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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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)

5. Cubo-Futurism
Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913

6. Cubo-Futurism
Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement,

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

8. Cubism in France
Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910

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

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

11. 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

12. 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

13. Suprematism
0.10 exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

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

19. Polychrome Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915

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

21. 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

22. Constructivist textiles
Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923

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

24. Constructivism
Varvara Stepanova, Figure no. 29, 1921

25. Constructivism
Vladimir Tatlin, Letatlin, 1930

26. Constructivism
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919

27. Photomontage of Tatlin monument in Leningrad

28. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563