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7. JD Books Futurist Period

7. JD Books Futurist Period

Book Production of Russian Avant-Garde Books 1912-16

Johanna Drucker

A simple question frames this paper: what can we learn by looking at the way Russian avant-garde books were made and thereby exposing some attitudes toward their production in their artist-author-producers? Many (though not all) were collaborative works among artists directly involved in the actual making of the books, and this distinguishes them from books whose production was contracted to printers by publishers. The Russian avant-garde artists are distinguished in this era by their involvement in production as well as a willingness to use a wide range of methods from rubber stamp and office equipment to hand coloring and collage. In his important study, The Look of , Gerald Janecek cites Donald Karshan, who states that in making their books, the Russian Futurist artists often used cheap, thin, brittle, wood pulp, “common paper, deliberately chosen, as an anti- establishment gesture and extension of ideological stance.”1 But what ideological stance? Choices about material properties and graphic codes of the earlier Futurist works inevitably link them to a later revolutionary political agenda and a larger historical narrative. And certainly the typography of LEF (1923) extends stylistic approaches developed among the Futurists—by way of Rodchenko, Lissitzky, and Mayakovsky. But what if we differentiate their style from attitudes toward their production? Looking at the specifics of making causes generalizations about the ideology of these artists difficult to sustain, or to contain in a historical narrative in which cultural radicalism and political activism necessarily align, since every instance is particular, not part of a simple, unified teleological agenda. Small in format and edition size, the Russian Futurist books have an unorthodox freshness that springs from the direct methods of hand work and typographic innovation. These books exhibit considerable variety. Some show more continuity with traditional book publication, such as ’s commercially printed A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912). Others are more conspicuously experimental such as Pomade (1913), Worldbackwards (1912), or a Game in Hell (1912 and 1914 editions). Letterpress produced work, the ferroconcrete poems of (, 1914) or the elaborately composed books produced by in Tiflis, beginning in 1917, offer their own special cases. Artists interested in book production had much to draw on in the first decade of the 20th century. Mass production of books in the previous century had been mechanized, industrialized, and notoriously poor in quality. Wood pulp paper and continuous feed presses, powered by steam in the first part of the century and electricity in the second, allowed for production to expand exponentially. With this expansion came changes in the print trades and higher degrees of specialization among its workers, as well as responses from those who saw themselves as champions of finer quality production. While William Morris and others (rightfully) bemoaned the poor quality of many printed materials, the professional skills of chromolithographers, engravers, type designers, printers, and hand- colorists were exceptionally high—and not only in . The works of Japanese woodblock artists reached a level never surpassed before or after. These tradespersons were supported by significant and substantial markets, and unlike fine artists or

1 gentleman printers they were pushed by the pressures of daily deadlines. At worst, the results were abysmal, at best, skilled professional output. The “industry” of print— commercial production outside the studio or atelier environment of fine —had strong cultural aspirations. , invented at the beginning of the 19th century, had become highly popular—the “democratic” art—because of its capacity to produce affordable color multiples for broad consumption. The American firm of Currier and Ives, for instance, produced more than a million individual lithographs (from more than 7,500 titles) between 1834 and 1907, many with eight, ten or more tightly registered print runs on each sheet.2 The successful enterprise became a recognizable “brand” in fine art for the masses produced by highly skilled workers in a thriving culture industry. The medium of lithography, the technology used extensively by the “anti- bourgeois” radical Futurist artists, was a means of production available to them precisely because it had been so commercially viable. Likewise, the cheap wood pulp paper, characterized as “ideological,” was what was affordable and ready at hand. In this period of shortages and economic difficulty, expensive handmade “fine” papers would have been hard to obtain and stigmatized by their deluxe commodity status. Other technological commonplaces, particularly the use of transfer paper, made it possible for Futurist artists to sit down at their own tables, desks, or drawing boards and calligraph their works with immediacy and rapidity. Drawn in litho crayon or pen, these images transferred readily to stone or metal plate. Artists took their hand-drawn sheets to the local lithographer and had them reproduced by skilled laborers in the trade. Few, if any among these artists actually printed their own lithos. None that I know of owned a press. Significantly, the line between studio and trade was still distinct. As a fine art medium, and particularly as a means of book production, lithography’s fortunes had risen and fallen since its invention at the beginning of the 19th century. Between 1826 and 1828, Delacroix produced striking lithographic drawings for an edition of Goethe’s Faust. But the planographic method of lithography is not compatible with the relief production used for letterpress text printing. Two separate production processes were required driving up costs, errors, handling, and other overhead in production workflow. In 1875, when Stéphane Mallarmé produced a fine edition of his own translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven with lithographs by Éduoard Manet, the work sold so badly that most of the edition was remaindered. This is surprising in an era when deluxe volumes of lithographed and chromolithographed visual works—Owen Jones’s of Ornament is a striking example—commanded high prices often supported by eager subscribers. The only efficient and effective way to use lithography for book production is to put the text and images onto the same plate. The Futurists’ aesthetic goal of immediacy was accomplished with the pre- existing ease of industrial print production. The marks of spontaneity, authentic artistic gestures, that are so anti-industrial in their look, and so intimately related to the touch and lyrical spirit of the artist, are, perhaps paradoxically, easy to reproduce through commercial, industrial technology. Spontaneity of direct expression on paper was affordable. The aesthetic impulse of brash informality lowered costs of production. The do-it-mostly-yourself approach distributed labor over a number of different operations: drawing/design, contract with trade printers, table-top glue pot and scissors, and finally, distribution by the artists. The books are made outside the official or institutional

2 channels of mainstream publication, thus suggesting a circumvention of its rules and decorum. The look of handwritten text communicates an “anti-establishment” stance. The drawings in Pomade, for instance, read as attacks on realism, , aestheticism, , classicism and above all academic art. But the production means being used are common, industrial, and fully integrated into daily bourgeois life and commerce. The of commercial production means can be compared to the use of the stylistic devices taken from advertising typography (the pointing hand in Zdanevich’s cover of Terentiev’s Fact) and using it for artistic and poetic projects. These artists are using existing means for their own purposes, but not thinking about restructuring their own relation to the means of production through ownership, changed patterns of training, or artistic identity. This substantively distinguishes them from Rochenko and Lisstizky, to take two artists whose thinking helped define the Constructivist aesthetic in large part through shifts of attitude toward production. Their model of the Constructivist artist overturned the long-held distinction of artist and trade craftsperson or professional that was part of the mythology of industrial capitalism. When , the Russian State Art and Technical School was founded in in 1920, industrial and art faculty taught together in a merger of what had been a school of fine : the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and the of Applied Arts. At VkhUTEMAS, a operated from 1922 onward, and Lissitzky, whose 1927 poster for architecture is a carefully thought through contemporary rework of an ancient sign of printers and masons, was among the visionaries reimagining the curriculum and training of a new model of artist-engineer. In that context, control of and engagement with the means of industrial production was an essential tenet of belief and practice.3 Among Soviet artists a deep schism erupted between those who wanted to show or prescribe new constructs and those committed to enacting them. Taking up the tools to reformulate the new Soviet ideology was a different task from criticizing the old order. In addition to lithography, Futurists used quite a range of different production methods. Hectography (a gelatin transfer technique), and other spirit printers were table- top duplication methods that allowed an artist to work directly with carbon paper or other transfer materials for right-reading reproduction. In other words, this is unskilled work relative to industrial printing. Many also use additional production methods, even within the same volume, such as rubber stamps, linoleum printing, some crude eraser or potato printing, and an occasional bit of hand coloring. In some cases, images or texts printed separately are collaged onto covers or interior pages. Works that were typographically experimental form a group of their own. They were labor intensive and dependent on professional skills for their composition as well as print production and will be addressed in a moment. Photographic reproduction is conspicuously absent from the books produced by this pre-Revolutionary artistic circle. The photographic image became one of Rodchenko’s highly articulated ideological instruments both in his writings and his artistic output. Reading Futurist work against what preceded it, rather than as an antecedent to later developments, we can see that it connects with a long romantic tradition in which signs of the artist’s hand and expressions of gesture, feeling, and impulse are important markers, distinguishing fine art from mechanistic production and reproduction. Other

3 responses to industrialization had appeared in the decades preceding Futurist innovations. The “book beautiful” movement and fine press traditions of the late 19th century embodied their version of the anti-industrial ideal. William Morris and T. Cobden- Sanderson, imbued the of book arts as craft with a nostalgia for the medieval guild idealized labor, of course, and the notion of production as a holistic process meets many contradictions in the works they produce, particularly as the question of how such rarified work gets translated into payment in a market place. Craft skills are expensive to sustain, and the fruits of such carefully focused energies come at a high price if the labor invested in them is to be adequately compensated. Contradictions abound, especially for a socialist. The demands of craft and the commercial pressures of industry had to be reconciled in the production of deluxe volumes for high-end consumers, a contradiction of which Morris was fully, even painfully, aware. But the notion of hand work as an antidote to the degradation imposed by repetitive mechanistic labor shares some sensibilities with the gestural free-form expressions of Futurist artists intent on overturning the dulling normative routines of conventional order. The Futurists have a willful impulse toward liberation. Morris was a systematic opponent of oppressive labor and exploitation. The Futurists are sporting figures exercising imaginative play as an alternative to dreary dull bourgeois culture. By the turn of the century, an additional concept of the book, the livre d’artiste, was fostered in the publications of Ambrose Vollard and Daniel Kahnweiler. The 1900 Vollard production of Paul Verlaine’s Parallelément, with lithographs by Bonnard, is lavishly made for high-end consumers. No conflict attends to the commissioning of these productions—they are luxury objects for a rarified market. Production was expensive, and the products embodied and reified that expense as deluxe commodities. But the highly synthetic approach to layout of texts and images in these works embodies the concept of the book as an integral “creation” not a combination of texts and illustrations, and in that regard its spirit has something in common with the vision of Goncharova, Kruchenykh, and Zdanevich, though they will never meet on the same ideological plane. The Russian Futurists are not responding to these productions of Vollard and Kahnweiler, or even Morris, at least not directly, but to objects close at hand that expressed similar sensibilities: the highly produced and completely consumable bourgeois The World of Art () productions. These gave full-blown expression to a cultivated, polished, sumptuously produced sensibility in books, dance, design, and spectacles. A glance at Leon Baskt’s sensational designs for the costumes of the Ballets Russes shows a direct connection to the idealization of the primitive—fauns, satyr, nymphs and nature spirits—as well as the exotic—luxurious costumes redolent of the East and its pashas, harems, spices, and rich silks—and the deeply traditional, nationalistic roots of Russian folklore and motifs shows how much and how little they have in common with Goncharova’s own forceful . Worldbackwards (Mirskonsta) is not an inversion of The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) by accident. These are the works to which the Futurists are responding. The middle-to-high-brow cultivated bourgeois “public taste” that delighted in Elena Polenova’s Symbolist-inspired illustrations for the Firebird, or Ivan Bilbin’s fairy tale images, is precisely that which the Futurists wanted to affront. During its five years, the World of Art publication was produced using high-end printing techniques. An artist like Polenova would have done an original design in gouache, watercolor, pen and ink that in

4 turn would have been translated into either relief or lithographic plates by a workman for a fee. Forget the anti-mechanical flow of organic forms evoking the harmony of natural rhythms and cycles if these images and motifs that suggest its aesthetic is an alternative to the industrialized world. Look to the way this publication is made within the systems of the industrialized world it inhabits. The romanticized ideal of “the natural” and “the primitive” appears so alluring in The World of Art because it is a highly capitalized machine. It is worth noting that among the various Arts and Crafts and inspired movements that arose in European and American environments, we can detect an important shift of orientation right at the turn of the century. The older idea that crafts and hand-production are the only viable way to counter the distressing effects and qualities of industrial production gives way to a newer model: a dialogue of art and industry with artists integrated as designers. This characterizes the German Deutscher Warbund established in 1907 by Henry Van de Velde, for instance, replacing the oppositional model of craft-vs-mechanized industrialization. This transformation is later expressed in in the Construstivist and Productivist attitudes. Along this fault line we can mark a break. Coming back to the realities of production, imagine yourself in the years 1912 to 1916, an inspired poet with a bit of drawing skill or artist friends, wanting to make a book. You’ve got little money and no access to printing equipment. What do you do? The table-top duplicator, the hectograph, with its paper plates and watery-runny ink in bright colors offers one solution. Like paper transfer lithography, this has the great advantage that the paper stencils or plates can be created in a right-reading direction, and don’t require that everything be carved or written in reverse. Better for the amateur, and more direct, allowing that aesthetic spontaneity and authenticity of touch to show in the casual making. Te Li Le provides a dramatic example of the use of hectography in several colors. The effect is almost like watercolor or tusche, and in the hands of Olga Rozinova the technique benefits from making use of the luminousity of the paper to adds dimension to the letters and drawings. Rather than trying to make the medium perform as if it were lithography or relief, she used its properties for the lightness and freshness they lent to the design. The publicity slogan of “every man his own printer” has a fine entrepreneurial flair to it along with its democratic ideal. The results were decidedly unprofessional as well as limited in edition size and sheet size that makes it impractical for any but fairly short runs. The same can be said of rubber stamping, which may seem like an easy and affordable technology for production, but when you start to calculate the amount of work involved in putting the letters into the slotted handle for each phrase, then printing each of these 100 to 200 times on each page, and then beginning again with the next group of words, it is easy to see that the amount of time involved in the work is not trivial. Likewise, producing an edition of 200 collages, even if these are tipped-in images cut and pasted onto the cover, is time consuming and tedious. As for printing linoleum or wood blocks by hand inking, this is not only labor intensive, it is slow, hard work with mixed results. Even if one person works the and another rubs the paper to pull the ink off the block, printing each page would take several minutes to produce. An edition of 200 pages would be a good, long day’s work—and the problem of finding space to lay these

5 out to dry one at a time quickly fills a room’s surfaces with wet sheets and poses its own logistical problems. Let’s take one example of a “low tech” production and calculate the work involved. Worldbackwards has 39 leaves (the odd number is an indicator that these were separate sheets, not folios). Let’s imagine there are 200 copies in the edition. Each copy contains the following elements, for each of which I’ll give a rough estimate of the production time if I were to produce this today: • one cover collage element (cut out 1 minute each, = 200 minutes, plus pasting 2 a minute = about 2 hours, for a total of 5 hours) • one cover label (cutting and pasting about 3 hours total), • seven pages with rubber stamp elements on them, usually printed in 3 or sometimes 4-line clusters for a total of 20 sets (setting the letters, ½ hour per group, 10 hours total, printing each set 1 hour per group of 200 impressions = 20 hours) • hand-added elements by potato or eraser print, another hour • lithos drawn by hand and lettered by hand 1 hour each approximately 25 hours, collation and stapling 2 hours Total? About 65 hours of work, not counting the work of the lithographers, for which you have paid (probably 2 hours per print for 200 copies so about 80 hours of labor paid for). Not bad, of course, for an edition of 200 books—a total of about 145 hours of work (some the artists’ own and some purchased commercially). Obviously this does not scale very well, and when we look forward to the Soviet era and note that books by Tretiakov and Rodchenko were printed in runs of 150,000, then the sobering reality of the limits of the earnest and idealistic Futurist approach to production becomes quite clear.4 These unruly and exuberant Futurists are attached to impulse and artistic immediacy, flying in the face of the established printing houses and the fine print art nouveau-symbolist producers of consumable bourgeois art commodities. The look of their work seems to resist and respond to industrial production through its hand-work and gestures (still reproduced by trade printers). But the “democratic” multiples they created were free to circulate without threat of too much revenue returning back to sully their radical fervor. The production values (fast and cheap) and value of the productions (outside commodity status and distinctly not luxurious) were consistently aligned. Nothing in this work suggests a systematic critique of production systems and methods, while they fervently overturn and attack the norms of the symbolic order. For these artists, free expression of imaginative ideas is a goal as much as a means. This isn’t to suggest they were outside the larger historical condition of changing visions of , only to suggest that they were naïvely without a systematic formulation of the relations of their own practice to political change. Zdanevich’s work is still unique in light of the larger picture I am sketching here of the discontinuities between Futurists and Constructivists. He has the distinction of being the only poet whose direct, hands-on training in letterpress we can document. According to Janecek the poet found the work too slow and gave up setting and printing on his own books. 5But he did know what was involved in the complicated tasks he was putting to his compositor. He was already within the fine print aesthetic he embraced

6 more fully in later life, filled with respect for the controlled discipline of professional production. Zdanevich’s orchestral compositions and his use of mixed fonts of varying sizes required elaborate effort in what is called the “justification” of a letterpress form. The basic principle on which letterpress operates is known as quadrature—the squareness of the cast letters allows (and requires) that they be set in solid lines of regular, same-sized letters. When this isn’t done, the type can’t be locked up and thus can’t be printed. In many of his orchestral verses he achieves the three-part effect of voices sharing parts of lines, words, or letters by composing in a mathematical combination of point sizes that can divide readily into standard sizes as a factor of 3. So, 36 point type can fit in a line that holds 3 lines of 12 point type next to it, or 30 point next to 3 lines of 10 point, etc. But type comes only in standard sizes, and you cannot break a 48 point line into three 16 point lines because type isn’t cast that way. Every deviation from the same-size norm requires careful calculation and very detailed addition of spacing materials. Putting type onto its side within a line is a nightmare, since it means that the entire line has to be justified with tiny spacers, thin slivers of copper and brass, that compensate for the varying widths of the letters’ bodies (a “w” is much wider than an “i” for instance, but they have to be packed to the identical width to print). I won’t begin to calculate the amount of time involved in setting a page of Dunkee for Rent or Ledentu as Beacon, or the elaborate designs in Kamensky’s Tango with Cows. But I can set a sonnet in metal type in about an hour. A sonnet with paragonnage (multiple sized fonts in a single line) would take three times that long at least. The same project with mixed font letters and oversized elements would stretch composing time by hours and even days. Also, the printing of such complex forms is not exactly smooth going as they are inclined to problems, work-ups, and other difficulties. So when we look at one of these pages we are seeing an enormous investment of labor. Zdanevich’s work, directly an expression as it is of his own vision, is a highly mediated and disciplined expression of aesthetic imagination. Spontaneity is not a factor, and full understanding of the restraints, constraints, and capacities of letterpress as a technology are essential to its realization. Letterpress is not an impulsive medium. His final zaum play, or dra, as he termed it, was produced in Paris in 1923, after the Futurist era had passed, and well beyond any moment in which he could expect it to find a ready readership. The extravagant typography makes the work seem as much like a performance on the page and in the book as it is a poem or play for production. Because of the date, it makes a useful contrast with that other, well-known piece of typographic production, ’s design of Mayakovsky’s For the Voice (1923). The tabbed section titles are composed entirely of materials from the typecase—playful, figured, in the bold red and black geometric forms that come to be the hallmark of Constructivist print graphics. But the full impact of the Constructivist aesthetic is an ethos as well as a formal style, and the engagement with industrial production that forms the foundation of Rodchenko’s approach to the image, photography, Lissitzky’s to graphic design, and the way their understanding of the role and concept of the artist is integrated into industrial vision and production. This attitude toward production distinguishes the artists who entered into their tasks as part of the new Soviet regime from those who had attacked the bourgeois order of Russia in the years just before the Great War and the 1917 Revolution. Whatever stylistic continuities we can see in the cover of Terentiev’s Fact, designed by

7 Zdanevich in Tiflis, and the work of Rodchenko, Lissitzky, and others, they belong to different worlds in a profound sense, and the line between them is marked in part by that change in attitude toward production as a value. Futurist book productions are an optimistic expression of artistic imagination and spontaneity as the antidote to the conventional ennui of bourgeois culture and as vividly innovative agents of symbolic change, charged with the belief in the need to re-envision the world, giving it new forms. But they are very much artists in a romantic tradition, rather than constructors of that new world.

Works cited:

Compton, Susan. The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912-16. London: The British Library, 1978. –. Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917-34. London: The British Library, 1992. Janecek, Gerald. The Look of Russian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. –. Zaum: The Transrational of Russian San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1996. LeGris-Bermann, Francoise. Iliazd: Maitre d’oeuvre du livre moderne. Montréal: Galerie d’art de l’Université, 1984. Johnson, Una. Ambrose Vollard. NY: Wittenborn and Co., 1944. Isselbacher, Audrey. Iliazd and the Illustrated Book. NY: , 1987. Markov, Vladimir. . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Porzio, Domenico. Lithography, 200 Years of Art, History, and Technique New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982.

1 Gerald Janacek, The Look of Russian Literature, p. 70. 2 http://www.geocities.com/scurrier/ 3 Compton, Russian Artists’ Books 1917-1934, p. 12. 4 Compton, Russian Artists’ Books 1917-1934, p. 20.

Johanna, please make more complete citations in the footnotes. 5 Gerald Janacek, The Look of Russian Literature, p. 167.

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