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 Russian Literature, 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 David Burliuk’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 Vasily Kamensky (Tango with Cows, 1914) or the elaborately composed zaum books produced by Ilia Zdanevich 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 Europe. 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 art—had strong cultural aspirations. Lithography, 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 printing 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 Grammar 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, symbolism, aestheticism, impressionism, 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 appropriation 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 VkhUTEMAS, the Russian State Art and Technical School was founded in Moscow in 1920, industrial and art faculty taught together in a merger of what had been a school of fine arts: the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and the Stroganov School of Applied Arts. At VkhUTEMAS, a printing press 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