ALPHABETICON. Russian Experiments... (Intro text) Poster

ALPHABETICON Russian Experiments with Text and Images in the 20th Century The Russian verb ПИСАТЬ (write) refers to both writing and painting, reminding us of the inherent affinity of word and image, of scribe and artist. In multiple ways, the interplay of the textual and the visual continues to inform our perception. As the new technologies and unprecedented social and cultural practices of the 20th century transformed the established order of textual and visual representation, poets and artists explored the relationship of the printed and written, verbal and pictorial, seen, heard, and read. In Russia, intense artistic experiments coincided with great social cataclysms and the search for a new expressivity produced striking results. ALPHABETICON, based on the collections of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives and University Libraries, presents a variety of interconnected forms—books for children and manuscripts, official posters and unofficial publications, Futurist, Constructivist, and Conceptualist editions, and poets' performances—that bring to the fore the interaction of the textual and visual, alphabet and icon. The transformation of bodies into letters, of letters into images, of lines and curves into meaningful signs, of letters into sounds returning to the human bodies makes up the itinerary of the exhibition. The art of calligraphy, based on the intrinsic oneness of scribe and artist, pen and brush, paper and canvas, has been estranged through the advance of technologies from the immediate experience of the author. Traces of human presence mark only the private, noncirculating records of poets' manuscripts and children's doodles. The display entitled "Subverting Gutenberg," curated by Monika Greenleaf and Joshua Walker, presents manuscripts and hand-written books from 1915 to the late 1960s. Seemingly archaic and nostalgic for the pre-Gutenberg penmanship, the manuscript techniques resonate with the ultramodernist emphasis on the visual at the expense of the textual. In the early 20th century, Symbolists, Futurists, and later Constructivists sought to re-create the bonds between the artist and the artifact, sensory experience and graphic representation. “From Letter to Image,” curated by Dustin Condren and Martha Kelly, represents these artistic trends in their search for the uniqueness of writing. Futurist publications from 1914 to the end of the 1920s stimulated and occasionally shocked the reader-viewer by a singular blend of words and images. Different fonts, formats, and images of the Constructivist collages overthrew the conventional linear perception of the text’s message with a visual and sensual one. Inspired by the childlike integration of letters and images, the Futurists and Constructivists designed the early Soviet picture books to revolutionize the world of childhood. In the 1960s, hand-written and hand-copied books reemerged in the underground samizdat production and circulation. In the post-Soviet commercialized space, the mass-produced and the public acquired a new significance. In the 1990s, Russian Conceptualists acknowledged their Futurist predecessors by imitating hand-writing techniques in their printed books. To revive our perception of printed texts, modernist artists also turned to such "primitive" or elemental forms as children's primers and first books. The panorama "From Body to Letter" and "From Body to Machine," curated by Sara Pankenier and Glen Worthey, surveys the iconography of the Cyrillic alphabet from its early forms to the late Soviet ABC books, in several sections. One section examines pictorial alphabets as enabling the child's transition from sounds and objects to graphic signs on a flat page. Another section brings together books for children, the elaborate designs of the World of Art, and the reductivist experiments of Russian Constructivists. After the revolution of 1917, the reading challenge became a major political task for the Soviet government and its vastly illiterate population. The creators of posters for the campaign against illiteracy had to rely on, but also rethink, the interplay between the pictorial image and textual sign that underlies a child's introduction to the world of letters. The poster sections, "Iconography of Literacy" and "From the Margins to the Masses," curated by Matthew Morris and Heather Farkas, illustrate the visual rhetoric of the extended literacy campaign (1921-1937), from its roots in Russian icons and folk art to the emblems of the European Enlightenment and imagery of the avant-garde. Soon the avant-gardist unity of alphabet and icon was broken down into two opposites. Whereas the Soviet public space multiplied the orthodox words and images, the unofficial culture valued the individual, the inalienable, and the perishable. The bards of the 1960s and 1970s sang their unpublished verse, and unrecognized poets recorded their work on used envelopes, school notebooks, index cards, and ultimately their own clothes and bodies. Contemporary poets Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein carry on the production of text as a performative gesture. Their recitals, filmed and edited by Dietmar Hochmuth, can be heard and seen in the section "From Letter to Body." In a full circle of cultural and historical revolutions, the letter and the image coincide in the body of the performer. alphabeticon was developed by "Visuality/Corporeality/Literacy," a research workshop of the Slavic Department and Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, with the generous support of the Hoover Institution. Oksana Bulgakowa, Anna Muza Curators of the project