bul shchyl ubeshchur skum vy so bu r l ez Aleksei Kruchenykh, 1913

Suprematism 0.10 exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

Malevich Quotations 1 Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

Malevich Quotations 2 Only with the disappearance of a habit of mind which sees in pictures little corners of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work of pure, living art.

Malevich Quotations 3 I say to all: reject love, reject aestheticism, reject the trunks of wisdom, for in the new culture your wisdom is laughable and insignificant. I have untied the knot of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour! Remove from yourselves quickly the hardened skin of centuries, so that you can catch up with us more easily. I have overcome the impossible and formed gulfs with my breathing. You are in the nets of the horizon, like fish! We, the Suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognize us.

El Lissitzy Quotation Suprematism has advanced the ultimate tip of the visual pyramid of perspective into infinity.... We see that Suprematism has swept away from the plane the illusions of two-dimensional planimetric space, the illusions of three-dimensional perspective space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground.

Symbolist Critic and Artist Alexandre Benois Suprematism = ‘Sermon of nothingness and destruction’ (1915)

Polychrome Suprematism Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915

Monochrome Suprematism Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition – White on White, 1918

Constructivism Usefulness of art for new (Soviet) society Move away from painting to more applied arts and materials, e.g. textile design Faktura = material properties of art

Constructivist textiles Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923

Constructivist ads Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Advertising poster for Red October cookies, 1923

Constructivism Varvara Stepanova, Figure no. 29, 1921

Constructivism Vladimir Tatlin, Letatlin, 1930

Constructivism Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919

Photomontage of Tatlin monument in Leningrad

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563