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Introduction Experiment/3KcnepHMeiiT, 1 (1995), 1-5. JOHN E. BOWLT INTRODUCTION The first number of Experiment/3KcnepuMeum concentrates on what has come to be known as the Russian avant-garde and, in its invocation of the Moscow Cubo-Futurist group, Centrifuge, pays homage to the en­ ergy and inventiveness ~f ,~he artists.who changed the course o~ Russian culture. 1 Since 1962, the'v,f7<U ~h,at Camilla_ Gray published hefJ}t?neering monograph, The GreatExpemrwnt: Russ1an Art 1863-1922/ over one hundred and forty monographs .have been published. on the. Russian avant-gardc:;, and since 1979, when the Centre Georges Pompidou orga­ nized the exhibition "Paris-Moscou, 1900-1930" in Paris, there have-been over one hundred gallery ex~ibitions devoted to tf"l~ same subject. The reader may wonder, then, what else remains to be said. The answer is­ much, not necesarily in the form of descriptive prose and critical assess­ ment~ but rather in the form of theoretical statements, declarations of in­ tent, and reminiscences by ~he artists and writers who participated in the cultural renaissance ofpr&and post-revolutonary Russia. In spite of a sub­ stantial visual production, the Russian avant-garde was a movement of word rather than of deed, and tile enunciation-the manifesto, the decla­ ration, the polemic, and the lecture-was crucial to its worldview. While verbal assur:nption did not always coincide w~th praxis, this documentary aspect is of :primary importance to the creative lexicon of Russia's "New Barbarians. "3 Another distinguishing feature was the emphasis of Russia's radical writers and artists on spontaneity, for they seemed to value process rather than result, the intuitive gesture rather than the. printed or painted artifact, "cognition" rather than "knowledge," as the poet and philosopher 1. The eclectic group of writers and artists, Tsentrifuga (Centrifuge) existed as a publishing venture in Moscow from 1913 until 1920. Among its members were Ivan Aksenov, Nikolai Aseev, Sergei Bobrov, and Boris Pasternak. For information on its activities, see V. Markov, Russian Futurism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 228-75. ' 2. C. Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962, and subsequent editions). · · . ·• · 3. "New Barbarians• is a reference to David Burliuk's article, "Di~ ·wilde'n• Russlands," in W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, eds., Der 8/aue Reiter (Munich: Piper, 1912), pp. 13-19. 2 Experiment,I3KcnepHMeHT Andrei Bely would have argued.4 This is manifest in their emphasis on calligraphy, the manuscript, and the handmade book, and in their passion for clowning, the impromptu speech, the ephemeral ('We paint ourselves for an hour," Mikhaillarionov and Ilia Zdanevich announced in their man­ ifesto "Why We Paint Ourselves" of 1913),5 and the unfinished (Alexei Kruchenykh invited his readers to finish the story themselves,6 while Velimir Khlebnikov would abort his poetry declamations by interpolating "etc., etc."). One of the main impediments to the study of Russian Modernism, therefore, is our inability to recapt~re its transient nature. This is especially true of the phonic dimension of the' ·poetipil declamations of David Burliuk, Vladimir Maiakovsky, and,'KhleQnikov; for it was the conce~."'at the top of my voic~~" 7 sometimes in cacophonic unison,8 that impressed and shocked. Apart from the sound reco~dings that Kruchenykh and Mai,akovsky made in later years, there remains little evidence that helps u~ to understand the. glossological effect of the Russian Futurist voice, of "the strong basso ... the poems that resounded and struck us by their en­ ergy and distinctivenes."9 In this sense, the rear force of Russian Futurism can never be evoked, because it w~s a movement of the m:oment that re­ lied for its effect as much.on the unprinted (and often unprintable) word as on the printed one, which is why the informal venue of the cafe, the cabaret, and the disput was more important to its s,trategy tha'1 the crys- tallized artifact such as th~ publish~d book or painted picture: ' How, then, can we analyze the comppsition of such a mercurial sub­ stance as Russian Cuba-Futurism? One way wpuid.be to undertake a be­ havioral study of its representatives and' examine their eve..Yday lives and their attitudes to eating and drinking and other bodily functions, for the simple delights of the flesh were central to the worldviews of Burliuk, 4. For example, Bely affirmed in his essay on the 'Problem of Culture' {1909) that 'Culture cannot be identified with. knpwled,ge ·.·:, wherea~ cognition is the knowledge of knowledge.~ A. Bely. Simvolizm (Moscow: Musaget, 1910), p. 5. 5. M. i.~rionov and I. Zdanevich, "Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia' (1913). English translation in j. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-garde (london: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 82. 6. A. Kruchenykh, Sobstvennye rasskazy i risunki detei (St. Petersburg: Euy, 1914), p. 47. '7. "At the ~op of my voice' (Vo ves golos) is the title of Maiakovsky's last long poem {1929-30). Cf. his book Dlia go/osa [For the Voice] (Berlin: Lutze and Vogt, 1923). 8. In his book Lidantiu faram [le-Dantiu as a Beacon) (Paris: 41 °, 1923), Ilia Zdanevich indicates that several sections of poetical lines be read in unison by up to Jwelve voices. I would like to thank Walt Comins-Richmond for pointing this out to ~e. 9. E. Afanasieva, "Baliiganchik." Typescript in the .~retiakov Gallery, Archive Division, Moscow. Call no.: f.4/2084, l. 3. · ' .
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