Miltos Frangopoulos

The Work as Such

A Discussion of Tatlin’s
“Collation of Materials”

Ph.D. Thesis in progress

Draft 1 - University of Essex, 1989
Draft 2- University of Derby, 2006
CONTENTS

Some Preliminary Remarks 3

1. The Object
1.1. Looking 6
1.2. Making 9
1.3. Talking 13

2. The Context
2.1. The Claim 16
2.2. Rupture 18
2.3. Russia 22
2.4. Word/Image 26
2.5. Tatlin 29

3. Approaches
3.1. Mark 39
3.2. Sign 46
3.3. Icon 54
3.4. Symbol 60
3.5. Referent 65
3.6. Index[heraldic device] 72

4. Readings
4.1 Text. 77
4.2. Thing 81
4.3. Semeion/Point 86
4.4. Sema/Signal 91
4.5. Fact 96
4.6 The Copula 100

5. Translation 104

Some Closing Remarks 108

Bibliography 111

Summary 118

List of Plates 119

Plates, Drawings & Photographs

2
Some Preliminary Remarks

So much has been written and said about the work of the heroic phase of avant-garde art that
yet another statement may seem superfluous. Of course this would mean that we are tired of
talking about it. And indeed it can be tiresome. So much is commonplace by now.
The main themes explaining the rupture the avant-garde represented are settled and done: The
malaise and alienation of the individual in the early stages of capitalism; the development of
political consciousness; the workings of social reform and revolution; the discoveries and
inventions of science and technology; the novel experiences in the manmade environment of
the city; the exhaustion of the artistic and literary conventions which could not keep pace with
changing circumstances; the simultaneous urge toward a distant past of authentic life and a
‘better’ future close at hand; the simultaneous condemnation (as reality) and celebration (as
potential) of the present moment; all these compose the great tableau of the Zeitgeist in which
avant-garde art emerged, and all these are by now the staple diet of concise textbooks and
short histories of modern art.
This is not to diminish their importance, or the validity of much that has been said around
these themes. It merely hints at the deadening effect of clichés. This is nowhere more strongly
felt than in the area of our proposed investigation: The Russian avant-garde. And this is what
may make the reader exclaim: “No, not yet another thesis on Tatlin and his lot!” Of course
not; we already know the story, a story of romantic revolutionaries and of unrequited love, the
story of “the generation that wasted its poets”.
But knowledge become clichéd is knowledge stifled. To be sure the lights are off the great
parading of the Russian avant-garde; the major shows have been staged, the Costakis
collection has run its course; talk of ‘revolution’ is receding. But what about the balance-
sheet? It would appear that for all this grand tour – from the late sixties to the mid nineties –
the various facets of that complex phenomenon appear for ever more lumped together under
the rubric of ‘avant-garde’.
No doubt there are aspects that bind the Russian avant-garde together and also link it to the
broader developments of European modernism, but even the slightest closer look reveals a
series of conflicts and contradictions, as with any social phenomenon in general, and any
1
artistic phenomenon in particular. This has already been noted, long ago.
But despite this, the conclusions to be drawn from this acknowledgement are not easily
forthcoming. It could be that it is difficult to sort out the differences, to establish a coherent
and systematic typology of the various attitudes and groupings, especially as the artists
seemed to be ‘hijacked’ by the rapid flow of events requiring them to respond perhaps “not
fully prepared”. Hence one may be more inclined to accept the generalisation that levels out
those differences, opting for the easy solution, even if easy here means facile.
What is facile, it transpires, is the verdict on the avant-garde. The verdict that arises from the
fact that we have to view it as a comprehensive phenomenon, and hence to pronounce a
verdict. Therein lies the difficulty of coming up with coherent and systematic typologies, for
they have to be coherent while phenomena appear incoherent and haphazard.
I have tried, in my M.Phil. thesis, some fifteen years ago, to map the sequence of events to
which the artists had to respond in post-revolutionary Russia, and to trace out the differences
among the artists, especially those in what may be termed the constructivist camp. I grant
that, as they all shared the same fate, my conclusion, though recapitulating the theme of
complexity and contradiction, stressed the common elements and did not avoid the
generalising tendency I spoke of above. In the end it was a tale of unrequited love.
To be sure there is no fault in such stories per se, and if written well they make good reading;
the problem is that this kind of story-telling in our context tends to lead us away from the
actual works of art, on which the story is based in the first place.
And what the works are telling us is not as coherent as we would wish. Different works
recount different stories. To be sure there are patterns that can be deduced, common elements

1
See J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 18

3
and links, but their diversity is obliterated once they are seen as so many branches of the same
tree, and not as perhaps different trees in the same landscape.
Do we really heed what they are saying? Do we really believe the artists themselves, for
instance, when they speak of an end to art? Or do we take it as mere caprice, a reaction that
expressed a general sense of exacerbation, and meaning nothing once the dust has settled?
The more time passes, the more difficult this becomes. As the distance increases differences
are blurred, and the ‘general’ picture takes hold. We have to talk of the avant-garde in
general, of modernism as a whole, we have to show how it reflects the Zeitgeist, how it is part
of a dominant paradigm.
But what the Zeitgeist reveals, if anything, is the utmost contradiction, and there is no
dominant paradigm other than that of tension; a tension that goes at least as far back as the
Enlightenment and early industrialism, and which has to do with a need to redefine the human
being, an issue that is still very much open. Thus, if one were to abide by such yardsticks as
Zeitgeist and paradigm one need to be extremely cautious. They are certainly useful, but hey
tend to undermine one’s generalising conclusions.
Again, this is most strongly felt with regard to the Russian avant-garde, inextricably bound
with the other clichés of ‘revolution’ and ‘utopianism’. Here the very story of ‘unrequited
love’ shows how simplistic it is to take avant-garde art as a reflection of revolutionary
politics.
But then how cautious should one be with regard to generalisations and Zeitgeist
interpretations? The tendency to swing the pendulum all the way to other end is natural. One
may focus too much on the actual works and lose sight of the overall landscape, paying only
lip service to ‘revolutionism’, ‘utopianism’ and such like. It is the well-known saying of
seeing the tree and not the forest, and vice versa. Or perhaps a seesaw between idealism and
empiricism.
Here, again, we find that in respect of the actual works there is much that has been already
said. The actual works of the Russian avant-garde have been more than adequately presented
and described, and a catalogue raisonné may be put together. But then, if we remain on the
purely formal aspects of the works, there is not much to go by, unless we see them as rough
notes, as pages from the artists’ scrapbooks – leading perhaps to more rough notes, some
more fully developed, of a project that forever remained unfinished.
But even so, what kind of project? Are we to accept it wholesale as a common effort? Again,
when artists come to blows with each other over different interpretations of the way art should
go, do we just see in that the antics of immature personalities? Is it again mere caprice?
This difficulty in deciding how to go about it, how to approach the Russian avant-garde is
quite intriguing. Is our interest wholly context-driven? And if not what is there in the works
themselves that puts them on the map of world art history?
To be sure, this reflects differing ways in art history, a recycling split between broader context
and specific work. Not so long ago the ‘New Art History’ sought to restore to the discipline
‘the missing lived social relations’ as against the ‘widespread tendency to isolate art from the
2
broader social circumstances’ . This ‘restoration’ brought a host of new and interesting ideas
with it, introducing not only social analysis and philosophical concerns but also
psychoanalysis and linguistics into the discussion, with regard especially to modern art.
However, it was by inversion repositioning the pawns of an earlier ‘clash’ between, one the
one hand, the crude reductionism of positivist and early Marxist thinkers, who saw art as an
epiphenomenon of social processes, and, on the other, the focusing on the specificity and
internal structure of the works suggested by ‘Formalism’ and ‘New Criticism’.
The works of the Russian avant-garde both by their contextualisation (within the process of
revolution) and their specificity (as non representational) seem to accentuate this division in
the possible approaches.
But one’s inability to decide on which to lay emphasis is perhaps triggered by a yet more
fundamental question: Do we, or should we really care about these works?

2
V. Burgin, ‘Something about Photography Theory’, in Rees A.L. & Borzello F. (eds.), The New Art History, Camden Press,
London 1986, p. 41.

4
This was brought home by John Milner who, in his capacity as external examiner to my
M.Phil. thesis, after most of the discussion was happily over, asked pointing to one of the
illustrations, a photograph of Tatlin’s Collation of Materials of 1914: “Yes, but why do we
still look at this?”
The question raises a host of issues, but perhaps we should start with “this”.

5
1. The Object
1.1 Looking

It is a sheet of paper, a page in a book or, rather, pamphlet, published in Russia in 1921.
Printed on this page I am now looking at, sitting in the British Library, is a photograph of a
work of art by the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin. Beneath the photograph, the legend reads:
“Collation of Materials: Iron, plaster, glass, asphalt”3 (1914) [plate 1]. The pamphlet contains
a text by the art-critic Nikolai Punin, the artist’s friend and admirer, entitled Against Cubism.
I am aware, based on information I already possess, that this work by Tatlin is now
“presumed lost or destroyed”. That is why I can only consider it in photographic
reproduction.
The photograph offers to view the image of what I understand to be a three-dimensional
object, seen from the right. Attempting to describe it on the basis of the photograph, one could
say the following: within a rectangular wooden frame which encloses a plaster surface, an
assortment of shapes, dominated by a triangular form, are brought together on that surface,
around a centre where most of the shapes meet or intersect, and which is close to the
perceived geometrical centre of the rectangle. Along the left side of the rectangle a black strip
runs from top to bottom, covering the far side of the plaster. The strip is slightly broader at the
base than it is at the top, but its right edge does not form a proper straight line. The shapes in
the ‘middle’ are first perceived as regular geometric shapes primarily by virtue of the
‘dominant’ triangle, which we understand, thanks to perspective, to be jutting out, and,
secondarily, due to the presence of a rectangle “under” the triangle, emerging through the
semi-circular opening on the side of the triangle which is adjacent to the plaster surface, and
supporting one of the edges of a semi-cylinder (extending almost to the upper edge of the
plaster), on which is ‘perched’ a transparent segment of a truncated cone ‘standing’ on a semi
circle. Finally another semi-cylindrical shape envelops part of the rectangle situated under the
triangle. However, the initial impression that these are regular geometrical shapes becomes
doubtful on closer inspection.
The ‘triangle’ is not a proper triangle for its summit is snipped to form, strictly speaking, an
irregular quadrangle. Also at the corner on the right an ‘irregular’ twirl can be seen as if the
metal has been twisted, emphasizing the presence of the material rather than its shape. The
flat piece of metal under the triangle, jutting out through the quarter-circular cut at about the
middle of the triangle’s side adjacent to the plaster is no proper rectangle, as can be seen from
its slanting side joined to the cut metal pipe. The ‘quarter-circular’ cut itself is no quarter-
circle as the side of the triangle extends a little ‘tooth’ on the (lower) left side at its base
adjacent to the plaster, thus negating its pure geometricity. The ‘semi-cylinders’ also appear
as slightly deformed, as the upper one seems to be cut at the top, while the lower one is more
like an elliptical curve turning its far edge spirally inward, and as much as can be seen in the
photograph it comes out again in an S-shape to form a base fitted onto the plaster, and its edge
seems to form a wavy line. Further, the semi-circle supporting the segment of the cone
resembles a horse-shoe – which it might well be – while a very un-geometrical ‘fuzzy’ line
appears on its left side. Finally, the edge of dark strip on the far side, as already mentioned,
does not form a proper straight line.
However, the irregularities, or the deformations are so slight that the shapes can still be
designated, in a broad and general sense, as geometrical. In this sense, the first impression,
though shaken, is reasserted only slightly corrected. For although I am now aware of the four
corners of the ‘dominant’ shape in the picture, its overall ‘triangularity’ prevails, and to all
intents and purposes – if I am to communicate what I see – I have to speak of a triangle and
not a quadrangle. Similar re-adjustments apply to the other shapes as well, and at risk of
proposing an oxymoron the shapes could be described as quasi-regular geometrical shapes.
Now, through one’s knowledge of ‘reading’ photographs (translating tone and shade into
texture) one understands that the triangle is a metal sheet jutting out from the plaster surface.

3
in Russian: meterialnii podbor, zhelezo, shtukaturka, steklo, gudron. The word podbor can be rendered as selection, collection,
assortment, gathering, from the verb podbivat’: to gather, collect, put together, form.

6
In any case, the little information provided in the legend of the picture is sufficient to assure
me. Similarly one sees that the rectangle under the triangle, whose texture is hard to detect,
but seems also to be metallic (it could be ‘read’ as wood but this is not substantiated by the
picture legend), is moving away from the plaster surface. At the same time it is ‘held back’ by
the semi-cylindrical folded metal which envelops its side, and supports at the top the left edge
of a cut-open metal pipe, whose right side rests on the plaster surface. The ‘pipe’ is joined at
the edge with a what is surely cut glass resting on a horseshoe-like piece of metal, to which it
is tied with a ‘fuzzy’ string of wire. At the far end I ‘read’ the strip as asphalt.
Thus the shapes are now perceived as solid pieces of material standing on or coming out of
the surface. In this sense they can be seen as two-dimensional planes that form the outer shells
of – as it were – geometrical solids, the triangle being the side of a three-sided pyramid, the
rectangle that of a parallelepiped and so on.
Having attempted to describe in a few words the component parts of this work it becomes
apparent that an ambivalence between regular and irregular, two- and three- dimensionality,
surface and volume cannot be easily resolved.
Moreover, these component parts, whether shapes or solids, do not assemble into a readily
recognisable configuration that could refer to some existing natural forms or their abstraction,
or even a motif or symbol in any way meaningful within the context of our culture (that is to
say the ‘educated’ or ‘informed’ western observer’s cultural baggage). It does not look like
something that I know, and my customary approach of grasping the theme or subject matter
of a work of art does not yield any results.
For a brief moment I feel I may avert my gaze, shut the book and walk away from this work
which appears as an unintelligible statement. I decide otherwise, if only because the book in
which it is reproduced is in the British Library. But not only because of this. As an ‘informed’
observer, knowing something of the context, both artistic and social, in which this work was
produced, I accept in good faith that this is not mumbo-jumbo and that the artist is genuinely
communicating something worth my time. I stay. I am intrigued, I try to find out. Does it
represent something?
Perhaps the transparent segment of a cone might have been a glass-tumbler, and in that
respect some tenuous link with a still-life may be established, if one were also to accept the
semi-cylindrical pipe as a distant likeness of a bottle and the four-cornered triangle as a sort
of table, with the rectangle under it acting like a leg.
Such a tentative suggestion has been examined by some scholars (Milner, among others), and
one could press the case further by following another familiar path, linking the artefact under
observation with other works by the same artist, in this case Tatlin’s Bottle Relief completed a
year earlier [plate 2], and thence with the broader context, namely the cubist still lives of
Picasso, Braque and Gris – featuring bottles and glasses [plates 3-5] – which Tatlin is
reported to have seen during his trip to Paris in 1913/14.4 Indeed it is conceivable to suggest
that the prominent metal curve in the Bottle is repeated here, although now it is found under
the ‘table’, and that the wallpaper ground in the earlier work has now become a plastered
wall.
As this linkage appears somewhat far-fetched, other keys may be tried such as a suggestion
that the quasi-geometrical shapes may be part of a human figure, recalling the shapes that
Tatlin’s Fisherman drawing of 1913 is composed of [plate 6], or those of Compositional
Analysis, also considered to be of 1913 [plate 7]. Or there could be a broader, generic
reference: the asphalt strip and horseshoe may refer to movement on a road, to travel. This
word may trigger an investigation seeking a different lineage, for we could bring in a
biographical dimension: the Collation as seen in this photograph may remind one of a sail and
mast of a ship, a ‘theme’ close to Tatlin’s heart, connected with his experience as a sailor.

4
see inter alia J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 78, and A.A. Strigalev, From Painting to the
Construction of Matter, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, Thames and Hudson, London 1988, p. 18. Also interesting in this respect
is the fictional description of Tatlin’s meeting with Picasso in G. Davenport, Tatlin!, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
and London [19701982], pp. 19-21.

7
Such figurative translations of the work are obviously not entirely persuasive, and more
suggestions could be forthcoming all the more to demonstrate the unviability of such an
approach.
Having tried and failed, I can now accept that this work is not a representation of something
that I can readily recognise. What is it then? Could it be something that I do know but cannot
immediately decipher?
Searching for more information my gaze has to undergo yet another ‘corrective’ process, as
the other extant photograph of the work comes into view. It is a photograph which appeared
in an issue of Izobratielnoe Isskusstvo of 1919, and presents us with a frontal view of the
Collation [plate 8]. Here the contours have changed and, more strikingly, the scalene triangle
of the 1921 picture now appears obtuse.
Looking at this picture of 1919 it becomes apparent that had I been left with only this
earlier picture to go by, I would not have been able to really tell that the depicted object
is three-dimensional and it would have been difficult to prove that the shapes are not
placed flat on the surface. It is only the supporting evidence of the 1921 photograph that
one may accept the Collation as a relief.
Deciding to remain with it, all the above suggestions as to its possible decipherment will
have to be investigated. But first the object itself must come into view.

8
1.2 Making

The available photographs are not a ‘perfect’ guide for a reconstruction of the object. Apart
from not being very clear, they do not represent the object absolutely ‘orthogonally’ in
relation to the vertical and the horizontal. The frontal view appears to be ‘dipping’ slightly to
the left, while the side view seems to be slanting slightly backwards, away from the
perpendicular plane.
Aware of the constraints posed by the extant photographs, a working hypothesis may be
nonetheless posited that the ‘frontal view’ depiction is facing us head-on, and that the frame
discerned is a rectangle which, if seen from above, may provide us with a plan view.
Similarly, the side view depiction is taken to stand vertically in relation to a horizontal
ground, and it can be adjusted in size to produce a perspectival projection of the frontal view
in equal dimensions. Finally the two pictures are accepted as photographs of the same object.
Hence, in order to reconstruct it we shall treat it as a geometrical composition and proceed to
calculations in accordance with the rules of linear perspective.
As there is no specific information regarding its actual size, and the photographs do not
provide us with any other recognisable objects to which it can be related in terms of
dimensions a element of guess-work is necessitated. With a fair amount of certainty it could
be supposed that it is not of ‘monumental’ proportions, and if one were to accept that the
transparent glass half-cylinder is a part of an average glass-tumbler, and the fragment of the
metal ring at its base is a part of a horseshoe, then the height of the frame area should not be
much larger than 50 centimetres, and accordingly the width would be around 30 centimetres.
This would tend to be supported by what can be surmised in terms of size from later corner-
counter reliefs by Tatlin, as well as by other ‘constructions’ produced by major European
artists at the time, which, as we shall have the opportunity to discuss later on, Tatlin may have
seen during a trip to the ‘west’.
However, given that the precise size is, and perhaps will remain forever, unknown and in
order to facilitate the reconstruction work to be undertaken within the confines of a desk
rather than of an artist’s studio, it would be safer to proceed on the basis of a standard A4
paper-size reproduction of the photo as the ‘plan view’, on which to ‘build’. This would mean
a reconstruction in dimensions of about 30 by 20 centimetres, which apart from making
handling and transportation easier, it also allows for a better comparison of what can be seen
in the photographs and what is finally reconstructed.
The main problem faced in a reconstruction of Tatlin’s Collation of Materials is the
calculation of the shape and degree of inclination of the ‘triangle’, which constitutes its most
prominent feature. The other pieces of material which are either flat on the surface, such as
the asphalt strip, or slightly diverging, such as the ‘rectangular’ metal sheet beneath the
‘triangle’, can be fairly accurately measured on the basis of the ‘plan view’ and need only
minor adjustments.
Once these were measured, an attempt was made to simulate an ‘objet trouvé’ process and the
rectangular metal sheet and semi-circular metal ring were retrieved from the scraps of the
window-workshop of the hospital where my wife is working. The former is aluminium and
the latter iron, and were cut to the required size by a member of the workshop staff. The
transparent ‘cone segment’ comes from a thick-plastic saltcellar bought at ‘Habitat’ in
London, cut with a carving knife. The folded metal enveloping the rectangular sheet and the
‘cut pipe’ are from the top of a biscuit tin-box, cut with a pair of scissors, while the thinner
metal bottom of the same tin-box was to be used for the dominant ‘triangle’ of the
composition. The reason for selecting this thinner sheet was that the ‘triangle’ needed to be
‘handled’ in various ways (the snipping at the top, the cutting of the quarter-circular hole
along the middle of its side adjacent to the plaster, the folding of that side as a ‘twirl’ appears
at its lower end), which required that this piece should me in some way more ‘malleable’. The
frame was made by a chance discovery of leftovers of floor-boarding which appeared to be of
the right size, while the plaster and metal wire were bought from a hardware store. Finally the
‘asphalt’ strip is made of plasticine.

9
To work out the shape and size of the triangle, we may proceed as follows (and as seen in
Drawings 1 and 2):
Taking the frame of the ‘plan view’ to form a rectangle ABCD, which is projected in the side
view as rectangle A0B0C0D0, we measure the sides and take the side BC as equal to the side
B0C0. This measurement will form the basis for the calculation of all other measurements. The
triangle marked as EFG in the plan view is taken to be the same as the triangle E0F0G0 in the
side view. Hence as the side EG can be measured, the side E0G0 is also considered as known.
Triangle EFG in the plan view is taken to be a perpendicular ‘shadow’ that forms the base of
the assumed three-sided pyramid. This means that lines EF and FG can also be measured on
the plan view.
The question is to establish the measurement of the height line F0H0. Once this is done, and
knowing the length of side EG, a simple application of the Pythagorean Theorem in two
successive steps may provide the answer as to the lengths of triangle sides EF and FG. With
the length of side EG also known, then all three sides of the triangle will be measured, giving
us only one ‘possible’ triangle, which will be the triangle as seen in both pictures.
The vanishing point of the perspective view is established by extending sides A0B0 and D0C0
until they meet. On the assumption that the vertical sides AD and BC of the plan-view
rectangle are equal to the vertical side B0C0 of the perspective view, lines parallel to the plan-
view frame base can be drawn from any point on the plan view to intersect the side-view line
B0C0 at points which can be joined with the vanishing point V, accepting that the points of the
plan-view will be located along these lines in the side-view.
Now, point F of the triangle in the plan view is taken to be the summit of a three-sided
pyramid, with point H vertically below it, on the plaster surface, giving us the height of the
pyramid as line FH. A line parallel to the frame base of the plan-view (DC) is drawn from
point F/H to intersect the vertical side-view frame (B0C0) at point H1. This point is joined to
the vanishing point V of the perspective side view, forming a line VH1, which is considered as
parallel to the upper and lower frame lines. Point H0, i.e. the base of the pyramid height line
F0H0, will be located along this line VH1. The summit point F0 of the pyramid in the side view
is joined to the vanishing point, forming a line VF0. This line is extended to intersect the
vertical side B0C0 at point F1 thus forming a line VF1. Now on the perpendicular plane (PP)
whose base is formed by line B0C0, a vertical line is drawn from point H1 to intersect line VF1
at point X. The line XH1 thus formed is the projection on the perpendicular plane of the height
line F0H0 seen in perspective. As the measurement base of the perpendicular (BC) is known,
the vertical line XH1 can also be measured.
On the basis of a length of 22 cm for sides AD, BC and B0C0, the length of the height was
found to be, when measured with a ruler, equal to 9.1 cm (Drawing 1). A larger pencil
drawing, with a vertical side length of 12.6, gave us height length of 5.1cm (Drawing 2),
which maintains the same ratio between length of side and length of height.
Certainly, these are rough approximations as the drawings were done in pencil and
measurements made with a ruler. Therefore, an alternative method that could yield more
accurate measurements was also followed.
‘Geometricised’ drawings of the Collation were made using the photographs reproduced in
the catalogue of the first exhibition of Tatlin’s work in the ‘west’, at the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm, in 1968, curated by Troels Andersen. The reason for this choice was that, though
old, these pictures are perhaps the clearest reproductions, given that most subsequent studies
appear to be reproducing these reproductions, or to offer smaller versions, save Larissa
5
Zhadova’s (in the English version of her Tatlin of 1988) , whose illustrations, however,
though produced twenty years later, seem to lack the sharpness of the pictures in the older
Stockholm catalogue. The actual size of the picture of the ‘plan-view’ was used as the basis
for the reconstruction of the object, in order to avoid any further deformations by
enlargement, given that this picture is not standing absolutely ‘square’, nor is the side view
5
L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit. The texts, illustrations and other materials of this edition refer to the Tatlin exhibition in the
Soviet Union in 1977. In a footnote to an article published in France, J.E. Bowlt appears critical of that exhibition and of some of
the texts that appeared in the catalogue, considering the 1968 Stockholm exhibition still as the ‘definitive’ one. See J.E. Bowlt,
Un Voyage dans l’espace: l’ oeuvre de Vladimir Tatlin, Cahiers du Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1979, no 2, p. 217

10
standing at 90o to the horizontal. Also given that the actual dimensions of the photographed
object are not known, it is impossible to properly calculate the standing point of the viewer
and to make adjustments with any degree of accuracy.
The photographs were electronically scanned and the ‘geometricised’ drawings were traced
on their outlines computer aided drawing software (AutoCad 2000). As can be seen in
Drawing 3, a line perpendicular to the base of the plan-view was drawn to join the base of the
‘height’ line, indicated here as point B, with the upper and lower edge of the frame at points
D and E. The photographs were then adjusted in size so that the vector DE which may be
measured on the plan-view became equal to the vertical side B0C0, indicated here as D’E’,
thus providing a basis for subsequent measurements of side view lines projected back on to
the perpendicular plane.
The side view drawing is placed within a grid of xyz axes, so that the projection of the
triangle summit, here indicated as B’, will be located on the plane of the x axes. The
converging upper and lower sides of the frame, when extended, lead to the vanishing point.
The orthogonal system of xyz axes is placed so that D’E’ will be located on the x axis, with
D’ at an equal distance from the x edge as D. Along vector D’E’ a point B’’ is established so
that D’B’’=DB. The projection B’ of the summit B of the triangle must be located along the
line joining point B’’ with the vanishing point. Moreover, point B’ must be located on the
perpendicular line intersecting summit B of the triangle. Hence point B’ is determined as the
intersection of these two lines. Vector BB’ represents the height of the summit B from the
horizontal plane. To measure its length it has to be projected onto the z axis. The projection,
indicated as GG’ can now be measured, relative to DB. The length of this projection is 90mm
(9cm).
This measurement appears to validate the one produced by the ‘rougher’ method initially
followed, though even here, for the reasons already mentioned, a degree of uncertainty will
always remain.
Thus, returning to our initial drawing, we have the height FH of the pyramid whose base is
the ‘shadow’ EFG. The two perpendicular sides of the three-sided pyramid are two right-
angled triangles whose two sides are now known. For we already have the length of the base
lines (from the measurement of the ‘shadow’ triangle) and the vertical. Applying the
Pythagorean Theorem, the length of the hypotenuse of these triangles can be established,
which will provide us with the measurements of the two unknown sides of the metal sheet
triangle of the Collation. Knowing the length of all three sides of the triangle there is only one
way of constituting it.
Thus the rectangular triangle EFH, with a height of 9 cm and length of base-line 9.8 cm, will
have a hypotenuse (EF) of 13.4 cm. Similarly triangle GFH, with the same height and a base-
line length of 9.5, gives a hypotenuse (FG) of 13.1cm.
Knowing the length of side EG as 15.9cm (measured on the plan-view), the triangle in
question (EFG) can now be drawn, with angles of approximately 52, 54 and 74 degrees, as
can be seen in Drawing 4 and 5. It is interesting that the resulting triangle is almost an
isosceles one, but not quite, reinforcing this ‘feature’ of the work in question to suggest
regular geometricity, only to ‘retract’ it.
Additionally, as the height of triangle EFG can now be calculated as 10.6cm, a further
application of the Pythagorean theorem may provide as with the distance of point H from side
EG of the triangle (as we know the hypotenuse, i.e. the height of the triangle [10.6cm], and
the vertical side, i.e. the height of the ‘pyramid’ [9cm]). The resulting distance is 5.5cm,
producing a triangle which gives us the angle of inclination of the triangle from the plaster
surface. The angle is 59o.
Once the measurements were established, a paper mock-up was first made, followed by rough
‘studies’ using aluminium-foil wrapped cardboard and plasticine for the surface (see
photographs 5-11 under ‘Work in Progress’), which were photographed and compared with
the original photographs.
Satisfied as to the ‘likeness’ of the object produced by the mock-up, the cardboard triangle
was used to trace the triangle onto the metal sheet with a thin felt tip marker to be cut.

11
After the triangular metal sheet was cut, the pieces were assembled using epoxy glue,
knowing of course that certain areas of the work remain hidden to view, and hence the
technique of the actual ‘collation’ of the materials cannot be replicated.
Indeed the final reconstruction is not offered as an exact replica, but a replication by an
inverse process of its presence in real space, or as if following a music score or the lines from
a play, re-enacting it – inevitably – only by approximation. And such approximations are
presented in illustrations [photographs 1-7].

12
1.3. Talking

Having thus brought the object into view, if not as an exact replica at least as a re-enactment
of its dramatic presence, one realises the infinite possibilities of its shape or ‘configuration’.
In its three dimensions it has acquired an architectural or sculptural ‘time’, the time the
viewer takes to go ‘round’ it, but there is nothing to remind us of a recognisable image, and as
it does not ‘congeal’ into a form that could in some way or other be determined as its subject-
matter, time keeps flowing in a continuum. There is no specific vantage point, no point to
situate the viewer, at least within the semi-circle extending around its surface (for it is a relief
and not a piece of sculpture in the round). The object, of course, can be inspected from above,
from below, and one may look between and behind the pieces of material. But there is no
point of assembly, where the object may be grasped as a whole, as denoting something. To be
sure there may be a number of meanings or images, mostly fragmented or merely hinted at,
that could be inferred (somewhat like what we ‘read’ – with Leonardo – in moving clouds)
but none can appear as the dominant ‘explanation’ of the work. There is now a proliferation
of images of possible meanings as the viewer starts to explore the work from a variety of
angles; there is a new ‘sense’ of the material as the viewer now may even touch it. The
inquiring look having drawn closer in order to reach some ‘single’, ‘unifying’ point of
reference is now faced with a multiplication of possible fragmentary interpretations. Thus the
inquiring viewer needs to retreat and perhaps try to look at the object in a different way, to
look at it – taking its cue from the title – as a ‘collation of materials’, treating it purely as an
object, as a ‘thing’ standing against one’s presence, as the word denotes in the original
meaning of the word object still heard in the Greek and German designations: anti-keimenon
or gegen-stand.
The object, or rather the pieces that it collates (or gathers), appear to be coming out from the
surface, which forms its ‘ground’, in an inverse process to that of perspective that draws the
gaze in, and presents volume as receding in depth. Here volume emerges as if ‘braking out’
from the surface. Indeed the process of reconstruction showed how in order to find out the
actual shape of the material, segments of the surface had to be ‘realised’ as projections and
then brought forward and out (the ‘shadow’ of the ‘pyramid’). It is seen here that units of
volume are (suggestively) created by units of surface – this ‘transmutation’ receiving a further
‘turning of the screw’ in the reconstruction by the fact that the pieces of material, though in
themselves properly three-dimensional, are mostly ‘sheets’ that are conventionally perceived
as two dimensional surfaces.
In this respect it could be said that here volume is built from the inside. The effect is similar
to that of an orthographic projection used in map elevations, where what is ‘uppermost’, that
is ‘closer’ to the eye, appears as smaller – or a form of ‘inverted perspective’ used in
Byzantine icons, where the surface is assumed to be the ground or surface of things ‘coming’
to the eye, and not the surface ‘through’ which the viewer’s gaze ‘goes’ to things. The
Collation’s surface is a ground that moves towards the viewer; it is not a window for the
viewer to pass through.
Perhaps the orthographic convention, which supposes the viewer to be infinitely distant,
might allow the viewer to relate to the four right angles of the frame that encloses the
Collation in order to observe it, even if only for an instant, in an absolutely vertical view.
The ‘picture’ that thus emerges may be described, if we were to adopt the ‘Gestalt’
6
conventions , as follows: Not far from the ‘geometrical centre’, in about the middle of the
plaster surface, a vertical axis appears which is wider and ‘heavier’ in its lower half, but still
suspended above and to a certain extent ‘over’ the base of the frame. This axis is intersected
by a diagonal (formed by the side of the triangle adjacent to the plaster ‘ground’) that runs
‘downwards’ from left to right. The diagonal almost touches the right side of the frame, but
its ‘outward’ movement is held in check not only by the downward slope, that is the ‘heavier’
half of the enclosed surface, but also by the slight diagonal slant of the vertically standing

6
see R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception; A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of California Press, 1974, Chapters II
and III, pp. 42-161. See also V. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, Dover Publications, 1979 (Chapter IV, Primary Plane)

13
black (asphalt) strip on the other side, which softly ‘echoes’ (as diagonal) but also pulls back
upwards (as vertical) the more pronounced diagonal of the triangle’s side. Simultaneously it
draws the whole composition to the left, and as it forms a pair of slightly converging lines
with the left side of the triangle, it creates a tension between the downward-and-out push seen
from left to right, and an upward-and-in pull seen from right to left, perhaps emphasised by
the thin ‘spiralling’ line, or twirl of metal wire ‘struggling’ to reach the upper side of the
wooden frame.
This tension produced by the counteracting of opposing forces, can be discerned along the
vertical aspect of the ‘picture’ as well, as the upper semi-cylinders move outward, ‘opening’
from left to right, while the lower semi-cylinder moves inward, ‘closing’ in the opposite
direction (right to left). The outward movement of the upper part is emphasised by the
doubling effect brought about by the wider span of the glass, which however is held back by
the wire that ties it onto the ‘horseshoe’, which in turn is held forcefully onto the surface and
is ‘struggling’ to stretch out in two directions. Similarly the inward movement of the lower
semi-cylinder is emphasised by a further ‘spiral’ turn of its left edge, which at the same time
relates to the ‘hidden’ outward bend of the metal sheet, which, as far as can be surmised,
forms the continuation of the semi-cylinder enveloping the right side of the rectangle. This
inward bend, highlighted by the three-pointed edge of the metal sheet (which can be dimly
perceived in the extant photographs of the work) is held in check by being firmly nailed onto
the surface, at the three protruding points.
But perhaps the most powerful antithesis is that between the ‘triangle’ and the ‘rectangle’, the
former moving out towards the left, the latter towards the right. In effect, the rectangle is
‘opening’, conventionally ‘read’ from left to right, while the triangle is ‘closing’, from up to
down. However, the ‘opening’ of the rectangle is negated as it is ‘pushed’ back toward the
surface but also ‘back’ toward the left. The ‘closing’, ‘downward’ triangle on the other hand
is, finally, the only piece allowed to freely thrust itself, quite ‘pointedly’ towards the viewer,
bringing the picture space to merge with the picture plane. This outward thrust is reinforced,
albeit not emphatically, by the quarter-circle hole almost directly opposite the protruding
angle of the metal sheet. Not emphatically, because the quarter-circle cannot properly ‘point’
to the angle. But only to either the upper or lower ends of the side from which it has been cut.
In this case its arching curve ‘points’ upwards thus helping to control the sliding slant of the
diagonal to the right and draw the composition back towards the left. Thus it is as if the
triangle breaks free, but not quite.
Finally, all the major component parts of the work are held together as if dependent on each
other. This is not a resolution of their conflicting tendencies. The rectangle seems to have
pierced through the triangle, cutting open the quarter-circle hole, to support one side of the
semi-cylinder which, however, being longer on the other side seems to be pushing the
rectangle down. It could be also that the slight continuation of the cut side of the triangle,
which deforms the quarter-circle, suggests an extension of this line through the point of
contact of the curve of the semi-cylinder and the straight line of the rectangle’s side.
Moreover, the triangle, though pierced by the rectangle’s right corner, rests on it and tightly
embraces its upper right corner. Indeed, as the triangle is made of a thinner metal sheet than
the rectangle, it could be said that the former cuts, or scars the latter. This effect is more
strongly sensed at the point where the string of wire and the edge of the glass semi-cylinder:
the wire keeps the glass onto the horseshoe by being stretched to the point of cutting its edge.
The tension is not released as the viewer is ‘released’ from the orthographic position, and may
now approach the work from a variety of angles. The contours of the configuration, and the
shapes of the pieces and their articulation keep changing as the viewer moves in space and
time. However, in the actuality of three-dimensional presence, the viewer, though seeing
changing forms does ‘apprehend’ the actual shape of the various pieces of material (as
triangle, rectangle etc.) freed from the distortions of perspectival projection that the two-
dimensional plane of the photograph presents. The perceived tension may now suggest certain
generic ‘responses’ of a psychological kind, relating to degrees of ‘inwardness’ and
‘outwardness’, ‘opening’ and ‘closing’, ‘advancing’ and ‘receding’, such as can be produced
by the ‘general’ feel that the location and tendencies of the various pieces in relation to their

14
ground and to each other may bring about. Similarly, the texture of the material, the ‘cold’
metal and glass, the ‘warm’ plaster, wood and asphalt, and the finer details, the constant
surprises that arise from the slight, at times almost imperceptible, deformations of geometry,
may also stimulate ‘generic’ responses from the viewer.
But the viewer might be hard put to find the exact words to describe or express these
responses. They may refer to ‘fundamental’ categories such as structure, geometry,
articulation, ground and figure, organisation, gathering, and balance that are all somehow
brought into play in this work. They may also refer to ‘basic’ modes of perception relating to
the two- and three-dimensionality of things. Or they may refer to texture, materiality and
sensation. But it will be very difficult to make out some ‘meaning’, to utter a ‘meaningful’
phrase that will encapsulate the work. A shot that may come close, based on the description
offered above, could be that it makes manifest a sort of tension between opposing forces
which is balanced out by the negating effect of each force upon the other. But still we are not
much more the wiser. Someone might attempt to condense the ‘meaning’ in a poem, as the
7
poet Velimir Khlebnikov, Tatlin’s friend, did (referring to the artist’s work as a whole) –
only to compound the problem of interpretation.
Delving into fundamentals the viewer, might in a last effort, as it were, attempt (based on the
knowledge s/he possesses) to assign a role for the Collation, as a symbol or emblem of sorts.
Is it possible to link the geometrical ‘solids’ traced in our description to some basic definition
of art such as may be inferred from Cezanne’s call to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere,
8
the cone”? Or, on the other hand, one might equally legitimately look for symbolic
archetypes such, for example, the cross, which it could be claimed appears (somewhat
deformed, to be sure) in the Collation. And if one happens to be acquainted with the Jungian
line of analysis one could be tempted to discuss the work with reference to the use of triangles
9
in yantra motifs. However, on such interpretations, and many others that may be proposed,
the work is silent: it neither refutes them nor upholds them.
But as we find it difficult to talk about this work, as we find it difficult to understand its
meaning or ‘what it stands for’, the question re-emerges: Why look at it?
Indeed the viewer, as an onlooker, may well avert his gaze and depart. For it might as well be
a heap of throwaway material by the sidewalk. But before departing he or she must be
reminded that it is not just a ‘heap’. First, it has a frame. Second it is hung in an exhibition.
Third it states a claim: it stands for itself.
Thus it transpires that there is a question to be put before asking ‘why look at it?’, and this
question is ‘who is looking at it?’ Is it merely an onlooker or a viewer with a stake in its
claim?
It is thus that one enters the orbit of the work, faced with a choice of either turning one’s back
on the object, ignoring the claim and its artistic status or pursuing the exploration by taking
the claim ‘seriously’ as something of worth in one’s engagement with art.

7
V. Khlebnikov, ‘Tatlin, visionary of the blades’, written in May 1916. See L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 336.
8
P. Cézanne, Letter to Emile Bernard, in H.B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1968, p. 19.
9
A. Jaffe, Symbolism in the Visual Arts, in C.G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols, Picador, London 1984, pp. 267-68.

15
2. The Context
2.1. The Claim

Surely, it must not have seemed a grand occasion when Tatlin in the spring of 1914 exhibited
his ‘painterly reliefs’ (zivopishnie reliefi) in his studio in Moscow, although it could be seen,
as Punin was to claim a few years later, in 1921, as a momentous event in the history of
European Art. It is uncertain, and perhaps unlikely, that the Collation of Materials was
presented then. It was undoubtedly worked on during 1914, and was certainly on display at
the Tramvai V exhibition early in 1915, as a photograph (in ‘frontal view’) was reproduced in
10
a newspaper review of that exhibition in March 1915 . The fact that the legend of the
photograph reads ‘Painterly Relief’ lends some support to the view that it was part of the
group of the works presented in 1914. In any event it definitely formed part, and one could
say the culmination of the same creative activity in the ‘handling of materials’, followed by
the corner and corner-counter reliefs. Tatlin himself, having described, in 1918, his works as
11
‘reliefs of a superior type’ , staked his own claim, perhaps even more forcefully than Punin
when, in 1920, he likened the import of his reliefs to that of the Bolshevik revolution by
declaring that “what happened from the social aspect in 1917 was realized in our work as
pictorial artists in 1914, when ‘materials volume and construction’ were accepted as our
12
foundations” .
To be sure, such encomia might be seen as attempts at a post-factum justification of a certain
type of artistic creativity that served to support a specific point of view within the intense
debate on art in Russia during the early 1920s, and, further, the case can be put today that
even if ‘momentous’ or ‘revolutionary’ the exhibition of 10 May1914 at 37 Ostozhenka in
13
Moscow was an event that in many respects did not fulfil its promise. But, nevertheless, it
could be equally plausible to suggest that almost a century after the event it still warrants
attention as an historical instant that produced works which left a mark on the story of
European art become global, works which still hold a certain fascination and, perhaps more
importantly – though through the irony of history they have mostly vanished – still raise – as
evidenced by the unabated scholarly interest in them – some fundamental questions
concerning the art object and the spectator’s relationship to it.
14
These works, two of which are reproduced here [plates 9 and 10] , are compositions made of
various materials with no discernible narrative elements or representational references – and
on these three counts Punin’s main claim that they constitute a break ‘going beyond the whole
15
the tradition of European art’ can be said to be validated, while furnishing substance to
Tatlin’s self-proclaimed ‘revolutionism’. To be sure these works appear somewhat haphazard
and not fully articulated compared to the Collation of Materials, which seems more
thoroughly thought-out and worked-through. Indeed it is no accident that Punin uses the latter
as the prime example for his encomium of Tatlin’s ‘breakthrough’, as effectively illustrating
the high point of the thrust ‘beyond tradition’.
No doubt such claims and assertions – which shall be investigated in what follows – may be
easily considered as self-congratulatory, but one would be hard put to describe them as
exaggerated. For, at first sight, in these works all the traditional illusionistic devices seem

10
Reproduced in J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 100. It is worth noting that the legend of the
photograph lists the materials as: wood, tin, wire (derevo, zhest’, provoloka). It is of course possible that the newspaper review
did not have all its facts right.
11
V. Tatlin, My Answer to “Letter to the Futurists” (1918), in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 185.
12
V. Tatlin, The Work ahead of us (1919), in J.E. Bowlt, (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, Thames an Hudson, London,
1988, p. 205.
13
A copy of the Announcement of the exhibition in Tatlin’s studio, in the Manuscripts Division, State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg f 121, d. 117, l.61, reads as follows: “On the 10th, 11th, 13th and 14th of May this year the studio of Vladimir Tatlin (37
Ostozhenka, apartment 3) will be open from 6 to 8 pm for a free viewing of his Synthetic-Static compositions. In addition at
seven o’clock of the aforementioned days, the Futurist Sergei Podgarskii will dynamically declaim his latest poetic transrational
records.” Also, a band letter placard mounted above the entrance to the apartment proclaimed: BEHOLD THE TRICK!
14
These are the works we can be certain were exhibited at the May 1914 exhibition, as they appear in photographic reproduction
in a booklet issued by Tatlin in December 1915, with the indication “1913-1914 (first exhibition of reliefs)” [pervaya vistavka
relefov]. See T. Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin, Moderna Museet, Stockholm 1968, p. 38.
15
N. Punin, Against Cubism, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin op. cit., p. 392.

16
absent and the mimetic convention as handed down from the Renaissance seems to be
abrogated. We are here faced with a new type of art that is by now ‘officially’ classified under
the rubric of ‘non-representation’.
Moreover, this rupture, this ‘revolutionary break with tradition’ was no thunderbolt out of the
blue. For a start, anyone acquainted with the work of Picasso at the time, would be tempted to
find similarities with his Bouteille et Guitare of 1913 [plate 11]. Indeed affinities with other
works by Tatlin’s contemporaries may be found and will be discussed in what follows. But,
for the moment, leaving aside the rather futile debate as to the parentage of the first non-
representational artefact, a more general point needs perhaps to be made, namely that at the
time of Tatlin’s exhibition the re-appraisal of traditional modes of representation was a
widespread phenomenon in the whole of western intellectual world, involving not only artists,
but also philosophers, social theoreticians, linguists and scientists. It was part of the overall
effort to come to terms with a host of new phenomena throughout human society and man’s
position in relation to nature, which raised the issue of reappraising the experiences of the
life-world, of redefining the human condition.

17
2.2. Rupture
[Zeitgeist (I). Crisis and the ‘new’]

The facts have been recounted many a time. I shall attempt here only to summarise them. Of
course the summary will not be (and cannot be) ‘objective’. It will be an ‘interpretation’ that
may furnish the foundation for the development of an ‘argument’.
Thus it could be said that it appears to be a point of general agreement among scholars that a
questioning or ‘re-thinking’ of certain central values long entrenched in the western
intellectual tradition occurred throughout Europe at the turn of the 20th century. As Jacques
Derrida once put it, by the end of the 19th century “the collapse of the great post-Kantian
metaphysical theories, especially that of Hegelian idealism was considered as final and
irrevocable. But triumphant positivism and scientific optimism began to lose their momentum
as well. The crisis of metaphysics was strangely concurrent with the crisis of positivist
16
science.” It could perhaps be argued that a realisation of the insufficiency of scientific and
analytic categories to account for the world of experience brought about a profound and
many-faceted ‘crisis’, which however, at the same time set in motion the quest for a solution,
for a radically new way of dealing with the world. According to Viktor Erlich, “by the
beginning of our century, an acute methodological crisis in various fields of scholarship had
set in. The world-view which had dominated the European intellectual scene for several
decades was re-examined and found wanting. With the basic assumption of positivist
determinism shaken, drastic revision of the logical foundation of positivist determinism was
17
in the order of the day.” Indeed, it is this realisation of the conditions of the crisis and the
awareness of a need for a ‘drastic revision’ that emerge as the salient features of this period,
accounting perhaps for the seemingly paradoxical fact that a sense of confidence in a ‘new
beginning’ accompanies the sense of ‘crisis’.
Thus, as various historical studies and memoirs suggest, the 20th century appears to have
opened with a widespread feeling of optimism as to the possibilities of humankind, an
optimism carried over from the 19th century and fed by the successes in science and
technology that were rapidly transforming man’s everyday life and environment, promising a
18
genuine, liberated experience of life in conditions of ‘infinite freedom’ . However, this
process of rapid transformation, which must have seemed vertiginous at the time, with its
wondrous inventions, the novel means of global communication and transport, the massive
power of the factory, the uncanny potential of the laboratory, was also transforming the
notions of time and space, questioning the basic and time-honoured assumptions of western
man’s own perceptions of himself.
Indeed, it could be said that the causal process of historicist ‘progress’, the great project of the
European intellect, in its successful unfolding had reached the point of undermining its own
validity. But this was in itself an ‘achievement’. Increasing knowledge was revealing the
world as infinitely more complex than had hitherto been imagined. But this opened up
‘unimaginable’ possibilities. Scientific progress had fragmented the holistic worldview which
had served as its own premise and was now posing pressing questions to philosophy. The
quest for the Phenomenological ‘bracketing of the world’ and the Vitalist ‘creative evolution’
can be seen as attempts to acknowledge the fragmented world and answer the new questions
by overthrowing the static eidos which historicist metaphysics had held as the ultimate truth.
The shift in this process of philosophical enquiry emerges with the acceptance, in certain
cases, of the uncertainty that this fragmentation produced, as can be seen in the works of the
‘vitalist’ Henri Bergson who, according to H.P. Lachat, suggested that “it is evident that a
universe which is partially irrational in itself cannot be apprehended but by a faculty which is
19
itself irrational, that is to say the intuition that respects this irrationality.” But perhaps more

16
J. Derrida, Husserl, Epoches Journal [in Greek], No.3 Athens 1964, p. 181.
17
V. Erlich, Russian Formalism; History-Doctrine, The Hague 1955, p. 51.
18
see for example A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, Du Cubisme, in R.L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art; Ten Unabridged essays,
Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1964, p. 18, and K. Malevich, Suprematism, in ibid. p. 95.
19
H.P. Lachat, L’influence de Bergson sur l’évolution de la pensée contemporaine, in Actes du Xe Congrès des Sociétés de
Philosophie de langues françaises, Congrès Bergson, Paris 1959, p. 193.

18
importantly it is the phenomenological attempt, pursued primarily by Husserl (whose
intellectual lineage may lead us back to Kierkegaard’s existentialism) to find a place between
idealism or metaphysics on the one side and empiricism or positivism on the other,
simultaneously refuting the total subjugation to generalised abstractions of the former and the
wholesale debunking of abstractions by the latter. Husserl set the issue quite succinctly when
he asked: “Can reason and that-which-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines
20
what is?” The quote comes from his well-known book whose title encapsulates the problem:
The Crisis of European Sciences.
The malaise could be summed up in the term ‘alienation’, a sense that man was drifting away
from ‘authentic experience’, as all aspects of human life became mediated by the state, the
economy and social institutions, and trivialised by ideologies. On the other hand, however, as
sense of imminent deliverance was equally in evidence, as development all around showed
that there was something else in the process of creation, and writings from nay quarters
demonstrated the possibility of achieving the goal of an authentic, unmediated experience.
Thus it is in this convergence of ‘optimism’ and ‘crisis’ that the first years of the 20th century
21
appear as what has been described as a moment of prophecy , promising a ‘new beginning’,
the opening of a path leading to the liberation of human faculties as yet unacknowledged or
repressed, and to an experience of the truth of the world in the actual moment, freed from the
shackles of a questionable ‘regulatory’ order of causality, an order that related to conditions
by now superseded.
The description of the period as a moment of prophecy is substantiated also by the observed
resurgence of the mythical and the mystical, by the proliferation of doctrines of ‘revelatory’
spiritualism such as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, neo-Calvinism and the like. The intuitive
and the irrational were further fed by the unveiling of huge vistas of ‘other’ – considered
‘primitive’ – cultures in the traumatic experience of colonialism, cultures which in their
‘noble savagery’ were seen as containing such elements of ‘authentic’ humanity as had been
repressed by western civilisation.
The prophecy or promise to lead civilisation out of ‘crisis’ can be seen in the calls for a
22
‘stronger being’ (starker dasein in Rilke’s words ) to rise up, for a ‘deeper understanding’ to
be grasped, that appear in many guises. Be it as the invocation of man’s tragic encounter with
23
his destiny in what has been called the desperate recklessness of Nietzsche’s thought ; or by
the post-Hegelian promise of social liberation through political activism; or by the quest for
an authentic existential freedom implied in the works of academic philosophers such as
Bergson and Husserl. But above all perhaps by ‘plunging into the unknown to find the new’
as the oft-quoted closing line of Baudelaire’s Voyage goes, with the disturbing discoveries of
the ‘unconscious’ in the human psyche (psychology), the unsettling awareness of the
‘arbitrariness’ of human language (linguistics), and of bewildering new scientific postulates
such as non-Euclidean geometry, the theory of relativity and quantum physics.
Most of these trends of thought, on varying degrees of clarity and intensity – and certainly not
consistently – can be said to have found, directly or indirectly, expression in the field of art.
This is substantiated by the fact that the artists themselves made such references in the
manifestos they wrote at the time. The emergence of the ‘manifesto’ as part and parcel of the
artists’ communication with their audience is in itself a moot point. For these declarations of
intent, often appearing before the artwork itself, show that the artists are conscious of the new
work that needs to be done from now on, and it is no accident that the first such declaration is
entitled the Futurist Manifesto. The style and content of these texts from 1908 to the early
1920s is an admixture, in various proportions, of the ideas briefly outlined in the previous
paragraphs. Attempting to summarise this style and content one could say that here the reader
is confronted with a visionary promise of redemption, together with a near-fetishisation of the

20
E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern UP, Evanston 1973, p. 11
21
J. Berger, The Moment of Cubism, in the Look of Things, Penguin London 1971, p. 131
22
R-M Rilke, First Elegy, The Duino Elegies, (Dual Language edition; trnsl., intro. & comm. J.B. Leishman and S. Spender),
Hogarth Press, London 1968, p. 25
23
The description is Gadamer’s; see G.H. Gadamer, Hegel’s Logic; Five Hermeneutical Studies, Yale University Press, 1976, p.
103

19
 24
concept of the ‘new’ as a revealed truth to which some misguided ‘reason’ had, thus far,
blinded humanity; a new suffused however with the ‘old’, as the lost centre of authenticity, a
new that could be simultaneously found in the technological future as well as in the primitive
past as an expression of the authentic present. Again it is no accident that futurism coexists
with primitivism.
But on the basis of the above, this period can also be described as a moment marked by a
vacuum of intellectual authority. It appears as a moment of confusion with the concurrent
affirmation of technology on the one hand and the questioning of the validity of scientific
methodology on the other. In a contradictory climate of both disillusionment and hope, a pull
both backwards and forward gave rise to a rethinking of history, which was now seen not only
as progress but also as a vicious circle of forgetfulness. What in the scientific surge seemed,
at first, to lead to a cumulative increase in knowledge was revealed in the end to be merely a
deficiency of knowledge. Man was not discovering more and more of the ‘essence’ of things,
but only that this essence was a concept conceived by him. Man was not discovering truth but
only the reflection of the structures of his own making. What was established was not an
25
eternal veritas but the contingent verum factum.
It was the beginning of that process which would lead the quantum physicist Heisenberg to
conclude that “natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the
interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of
26
questioning.” Such a notion, on which the famous ‘principle of uncertainty’ is based,
echoed what was established in a different scientific field, that of linguistics, and namely that
the words of human language did not contain an inherent meaning but where ‘arbitrary’ signs,
27
invented by man in order to communicate.
But if the only recognisable or knowable truth resides what man’s own creative endeavours
can produce, then it emerges that to think is not to discover what is already there, but to create
or invent a new reality. This is of crucial importance, as it destabilises all the habitual
premises and calls for a redefinition of man’s perception of himself and nature. In such
conditions it is no wonder that man’s autonomous position in the world is radicalised and that
the claim for the authenticity of the product of human creativity is established.
Thus the actual in the concrete situation, or what Husserl called the ‘return to things
28
themselves’ , is posited as the only field of ‘true’ experience, encompassing what it cannot
determine by acknowledging the margin of indeterminacy – the ‘unknown’ that leads to the
29
‘new’ – perhaps grasped comprehensively as a Stimmung of sorts.
It is this paradox of optimistic crisis, in the contradiction of an irrational reasoning, which
could be said to verify Marx’s famous dictum that ‘everything is pregnant with its opposite’,
and it is in such a context from which the European artistic avant-garde can be seen to
emerge. It is a complex context where a ‘utopian’ thinking seizes the imagination of people,
not simply as a quantitative accumulation of ‘progress’, but as a qualitative break – a
complete ‘rupture’ with the past.
It is interesting that in the avant-garde’s attack against tradition not even its direct
predecessors, Impressionism and Symbolism, were spared (though at times lip service was
paid to Impressionism’s assistance in forwarding the cause forward).
The general ‘feel’ of the time, perhaps directly expressed first in architecture, as on open
30
attack on Symbolism, by Adolf Loos’s famous dictum that ornament is a crime , brought
with it a celebration of the machine aesthetic, as was to be glorified in the manifesto of the

24
On the theme of ‘le nouveau’ see C.A. Hackett, Rimbaud, A Critical Introduction, Cambridge UP 1981, p. 29
25
The distinction belongs to the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). See G. Vico, The New Science, Cornell UP,
Ithaca 1948.
26
W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy [1959], Ch. III, Penguin, London 2000, p. 43
27
As was to be stated, at the time of the rise of the ‘avant-garde’ by Ferdinand de Saussure with regard to the ‘signifiers’ of
human language. See F. de Saussure Cours de linguistique générale, Fontana, London 1974. […]
28
J. Derrida, Husserl, Epoches Journal, op. cit., p. 181
29
For a discussion of this concept see C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, Academy Editions, London 1973, Chapter 1, p. 6
30
A. Loos, Ornament and Crime [1910], in I. Frank (ed.), The Theory of Decorative Art; An Anthology of European and
American Writings, 1750-1940, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 288

20
 31
Futurists , who can be seen as very consciously trying to sever the umbilical cord linking
most of them (and especially their leader Marinetti) to the Symbolist milieu.
On the other hand, the break with Impressionism was not as abrupt – as can be seen in the
development of Cézanne’s post-impressionist ‘prismatic’ compositions to the proto-cubist
work of Picasso, and thence to the ‘polyhedral’ and ‘time-based’ paintings of full-blown
Cubism. But it was precisely this developmental logic that fed the belief that the ‘newer’ art
was an indication of some kind of progress in perceiving and relating to the world, a progress
which had reached the point for a qualitative ‘break’. This can be seen clearly in the text of
Gleizes and Metzinger on Cubism and emerges even more forcefully in Malevich’s
Suprematist manifesto. The same step-by-step ‘improvement’ also informed Punin’s Against
Cubism, already mentioned – but on this there a few things to be discussed later on.
Thus, it was as if the new art in the opening years of the twentieth century was pressing on in
the same direction as Phenomenology was following in philosophy (and such parallels have
32
been drawn by scholars ). For it was as if the young artists had found between the empirical
reality of Impressionism and the idealised unreality of Symbolism a new reality, affirming the
fragmented world and attempting to deal with the concrete conditions that were taking shape.

31
F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, Le Figaro, in H. B. Chipp (ed.) Theories of Modern Art, op. cit., p. 286
32
see, inter alia, C. Bogdan, The Semiotics of Visual Language, East European Monographs, Columbia UP, 2002, Chapter VI:
Cubism and Phenomenology; a semiotic comparative analysis.

21
2.3. Russia
[Zeitgeist (II). At the crossroads]

The belief in a ‘new beginning’, the dreaming of a new era looking over the centuries both
future and past, that seemed to inspire the artists and thinkers in western Europe, was very
much shared by intellectuals, artists and poets in Russia. “Our days are exceptional – some of
the most remarkable in History”, wrote Valery Bryusov in 1903. “Unexpected and marvellous
possibilities,” he continued, “are being revealed to mankind. That which for centuries
remained inert, dead, fundamental matter is beginning to tremble with life in the depths of our
souls. It is as though […] some obscure shutters have been parted. Like stems of plants we
involuntarily, unconsciously turn our head toward the source of light. Soothsayers of the new
are everywhere – in art in science, in ethics. Mysteries that we have not known before are
revealed in everyday life. Events which had passed by, paying no heed, now attract our full
attention. Through their coarse thickness the radiance of another existence manifestly
33
shines”. Equally, the opposing forces that were giving rise to these events were very clearly
discerned, as evidenced in the writings of D. Merezhovsky who as early as 1892 had stated:
“Our time must be defined by two opposing features – it is a time of extreme materialism and
at the same time, of the most passionate idealistic outbursts of spirit. We are present at a
great, significant struggle of two views of life, two diametrically opposed worldviews. The
last claims of religious feeling are colliding with the last conclusions of empirical
34
knowledge.”
The point has very often been made that Russia, which was to experience the despair and
hope of an actual social revolution in 1905, was a country where all the contradictory
developments and phenomena that mark the opening years of the 20th century in Europe
appeared in an even more intense form. That Russia was indeed a ‘special case’ was very
much felt at the time, as can be seen in the writings of as diverse figures as Lenin,
Mandelstam, Bely and Khlebnikov who, in one of his poems stated:
Russia is an enlarged continent
That amplified enormously the voice of the West35
In Russia, as I had the opportunity to discuss at some length in my M.Phil. thesis, the new and
the old, the modern and the primordial, the primitive and the over-civilised, existed in closest
proximity. This unique imbalance brought all phenomena into sharper relief, rendering the
contradictions and confusion of the age even more acute/ Russia was caught in a cultural tug-
of-war, or a binary system of allegiances where, as Lotman and Uspenskii have pointed out in
36
their Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture, the spatial and temporal, the new
and the old, the ‘western and oriental’ were constantly fused together to form arguments in
the interminable debate on Russia’s identity and destiny, following the vagaries of Russian
history in its Byzantine, Tartar and European phases. What in Western Europe appeared
mainly as a cultural crisis was thus compounded in Russia by a chronic social crisis and also
by an equally chronic crisis of national identity. The social crisis produced conditions where a
‘new’ world was sensed as a distinct possibility. As Osip Mandelstam was to write, those
37
living in St. Petersburg felt “that something very splendid was to happen.” On the other
hand, within the context of the national identity crisis the questions about the relevance of the
‘primitive’ and the ‘archaic’ acquired a much more pronounced urgency. The Asiatic imprint
of Russia’s soul, the backwardness of its peasant life, the ‘difference’ of its Scythian past, the
‘otherness’ of its Byzantine inheritance, were all thrown into the debate in a country where a
trip from the capital to the provinces was also a voyage from the modern world into the

33
V. Bryusov, A Review of K.D. Balmont’s ‘Let’s be like the Sun’, in R.E. Peterson, Russian Symbolism; An Anthology of
Critical and Theoretical Writings, Ardis Ann Arbor, Michigan 1986, p. 42
34
D. Merezhovsky, On the Reasons for the Decline, and the New Currents in Contemporary Russian Literature, in ibid., p. 18
35
V. Khlebnikov, ‘Burlyuk’, cited in V. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle, Pluto Press, London 1974, p. 18
36
see I.M. Lotman & B.A. Uspenskii, Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture in AD Nakhimovsky & A Stone-
Nakhimovsky (eds.) The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, Cornell, 1985, pp. 30-66.
37
quoted in M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, The Experience of Modernity, Verso, London 1985, p. 174.

22
 38
primitive past, as Kandinsky would describe his journey to the Vologda district. In such
39
conditions, aptly described by Marshall Berman as “the modernism of underdevelopment”
the struggle for a re-evaluation of established traditions became more intense, more desperate,
and the artistic avant-garde more self-confident and vociferous as it entered the stage with a
Slap in the Face of Public taste, ready to “throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
40
overboard from the steamer of modernity”.
The attack on artistic tradition, which in Russia occurred simultaneously in the field of poetry,
the visual arts and literary criticism (within the context of trend that comes generally under
41
the heading of ‘Russian Futurism’ ) has been described as an attempt to overcome the
morbid retreat of Symbolism to an illusory noumenon, by redirecting interest away from the
rarefied realms of an other-worldly existence of ‘higher meaning’, to the actual, concrete,
material of art and literature as the sole field of reference of the aesthetic. To the vicarious
experience of Symbolist poetics, where the word reflected or opened a door to a higher order
through a process of theurgy, the Futurists may be said to counterpose the concrete experience
in the ‘things themselves’, not (and as already suggested) in an eternal veritas but in the
contingent verum factum, as an autonomous new reality authenticated by the creativity of the
autonomous subject.
To be sure, this is a broad generalisation that fails to take into account the specific – and at
times contradictory – particularities of both Symbolism and Futurism. The line of
demarcation between the two trends cannot be easily drawn and a case may be, and has been,
42 43
made – most notably by Markov and also by Barooshian – that to a considerable extent
Futurism evolved out of, rather than emerged in opposition to, Symbolism. It is indeed true,
as we shall see over and over again, that the distinction between Symbolism and Futurism
becomes at times an extremely difficult enterprise. For Symbolism, like all so-called artistic
movements, was not as homogeneous as any definition would imply, and in the great variety
of Symbolist writings ideas that would be trumpeted as new inventions by the Futurists and
the literary critics who supported them (later known as Formalists), are already there. The
44
case of Andrei Bely is most pertinent in this respect.
What however seems to be important as a point of divergence is the stand taken up by the
Futurists against the Symbolist ‘retreat’ from the world, and their overtly declared intention to
reject the ‘use’ of the word as a means of escape from the world of things, a world which the
Futurists unhesitatingly affirmed and accepted.
It is in this sense that the polemics of the Futurists against the Symbolist tradition which had
dominated the Russian literary and artistic scene in the first years of the 20th century have
been discussed by Viktor Erlich – in his influential work Russian Formalism – where the
main point of contention between the two trends is seen as their diverging views on the way
the ‘word’, or the ‘material’ of art is perceived.
According to Symbolist poetics, says Erlich, ‘poetry is a revelation of ultimate Truth, a higher
form of cognition, a ‘theurgy’ capable of bridging the gap between empirical reality and the
45
‘unknown’” . It is such a notion of poetry that the Futurists – although themselves very much
attracted to the ‘unknown’ as we shall see – seem to be striving to undermine and refute in
their manifesto The Word as Such (signed by their two most prominent exponents Khlebnikov
and Kruchenykh, in 1913), where they declare: “We the Futurist poets thought more about the

38
Kandinsky, Reminiscences, in R.L. Herbert, (ed.) Modern Artists on Art, op. cit., p. 30
39
M. Berman, All that is Solid melts into Air, op. cit., pp. 40, 82
40
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Word as Such, in Kern G (ed.-trns) op. cit., p. 197
41
It is characteristic of the binary forces in Russian culture that the Futurists themselves were sceptical about the designations as
futuristy, as this tended to identify them too closely with the Futurists of the ‘West’, i.e. the Italians (whom they considered as
‘vociferous braggarts’), and coined the ‘indigenous’ neologism budetliansky, which P. Schmitd has rendered as Futurian, from
the word buduschii (future). Its use was rather limited.
42
V. Markov, The Longer Poems of Velimir Xlebnikov, Berkeley 1962, p. 61
43
V. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930, a Study in Avant-Garde, Mouton, The Hague 1974, p. 31
44
A number of scholars have referred to Bely as a precursor of futurism. Markov sees his work as helping to develop futurism on
a higher level; Z. Folejewsky has pointed to ‘pre-futurist’ elements in his work; while B. Livshits considered Bely’s
‘Symphonies’ of 1902 as ‘futurist’. Finally V. Asmus has stated that among the Symbolists ‘no one did as much as Andrej Belyj
to implant formalism in art, poetics, aesthetics’. See V. Barroshian, ibid, p. 31, n54.
45
V. Erlich, Russian Formalism, op. cit., p. 35

23
Word than about the Psyche, mercilessly abused by our predecessors. Let us rather live by the
46
word as such than by our own experience.”
Thus it could be said that for Symbolist poetics the word is still a vehicle of representation, a
referent (or signifier) full of suggestive images. As Erlich points out, the poetic word “is seen
as a mystical logos reverberating with occult meanings” and the metaphor is elevated “from
mere figure of speech to a Symbol, the function of which is to express the parallelism of the
phenomenal and the noumenal, to reveal the latent correspondences between the world of the
47
senses […] and the superior or transcendental reality.”
But such views upheld ‘content’ and ‘spirituality’ which, according to the Futurists, were “the
48
greatest crimes against genuine art” . What was important to the Futurists was not the
suggestive richness of the word – its claims to a register of set ‘truths’ or ‘meanings’ – but the
word as ‘material’ of a creative process registering a new reality, a ‘not-yet-known’ in the
autonomy of its self-presence. As the poet Benedict Livshits was to put it, this is a “creativity
which places the criteria of its value not on the plane of the mental relationship between
49
reality and consciousness, but in the realm of the autonomous word” . Thus, there were no
‘latent correspondences’ to be revealed; for the Futurists there was no question of a ‘bridge’
to the ‘unknown’ that would make it understandable, but only the shaping of the unknown
with new concrete ‘facts’ brought about by working on the ‘material’ of art.
The rift is an important one, though the ‘new’ stand by the Futurists is, as we shall see,
difficult to defend. The ‘theurgy’ of the Symbolists appeared to maintain a link with the
[traditionally accepted] ‘profound’ meaning, with a core content that revealed the
meaningfulness of existence beyond ephemeral circumstances, to the fundamental and
original essence of human life. The ‘ephemeral circumstances’, the real world that is,
appeared as false and alienating, while the ‘beyond’ held an original truth. Simply put they
upheld sentiment as opposed to reason, and in this sense they can be said to belong to the
great romantic tradition. The position of the Futurists, on the other hand, was somewhat
contradictory. They did not accept such a division between the ‘here’ and the ‘beyond’, but
this did not mean that they fully affirmed this real world. In discrediting the ‘beyond’ as the
residence of an original truth they were truly modern, but ran the risk of obliterating any
meaningful existential foothold for human experience.
This was sensed at the time, as can be seen in the now famous entry by the expressionist
painter Egon Schiele, in the diary he kept during the time he spent in prison in 1912 [on
charges of indecency]: “Kunst kann nicht modern sein. Kunst ist urewig“. (Art cannot be
50
modern. Art forever seeks the origin) .
However, as the Futurists took the actual world – and in this they were in agreement with the
Symbolists – to be an alienating place, they reasserted the original meaning. But not in the
traditional sense of an ‘escape’ to an otherworldly sphere but in a confrontation with what is
at hand, which is what can only beget meaning. What is at hand in poetry is the word which is
not a means, a carrier, a vehicle or anything that echoes meaning, but a primary fact that
sounds, and as it sounds registers any possible meaning it may create in the listener. In this
the Futurists (in keeping with the contradictions of the age we have mentioned) may be
leading us to an even more primeval origin, where however the covenant of communication
and of making sense may not necessarily hold.
This is what perhaps led, one of the major Symbolist writers, Alexander Blok to talk of the
51
‘poison of modernism’.

46
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Word as Such, in Kern G (ed.-trns) op. cit., p. 197
47
V. Erlich, p. 35
48
ibid, p. 44
49
B. Livshits, The Liberation of the Word, in A. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, Cornell UP, 1988, p. 80
50
Egon Schiele, Prison Diaries, Entry of 22nd April 1912, in A. Comini, Schiele in Prison, Thames and Hudson, London 1974, p.
46
51
A. Blok, Collected Works (Sobranie Sochinenii), Vols I-VIII Moscow-Leningrad, 1963 plus one unnumbered volume
(Notebook), Moscow 1965. The phrase ‘Poison of Modernism’ forms a separate line in Blok’s notebook (p. 214). see also W.
Weidle, The Poison of Modernism, in Gibian G & Tjalsma HW (eds.), Russian Modernism, Culture and the Avant Garde 1900-
1930, op. cit., pp. 23-25

24
In any event, we could summarise the position of the Russian Futurists by quoting Viktor
Erlich once again: “Futurist poetics unequivocally discarded the Baudelerian theory of
correspondences. It had as little use for mystical as for ‘social’ meanings. To Kruchenykh or
Khlebnikov, the poetic word was neither a vehicle of rational thought nor a glimpse of the
52
other world […] it was a primary fact, a self-sufficient, self-valuable entity.”
The notion of the ‘self-valuing’ word is invariably brought up by scholars, but the discussion
of its implications as a radical alternative to Symbolism, equally invariably, appear somewhat
inconclusive. Perhaps this is because a notion like the ‘word as such’ seems eo ipso to negate
interpretation, to reject outright any ‘in-other-words’ type of analysis. Perhaps it is because
Futurist works do at times ‘lapse’ into the realm of hidden correspondences, offering
themselves more readily to a ‘Symbolist’ reading. And how could it be otherwise, one may
ask, since language is commonly understood to be a system of phonetic ‘symbols’?
But perhaps if we are to engage with the ‘word as such’, if we are to come to terms with the
Russian Futurist project and its claims, then we might find that a shift in our analytical
approach may prove necessary.

52
V. Erlich, Russian Formalism, op. cit., pp. 43-44

25
2.4. Word/Image
[The Imageless Word and the Wordless Image]

A classic, by now, example illustrating the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the word is surely Velimir
53
Khlebnikov’s Incantation by Laughter, written in 1908 and published in 1910 , where
laughter is not evoked through words but is present in the words, as the free variations of the
54
verb smekhat bring forth the sound of laughter. The word itself is laughing as it is read :
O rassmaeites, smekhachi!
O zassmeites’, smekhaci!
… smekh usmeinykh smekhachei!
… smekh nadsmeinykh, smeyachei!
Overall, Khlebnikov is considered as the ‘exemplar’ of Russian Futurism and perhaps the
most ardent opponent of Symbolism. But his work may also be considered as a prime
example substantiating the view that no rift is absolute or as clear-cut as intended, nor is the
application of a theory ever as thorough as it is wished by it propagators. For when it is
suggested that the Russian Futurist movement did carry certain Symbolist ‘birth-marks’, or
that its utterances many a time betrayed a symbolist origin and problematics, it is perhaps
works such as Khlebnikov’s Usa-Gali, Ka and Zhuravl that spring to mind. But even in such
cases – fraught of course with contradictions – the particular features of the Futurist ‘project’
may also be discerned.
As Roman Jakobson has suggested, Khlebnikov’s poem Zhuravl (Crane) of 1911 – though
55 56
decidedly ‘Symbolist’ in its conception and imagery according to Markov and Barooshian
57
– can be seen as a ‘realised metaphor’. In the ‘revolt of things’ although what transpires can
be described as ‘nature’s revenge’ on urban civilisation – a Symbolist theme – a double play
is constantly at work, not so much in the double meaning of the poem’s title (both natural and
manmade) – still a Symbolist device – but rather in the dislocation of the usual function of
words, as the animate and inanimate are welded into a complex and confusing whole, where
the organic and the inorganic are motivating each other, but with no antithetical consistency
that would by a process of inversion ‘make sense’, as train lines become tendons but hands
become grass, and it is the dead who clothe with flesh the mechanical monster-bird that
threatens to devour the city:
On the roofs of skyscrapers
Swayed the grass-patterns of outstretched hands
A bridge, locking together its two sleeves of water
Now slowly moves of … imitating an iceberg’s movement
And out of that took shape the bird’s chest.
Houses form a strange spleen…
The monster’s legs have hair more lush than goat’s fur…
And a mighty skeleton was made…
And corpses flew to him from the graveyards
And clothed with flesh the iron frame of bones
Certainly it could still be argued that a Symbolist thematic pervades the poem, as Barooshian
seems determined to demonstrate, and lines such as:
Kashei the Deathless the menacing was not more evil
Than the revolt of things, quite possibly, will be
would appear to support this view. But what is important to note is that through a constant
process of doubling, nature’s revenge on man is exacted by usurping man’s own creation.
Khlebnikov seems here to be resisting the Symbolist dichotomy of nature and reason (as

53
in Nikolai Kulbin’s magazine Impressionist Studio
54
G. Kern (ed.-trnsl), Velimir Khlebnikov; Snake Train, Poetry and Prose, Ann Arbor, 1976, p. 61.
55
V. Markov, The Longer Poems of Velimir Xlebnikov, Berkeley 1962, op. cit., p. 61.
56
V. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930; a Study in Avant-Garde, Mouton, The Hague 1974, pp. 30-30.
57
R. Jakobson, Novejsaja russkaja poezija, op. cit., p. 15.

26
 58
expressed, for instance, in Bely’s Gorod [City] ) leading us not to a final nemesis, as the
crane begins to devour people, but to the unexpected
But then once he rose up and flew far away
And nobody ever saw him again.
Thus even within the symbolist thematic Khlebnikov may be said to be moving in a different
direction, breaking new ground by producing a much more complex structure and leading to
unexpected conclusions. As Edward J. Brown has pointed out, “it is true that scholars have
found traces of Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Balmont and other Symbolists in Khlebnikov’s
work, and there can be no doubt that Khlebnikov […] owed something to the Symbolists. But
the fact that the poet’s adolescence was spent in the Symbolist stream, and that even his
mature work shows evidence of this experience, does not argue an affinity with that school.
59
On the contrary, Khlebnikov’s main effort was to expel this influence”
Although the success of this effort may still be open to doubt, the attempt to cut off the
umbilical cord that linked the poet to Symbolism can be seen not only in Khlebnikov’s
approach to language, in his Incantation by Laughter – and the rejection of his request to have
60
it published in the Symbolist journal Apollon – or his other poetical experiments such as
‘Reverten’ (Turnabout) – a poem whose lines can be read in reverse producing the same
sound as when read properly (e.g. “Koni topot inok”), a device that harks back to Byzantine
61
palindrome inscriptions called ‘carcinic’ or ‘crab-like’ . But more importantly perhaps it can
be seen in that his poetry served as a foundation for the theories of the Formalist critics who
attempted to systematise the new poetics as against the ‘old’ schools of literature.
Indeed, Khlebnikov’s attempt to break with the Symbolists is further and most clearly
evidenced by the fact that he did put his signature under the manifesto The Word as Such
62
together with Kruchenykh who, in 1913 was to publish his ‘dyr bul shchyl’ in which,
according to the author’s claim there was ‘more of the Russian national spirit than in all of
63
Pushkin” . It was with Kruchenykh that Khlebnikov worked on and attempted to formulate
zaum (trans-sense or beyond-sense) language, laying emphasis on the sound texture of the
text and the potentialities of graphic as well as phonic signs, in a process which ultimately
culminates in word-creation, beyond the established chains of meaning in language, rejecting
the notion that words should conjure up readily definable ‘images’.
At this point it would be reasonable to expect that such a language would decisively part
company with the visual arts. However, through a process of negation the language that had
discarded ‘images’ allied itself very closely to a tendency in the visual arts that was
discarding ‘narrative’. It is thus that the poet Livshits would later acknowledge that it was
64
first “in the visual arts that the banner of emancipation of material had been raised” .
The process whereby artists in Russia, either in groups or sometimes alone, discarded
narrative and rendered forms more and more abstract from about 1908 to 1915, leading to
‘non-representational’ art has been extensively researched and discussed, starting with

58
see A. Steinberg, Colour and the Embodiment of Theme in Bely’s ‘Urbanistic Novels’, Slavonic and East European Review, v.
57, 2 April 1979, p. 191
59
see the deprecating references in The Word as Such and The Letter as Such, in G. Kern (ed.-trnsl.) Snake Train, op. cit., pp.
197-200
60
ibid., p. 268
61
The most famous one was on an inscription by a fountain outside the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople, said to have been
devised by the emperor Justinian (527-565), which read: nipson anomimata mi monan opsin (wash thy sins not only thy face).
62
First published together with other poems in Pomada in January 1913 with illustrations by Larionov. The phrase is from the
end of the first poem which read:
dyr bul shchyl
ubeshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
63
H. Eagle, Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism, in A. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, op.
cit., p. 289
64
B. Livshits, The One-and-a-half eyed Archer, cited in B. Fer, Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism, Oxford Art
Journal, Vol. 12 No 1, 1989, p. 14

27
Camilla Gray in 1962. From among these artists, the one who seems to have been the first to
focus on concrete material as the basis of his visual compositions was Vladimir Tatlin, a
rather solitary figure, to whom we now turn.

28
2.5. Tatlin

In surveying the wave of Futurist books published in the years 1912-106 in Russia, as well as
the studies written about it, one is left with the erroneous impression that Tatlin was not
among its protagonists. He is certainly known to have belonged to the ‘group’ of Futurist
artists and he did participate in various exhibitions and in collective illustrations of certain
‘futurist books’, but his contribution appears to have been quantitatively limited, if compared
with, say, Malevich’s or David Burliuk’s, whose work is very frequently cited in general
surveys of the subject. However, what may account for Tatlin’s limited presence in such
studies is that he does not appear ‘convenient’ to the scholar. He seems rather difficult to
handle within the context of generalised presentations, and it is perhaps no accident that,
despite the position of considerable importance on the whole accorded him in the history of
the Russian avant-garde in terms of his qualitative contribution, in quite a few of the major
works of scholarship bearing on the initial phase of Russian Futurism he does not figure very
prominently. Certainly no intention to belittle Tatlin’s work may ascribed to such scholars,
but it is worth noting that, for instance, Markov in his vast and immensely influential survey
65
of Russian Futurist literature mentions Tatlin just three times, referring only to his
participation in certain exhibitions and publications; Susan Compton in her Russian Futurist
66
Books: 1912-1916 has very little to say about Tatlin, reproducing only one of his drawings
(for the publication of the Service Book of the Three); Marjorie Perloff in her study The
67
Futurist Moment; Avant-garde, avant- guerre and the language of rupture chooses not to
bring Tatlin into the discussion in the chapter devoted to Russian Futurism entitled The Word
Set Free. To be sure, all these are works primarily concerned with the literature of the period,
but it seems at least worth noting that Tatlin does not appear to tie in very easily with the flow
of the story as told by these authors in the same way as other artists who are more frequently
mentioned, and most notably Malevich. And, in order to ‘absolve’ the scholars, it is indeed
68
striking that even Khlebnikov, who wrote a poem in praise of Tatlin in 1916 , would in 1919
(the year in which Tatlin setting to work on his Monument to the 3 International would
rd
69
express his full confidence in “Khlebnikov’s example” ) cite Malevich in his Thesis on Time
70
and Space as an example of the application of his linguistic theories in painting.
Perhaps in all this, Camilla Gray’s description, based on comments of Tatlin’s fellow-artists
and reiterated by many other scholars, of a character whose “morbid distrust of people, and
71
lack of self-confidence in his work, was a result of his unhappy childhood” is thus
confirmed: Tatlin found it difficult to work within a group because he was introverted and
diffident. But if this might explain his reticence and what has been reported as his tortuous
72
and slow way of going about his work , the fact in other words that he was not prolific in
either statements or artefacts, it surely does not provide us with the ‘master key’ to his work.
It certainly may account for his limited presence in team-work, as it may also account for a
certain ‘singularity’ or even ‘uniqueness’ of his investigation, and thus justify precisely this
singling out of his case as a subject for this thesis. But an analysis of his work that would base
itself on his diffidence or his unhappy childhood would do so at its own risk.
Having noted a certain tendency by scholarship to focus on Tatlin’s contribution in post-
revolutionary artistic development in Russia rather than in the events of the early 1910s (a
tendency very much in evidence in M. Perloff’s book), it should be clarified right away that
this does not mean that Tatlin’s early career has not been adequately researched and

65
V. Markov, Russian Futurism; A History, op. cit.,
66
see S. Compton, The World Backwards; Russian Futurist Books 1912-16, British Museum, London 1986, Chapters 2 and 4,
pp. 23-44 and 67-86
67
see M. Perloff, The Futurist Moment; Avant-garde, avant-guerre and the language of rupture, Chicago 1988, Chapter 4 pp.
116-161
68
L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 336.
69
V. Tatlin, The Initiative of the Individual in the Creativity of the Collective, in L.A. Zhadova, Tatlin, op. cit., p. 238.
70
T. Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin, Moderna Museet, op. cit., p. 126.
71
C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, Thames and Hudson [1962] 1986 p. 168. On his unhappy relationship with his father
and stepmother, see ‘Curriculum Vitae of Honoured Art Worker Tatlin’ (1953), in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), op. cit., p. 321.
72
See the reminiscences of Tatlin’s pupil, V.B. Elkonin, What I remember about Tatlin, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), ibid., p. 438.

29
documented. Thus his position within the early phase of Russian Futurism can be established,
and scholars seem to agree that, firstly, he was very much a part of the initial group, and
secondly, that like all members of this group bore, inevitably as they were Russian, a dual
imprint of both ‘east’ and ‘west’.
Indeed, in typically Russian fashion the Futurists’ attack on symbolism expressed the binary
forces referred to earlier. On the one hand Symbolism was despised as being a slavish ‘copy’
of western models, and the Russian folk and Byzantine traditions were invoked against it
(though Russian Symbolism did draw from these traditions). On the other hand, developments
in the west, especially Parisian Cubism, were used by the Futurists to prove that Symbolism
was outdated and superseded by events.
But even this relationship to Cubism was subject to the binary forces. Certainly it could be
argued that the artists and writers of the Russian avant-garde, who had the opportunity to
view some of the latest work of western European artists, most notably Picasso’s, in the
collections of the industrialists Schukin and Morozov, sought to a certain extent to posit
Cubism as an authority that would legitimise their own endeavours. Malevich, David Burliuk,
Rozanova and, of course Udaltsova and Popova (who both worked in Paris in 1912-13, the
73
latter in the studios of Metzinger and Le Fauconnier) , all acknowledged Cubism as the
starting point in the development of the ‘new art’, stressing the demand for a new standpoint
to be taken up by the viewer. This can be seen in Malevich’s Non Objective World and
Rozanova’s The Foundation of the New Creativity and the Reasons for its Incomprehension,
where the established ‘habits’ of the viewing public are challenged, and where the claim to
the creation of a ‘new reality’ is forcefully stated. Indeed, Malevich brings in Picasso to
support his argument: “For an artist like Picasso”, he says, “objective nature is merely the
starting point – the motivation – for the creation of new forms, so that the objects themselves
74
can scarcely, if at all, be recognised in the pictures.” For, according to Malevich, “an artist
who creates rather than imitates expresses himself, his works are not reflections of nature but
75
instead new realities, which are no less significant than the realities of nature itself.”
Similarly Rozanova would state: “The artist must not be a passive imitator of nature but an
76
active interpreter of his relationship with it”. Further, David Burliuk in his text Cubism,
published in the Slap in the Face of Public Taste in 1912, proclaimed that “among all the
trends of this New Painting, the one that has stunned the eye of the spectator is represented by
the Tendency defined by the name of Cubism,” and added: “the centre of gravity of this art
has been displaced. Before, the spectator was only a gawker of faits divers, whereas now he
presses towards the magic glasses of a superior Visual Analysis, of the Visible Essence that
77
surrounds us” .
But of course, the existence in Russia of both a vernacular and a sophisticated ‘non-mimetic’
visual culture (in the folk and religious traditions), meant that this discussion concerning the
position of the viewer was inevitably brought into the broader issue of Russia’s relation with
East and West, or what we have termed Russia’s chronic national identity crisis. This can be
seen in the texts of Markov, Sevchenko and especially Yakulov who, in the Manifesto The
West and Us (My i Zapad, published in collaboration with Livshits and Lourie in 1913),
declared: “The art of the West is the incarnation of the geometric conception of the world, a
conception which is directed from the object to the subject; the art of the East is the
incarnation of the algebraic conception of the world, a conception which is directed from the
78
subject to the object” . The inference here is, of course, that the East had already, since long
ago, grasped what the West was, just now, struggling to say.

73
N.L Adaskina, Chronology of L.S. Popova’s Life and Works, in D.B. Sarabianov and Nl. Adaskina (eds.), L.S. Popova 1889-
1924, Exhibition Catalogue, Tetriakov Gallery, Ars Publications, Moscow, 1990, p. 6.
74
K. Malevich, Non Objective World, in T. Andersen (ed.), K. Malevich, Essays on Art, London 1967, p. 20.
75
ibid (this goes back to the early Romantics such as Novalis and Moritz; see K.P. Moritz, Peliminary ideas on the Theory of
ornament [1785] and Novalis. Miscellaneous remarks [1799]).
76
O. Rozanova, Les bases de la création nouvelle et les raisons de son incompréhension, in T. Andersen and Ks. Grigorieva
(eds.), Art et Poésie Russes, op. cit., p. 60.
77
D. Burliuk, Le Cubisme, in ibid., p. 67.
78
quoted in V. Markov, Russian Futurism; A History, op. cit., p. 32.

30
The interest in the debate on East-West relations on matters artistic, as well as the actual
process of exchange of ideas between France and Russia, is evidenced in the fact that a
translation of My i Zapad was published in Le Mercure de France – with a brief note by
79
Apollinaire on the poor quality of the rendition – on 16 April 1914 , while in 1913
Matyushin had already published a Russian translation of Gleize’s and Metzinger’s Du
Cubisme. Indeed, 1913 seems to have been, as Khardziev argues, a year in which the contact
between the Russian avant-garde and the Parisian artists and writers were further
80
strengthened . According to Khardziev, the publication of Blaize Cendrar’s La prose du
Transsibérien and Apollinaire’s writings on Simultaneisme, which were discussed in Gelyos
(Helios), the Russian journal published in Paris, appeared as an encouraging support to the
Russian Futurists, whose publications had already engaged with the question of the text-
image interrelationship and interaction.
However, for all the interest in the artistic discoveries of the Parisian painters and poets, the
specific conditions in Russia and the Russian artists’ preoccupation with their own problem of
self-determination contributed to a situation where it was very difficult to ‘implant’ Cubism in
Russia. Indeed, Cubism as a separate artistic trend does not seem to have flourished in Russia
and as has been suggested, “those works produced by Russian artists that could be defined as
81
cubist appear more or less ‘impure’ when measured up against the original French style” . It
could be, as Margit Rowell has suggested, that the Russian artists’ knowledge of Cubism was
incomplete and that “those who studied under Metzinger and Fauconnier were not exposed to
the most original, authentic or subtle developments of Cubist painting”. Indeed, this could
apply even to an artist as talented as Lubov Popova, whose Composition with Figures of 1913
carries traits of Metzinger’s ‘akward’ style [plate 12]. Moreover, M. Rowell continues, “the
knowledge of the artists who remained in Russia was partial as well, based on scattered works
and reproduction of a myriad of first and second rate Cubists whose relative value it may have
82
been difficult to assess” . Thus it would appear that the interest in Cubism was above all
theoretical, and indeed this was a time when the whole atmosphere in the Russian artistic
milieu seems to have been conducive to theorising, as can be seen in David Burliuk’s
83
statement: “Nowadays not to be a theoretician of painting is to refuse to comprehend it” . In
this respect, Rowell’s conclusion that most Russian artists who acknowledged a Parisian
influence, used cubist devices in order to formulate their own particular styles, may carry
some truth. One could further add that Cubist ‘ideas’ were also used by artists as
‘ammunition’ in the factional rivalries that, as we shall see, emerged within the broader avant-
garde camp in Russia.
Hence, overall, conditions in Russia in the early 1910s were truly complex, if not confusing,
but perhaps this complexity was precisely a factor of dynamism and innovation. The situation
has been succinctly summarised in Susan Compton’s brilliant conclusion to the Introduction
of her already cited book, where she states: “The unique coincidence in Russia of immediate
contact with Cubism and a rich indigenous primitive past vitalised the artists’ and writers’
search for an escape from the luxuriant hothouse of Symbolism and the anecdotal bias of
much nineteenth century art. Avant-garde painters and poets became concerned with the
84
structure of art whether visual or literary.”
It was in this climate that Tatlin’s career began to develop, and that he was in close contact,
even before 1910, with the group of artists that would form the Russian Futurist ‘movement’,
cannot be doubted. Visual proof of this contact can be found in that, as early as 1908, a
portrait of Tatlin – in sailor’s shirt – was painted by Larionov (the founder of “Rayonism”)
[plate 13], who about a year later produced portraits of David Burliuk and Velimir
Khlebnikov. In 1910, Tatlin after some months at sea on a merchant ship, exhibited work at

79
see J.C and V. Mercade, Des Lumières du Soleil au Lumières du Théâtre in Cahiers du monde Russe et Soviétique, v. XIV, 1,
1983, p. 12.
80
N. Khardziev, K istorii russkogo avantgarda, Stockholm 1976, pp. 63-64
81
M. Rowell, The Cubist Experiment in Russia, in Cubist Drawings 1907-1929 (ex.cat. J.C. Lee Gallery), Houston, 1982, p. 67
82
M. Rowell, ibid, p. 75
83
D. Burliuk, Cubism, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 75
84
S. Compton, The World Backwards; Russian Futurist Books 1912-1916, op. cit., pp. 13-14

31
the Second International Exhibition in Odessa, together with Larionov, Goncharova, Yakulov,
David and Vladimir Burliuk and others. This was the year of publication of A Trap for
Judges, with texts by Kamensky, Khlebnikov and the Burliuk brothers, which is considered
the first Russian Futurist book, and in this sense may be said to inaugurate the movement.
However, as John Milner has pointed out, “the close knit cooperation that all this implies did
not survive 1911, and the history of Russian art from 1911 until the war began in 1914 is shot
85
through with factions and briefly independent groups” . The main feature of this factional
struggle appears to have been the, at times, intense rivalry between Larionov and David
Burliuk. At the peril of a crude schematisation it could be said that Larionov, together with
Goncharova, seemed more interested in the folk tradition and the ‘oriental’ side of Russia. It
was the icon, the lubok and a certain form of ‘primitivism’ – sometimes linked with
children’s drawings – that provided a basis of their work. Larionov’s paintings and drawings,
when they do not refer directly to peasant art, carry bold strokes that evoke an almost
‘barbaric’ vigour, infusing in his portraits a ‘rustic’ element, which is not at all in evidence in
86
contemporary photographs of some of his sitters [plates 14 and 15]. With a softer touch,
Goncharova keeps close to the folk tradition, often working on directly religious themes of
the Byzantine tradition [plates 16-17]. Both artists in 1913 would proclaim: “Long live the
beautiful East! … Long live nationality! We march hand in hand with our ordinary house
87
painters” . On the other hand, David Burliuk sought to find common ground with French
Cubism [plate 18], as can be seen in his text Cubism, even resorting to some ethnographic and
historical arm-twisting to demonstrate how the French as descendants of the Gauls were of
88
the Cimmerian race that once inhabited the Russian plains . But he also appears to have
looked to Paris for guidance, as he is reported to have exclaimed, when informed of the latest
artistic developments in the West through photographic material brought over from Paris by
89
the young Ukrainian artist Alexandra Exter: “Larionov and Goncharova have had it!”
To confound matters further, Khlebnikov, who was strongly supported by the Burliuk
brothers, already by 1914 expressed his disappointment in them, stating that “…David and
Nikolai Burliuk continue to publish works which bear my signature, which are worthless and
90
garbled to boot.”
Thus if we are allowed, for the purposes of this discussion, to look for ‘labels’ we could
perhaps say that this rivalry may be seen as a divergence of the two paths of Russian culture:
one looking eastward (Larionov) and the other looking westward (Burliuk). This rivalry was
brought to a head in 1911, when the Knave of Diamonds exhibition society of the Union of
Youth – the first grouping of the Futurists – was split with Larionov, Goncharova, Tatlin and
Malevich forming the Donkey’s Tail group, while the Burliuk brothers together with the
91
young poet Livshits formed the Hylaea.
Nevertheless, the division should not be understood as a clear and sharp difference in outlook.
To be sure, as we have said, Larionov and Goncharova were very much interested in Russian
folk and religious art and the indigenous ‘primitive’ culture, while the Burliuks were seeking
guidance from the west. But even as they were forming the Hylaea group and relishing the
prospect of scoring a personal victory over Larionov and Goncharova on the basis of Exter’s
photographs from Paris, the Burliuks were turning to Russia’s ‘primitive past’. The very name
Hylaea (the ancient name of Southern Russia) points back to that past, but even more so the

85
J. Milner, See J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 18.
86
J. Milner, ibid. pp. 11-12
87
M. Larionov and N. Goncharova, Rayonists and Futurists; a Manifesto, 1913 in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-
Garde op. cit p. 90
88
D. Burliuk, Cubism, in J.E. Bowlt,( ed) , ibid., p. 69
89
V. Markov, Russian Futurism; A History, op. cit., p. 33
90
V. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930; a Study in Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 35. It appears that D. Burliuk took
such liberties because he was Khlebnikov’s main source of financial income. In this regard V. Barroshian refers to the memoirs
of David and Marussy Burljuk, [Mayakoskij, in Color and Rhyme, No. 32, New York, 1956, 27]. The Burliuk brothers, in their
attempt to promote their version of the new art as well as themselves, seem to have alienated a number of the artists and poets of
the time. In 1914 Filonov wrote to Matyushin ‘I reject the Burlikuks once and for all. At the moment they are concerned not so
much with the new art. But with the exploitation of the new art.” See Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 16(1), Spring 1982, pp.
93-94
91
See C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, op. cit., p. 98; and V. Markov, Russian Futurism; A History, op. cit., pp. 29-60

32
 92
writings of Livshits referring to the formation of the group at the estate in Chernyanka . As
Viktor Markov points, out Livshits amidst the rural life and the “enormous expanses of the
steppes on which uncountable herds of sheep and pigs were grazing” saw something
primeval, or “Homeric”. “Prehistory”, writes Markov, “looked at him not only from the
meandering ornamental patterns on the houses and from the Scythian arrows found in
numerous mounds, but also from the simplicity of their eating, hunting and courtship
93
habits.” And thus, “Hylaea”, proclaimed Livshits, “the ancient Hylaea trod upon by our feet,
94
took the meaning of a symbol and had to become a banner.” On the other hand, Larionov –
who in the Rayonist Manifesto of 1913 was to express his “utter scorn” for the “talentless
people… of the Knave of Diamonds, Slap in the Face of Public Face and Union of Youth
95
groups – in the very formulation of his ‘Rayonist’ theory found it necessary, for all his
appeals to the ‘beautiful east’, to rely on the ‘western’ science of optics and also to see an
artistic lineage in the West, and especially in France, which he credited with a “genuine
96
painterly tradition” . Moreover, certain of his paintings, such for example his portrait of
Tatlin (1911-1912), cannot be said to be immune to the influence of Cubism – which itself,
needless to say, carries a certain primitivism, or at least an ‘eastern’ negation of perspectival
form. Such an influence from the ‘west’ is actually acknowledged by Goncharova (in the
Preface to the catalogue of her exhibition in 1913), even if only to ‘prove’ the ‘superiority’ of
97
the East over the West. Indeed it seems very difficult to erect a ‘barrier’ between the two
tendencies, and the distinction is blurred even further when one considers the views these
tendencies shared (such as a refutation of individuality, the assertion of the artwork as a truth
98
in itself) and also the sheer number of collective works on which all the artists of both
tendencies collaborated, in their common fight against Symbolism and in favour of a radically
new art.
At the same time, however, it must be stressed that the Russian Futurists were still in contact
with certain Symbolist circles and ideas, as the Mir Iskusstvo (World of Art) movement was
very much an unspent force, and as the fin-de-siècle orientalism received from the west in the
guise of spiritualist and mystical schools of thought (such as, for instance, ‘Anthroposophy’)
found fertile ground in the cultured urban milieu in Russia, especially among groupings such
as the ‘Impressionists’ or ‘Intuitionists’ of St. Petersburg led by Nikolai Kulbin, the ‘crazy
99
doctor’, in whose magazine Impressionist Studio Khlebnikov’s Incantation by Laughter was
first published in 1910. Kulbin characteristically declared: “Having measured physics by
means of innumerable apparatuses, I have found the units of physics. These are very small
unconscious sensations from which the world is made.” Consequently, according to him,
“painting is the spontaneous projection of conditional signs from the artist’s brain onto the
picture”. One of the conditional signs, says J.E. Bowlt, “which Kulbin saw as recurring in
history was the triangle, a sign which we can identify also with the aesthetics of Kandinsky at
the time and, of course, with the ideas of Andrey Bely, Zinaida Gippius and Vyacheslav
Ivanov. […] The triangle assumed such important for Kulbin that he organized a painting
100
group of that name in 1908 and began to sign his writings with its graphic representation.”
Kulbin also found followers among the Russian Futurists, and his associates such as
Matyushin, who – as already mentioned – was to translate and publish Gleizes and
Metzinger’s Du Cubisme in 1913, moved within the wider context of the Union of Youth and
101
played a considerable ideological and organisational role in the cultural scene as a whole.

92
V. Markov, ibid., p. 33
93
ibid.
94
ibid, 33-34
95
M. Larionov, Rayonnist Manifesto, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 89
96
ibid, p. 96
97
N. Goncharova, Preface to Catalog of One-Man Exhibition 1913, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, op. cit.,
pp. 59-60
98
see D. Burliuk, Cubism and M. Larionov, Rayonnist Painting, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., pp.
75 and 95
99
see J. Howard, The Union of Youth, an artists’ society of the Russian avant-garde, Manchester UP, 1997, pp. 9-11
100
J. E. Bowlt, The Union of Youth, in Wladimir Weidle, The Poison of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 171-2
101
see J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde op. cit., Introduction p. xxix

33
In this rather confusing picture, it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint Tatlin’s position,
as in the years 1911-1913, he does not seem to take up a ‘position’ but rather to pursue a
passage, a passage that cuts across the already blurred borderlines of the divisions within the
Futurist camp in that period. He appears to proceed with great caution, avoiding the
proclamatory statement (close to the heart of so many Russian Futurists at the time),
subordinating the ‘programmatic’ to the investigation of the question of representation (and
not vice versa). This may be attributed, as we have already suggested, to his diffidence, or
even to some form of dyslexia, for he was to note a few years later: “Having been interested
since my childhood in art which is perceived through the eye, I have some reservations about
102
my writing, which I have never really perfected”. But at any rate, this is how his character
was formed and this is what shaped his interests, leading him on to his particular path charting
103
a course of his own .
Thus, although initially under the influence of the ‘eastward’ looking group, having worked
104
on icons and copied church frescoes , befriended Larionov and Goncharova and spent a
105
summer painting at their estate in Tiraspol , Tatlin proved not a very loyal follower, and his
exhibits early in 1912 at the Donkey’s Tail exhibition were, as John Milner has pointed out,
“perhaps most completely at variance with the primitivist paintings of Larionov, Goncharova
106
and Malevich” Although some of his costume designs for the play Tsar Maximillian [plate
19], presented at this exhibition, retain a certain folkish flavour, they are neither revivalist in
form nor ‘barbaric’ in their energy, and could be said to be already pointing to the more
cubistic concerns and investigations of pictorial composition that surface in the Ivan Susanin
designs of 1913.
By 1912 Tatlin had already emerged as very much an artist in his own right, with his Sailor
self-portrait (exhibited in that year) through a fruitful dialogue with the icon tradition, in
which he succeeds in deconsecrating the icon form and reinstating it in terms of both picture
107
space and as the craftsman-like procedure in the handling of the material (faktura) ,
avoiding at the same time to fall back on the romanticism of its cultural (religious and
national) connotations in the manner of a Goncharova. Thus in pursuing his own trajectory,
Tatlin in 1913 did not exhibit at the Target exhibition, which opened in Moscow on 24
March, with works by Larionov, Goncharova and Malevich, having in the beginning of that
year moved away from that group of artists by joining (on 3rd January) the Union of Youth, for
108
whom he had already produced some work in late 1912 , most probably while he shared a
studio with Rozanova.
His concern with questions of volume and mass (not tackled in the Sailor but increasingly
evident in some of his sketches of that period [plates 20-21]) that seem to coincide with his
growing interest in Western artistic developments, and in Cubism in particular – which would
take him to Paris in 1914 – brought him closer to the group formed around David Burliuk,
who by that time had befriended Vladimir Khlebnikov and the young Vladimir Mayakovsky,
and was emerging as the principal ‘driving force’ of the Russian Futurist movement. But still,
Tatlin did not participate in the publication of either A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, or of
A Trap for Judges No2 (his contribution to Futurist publishing being up to then limited to the

102
V. Tatlin, My Answer to ‘Letter to the Futurists”, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 185
103
Tatlin’s taciturn outlook has been also ascribed to a secretive nature, ‘a difficult character’, jealous of his associates and
suspecting that other artists may ‘steal’ his ideas. The lack of detailed information about his ‘lost or destroyed’ works may also
be linked to the above. Further there have been reports that Tatlin was seen burning some of his own works in the early twenties.
See Strigalev, as well as Sarabianov in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., pp. 41n62, 61n7, and the reminiscences of his student
V.B. Elkonin, in ibid. p. 438
104
V.I. Kostin, Tatlin’s Drawings, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, ibid. p. 67
105
D.V. Sarabianov, Tatlin’s Painting, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, ibid. p. 46
106
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 28
107
The Russian word which the dictionary gives as ‘texture’ was used to denote the way the materials themselves affected the
development of form in an artwork. See M. Rowell, Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, October, 7; Winter 1978, pp. 83-108, and
also pp. 63-65 below.
108
According to J.E. Bowlt, this was ‘Compositional Analysis’; see J. E. Bowlt, The Union of Youth, in Wladimir Weidle, The
Poison of Modernism, op. cit., p. 182. It is perhaps not the one reproduced in plate 7 above, as Zhadova convincingly places it
1913, considering it as a very important landmark in the development of Russian avant-garde art. See L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin,
op. cit., pp. 59-66.

34
 109
‘primitivist’, according to Markov, illustrations for Worldbackwards) [plate 22]. Thus in
early 1913, Tatlin’s position in terms of the main trends of Russian Futurism, seems to be in a
kind of no-man’s-land. Nevertheless, his gravitation to westward can be seen in the shifting of
the Russian motif out of primitivism, bringing it closer to the more ‘tame’ style of the World
of Art and the Ballet Russes, with whom Tatlin’s links seem to have been quite close in
110
1913 , as the Ivan Susanin designs would suggest [plate 23]. But even if, as has been
maintained in connection with these designs, “the primitivism pioneered by Larionov has,
surprisingly, given way to decoration of the kind that characterised the use of traditional and
111
folk motifs by Golovin, Benois, Bakst and Rerikh” , Tatlin’s work is bereft of fin-de-siècle
ornamentation and less ‘mythical’, demonstrating an austere control, where one could argue
that there is nothing superfluous, nothing that cannot be subordinated to the rhythmic
construction of the figures. Tatlin seems here to be closer to the views of David Burliuk, who
in 1912 wrote that what we see is “merely a number of definite sections of different surface
planes”, calling for a new conception that “arose only in the twentieth century under the
112
general name of Cubism” . But Tatlin appears above all to be interested in the rhythmic
continuity, seeking a formal control through which, one could say, only what ‘organically
necessary’ to the rhythmic articulation of the composition is portrayed – and in this it could
be argued that Tatlin is still referring to the icon tradition. As Margit Rowell has pointed out
in relation to Tatlin’s works in 1911-13 in general, they “betray the importance of this
experience [of icon painting] to his developing style. The dynamic curves, the luminous and
spatially undefined ground, the strongly schematised morphologies, the abrupt change of
scale between central and secondary motifs (some of which are inserted in the rhythms of the
113
landscape) are reminiscent of the icon’s stylistic conventions.” It is the dynamic curve, the
schematised morphology, and above all the intense rhythmic control that we also find in the
oil composition Seated Nude of the same period, a work which in its construction could be
seen as referring, somewhat indirectly, to Picasso’s Dryad, [plate 24] which Tatlin may have
had the chance to see in Schukin’s collection in St. Petersburg, while the treatment of the
picture surface harks back to the icon tradition, especially as the bold white highlights bring
114
to mind the technique of the fifteenth century icon-painter Theophanes the Greek, (who is
generally considered as the teacher of the greatest Russian religious painter Andrei Rublev). It
would not perhaps be ill-founded to suggest that this work sums up Tatlin’s ‘progress’ in
1913, as it seems to be pointing both to the icon tradition in terms of picture space (as in his
Sailor composition of the previous year), as well as to the interest in the questions of volume
and mass (as can be further seen in some of his drawings of 1913), which brings him closer to
the investigations of the Parisian Cubists. But more importantly, this work carries over
faktura, the handling of materials, to a direct confrontation with the question of volume: How
can the image be seen to be made of actual paint on canvas and at the same time be perceived
as volume?
The question is crucial. For one could say that in its answer the challenge set by the Futurists
of dealing with the material of art ‘as such’, or dealing with ‘painting as an end in itself’ and
‘pursuing only painterly objectives’ as they put it, can be met. And perhaps even further, in its
answer the claim of creating a new authentic and autonomous object can begin to be
formulated. Thus, with this in mind, it could be argued that in the Sailor [plate 25] and
perhaps even more so in the Reclining Nude [plate 26] of 1913, the figures can be seen to be
‘made of paint’ but the volume appears only as a result of their relation to the picture surface
as something different from it. In this ‘relating’ the materiality of the picture is – even if only
momentarily – lost. In the Seated Nude [plate 27], however, the figure can equally be seen as
‘made of paint on canvas’ but in this case as an integral part of a picture surface similarly so
handled. Nevertheless, it could still be contested that the problem of volume is thus merely

109
V. Markov, Russian Futurism; A History, op. cit., p. 42
110
L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 183
111
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 54
112
D. Burliuk, Cubism, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde op. cit., p. 79
113
M. Rowell, Vladimir Tatlin; Form/Faktura, op. cit., p. 87
114
for a discussion of this point see Section 3.3 below […]

35
articulated, quite emphatically perhaps, but not fully solved, for the mass of the human body
is constantly reclaimed by the picture surface. Tatlin seems here to be touching on a dual
question: is there an objective space of and for the picture? Or, in other words, is it possible to
treat volume in keeping with precepts of faktura without falling back on conventions of
illusionistic space? If the artwork-as-material is to be asserted, if faktura is to be upheld, is it
not, finally, impossible to ‘handle’ volume in a way other than in its actual, concrete material
presence – i.e. in its three-dimensionality?
It is at this conjuncture that we find Tatlin on the eve of his trip to the west in 1913/14. And it
is thus that we can conclude with John Milner that “Tatlin travelled to the West as a mature
115
painter and came back as a constructor of reliefs” .
However, a certain confusion has arisen concerning the date of Tatlin’s trip, as a revision has
been offered by Strigalev suggesting that Tatlin travelled to Berlin and Paris (as a bandore
116
player with a troupe of folk-artists) not in 1913 as previously thought but between late
January and late April 1914, a view adopted by John E. Bowlt, who has amended the date in
the second edition of his Russian Art of the Avant Garde (1988). Up to then it was generally
thought that it was on his return to Russia from the West, after the by now ‘mythologised’
117
meeting with Picasso , that Tatlin set to work on his Bottle relief, perhaps in direct reference
to Picasso’s Vieux Marc collage [plate 3], bearing similarities also with the work of Juan Gris,
who at the time was in close contact with his elder compatriot in Paris [plate 5]. Without of
course suggesting that Tatlin ‘achieved enlightenment’ in Paris, it has been considered
probable that the Cubist collages which he may have seen in the West enabled Tatlin to
appreciate the possibilities of dealing with the problem of ‘depth’ by relinquishing
illusionistic space. For in Cubist collage, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out “it is the affixing
of the collage element to the surface that is at the centre of collage as a signifying system […]
That element enters the work as a literarisation of depth: it actually rests ‘in front of’ or ‘on
118
top of’ the field or element it now partially obscures.” It was also considered probable that
immediate contact with Cubism may have suggested a freedom to displace the elements of the
composition, to fragment the object of observation and perhaps in a way that the Byzantine
tradition could not, to ‘relegate’ even further the narrative elements seeking a new rhythmic
articulation in the inter-relation of the fragmented picture surface.
But if the new dating is accepted, the construction of the Bottle relief (traditionally dated
1913) will have to be placed before the trip to Paris, thus rendering Tatlin less ‘indebted’ to
Picasso than had been hitherto thought. But the new dating presents us with a problem
concerning Tatlin’s reliefs that come chronologically after the Bottle, as it allows for very
little time return from Western Europe in late April of 1914 and the opening of the first
exhibition of his ‘Painterly Reliefs’ in Moscow on 10th May 1914, where, according to
119
Milner, the Collation of Materials (which he refers to as a Painterly Relief) was presented .
This would mean that these works were either produced or at least begun prior to the trip,
sometime in 1913, thus rendering that year an almost incredibly prolific period in which a
striking variety of projects were undertaken. Indeed, it would seem that in November 1913 he
120
even contemplated joining the Symbolist World of Art group .

115
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 80.
116
The 1913 date is adopted by J. Milner in Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 70. This is supported by Tatlin’s own
autobiographical references, giving 1913 as the date for his trip to Paris. However in at least one case he states that he returned to
Russia two months before the War. See, L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., pp. 262-266. Another (undated) letter to an
undetermined recipient it appears that Tatlin is arranging for payment for his bandore performances to be made ‘before my
departure from Moscow, 125 marks on 20 February, the rest on 7 March (n[ew] style)”, presumably of 1914. See L.A. Zhadova
(ed.), Tatlin, ibid, p. 181.
117
J. Milner accepts as a fact, and offers the following description: “Picasso recalled Tatlin playing the accordion in his studio in
Paris. Determined to visit Picasso, once there Tatlin made every effort to stay as a pupil or assistant, even offering to sweep his
floors and stretch his canvases. ‘They communicated by gestures, smiles and drawings, and, according to Tatlin, understood each
other perfectly’. ibid.
118
R. Krauss, Re-Presenting Picasso, in Art in America, Dec. 1980, pp. 94-96.
119
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 91.
120
V. Tatlin. Letter to Benois, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., pp. 182-183. This draft letter, which Zhadova suggests
should be dated after 3 November 1913, shows that Tatlin was at 37 Ostozhenka in Moscow at the time, and indicates that the
artist was working preparing for an exhibition, with no mention of a plan for a trip abroad, or reference to a recent return from
such a trip.

36
It thus transpires that a 1913 dating seems impossible, and the confusion may be resolved if
we accept Camilla Gray’s initial suggestion that the Collation of Materials were presented for
121
the first time at the Tramvai V Exhibition in Petrograd which opened on 3 March 1915 .
This would seem to be validated by Tatlin himself, as he would refer to 1914 as the year in
122
which he produced the reliefs and as Strigalev points out he assigned a special importance
123
to that year as a watershed in the development of his art . Moreover, the artist would on
124
more than one occasion acknowledge the influence exerted by Picasso on his own work .
Therefore, on the basis of the above, it appears highly unlikely that the Collation of Materials
antedates Tatlin trip to the West. What could be suggested, however, is that although the
revised dating of Tatlin’s trip does not negate Picasso’s influence and cannot properly place
the ‘Painterly Reliefs’ prior to the artist’s direct contact with Parisian Cubism, the limited
amount of time between the artist’s return (in mid-1914) and the opening of the Tramvai V
exhibition (early-1915), does lend substance to the claim voiced as early as 1915 in a review
125
of Tatlin’s reliefs that he was “an independent artist and not an imitator of Picasso” , a
claim supported and verified by many later scholars, most strongly, if not a bit awkwardly, by
126
Strigalev.
At any rate, the Bottle, although undoubtedly recalling cubist ‘still lives’ can be said to be yet
another step in the development of the handling of material or faktura. In this work there are
no visual references other than the material employed (wood, tin, wire, wallpaper, glass).
There is reference to the bottle’s profile, its transparency, the roundness of its neck and the
cylindrical curve of its body – is short to the ‘glassness’ of the bottle. Further, the opposing
individual qualities of the various and different materials that have to be resolved, and dealt
with only in material terms – for example, a few nails connecting metal to wood. The
construction of the relief arises from its materials, and in this sense it could be said that here
space is space occupied by these materials. However, this space is not real space as the relief
is still referring to depiction and is not involved in the ‘glassness’ of the glass itself. The
interest in the inherent qualities of the material itself not as a referent but as a carrier of its
own significance – the material as such – will become evident in the Painterly Reliefs of the
following year, where no recognisable reference is made to anything beyond what is actually
seen: a relief made of various chance materials framed like a painting. This is the difference
to Picasso’s Bouteille et Guitar, whose formal similarity to Tatlin’s Painterly Reliefs has
already been mentioned. For in Picasso’s work the pieces of wood ‘stand’ for a guitar and a
bottle, whereas in Tatlin’s this link with representation has been abandoned. The emphasis is
on the materials, not on what their form may conjure up as something ‘other’. To be sure, as
Milner has pointed out with regard to cubist collage in general, the ‘wit’ in Picasso’s
approach is absent in Tatlin’s work. But there is a further turning of the screw here, which
makes perhaps matters more ‘serious’ and leaving the spectator ‘nonplussed’. And this is the
case with Tatlin’s next major work, the Collation of Materials, where space is the space
enclosed by the frame which forms the ground on which the collation stands, and where the
artist treats the materials as such, including the ‘glassness’ of the glass, without any properly
recognisable hint of figuration whatsoever, not even in the title of the work.
This absence of any narrative allusion is important to note when comparing Tatlin’s work of
the time with that of other artists who contributed at the Tramvai V exhibition utilising similar
devices and ‘mixed media’. Ivan Puni, for example, presented a collage of ‘wood, wallpaper

121
That it was presented at the Tramway V exhibition there is no doubt, for as already stated a photograph in frontal view
appeared in a newspaper review of March 1915, reproduced by Milner (in Tatlin…, op. cit., p. 100).
122
V. Tatlin, The Work Ahead of Us, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 205. However in a list of
works drawn up by Tatlin in 1921, he groups a number of works under the heading of ‘Construction of Materials’ with the rather
vague dating of 1913-1914. The ‘Collation’ appears fourth among the eight works selected for listing.
123
A.A. Strigalev, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 18
124
V. Tatlin, Answers to Questionnaire [1928], in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, ibid., p. 262
125
S.K. Isakov, On Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, ibid., p. 334
126
The issue of ‘precedence’ cannot be properly resolved, and in any event neither Tatlin nor his ‘spokesman’ Punin wished to
claim such ‘credit’. Indeed, in the pamphlet Against Cubism we read: “We do not wish to claim precedence for the invention of
‘live space’. Most probably it all belongs to the primum mobile of the universe. This is not the issue, who was the earlier –
Picasso or Tatlin – to construct reliefs, for us this is of no great importance.” N. Punin, Protiv Kubizma, Peterburg 1921, p. 14n1

37
and other materials’, but with the ‘explanatory title’ Card Player [plate 28] Malevich
exhibited several works including An Englishman in Moscow, with clearly discernible
figurative elements. His more abstract composition of 1914 (oil on canvas with collage of
postage stamp and thermometer) allowed for a narrative ‘reading’ as it was entitled Private of
the First Division [plate 29]. Lubov Popova had also engaged with collage, using newspaper
and wallpaper, in her Hours of 1914, where a clock with roman numerals, a moving
127
pendulum, and the word chas (hour) in Cyrillic lettering feature prominently [plate 30] .
Tatlin, as more original as was perhaps thought, more ‘thorough’ in fusing the major
conflicting and cultural trends in Russia at the time, indeed as one of the more con-fusing
representatives of Russian Futurism, uncompromisingly pressing on with his search for an ‘art
as such’, presents us, at the eve of the Great War, with a seemingly insoluble enigma, his
Collation of Materials: An assortment of pieces of metal put together on a plaster surface
surrounded by a wooden frame, and presented as an art object, or in John E. Bowlt’s words:
128
“the first non-figurative construction in European art.”

127
In the month following the Tramvai V exhibition, i.e. in April 1915, another collective show was staged in Moscow entitled
The Year 1915, at which Kandinsky presented his Composition VII, a work with no ostensible narrative reference. However, it is
well known that Kandinsky accompanied his oeuvre with a ‘grand narrative’ of texts, such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art and
Point and Line to Plane, which contrasts sharply with Tatlin’s reticence. Though a most formidable case of a fusion of East and
West, Kandinsky is not introduced into the discussion proper as he was mostly concerned with the handling of colour on the two-
dimensional surface, which constitutes a different field of enquiry to the one here investigated, namely the ‘breaking out’ from
the picture surface.
128
J.E. Bowlt, Un Voyage dans l’espace: l’ oeuvre de Vladimir Tatlin, op. cit., p. 223

38
3. Approaches
3.1. Mark

Looking at a work such as Tatlin’s Collation of Materials the problems of its re-introduction
into the flow of language become immediately apparent. Questions to the effect of ‘what does
it mean?’ or ‘what does it look like?’ that have been posed by layman and scholar alike in
connection with Tatlin’s reliefs refer to that conceptual corner-stone of our logocentric
tradition of the ‘idea as representation’, up against which the artefact will have to be
measured. In this sense, the artwork cannot stand in its own right unless it is reconstituted in
an ‘in-other-words’ type of narrative.
The relational structure of representation where what is seen is not ‘really’ that which is seen,
has been presented in Gomperz’s famous example of the actor. Following Karl Buhler’s
summary of Gomperz’s idea, we read: “If I consider the actor … standing thus before me on
the stage, he is now Wallenstein and yet not Wallenstein himself in person. Rather he is Mr.
Basserman, who is playing him… he is something and yet he is not that… The perceptible
accidents of the actor Basserman are ascribed as inhering in a foreign substance, the
Wallenstein of the writer. The spectator takes the costume and gestures, the words and deeds
of Basserman the individual as something that enables him to experience the Wallenstein
129
created by the writer.” It is within the confines of this formula ‘it is something and yet it is
not that’ that the initial contact of the viewer with Tatlin’s relief brings forth the bemused
question as to its meaning and likeness. And it is within this context that the difficulty of
reducing the Glass Relief thematically, of speaking of its content, or of bringing its
‘accidents’ to ‘substance’, is perceived as the work is placed before the viewer as an
intentional object, an object that is intended for some communicative function in its
relationship with the viewer – who expects to understand this function within a sphere of
validity, where certainty and doubt, sense and nonsense cannot be confused. This expectation
of an unequivocal stabilisation of the artefact’s ‘meaning’ or ‘likeness’, caught in a phrase, as
it were, at the moment of communication of its substance somehow divorced from its
particular accidents (or where the accidents themselves ‘disappear’ to give place to substance)
is very much with us, constantly giving rise to the bemusement mentioned above in
connection with artefacts that, for want of a better word, are called ‘abstract’.
“Abstract painting has now existed for nearly three-quarters of a century;” wrote David
Carrier in the late 1980s, “it has been the dominant mode of modern art. Why then, after all
this time,” he asks, “is there such scepticism about its continuing viability? Why the relentless
attempts by naïve and sophisticated critics alike to allegorise it, reading every horizontal
panel as a landscape, every expressive gesture as the representation of feeling from the inner
world of the artist? An abstraction refers to nothing, and so depicts nothing. What could be
more obvious,” Carrier continues “than a distinction between a representation by Rembrandt
and an abstraction by Reinhardt? But maybe, that distinction will not survive scrutiny. A
naïve way to undermine the distinction is to look for depicted forms in the ‘abstract’ work.
Reinhardt depicts a cruciform; Mondrian a city grid; and Pollock, Gombrich says, represents
images of urban rubbish […] a sophisticated account [such as Baudrillard’s] argues for the
130
same conclusion.”
Leaving aside the distinction (and the value-judgement involved) between the naïve and the
sophisticated, between Gombrich and Baudrillard, we note that the above argument, though it
points toward a critique of a reductionist interpretation of ‘abstract’ artefacts, may lead to a
reduction in the opposite direction. For it revolves around an ‘either-or’: the artefact is either
something ‘other’ which is re-presented, or it is empty; either the particular accidents may be
brought to some other substance, or as accidents in themselves can say nothing. If there can
be no symbolic or allegorising reading, there can be no reading at all.

129
Cited by Karl Bühler in K. Bühler, The Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, John Benjamins
Publishing, Amsterdam, 1990, p.49
130
D. Carrier, Baudrillard as Philosopher, or the End of Abstract Painting, Arts Magazine, 63;1, 1988, p. 52

39
Is it then a sign [that struts and frets upon the stage] signifying nothing or does it signify
something?
The difficulty in readily finding a given ‘signified’ to tie to such a ‘signifier’ is not unknown
in the fields of linguistics and psychoanalysis. It is an undisputed fact, by now, as the
distinguished polymath George Steiner has stated, that “we mean infinitely more than we
131
actually say” . Hence a chain of signifiers without a fixed signified may indeed evoke that
supplement of meaning, which is nowhere properly uttered. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
maintained that ‘there is no common measure between what is spoken and what is lived,
132
between the true essence and the manifestation of that essence in spoken discourse” , and
has spoken in terms very similar to the ‘whirlwind’, pointing to a ‘game’ of signifiers and the
double-triggered mechanism of metaphor, in a speech where the finely tuned ear of the
analyst may at some instant snatch the “spark that fixes in a symptom the signification
133
inaccessible to the conscious subject.”
But in this case the ‘bemused’ or ‘baffled’ viewer is really astonished. The work standing
there is a mark that perhaps gives out less than what it means. But how can it be taken to
evoke any supplement of meaning? Can it be seen as a mark of some sort or other, which
through its classification within a series of a kind, produce the broader sense in which to
locate it?
There are ways to approach it, but in such a classificatory process, the viewer will have to be
likened to the polymath. For it would be possible to summon ‘cultural fragments’ from one’s
education and see in this indecipherable piece the Romantic “nonmenthod of presentiment
134
and enthusiasm” as described by Gadamer , where ‘feeling’ inundates rational meaning to
the point of obliteration. Such a line of thought may of course lead beyond the pale of
meaningful discussion, bringing in the question of sanity. But still the viewer may be
‘allowed’ to see in this seemingly nonsensical jointing of haphazardly collected pieces of
material a mark that brings forth a symptom of sorts.
For in the ‘generic’ responses we spoke of earlier in our discussion of the conflicting
tendencies of the pieces of material, the viewer may see an attempt, perhaps a desperate one,
to cancel out a schism or splitting, like an anguished cry that registers the effort. Or, in the
reminiscence of a still life, where as Milner mentions en passant that one may see the jutting
triangle as a reference to a table, the viewer (taken again as a polymath, that can consciously
retrieve the information he/she possesses) can see that ‘schizophrenic table’ that Henri
Michaux describes in the Major Ordeals of the Mind, as quoted in one of the major works of
late twentieth century, the Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari: “The striking thing, says
Michaux about this table, was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or
intentionally simple, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been
dissimplified in the course of carpentering. […] As it stood it was a table of additions and if
finished it was only insofar as there was no way of adding anything to it, the table having
become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table […] its surface, the useful part
of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with as little relation to the
clumsy framework that the thing did not strike one as a table, but as some freak piece of
135
furniture, an unfamiliar instrument […]”
Turning back to that other ‘unfamiliar instrument’, the Glass Relief, we know that it was as
early as 1914 that a discussion along similar lines to those presented above, concerning the
work of the Russian avant-garde artists was put forward by E.P. Radin, a Russian psychiatrist
136
who wrote a study entitled Futurism and Madness . In this he was perhaps echoing the

131
see G. Steiner, After Babel, Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford UP 1998, Chapter IV[Greek edition, Scripta,
Athens 2004, p. 465]
132
A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1982, p. 7
133
J. Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, in Ecrits, Routledge, London 1989, p. 166
134
H-G. Gadamer, Hegel’s Logic, op. cit., p. 6
135
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Athlone, London 1977, p. 7
136
E. Brown, Introduction to G. Kern (ed.-trnsl.) Snake Train, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1976, p. 19. It is to be noted, however, that a
major collector such as Schukin took them seriously, as he bought one of Tatlin’s reliefs from the 1915 Tramvai V exhibition in
Petrograd, paying what seemed a fantastic price of 3,000 roubles, equal to 15-20 landscapes by D. Burliuk. This was reported in
the morning edition of the Birzheve vedomosti [14706] of 6th March 1915 (see Vasilii Rakitin, The Artisan and the Prophet;

40
dismissal of avant-gardism by Aleksandr Blok, who, as we have already mentioned, referred
to the “poison of modernism”. In his book, Radin compared Futurist poetry with the actual
writings of committed schizophrenics, with, as E.J. Brown points out, “astonishing
137
results.” Khlebnikov’s Incantation by Laughter, or his later Zangezi (a play of zaum
language staged by Tatlin in 1923), or Kruchenykh’s dur bur schyl, may well fit the
description, as would Tatlin’s Glass Relief, seen as an ‘object of additions’. But perhaps it is
in a somewhat later Russian story, by one of the ‘epigones’ of the Futurists, Daniil Kharms
that, as a sort of ‘closing statement’ may provide us with a more clear (blatant might be a
better term) of that unfamiliar purposeless object, which again by reference to the Anti-
Oedipus we may now call the ‘schizophrenic body’ or the ‘body without organs’.
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. He also had no
hair, so he was called red-haired in a manner of speaking. He wasn’t
able to talk, because he didn’t have a mouth. He had no nose either.
He didn’t have any arms or legs. He didn’t have a stomach, and he didn’t
have a back, and he didn’t have a spine, and he also didn’t have any
other insides. He didn’t have anything. So it’s hard to understand whom
we are talking about.
So we better not talk about him any more.138
Thus we retreat into a state where it is ‘better not to speak’, where no object functioning on
any register is reached, where signification based on a referential or symbolic order can never
be properly established. Any inference that the audience may chose to draw would have to be
drawn through negativity, through what is absent, without ‘hope’ of ever reaching any
unequivocal conclusion. In the indeterminate ‘negative’ space nothing can be finally pinned
down as a recognisable sign.
Thus if we are presented with the impossibility of an effective decipherment, we are perhaps
faced with an internal or esoteric monologue in whose ‘silent speech’ there is properly
speaking no representation. Perhaps we have attained the stage, suggested by
phenomenologists, where “in contrast to empirical language, that opportune recollection of
pre-established signs, authentic language, the speech of language is like a sort of being than a
139
language. It is an ‘open experience’ an ‘ever created’ opening in the plenitude of being.”
The connection of the above formulations with the word-creating process of transense, or
zaum, language should be noted. ‘Openness’ and ‘constant creation’ have been used in
‘defence’ of avant-garde literature and art. Roman Jakobson, the young formalist theorist who
went on to become one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century, spoke of the word
140
in zaum poetry as emerging “in statu nascendi” , while the ‘founder’ of Formalism, Viktor
Shklovsky saw in the ‘closed’ sense of the ‘habitual’ designation of words, the death of
language which needed ‘resurrection’. Similarly, another major linguist and critic, Umberto
Eco, wrote a book entitled the Open Work, in which he pointed out that the poetics of
openness tends to “produce in the interpreter acts of a conscious freedom [to] render him an
active centre of an inexhaustible framework of relations through which he elaborates his own
form, without being determined by a necessity deriving from the organisation of the work
141
itself” .
To be sure, this leads us to the idea of the reconstitution of the work by the reader/viewer,
where there is no fixed meaning that can be explained even by the author of the work, but a
drifting collation of all possible readings of the work.

Marginal Notes on Two artistic careers, in The Great Utopia; The Russian Avant-Garde 1915-1932 (ex. cat.), Guggenheim
Museum, New York 1992, p. 25)
137
E. Brown, ibid.
138
D. Kharms, Blue Notebook No. 10, in G. Gibian (ed.), Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, The Man with The Black
Coat; Russian Literature of the Absurd, North-Western University Press, Evanston, 1997, p. 57
139
E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment; Investigations in a Genealogy of Morals, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1973, p.
xviii
140
R. Jakobson, Noveisaja Russkaja Poesija, Typografija Politika, Prague 1921, p. 47
141
U. Eco, L’oeuvre ouverte, Seuil, Paris 1979, p. 18

41
But even accepting the idea of the ‘death of the author’, the viewer of the Collation finds no
hold on the work, it appears as an organless body of which we may as well not speak bout.
Thus even in the attitude of ‘openness’ the viewer’s possible expectation of unexpected or
astonishing meanings created or nascent in his relationship with the work are firmly rebutted:
What is astonishing is merely unspeakable.
Now, if the viewer, picking up Eco’s suggestion, were to seek different paths in accepting that
‘inexhaustible network of relations’, then could it not be objected that there is nothing new in
this, and that the ‘claim’ to ‘newness’ carries no exceptional weight, such as Punin and Tatlin
implied? For, in a general sense, all art may be seen as motivating such ‘acts of conscious
freedom’ in its interpreter, and no doubt Umberto Eco is aware of such an objection, as is
Shklovsky as well. For in actual fact no sign ever functions within a structure of absolute
identity; there is always a specific context that transforms it. Even a work that could be taken
as ‘closed’, as ‘clearly’ meaningful such as Renaissance painting, is not properly ‘closed’ and
does provoke a personal and ‘creative’ response on the part of the viewer, to say nothing of
the non-finito.
This is the kind of issue that Shklovsky attempts, somewhat confusedly, to address when he
says: “If we ask as a demand for the ‘word as such’ that it must […] be generally meaningful,
then of course transense language falls by the wayside. But,” he hastens to add, “it does not
fall alone: the fact that we have adduced force one to wonder whether words do have meaning
[both] in transense language and in simple poetic speech, or whether this is only a view that it
142
wrongheaded as a result of careless observation” .
What Shklovsky appears to be implying here is that transense language operates in a way
similar to ‘simple poetic speech’. What is traditionally designated as poetic speech,
Shklovsky seems to argue, is already ‘transense’, as poetry cannot function through a simple
clear-cut system of equivalences. This view, first formulated within the Formalist circle
143
known as OPOYAZ by Yakubinski and further elaborated in later years by Jakobson who
argued that “the distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word
144
and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of emotion” , acknowledges
what would appear as self-evident among linguists today, namely that “no word is ever really
a mere proxy for a denoted object. In fact the transaction of ‘meaning’ has a complexity of
dimensions which ‘poetic’ use of language further complicates. Indeed, Jakobson, in his
famous statement in 1960, was to link ‘poetic use’ to language in general, based on the
145
‘rhetoric’ of everyday speech.
Thus, following Shklovsky’s ‘defence’ of zaum language, it could be said that if zaum ‘is not
to fall by the wayside’ it would have to stand squarely in the familiar ground of poetry in
general (if not language in general). It is interesting to note that this view was developed and
strongly advocated later, in the 1920s, in order to prove that transense was not nonsense
against rising criticism by deprecators of Futurism in the context of the clash between the
artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard, i.e. the Bolshevik party that ruled Russia after
the revolution. In an article in the periodical LEF, edited by Mayakovsky and functioning as a
mouth-piece for the avant-garde artists, Arvatov based his analysis of zaum on the
acknowledgement that “in a whole series of OPOYAZ works (by Yakubinski, Jakobson and
Shklovsky) it has already been established that ‘transrational’ language can be found in
146
writers and poets of all historical periods.” On this point, more recent work, notably by

142
V. Shklovsky, O poezii i zaumnom yazhike, quoted in V. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism, op. cit., p. 93
143
L. Yakubinski, Sborni po teorii poeticheskogo yazika, (Collections on the theory of poetical language), Petrograd 1916 (where
the distinction is made between the practical communicative usage, in which language does not have an autonomous value, and
poetry where the practical purpose recedes in the background and linguistic images acquire autonomous value. [p. 16])
144
quoted in T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Methuen, London 1983, p. 64
145
see R. Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics, in T. Seabok (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 1960 pp. 350-377. It is perhaps
worth noting that Paul Ricoeur sees the foundation of this new awareness with regard to language as going back to 1953:
“Thanks to his famous article of 1953, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, the coupling of
metaphor and metonymy has been linked permanently with the name of Roman Jakobson. It was his stroke of genius to have
connected this properly tropological and rhetorical duality with a more fundamental polarity that concerns the very functioning of
language and not just its figurative use. Henceforward, metaphor and metonymy do not merely define figures and tropes; they
define general processes of language”. P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1986, p. 174
146
B. Arvatov, ‘Language Creation’, in LEF, Zhurnal levogo fronta, Moscow 1923, No. 2

42
Briony Fer, has identified certain contradictions in the texts of the Formalists, who attempted
to establish their ‘new’ poetics by seeking justification in example drawn from the ‘old’
147
art , which would indicate that they were merely suggesting a more systematic organisation
of time-honoured devices.
Indeed, the Russian Futurists’ concern with the ‘inaccessibility’ of poetic language may be
traced to Goethe’s dictum – which the Russian Formalists used to refer to – that “the more
immeasurable and inaccessible to the mind the given poetic work is, so much the better it
148
is” , or it may also be linked to more recent versions such as Derrida’s that the “form
149
enchants us once we cease to understand it” .
Furthermore, the Futurists’ attack on the poetic image as a referent, and their views on the
‘self-referentiality’ of the ‘word as such’ had already found expression among the Symbolists.
As I. Annensky put it, “poetic image is an old and positively unfortunate expression. It
compels us to suppose the existence of poetry not only outside rhythms, but also outside the
150
word, because in words there can be no image, and in general nothing cut-off.” The notion
of the ‘perceptibility’ of the word as opposed to its meaning, developed by Shklovsky, may
find an antecedent in Ivanov’s definition of Symbolism: “One can speak about Symbolism”,
says Ivanov, “only by studying the work in relationship to the perceiving subject and the
creating subject as individual personalities. […] Since Symbolism designates the relationship
of the artistic object to the two-fold subject, creating and receiving, then whether the given
151
work appears for us to be symbolic or not essentially depends on our reception.”
Another Symbolist writer, Chulkov, voices concerns about art that are not only almost
identical to those of some of the Futurist artists’, notably Malevich in his refutation of the
mimetic convention, but also have a long lineage that can be traced at least as far back as the
German Romantic poet Novalis in the late eighteenth century: “Human art is not a weak
imitation of nature but something that overcomes it, the restoration of original images, a
152
magic mirror that reflects the world of divine potential in itself”. Moreover, the broader
issue of the ‘new’ that motivated the Futurists and Formalists is also treated along similar
lines: “in order to become acquainted with the world of real, not imagined values, we must
153
recreate ourselves” .
It could be thus said that Symbolist poetry had reached the limits of traditional expressivity
and had already engaged with the questions of the function of the material of poetry, i.e.
words. “Any thought that is uttered is a lie,” wrote Ivanov in 1910, “a contradiction painfully
experienced by the contemporary soul – the need to ‘express oneself’ and the impossibility of
154
doing so” . As for the experimentation with the graphic implications of the word, written or
painted, one may again refer to Symbolist antecedents, such as Bely’s Petersburg, where as
Gerald Janecek has put it, referring to the section where the anarchist Nikolai is about to plant
a bomb, “a beautifully symmetrical indentation within an indentation seems visually to depict
the series of mental shifts to the deepest level of Nikolai’s consciousness and break out again
155
at the point in which he sets the bomb in motion.”
Finally, a much later but revealing comment by the constructivist artist Naum Gabo (one of
the youngest members of the Russian avant-garde who left Russia in 1921) straightforwardly
acknowledges the indebtedness of the avant-garde to the Symbolist painter Valery Vrubel.
“His genius,” says Gabo, “is responsible for moulding the visual consciousness of a new

147
B. Fer, Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism, op. cit., p. 19
148
J. P. Eckerman, Conversations with Geoethe, Sunday May 6, 1827, Everyman, London 1935, p. 206
149
J. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, Flammarion, Paris 1979, p. 11
150
I. Annensky, On Contemporary Lyricism, in Peterson RE, Russian Symbolism; An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical
Writings, Ardis, 1986, p. 129.
151
V. Ivanov, The Precepts of Symbolism, in ibid. p. 185
152
G. Chulkov, The Veil of Isis, in Peterson RE, Russian Symbolism; An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings, Ardis,
1986, pp. 87-8. (According to Novalis art does not imitate nature; it is part of it. For a discussion of the early romantic ideas on
art and the overcoming of ‘mimesis’, see T. Todorov, Theories du symbole, Seuil, Paris 1977, pp. 182-219)
153
ibid.
154
V. Ivanov, The Precepts of Symbolism, in R.E. Peterson, Russian Symbolism; An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical
Writings, op. cit., p. 143
155
G. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature; Avant-Garde Experiments 1900-1930, Princeton UP, 1984, p. 83

43
generation which came after him […] His influence on our visual consciousness was as
156
decisive as Cézanne’s […] Even Cubism was not entirely a surprise to us” .
Thus it could be said that in their attacks on Symbolism the Russian Futurists and Formalists
were forcing unlocked doors, and, perhaps, the closer one looks at Russian Symbolism and
Futurism the more difficult a clear distinction between them becomes. And it becomes almost
impossible when the Futurists are seen to plead on their ‘defence’ that transrational language
is a feature of all poetry, but in so doing they were acknowledging the limitations of the ‘word
as such’ both as a novelty and as a self-valuing entity.
To be sure, effectively speaking, some sort of signification – following some form of,
however loose or contingent, equivalence or correspondence is at work, and the symbolic in
language cannot be fully overcome, if it is to communicate something (or even if it is merely
to express something inwardly to ourselves). The symbolic is a condition for language, and
this something that can hardly be refuted, and is acknowledged by scholars, not least those
delving in the minutae of the resonance of linguistic acts, such as Jakobson, Lacan, or Derrida
to mention but a few. The latter, whose style is moving on a register which is quite far from
that of ordinary and clear-cut equivalences, has convincingly argued in connection with the
‘speech of silence’ that “even in fact I effectively use words, and whether or not I do so for
communicative ends […] I must from the outset operate within a structure of repetition whose
157
basic element can only be representative” . Even a phoneme (the smallest sound unit of an
utterance), according to Derrida, if it is to be apprehended as such and not as mere voice or
noise that we heard only once – a unique event – and has irretrievably disappeared in the past,
it can be apprehended as a phoneme “only if a formal identity enables it to be issued again
158
and be recognised” .
Thus some form of signification process must be at work if we are not to be lost in the silence
of the vanished voice, of the unique event that cannot be repeated. The seeming recklessness
of zaum or Tatlin’s Relief must be operating in a structure whose basic element can only be
representational, must have some form of recognisable meaning if they are not to be erased as
irretrievable, must be signs referable to a certain pre-established register from which they can
be issued again and be understood.
Indeed, such a representational signification process may be in operation, as the transrational
can be hemmed in and brought to meaning in a way suggested by Khlebnikov himself, in his
essay About Verse:
“[…] all these shagadam, magadam, vygadam, pits, pats, patsu, these series of syllables which
reason can make no sense of, why do they seem to be a transense language in folklore? And
yet the greatest power over man, a direct influence in the fate of man, the spells of sorcery are
ascribed to these incomprehensible words. The greatest spell is concentrated in them. To them
is ascribed the power to control good and evil and to direct the heart of lovers. The prayers of
many peoples are written in a language incomprehensible to those who pray. Does the Hindu
understand the Vedas? Old Church Slavonic is incomprehensible to the Russian. Latin – to
the Pole and Czech. But a prayer written in Latin works as effectively as the sign on the
street: “On Sale Here” […] Hence the magical speech of invocations and incantations does
159
not mean to have sense as its judge.”
The reference to the magical content of religious incantations has not been lost to scholars
who have detected a connection with the glossolalia of the religious sect of the Khlysty who
were active at the time in Russia, and with whom Khlebnikov is known to have had some
160
contact.
It is thus that we come back to that ‘either - or’ through which the viewer faces the Glass
Relief. Is this artefact a sign, a hieroglyph, a magical message, a still life and so on, or is it a

156
N. Gabo, Mikhail Vrubel: A Russian Interpretation of fin-de-siècle Art, The Slavonic and East European Review, v. LIV,2,
1976, pp. 332-333
157
J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and other essays on Husserl’s theory of Signs, Northwestern UP, Evaston 1973 p. 50
158
ibid.
159
V. Khlebnikov, About Verses, in G. Kern (ed.-trnsl.), Snake Train, op. cit., p. 227
160
see G. Ivask, Russian Modernist Poets and Mystic Sectarians, in Gibian G & Tjalsma HW (eds.), Russian Modernism, Culture
and the Avant Grade 1900-1930, op. cit., pp. 93-94

44
hermetically sealed, impenetrable – and in the final analysis, as far as the viewer is concerned,
empty – statement? The Collation of Materials does not offer a quick answer to the first set of
questions. The issue as to what it is, as to what its intended content to be transmitted to the
viewer, as to what ‘other’ already known, familiar ‘thing’ it can be likened to, in short, as to
what it re-presents, cannot be decided, it remains in doubt. And once the viewer decides not to
avert his/her gaze, i.e. once s/he does not opt for the quick affirmative answer to the second
set of questions, the doubt becomes the ground of his approach to, or interest in, the work.
This is an important step to be taken; indeed it forms the initial condition for a critical
discussion of the work, and thus needs to be clarified. There is an appeal to a conscious state
here being made, an awareness of observing the artefact in conditions where doubt serves as
the premise, questioning what is readily at hand, suspending the decision and placing all
preconceived notions about the relationship between viewer and artefact under scrutiny.
For initially the viewer’s doubt, in as much as it sought an answer to the either-or,
presupposed a register on which the artefact may or may not be inscribed, a set of pre-
established notions or ideas to which the work will or will not correspond, or be an instance
of, in what is known since antiquity as the mimetic convention, the convention within the
logocentric tradition that makes it possible to speak about art ‘making sense’. This would
include reproductions of natural forms or abstractions thereof in varying degrees, down to the
‘absolute’ schematisation of emblems or pure geometric forms. However, in this work there is
nothing that can enable us to speak of it in any ‘generally acceptable’ way.
Thus works such as the Collation of Materials, through the indecision of the viewer looking
at it, defer the answer to that either-or, the doubt is a doubt that lingers, and in so doing –
while sustaining the viewer’s interest (even if he may be described as merely intrigued) – it
may be said to be questioning the presupposition of the register itself, disorganising or
destabilising the ground of the viewer’s approach.
We have, of course, seen that if some form of significance that can be apprehended, then
perhaps the work ‘falls by the wayside’. And what we have found, or other accepted, so far is
that it is a mark, intentionally produced, that contains contradicting forces in a precarious
balance, and that it provokes a question as to the concept of meaning itself. Could this mark
be – to begin with at least – a question mark? A question mark that destabilises any
affirmation that we may think of in relation to this work?
But precisely, it could be said (setting the discussion in motion again) destabilisation is at the
heart of the project which lays claim to a radical rupture with established notions of
representation, seeking to explore new modes of perception, broadly linked with ‘visions’ to
overcome alienation and revitalise the experience of the lifeworld. Seen in this context,
destabilisation is a principal device in shifting to the side the dead weight of established
presumptions, and in this sense the Glass Relief, by producing the ‘bafflement’ in the viewer
is at this initial stage successful.
This ‘success’ is in line with the Futurist and Formalist theorists who spoke of the zdvig or
161
‘displacement’ and ostranenie or ‘defamiliarization’ as the devices that could produce a
new awareness of text or artefact by “subverting the particular patterns of ordinary language”
that enables literature and art to “create a ‘vision’ of the object instead of serving as a means
162 163
to know it” . The overall effort is “directed at seeing, not at recognition” .
The distinction is crucial, but perhaps somewhat unclear. And in creating a ‘vision’ perhaps
the Futurists and Formalists are still treading the old ground of Symbolism.
But let us attempt to elucidate this point, by moving a bit further in time to Tatlin’s next
exhibition in the winter of 1914-1915. However, a brief biographical reference needs first to
be inserted.

161
see V. Erlich, Russian Formalism, op. cit., pp. 214-219; and T. Hawks, Structuralism and Semiotics, op. cit., pp. 62-65
162
V. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle, Pluto Press, London 1974, p. 114
163
cited in S. Bann & J.E. Bowlt (eds.) Russian Formalism, Edinburgh 1973, p. 47.

45
3.2 Sign

“As a youth Tatlin had left home to go to sea. At the age of forty-four these experiences were
still clear to him and important. When asked to illustrate a book, On the Sailing Ship by S.
Sergel, in 1929, he drew from experience. The ship’s deck provides a vertiginous view of the
masthead, the sea and ship rolling below, everything visible in movement. One drawing
shows a figure precariously balanced on ropes and wrestling high above the ship amongst the
rigging with flapping filling canvas. The figure who might so easily have been Tatlin slips to
a corner of the drawing in which the human figure grapples to reconcile buffeting air and
164
weather with the wood, canvas and rope of the ships construction” .
This is how John Milner opens his book on Tatlin. In the fifth chapter, discussing the artist’s
Corner Counter-Relief, he states that exhibit No. 132 at the 0.10 exhibition in the winter of
165
1914, involved ‘ropes and knots quoting the mariner’s experience” [plate 31]. This
supports Milner’s suggestion that this experience was important for Tatlin. Indeed it must
have been, for on closer observation the drawing of the sailor on the ship’s mast reveals a
feature that relates it very closely to Tatlin’s famous design for a structure known as the
Monument to the Third International presented in 1919: the rigging of the ship, the ropes
reaching to the masthead appear to be at an angle identical to the one at which the spine of the
Monument is tilting [plates 32-33]. This can be further supported by Margit Rowel’s astute
remark that “it is worth noting, in relating to Tatlin’s reliefs, that there are no absolute right
angles aboard a seagoing vessel, no strictly geometric planes, no tightly fitted joints which
would run the risk of splitting or breaking open under stress. Everything is designed to absorb
166
the unpredictable play of the sea.”
But would this mean that these works are all expressions of such an experience? If this were
the case, then not only would the difference between the Corner Counter-Relief and the
drawing be very slight (they would be merely different in approximation), but also the
drawing would ‘explicitly’ say everything that is ‘merely’ implied in the Corner Relief (the
latter’s ‘incompleteness’ would be incorporated in the former’s ‘fuller’ image). But of course,
we do not approach Tatlin for the answer provided by his drawing, but for the problematic
questions that his material constructions pose, because what their incompleteness ‘does not
say’ directly makes them, somehow, more relevant to us. The point seems rather clear and has
been made time and time again. As Milner most clearly put it: “Tatlin remains a mysterious
figure of great originality and influence whose works continue to fascinate […] If his works
are problematic it is because they accept their context and refuse to become signs of a perfect
167
and other-worldly existence.”
But if indeed we were to accept the context, then, returning to our example of exhibit 132, we
could say that it is not the mariner’s experience that produces the ropes and knots of the work,
but rather that it is the ropes and knots that bring forth the mariner’s experience.
This is no mere play with words. If the ‘acceptance of their context’ (echoing Tatlin’s own
dictum ‘real objects in real space’) is anything to go by, then the ropes and knots in the
Corner Relief are not part of the image of a ship, but ropes stretched and tied; the material is
its own tension and presence. It does not re-create the image and much less so does it take us
out to sea by reference. It does not seek re-integration into the whole of an image; it is not
expressive of something other than itself. On the contrary, it holds out this dis-integration of
the image, where the material is expressive of itself alone. If it is saying something it would
be what a rope is to a hand that is stretching it or tying it into a knot.
It is interesting that in discussing Tatlin’s reliefs exhibited in 1916, Camilla Gray also uses
the biographical reference but takes it to a different direction. After a brief description of the
reliefs she concludes that these works [plates 34-35] are suggestive of the urge to fly,
mentioning that “these complex constructions of 1916 were actually attached to the wall by a
164
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 3
165
ibid., p. 113
166
M. Rowell, Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, op. cit., p. 100. (Rowell also mentions that Tatlin himself referred to the ‘culture
of materials’ as ‘born of the man of the sea’ [p. 99])
167
ibid. p. 2

46
wire, but one has the impression that they would be free flying but for the technical lack of
168
skill of their author” , further suggesting that “this urge to master space – which was sprung
in Russia – is the rationalisation of the urge expressed so vehemently” by Tatlin and the other
Russian artists of the time. This ‘urge’ expressed here would of course manifest itself most
clearly in Tatlin’s work a decade or so later in his ‘flying-machine’.
Thus, where John Milner goes to the past (Tatlin’s previous experience as a sailor), Camilla
Gray moves on to the future (Tatlin’s actual attempt to fly), in order to find an explanation of
the artist’s work. The case could indeed be closed here, but for the apparent contradicting
findings of the experts: one referring to the sea whilst the other to the sky, one to sailing the
other to flying. Both, of course, can be taken as valid for they are linked to biographical
‘hard’ facts. Perhaps the viewer is invited to choose, seeking some additional information,
such as is furnished by Milner, who further elaborates on Tatlin’s life at sea: “Tatlin’s
experience as a sailor familiarised him with a handling of canvas utterly at odds with that
taught at the Moscow College. Beneath enormous sails and intricate rigging, Tatlin inherited
procedures in which the handling of materials was precise, practical and articulate. The crack
of wood against the sea or the flapping of a sail in the air were conflicts of materials; the
ship’s structure and survival relied upon articulate handling of those materials to resolve and
169
take advantage of their opposition” . And hence: “Exhibit No 132 at 0.10 was a corner
counter-relief by Tatlin involving ropes and knots quoting the mariner’s handling of
170
materials. The linear supports are no more disguised than the rigging on a sailing ship”.
Thus, what we are faced with here would be no more than some vague depiction of a sailing
ship or some fragmentary allusion to a sailing experience.
But if we were to follow such a line of argumentation, a third choice might present itself. For
we could link Tatlin, ‘biographically’ as it were, with the Russian futurist milieu of 1913, and
more particularly with Khlebnikov’s investigations.
As we have already mentioned, 1913 was the year of publication of the manifesto The Word
as Such, by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, which was soon followed (in the same year) by The
Letter as Such. In the former the poets spoke of “a new path for art”, where, “the word was
developed as itself alone. Henceforth, the work of art could consist of a single word, and
simply by a skilful alteration of that word the fullness and expressivity of artistic form might
be attained. But this is an expressivity of another kind. A work of art is the art of the word.
From which it followed automatically that tendentiousness and literary pretensions of any
kind were to be expelled from works of art. Our approximation was that of the machine –
171
impassive, passionate…” All these phrases are pertinent to our discussion, and we shall
come back to them, but at this point we need to link them with the poets’ next statement of
1913, in which we read: “No one argues any more about the word as such, they even agree
with us. But their agreement does no good at all, because all those who are so busy talking
after the fact about the word say nothing about the letter. They were all born blind! The word
is still not valued, the word is merely tolerated […] if you ask the write-wright, a real writer,
he’ll tell you that a word written in one particular handwriting or set in a particular typeface is
totally distinct from the same word in different lettering […] the mood alters our handwriting
as we write. Our handwriting distinctly altered by our mood, conveys that mood to the reader
independently of the words. We must therefore consider the question of written signs –
172
visible, or simply palpable, that a blind man could touch.”
Could it be then that Tatlin is working along the lines suggested here? Perhaps not in the
sense of the actual production of the, by now famous, Russian futurist books with which a
number of futurist artists were engaged, as we have already seen, but in a more ‘thorough’
way, seeking to condense the work of art in a word suggested by a palpable letter that a blind
man could touch?

168
C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, op. cit., p. 180
169
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 112
170
ibid.
171
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Word as Such and The Letter as Such, in G. Kern (ed.-trnsl.) Snake Train, op. cit.,
pp. 197-98
172
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Letter as Such, in G. Kern (ed.-trnsl.) Snake Train, op. cit., pp. 199-200

47
Could it be that there is an interaction between Tatlin’s work and the investigations of
Khlebnikov, who went on, some years later (1919) to suggest how the letters of the Russian
alphabet appeared as concrete shapes, calling on the artists “to alter and improve the signs”,
and adding that “if you succeed in constructing them, you will have put the finishing touches
173
on the tasks that must be accomplished on this star that we all inhabit” .
It is interesting to note that in this text, entitled To the Artists of the World and subtitled A
Written Language for Planet Earth: A Common System of Hieroglyphs for the People of our
Planet, the letter S (Cyrillic: C) is presented thus: and defined as “a fixed point that
serves as a point of departure for the motion of many other points which begin their trajectory
174
there,” or as “a bundle of straight lines” .
This appearance of the letter S immediately brings to mind the taut ropes of Tatlin’s reliefs,
which might in this way be seen as an attempt at the “construction of a palpable sign”. Indeed
it could that the ropes or rigging (snasty) of the ship (sudno) stretching before us (styanut: to
tighten) are also an exploration of a concrete hieroglyph, which takes us away from the
surface of the sea to deeper corners of experience, as according to Khlebnikov, “with S begin
the most substantial bodies: slon-elephant, solntse-sun, som-catfish, sam-oneself, sila-
strength, sobranie-assembly, soi- a tribe, selo-village, semya-family, stado-herd, stanitsa-
town, stay-flock, sto-hundred, sad-garden (unification of parts). The factors (unifiers): soyuz-
175
union […] slava-fame, slovo-word, slukh-rumor, semya-seed, syn-son, son-sleep […]” . It
is perhaps within a similar exploration that Khlebnikov, as if reciprocating to Tatlin’s work,
refers in his poem Tatlin tainovidets lopastei to snasty (the ship’s rigging) and to Tatlin
himself as solntselov, which may be rendered as ‘suntrapper’ and which, according to Ronald
176
Vroon connotes the ‘inventor’ who has mastered the laws of both time and space.
If we were to accept such a context as valid, then looking at the Collation of Materials,
especially in the positioning of the cut glass tumbler along the top half of the a straight pipe
(as seen from the side view [see photo]), it might remind one of the Cyrillic letter Ch (Ч), a
letter which Khlebnikov was to describe as “a hollow two-dimensional mould that serves as
177
an envelope for a three-dimensional body” , and a letter with which the Russian word for
tumbler (chara) begins.
It is intriguing that in our initial description of the Collation’s materials and shapes we were
led to talk of an interplay between two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional solids,
which comes very close to Khlebnikov’s description of the ‘palpable hieroglyph’ this work of
Tatlin’s may be said to conjure up.
However, this may sound far-fetched, and if we were to follow such a line of argumentation
we would enter a rather shifting terrain, where “incidentally, osen-autumn and osyel-jackass
178
are related just as vesna-spring and vesolyi-merry” . But it should be granted that it is not
any more ‘far-fetched’ than the other ‘biographical’ references put forward by Milner and
Gray, and, perhaps, this third suggestion may be seen as having the additional merit of a
linkage with the specific concerns of the avant-garde artists at that time.
It could thus be argued that in one way or another Tatlin’s reliefs may be signs of some sort of
experience. It could be that the experience is part of the life of that particular artist, or that
they refer to existential states in general. It could be the professional experience of a sailor on
a merchant ship, or ‘life at sea’ and, by association, life in an unstable, shifting world.
We have already indicated, in our discussion of Milner’s suggested reading of Tatlin’s relief
No. 132, that such an approach would not only tend to ‘narrow’ the scope of the work but also
it would seem that it turns it ‘inside-out’ to link it with depiction and a ‘figurative’ discourse.
It is also interesting to note that such associations with ‘biographical’ data are offered more
readily by works other than the Collation, produced later, from 1915 onwards. Though, by
some great stretch of the imagination, the vertical ‘spine’ of the Collation may be taken as a

173
V. Khlebnikov, To the Artists of the World, in C. Douglas (ed.), The King of Time, op. cit., p. 150
174
ibid,
175
V. Khlebnikov, The Simple Names of the Language, in G. Kern (ed.), Snake Train, op. cit., p. 205
176
R. Vroon, Xlebnikov’s Shorter Poems; A Key to the Coinages, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1983, p. 76
177
V. Khlebnikov, To the Artists of the World, in C. Douglas (ed.), The King of Time, op. cit., p. 148
178
V. Khlebnikov, The Simple Names of the Language, in G. Kern (ed.), Snake Train, op. cit., p. 206

48
mast of a ship and the ‘triangle’ as a sail, or even as the flapping of a wing, this work is much
more ‘reticent’ in this respect compared to the ones discussed by Milner and Gray. To be
sure, it does not preclude such a reading, but at the same time it seems to undermine it.
If it is to be taken as a sign, then perhaps it should be seen as a signifier, which does not settle
firmly ‘onto’ a specific signified. Just as “incidentally”, osen-autumn is related to osyel-
jackass and vesna-spring to vesolyi-merry, the Collation seems to take us into the realm of
shifting associations which is at the heart of the Russian Futurists’ investigations of the time.
It is here that we need to look somewhat more closely at the ideas on language proposed by
the futurists in the second decade of the twentieth century, on which we have offered hints of
a general critique in the previous section.
A point of departure could be the statement from the Word as Such quoted above, which
spoke of a ‘new path for art’ and an ‘expressivity of another kind’, where the ‘work of art is
the art of the word’. Read in conjunction with the Letter as Such, which we have already
referred to, it becomes apparent that the ‘other kind’ of expressivity is the absence of the
stable state of the word, of a clear-cut relationship between the word and its meaning, or, in
linguistic terms, between the signifier and the signified.
In connection with Tatlin’s work, such a state of affairs becomes evident when one uses, as
John Milner does, descriptives such as ‘fascinating’ and ‘mysterious’, which presumably
allow that such works are never an expression of a final equilibrium of a system of
relationships.
This ‘fascinating’ and ‘mysterious’ aspect can be perhaps elucidated by reference to
Shklovsky’s statement put forward as a comment on Tatlin’s Monument to the Third
International (1919-20). It is a statement that links the Futurists’ and Formalists’ views on the
word in poetry with the actual work of the ‘master of counter-reliefs’, and in this respect it
would appear very pertinent to our discussion. Perhaps we should first provide a brief
description of the work, also known as Tatlin’s ‘Tower’, to support our discussion.
Tatlin’s Tower was presented on 8th November 1920, as wooden model about ten meters high.
It was a complex structure, to be made of iron and glass in huge dimensions, higher than the
Eiffel Tower (which it certainly alluded to) rising to 400 meters, and intended to house the
political headquarters of World revolution, or more specifically the Third, Communist
International (Komintern). The supporting external structure to be made of iron, consisted of
two separate spirals moving in the same direction around a diagonal axis.[plate 36] The
dynamic effect of these two spirals in an oblique direction has been aptly described by John
Milner: “The monument appeared dramatically emphasising its energetic qualities: the spiral
thread seemed to heave forward off its base upwards and forwards, the screw thread of a
179
tunnelling device screwing into the air as it emerged from the earth” . But the most
‘dramatic’ feature was the diagonal spine, which emerged solidly from the ground gradually
narrowing, thus holding the two spirals in a relationship of intensity which was released as the
axis stopped short of the last twist of the spirals, allowing the final truncated cone they
formed to realise its thrust free from its connection to the ground [plate 37]. In its function as
a building, the Tower was to hold within its iron structure a number of large glass halls, in the
shape of basic geometrical solids, that would rotate at different speeds. In Punin’s description
of 1920, “the monument consists of three great rooms of glass erected with the help of a
complicated system of vertical pillars and spirals. These rooms are placed on top of each
other and have different, harmonically corresponding forms; they are able to move at different
speeds by means of a special mechanism. The lower storey, which is in the form of a cube,
rotates on its axis at the speed of one revolution per year. This is intended for legislative
assemblies. The next storey, which is in the form of a pyramid, rotates on its axis at the rate of
one revolution per month. Here the executive bodies are to meet. Finally, the uppermost
cylinder, which rotates at the speed of one revolution per day, is reserved for the information

179
J. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-garde, op. cit., p. 151

49
services… It will also have a telegraphic office and an apparatus that can project slogans onto
180
a large screen. These can be fitted around the axis of the hemisphere.”
Although the ‘mechanical devices’ were never actually worked out, this concern with time
and the motion of solid geometrical shapes has led several scholars not only to the obvious
similarities of the Tower to mythological archetypes or to Biblical themes, in the form of the
181
Ziggurat – the tower linking men to God – but also to suggest astrological influences in the
182
conception of the monument. Diverse symbolisms as those of industrialism (through the
glass and iron) and sacred geometry (through the geometrical solids) can be further explored,
as can the direct relationship with the theoretical investigations of the Russian avant-garde of
the period, and in particular with Khlebnikov’s ‘project’ that Tatlin was closely following at
the time. This link has been convincingly presented by John Milner, and it could be added
that the writings of Punin and Shklovsky on the Tower show that it was seen at the time as a
very important statement of the ideas of the Russian avant-garde.
Thus, to return to Shklovsky’s comment, we read:
The word in poetry is not only a word; it attracts dozens, in fact thousands of
associations. The work of art is thick with them, as the air of Petersburg with
snow. The painter, or the master of counter-reliefs, is not free to bar the way for
this blizzard of associations, leading them through the canvas of the painting or the
rods of iron spirals. These works have their own semantics. Tatlin, it seems, has
taken the Council of the People’s Commissariat as artistic material for the
monument and exploited it together with ROSTA to create an artistic form. The
monument is made of iron, glass and revolution.183
Let us try to examine more closely what Shklovsky is suggesting in this statement: “These
works have their own semantics”, he says. It is not up to the artist to ‘explain’ them, to
pinpoint a specific meaning or meanings. They produce, as any word of poetry does, a
‘blizzard of associations’, which implies that it is impossible to attach a particular signified to
the ‘word’ of the work of art. Thus when Shklovsky comes to describe what the Monument is
made of – its materials – instead of ‘enclosing’ the object within the meaning of the concrete
materials, he opens it up by saying ‘it is made of iron, glass and revolution’, the last word as
‘material’ carrying a blizzard of connotations, especially when coming from a writer with an
184
openly confessed ambiguous or ‘confused’ position vis-à-vis the Russian revolution . This
word, moreover, may take another turn in several European languages (including English, but
not Russian), as it may be taken to ‘return’ to the actual construction of the Monument, which
was planned to have the ‘office rooms’ revolving at various speeds.
It is perhaps within this ‘blizzard’ of associations that Khlebnikov’s rather obscure utterings
seem, if not entirely to make sense, then to reveal something of their substance:
To find, not breaking the circle of roots, the touchstone of all Slavic words, the
magic by which one may be transformed into another.185
From such a standpoint, the goal of the quest is not a reductionist classification of identities
but an ‘enchanted’ process of transformation. In this way the ‘blizzard of associations’ is not
to be dispersed, but rather to be experienced in the full.

180
N. Punin, The Monument to the Third International,; A Project by the Artist V.E. Tatlin, in T. Andersen, VladimirTatlin, op.
cit., p. 57. It is to be noted that Punin does not clearly mention the hemisphere at top of the structure, clearly visible in the
drawings and the model produced by Tatlin, which by introducing the sphere would ‘complete’ the series of the basic
geometrical solids present in the ‘Tower’. A more precise rendition of the original Russian into English (as offered in L.A.
Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 344.) is ‘spherical segment’. However, as Punin locates this segment in the area a1-b3, [plate
30] it is evident that he is referring to the topmost part of the Monument.
181
For a description of the structure and function of the Ziggurat, see H. Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient
Orient, Pelican London 1970, pp. 20-22. It is interesting to note that Frankfort concludes that “it seems that the temple at the top
of the Ziggurat was thought to be a hall, where the manifestation of the god was awaited.” (p. 22)
182
see J. Milner, Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 156
183
V. Shklovsky, The Monument to the Third International; the most recent work by Tatlin, in T. Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin, op.
cit., p. 56
184
see V. Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, Memoirs 1917-1922, Cornell, Ithaca, New York 1970, p. 133
185
V. Khlebnikov, by E.J. Brown, Introduction to G. Kern, Snake Train, op. cit., p. 13

50
And so, consistently, Khlebnikov proceeds not to disentangle ‘meanings’ but to ‘freely fuse
together all Slavic words”, adding that “such is my first approach to the word. This self-
186
valuing word stands beyond ordinary life and what is useful or not” . Thus, it is perhaps in
the instability of the blizzard, in the tension of the fusion that we should approach the word
and the work.
Along these lines it could be possible to argue, in connection once more with Tatlin’s #132
relief, that if the ropes and knots do not ‘take us out to sea’ in an imagist setting through
reference, then they lead us towards an unlimited number of states of experience in the actual
through the literal confrontation with the real material in space alone, just as in Khlebnikov’s
and Ktuchenykh’s statement: “the word-worker remains face to face, ultimately and always,
with the word itself alone”.
To further explore this literal confrontation as opposed to reference of the image, one should
perhaps consider the placing of the material in question in the corner-relief that has served as
an example for this discussion, dwelling on the visible aspect of the word.
This would lead us, through the ‘look’ of the ‘palpable’ ciphers of the Letter as Such, we have
already discussed, to the shifting terrain of the relationships between ‘autumn’ and ‘jackass’.
This is the terrain of endless paraphrase, an obscure terrain where meaning becomes elusive,
as the common ground of language is destabilised. As is well known, the central feature of
Khlebnikov’s work is his ‘coinages’ or ‘neologisms’, the ‘word-creation’ using the Slavic
languages as raw material, through a free and very personal ‘handling’ of etymology, of
187
sound patterns, of suffixes and pre-fixes, of grammatical and syntactic structures , resulting
in what often seems unintelligible or irrational utterings. In view of the of this ‘personal’ or
‘a-logical’ attitude which characterised Khlebnikov’s endeavours, and which makes
interpretation of his work highly problematic, it has been suggested that “if we are seriously
to understand Khlebnikov, we must reconstruct his poetical world, enter into that universe as
188
he saw it” . But a number of scholars have pointed out not only the difficulties but also the
dangers of interpreting Khlebnikov at all. “Are we not,” asks Henryk Baran, “perhaps trying
to force Khlebnikov into a certain straitjacket of ‘rationality’ and ‘total intelligibility’, and
189
thus potentially distorting the nature of his poetics? Such a danger is indeed present.” This
danger may be seen in that certain studies, in their interpretative zeal, tend to veer toward a
symbolist reading of Khlebnikov’s poetry, stressing, as with Barooshian, Khlebnikov’s links
and affinities with the Symbolists, and generally presenting Khlebnikov as favouring a more
190
idiosyncratic or cryptic correspondences .
We have already touched upon this critique, and have explored some of the limits of
Khlebnikov’s zaum or ‘transense’ language. But here we need to focus on this essential
feature of his poetry, namely ‘word-creation’, which may prove useful in our discussion of
Tatlin’s work, as it illuminates the ‘nascent state’ of the word that Jakobson spoke of [see
page 38 above].
As Khlebnikov himself put it: “Word-creation is the enemy of bookish ossification of the
language, and, inasmuch as this is supported by the fact that in the country […] language is
191
being created every instant […] the right carries over into living literature” .
This problem of ‘ossification’ or trivialisation, the ‘deadening’ of the language appears to be
the central concern of the Futurist poets and Formalist critics at the time in Russia. The need
for a ‘resurrection of the word’ was forcefully brought to the fore by Viktor Shklovsky in an
essay bearing the above phrase as its title in 1914 [and considered to be the inaugural text of
the Russian Formalist school of criticism]. “We are like the violinist”, wrote Shklovsky, “who
has ceased to feel the bow and the chords; we have ceased to be artists in our everyday life,

186
V. Khlebnikov, Svoyasi, Collected Works, II, 9. For translations into English see R. Vroon, Xlebnikov’s Shorter Poems, op.
cit., p. 8 and E. Brown in G. Kern (ed.), Snake Train, op. cit., p. 13.
187
See R. Vroon, Xlebnikov’s Shorter Poems, op. cit., pp. 38-74, 90-99
188
B. Lonnqvist, Xlebnikov’s Plays and the Folk-Theater Tradition, in A Nilsson A (ed.), Chlebnikov Symposium, Stockholm
1985, p. 79
189
H. Baran, Xlebnikov’s Poetic Logic and Poetic Illogic, in ibid. p. 9
190
R. Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov; a Critical Study, Cambridge UP, 1987, in ibid. 23
191
V. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930; a Study in Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 29

51
we no longer love our houses, our clothes, and very easily depart from a life we do not
apprehend. Only the creation of new forms of art can reinstate in man the feeling of the world,
192
resurrect things and kill off pessimism” . Thus, according to Shklovsky, says Terence
Hawkes, “the essential function of poetic art is to counteract the process of habitualisation
193
encouraged by routine everyday modes of perception” . This ‘counteracting’ could be
achieved through the use of certain devices and techniques, of which the zdvig – or
‘displacement’, leading to ‘estrangement’ (ostranemie) – emerges as the most important in
Futurist and Formalist writings. This device, as we have already mentioned, was seen as
enhancing perception, as infusing language with new life. And in this respect, Khlebnikov’s
neologisms or what became known, after Khlebnikov’s collaboration with Kruchenykh who
coined the term, as zaum language, appeared perhaps as the purest form of this much needed
‘resurrection’. For the zaum neologisms seem to validate the claims of the Formalists who
strove for a literature that “disorganises the forms through which the world is customarily
perceived, opening up a kind of chink through which the world displays to view new and
194
unexpected aspects.” Zaum could demonstrate with a certain directness the Formalist view
that “the distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and
nor merely a proxy for the denoted object, or as an outburst of an emotion; that words and
their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and inward form acquire weight and value of
195
their own.” Indeed, the Formalists very much favoured the use of neologisms arguing that
“they enrich poetry in that they create a euphonic effect […] and produce an awareness on the
196
part of the reader and compel him to think etymologically” , as the word is given in statu
nascendi.
Thus the zaum neologism appears as an invention, using language as material to be creatively
manipulated in ‘novel’ ways, offering an active role to the reader in a seemingly endless
series of multiplications and permutations of associations, and opening new paths of
perception. It is in this context of ‘invention’ that the investigations of the Russian avant-
garde must be seen, and it is in close connection with transense neologism that Tatlin’s reliefs
should be examined.
In this process of invention, the fixed points of language or a system of representation can
only act as a starting point, as a basis from which to proceed. They are like the ship and its
rigging which take us out to sea. But the course is not properly foreseeable, and not clearly
determined. We may encounter storms and blizzards - and perhaps this is the main idea.
Indeed, as Gerald Janecek has pointed out in connection with zaum, “indeterminacy is the
goal of zaum”. Basing his analysis on a statement by Kruchenykh in the Service Book of the
197
Three (1913) , Janecek continues: “The prefix za- provides the necessary loosening of
reason and logic, while avoiding value judgements […] za- suggests initiating action, going
beyond limits, penetrating into the unknown. To attempt to be more specific would miss the
point. My own ‘definition’ of zaum would therefore be: A state of indeterminacy produced in
the case of literature by intentional lapses from the norms of standard speech or writing. In
semiotic terms, we are dealing with a newly created sign or sign series in which the signatum
is not clearly specified, but is to be guessed or decided by the receiver on the basis of his own
associations. Or as Jakobson puts it: эти слова как бы подыскивают себе вначение (as if
198
these words are looking for their own meaning)”.
To be sure, all this refers to what may be termed the signifier chain which is by now part of
the staple diet of semiotics and literary and art criticism. The Russian avant-garde, and in
particular the Formalist critics, seem to anticipate and to ‘pave the way’ for the realisation and

192
V. Shklovsky, The Resurrection of the Word, in S. Bann and J.E. Bowlt (eds.), Russian Formalism, Edinburgh 1973, p. 46
193
T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, op. cit., p. 62
194
T. Bennet, Formalism and Marxism, Methuen, London 1986, pp. 24-25
195
V.Erlich, Russian Formalism, op. cit., p. 183
196
R. Jakobson, Novejsaja russkajia poezija, op. cit., p. 47
197
A book produced by D. Burliuk, including conventionally printed poems by Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, D. & N. Burliuk, and
drawings by Mayakovsky, Tatlin and the Burliuks.
198
G. Janecek, A Zaum Classification, Canadian-American Slavic Studies XX, No 1-2, 1986. For Jakobson’s full passage see R.
Jakobson, Noveisaja Russkaja Poesija, Prague 1921, p. 67

52
acknowledgement of the indeterminacy of language itself, as exemplified in George Steiner’s
199
already mentioned dictum: “We always mean much more than we ever say” .
Every act of speech or writing, according to Steiner, is an act of translation of one’s thought,
an act which is forever incomplete, if only because there is always another way of putting it.
In this respect, then, the interpretations or ‘translations’ of Tatlin’s reliefs offered by Milner
and Gray (as well as my own proposal with regard to the Collation) may be ‘legitimised’, but
they will all have to acknowledge that they remain inconclusive and that they cannot be
presented as a final verdict.
But even as tentative suggestions they need not be overemphasised. They certainly take us
one step further from the mere ‘question mark’ where our discussion had led us in the
previous section, but they do not furnish the answer. They show the possibility of some sort of
answer, as they establish the reliefs as signifiers. But the signified they may be pointing to
cannot be clearly decided upon. Certainly, one could accept the ‘biographical’ interpretations,
settling for the comfort they afford. But by bringing such works back into the representational
mould one would tend to render these as ‘mere’ depictions of experiences – and not very clear
ones at that – which would in turn mean that the Russian futurists’ claim to chart ‘a new path
for art’ is not taken very seriously.
Indeed, if we were to accept a view that takes Tatlin’s reliefs as depictions of biographical
experiences, then the very important findings which such rigorous scholars, as Gray and
Milner, have themselves brought to light are washed away. For it is primarily through their
research that we have come to appreciate the dual influence of indigenous Russian traditions
and European trends, through diverse phenomena such as icon-painting, Futurist poetry and
Cubism, on the Russian avant-garde in general and Tatlin in particular; but what is lost here is
that these influences speak of a certain rupture with a time-honoured system of
representation.

199
see G. Steiner, After Babel, 1975, Chapter IV

53
3.3. Icon

Despite what has been said and done in the last hundred years in the process of questioning
the canons of the western cultural heritage, our hesitation or difficulty to come to terms with
the idea of rupture, and our unwillingness or inability to engage with it in a way other than by
‘healing’ may lead us to crude oversimplifications when we talk of the influences that may
have contributed to this rupture.
This appears to be the case with regard to the connection between Tatlin’s work and the icon
tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The artist himself is known to have stated that ‘had
it not been for the icon and the lubok I would have remained with my paintbrushes and
200
easel’ , hinting that his interest in the ‘language of materials’ was partly stimulated by the
artefacts of the indigenous Russian culture.
But we need to be cautious not to posit this language of materials as a mere substitute for the
language of paintbrushes, as this may lead us to a somewhat crude connection between
Tatlin’s ‘Collations of Materials’ and the ‘materiality’ of the icons. This appears to be the
case with even some prominent scholars, such as Christina Lodder, who in the opening pages
of her formidable Constructivism makes a reference to the influence of the religious icon
tradition on the Russian avant-garde, overly stressing their material aspect, which would seem
to imply that this tradition could inspire a kind of ‘cult’ of materials, thus viewing the icon
ultimately as juju (but even a ‘nail-fetish’ is not merely a mass of material but a record of
201
sorts inscribed within a ‘different’ code) .
True, the icons were very often decorated and inlaid with precious metals and jewels, and
indeed the whole Russian Christian tradition was legitimised on the basis of material
artefacts: It was the ‘heavenly’ beauty of the interior of St. Sophia in Constantinople during
mass, as we are told by the Russian Chronicle, that so dazzled the emissaries of the Kievan
czar in the tenth century, and was thus decisive in the conversion of the ‘Rus’ to Christianity,
202
and in particular to the eastern orthodox denomination . Also, it was the ‘miraculous’ icon
of the ‘Vladimir Virgin’ of the twelfth century that was brought over from Byzantium to
Russia to enhance the authority of the Christian faith and which, as Talbot Rice has put it,
203
exercised a marked influence on Russian painting [plate 38]. Further, and perhaps most
importantly, in our context, it is certainly the way in which the icons are made that lays
204
emphasis on the handling of various materials , the faktura that left a deep imprint on
205
Tatlin, who had worked at an icon workshop in his youth at Kharkov , as well as on most of
the Russian artists of the time. But this faktura, it must be stressed, is part of a system of
representation, not a fetish; a system of representation in which the viewer is not a spectator-
appropriator but a beholder who uses the image to see that which cannot be described
(aperigrapton).

200
C. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, op. cit., p. 12
201
For an explanation of the role of the nkisi nkondi ‘nailed’ figures of the Kongo as judicial archives, see D. Biebuyck,
Historical and Cultural Aspects of Central Africa, in T. Phillips (ed.), Africa, The Art of a Continent, Prestel, Munich, New York
and London, 1999, pp. 244-246.
202
see R. Hare, The Art and Artists of Russia, Methuen, London 1965, p. 23, where the following account is given: “According to
Nestor’s chronicle, the enterprising Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, sent emissaries to various countries, and instructed them to report
to him faithfully on the rival merits of available organized religions. In fact Vladimir was hard to find a practical religion, which
could best help an enlightened, hard-working ruler to capture the imagination of unruly subjects, and keep them under firm
control. The envoy who visited Constantinople was spell-bound by the splendour of the festive service which he attended in the
Cathedral of Saint Sophia. His report about this awe-inspiring religion was so much more impressive than the others, that
Vladimir promptly selected Orthodox Christianity as the most suitable faith to hold together disorderly Russia, and commended
his unstable but obedient subjects to be baptized. In this way Vladimir, in the year AD 988, imposed both official Christianity
and its ancillary art upon his malleable country.”
203
D. Talbot-Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era, Thames and Hudson, London 1963, pp. 126-27
204
This is how Vladimir Markov (Valdemar Matvejs), writing in 1914, described the making of religious icons in Russia, in
order to support the new ‘language of materials’ that was emerging among the avant-garde: “Let us look back to our icons. They
were embellished with metal halos in the form of crowns, metal casings on the shoulders, fringes, incrustations. Even paintings
were enhanced with precious stones, metals etc. […] Through the noise of colours, the sound of materials, the assemblage of
faktura, the people are called to beauty, to religion, to God.” Quoted in M. Rowell, Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, op. cit., p. 94
205
A.A. Strigalev, From Painting to the Construction of Matter, in L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 12; also see
Biographical Data, compiled by L.A. Zhadova, ibid, p. 445.

54
The roots of this system of representation go at least as far back as the eighth century A.D.
and the Iconoclast controversy in Byzantium, which lasted for over a hundred years (730-843
A.D.). The eventual victory of the Iconodule faction meant that the elaborate and at times
very delicately formulated positions argued against the principal Iconoclast accusation (that
any image-making was tantamount to idolatry) became official dogma. Up against the
accusation of idolatry, the Iconodules never argued for a theory of a ‘window to the world’ or
‘mimesis’, but drawing from the authority of the Church Fathers they argued for the image as
a mediation between man and the divine, as an aid for “the contemplation of the essences and
206
orders which are above us” . Thus, as G.H. Hamilton has put it, “the icon was worthy of
veneration as a mystical counterpart of the doctrine or person represented. In this way it had a
‘reality’ different from and considerably more important than any actual sensory experience
on the part of those who contemplated it. The intention of the painter could never be reduced
merely to the depiction of objects and situations in the world about him. His obligation was to
portray as best as he could events and personages whose actual presence may have been
remote in space and time, but whose spiritual reality could be invoked by his skill. An icon
was neither a literal representation nor an abstract symbol. The painter needed some
knowledge of the world, since the persons and places he was to portray were all considered
historically true, but their mystical presence prevented any too precise identification with the
207
living world around him” .
In the confluence of these two imperatives of relating to both the worldly and the heavenly,
which was ultimately legitimised by the incarnation of the divine in the body of Jesus, the
figures have to strike a delicate balance. As Erwin Panofsky has shown, drawing from the
Painter’s Manual of Mount Athos of the twelfth century, the Byzantine icon painters opted for
a ‘planimetrical schematisation’ based on a ‘modular system’ which allowed for the
establishment of forms geometrico more. With regard to the human face, the ‘three-circle
scheme’ was used, “taking the length of the nose (= 1/3 the length of the face) as a unit. The
length of the nose equals, according to the Painter’s Manual of Mount Athos, not only the
height of the forehead and the lower part of the face (which agrees with the canon of
Vitruvius and most Renaissance canons), but also to the height of the upper part of the head,
the distance from the tip of the nose to the corner of the eye, and the length, down to the pit,
208
of the throat.”[plate 39] This scheme, which was widely used throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages, sought to infuse the ‘imperfect’ human body with the spiritual ‘perfection’ of
geometric shapes. However, it was not pure geometry. As Panofsky acknowledges, “for all its
tendency toward schematisation, the Byzantine canon was based, at least in some degree, on
the organic structure of the body; and the tendency toward geometrical determination was still
209
counterbalanced by an interest in dimensions.”
This intricate and delicately balanced system, by nature of the debate through which it was
formulated, had to emphasise, paradoxically perhaps, its material substance in order to
disprove its idolatrous function. Indeed there was no way in which to deny that the icons, as
the Iconoclasts would point out, were material objects, but to the charge that the image was of
the same ousia (substance) as the subject depicted (thus “drawing the spirit of man to the low
210
and material adoration of the creature” ) the Iconodules answered by quoting the authorities
who argued that “we allow material adornment in the churches […] because we conceive that
the faithful are led even by images towards the intelligible beauty and from the abundant light
211
of the sanctuaries to the intelligible and immaterial light.” Such an argument, of course,
demanded that the substance and texture of the materials used for these icons as well as the
traces of the draughtsman’s work should be evident, for the handling of the materials is,

206
Pseudo-Dionysius, quoted in L Barnard, The Theology of Images, in A. Brier and J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm, Papers given
at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, p. 11
207
G.H. Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia, Penguin 1954, p. 61
208
E Panofsky, History of the Human Proportions, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Penguin, London 1993, p. 108
209
ibid, p. 112
210
Emperor Constantine V, quoted in Leslie Barnard, The Theology of Images, in A. Brier and J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm, op.
cit., p. 10
211
Bishop Hypatios of Ephesus to Julian of Atramytion, quoted in ibid. p. 11

55
within this context, of paramount importance, in order to ensure that the icon will not claim to
be replica, that the icon will not thus degenerate into an idol.
212
In this system, which Konrad Onasch calls ‘a relationship of ascertainable analogies’ , it
was up to the viewer to relate, by contemplating, with what the icon can merely suggest. This
meant an economy of means, a sharpening of contrasts, and non-illusionistic highlights. And
it is those devices that we find in the work of one of the greatest icon-painters of the Russian
tradition, Theophanes the Greek (c. 1380), whose very career constitutes a prime example of
213
how Byzantium directly influenced the development of Russian art. As the Russian scholar
G.I. Vzdornov mentions in connection with Theophanes’ frescoes in the Church of the
Saviour in Novgorod [plates 40-44], “the painter does not go into details and stresses only the
main features of the subject,” paying “little attention to the landscape and architectural
background”. And Vzdornov continues: “Theophanes favours contrasts. At the finishing
stages he would deliberately thicken the dark colours and brighten the light ones. The
transitional tints as they are disappear and contrasts are sharply intensified. His dark is dark in
the extreme […] and his light acquires a dazzling quality of whiteness. But the dominating
device is highlights, characteristic of Theophanes solely. They are performed in a bold and
214
decisive manner with pure white or white with a tint of blue.”
This last device is forcefully apparent in Tatlin’s Seated Nude of 1912 [plate 26], as
mentioned earlier on, and this work together with the Reclining Nude of 1913 [plate 27] bring
forth another salient feature of Byzantine art: the picture surface on which the figures are
painted. In western Europe it took the painstaking research of Cézanne, within the context of
post-impressionism, to reassert the presence of the picture surface and to move away from the
strict rules of linear perspective which had allowed for the illusionistic ‘disappearance’ of that
surface, conjuring a depth in a ‘space’ which extended ‘behind’ it. Byzantine art had never
made such a claim. Having inherited techniques of representation that go back to late Roman
art of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., which had already shown a shift in style which
differentiated them from the mimetic project of classical antiquity, it successfully checked
‘humanist’ revival tendencies in the tenth and thirteenth centuries, in its attempt to preserve
the delicate balance we spoke of above. The technique that ‘asserts’ the picture surface in the
most pronounced manner is that of the mosaic, where each coloured tessera the picture is
made of is actually a small ‘piece’ of surface, and as it has a certain amount of thickness as a
material pebble it really protrudes from the surface on which the picture is set. That is to say,
the figure, even when composed of paint, is not ‘behind’ the ‘window’ as in western art, but
‘in front of’, or literally on a ‘wall’. Indeed it is mostly a real wall, given that this painting
tradition is almost exclusively part of the interior architecture of religious temples. The
viewer is not the ‘individual’ precious to humanism but the ‘collective’ congregation during
mass, and there is no single vantage point from which to look at the paintings such as
demanded by linear perspective and the illusionistic ‘window’. The pictures may be seen
from any point from within the collective – the only ‘vantage’ point being that of an
omnipresent God – and they issue forth in an ‘inverted perspective’ toward the spectator (i.e.
with the lines converging onto a vanishing point located in front of the picture plane) [plate
215
45] , even as (divine) light issues from the gold-leaf ground of the picture itself, rather than
recede in the distance and receive natural light.

212
K. Onasch, Identity Models of Old Russian Sacred Art, in H. Birnbaum and M.S. Flier (eds.), Medieval Russian Culture,
California Slavic Studies XII, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980, p. 178
213
He is traditionally considered as the teacher of the greatest Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev
214
G.I. Vzdornov, Freski Feofana Greka v Cherkvi Spasa Preobrazheniya v Novgorode, (with Summary text in English),
Moscow 1976, p. 274
215
Oleg Tarasov proposes the following interpretation of this Byzantine representational device: “Icons are so ordered that
everything depicted in them is presented in its own ontology. Their makers took much trouble to distort the phenomenal world
with a special reverse perspectival scheme, whereby parallel lines are represented as diverging from, rather than converging on, a
distant vanishing point beyond the picture space. This perspective suggests everything within the spatial-temporal rectangle – the
icon’s mirror – to the laws of the sacred. But we should note that when a person surrounds him- or herself with icons in the quite
literal sense, a reverse mirror effect can easily arise: reality itself can be subordinated in one’s consciousness to the sacral mode
and so appear more authentic than it is.” O. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion; Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, Reaktion Books,
London 2002, p. 37.

56
Most of these devices can be found in what is arguably the finest of Russian icons, the famous
Troica by Andrei Rublev, Theophanes’ great pupil, which depicts the angelomorphic type of
Trinity [plate 46]. Here, as K. Onasch puts it: “Rublev has removed all epic and superfluous
or redundant elements and has thus created a picture of extraordinary thought concentration, a
‘dogmatic telegram’ as it were. Central to this picture is not the intra-Trinitarian relationship
of these divine figures […] but also the process of salvation which the three agree upon in
their ‘silent conversation’. With the help of inverted perspective and circular composition the
216
viewer looks upon the depths of the Triune Divinity as it sacrifices itself for mankind.”
This is an intellectual art, not sensual in its depiction but at the same time conscious of its
sensuous presence. The picture plane is palpable as picture surface in its materiality, and this
not only because the icon is kissed in veneration, but also because its corporeality is the only
possible visual link between the immaterial and material world of Christianity. “I, sinful
Stephen,” says the Wanderer Stephen of Novgorod in the fourteenth century, “came to
Constantinople with my eight companions to venerate the holy places and to kiss the bodies
of the saints,” and on visiting St. Sophia he recounts: “We kissed the image [of the Saviour]
217
and we were anointed with oil and holy water.” The image is the mediator bringing forth as
218
much as can be presenced of the saints’ or the saviour’s immaterial presence . Thus the
materials which the religious icon is made of are not devices that produce an illusion but the
material imprint that testifies to the Christian God’s incarnation. Thus when pearls are set in
an icon as tears – as was the case, related in the Anonymous Description (14th century) of the
219
icon of the Holy Mother of God which “wept when the Franks wanted to take it” (in 1204)
– these pearls are not representative of Holy Mary’s tears, but rather [within the context of
that system] these pearls are as much as we can perceive her tears with our senses. For, as it
still being argued in relation to icons among orthodox theologians, “in the icon [image] of the
Lord we do not have either the invisible and undepictable divinity – who could describe the
indescribable? – or merely and simply humanity – how can one separate humanity from Him
who unified in His person indivisibly the divine and the human nature? What is presented,
220
depicted in the icon is the one substance of the Holy Word incarnate.” In this sense it is not
the artist’s personal experience, the individual inspiration of the private domain, that can
claim prominence here, but rather the communal way of passage for the beholder towards the
‘universality’ of his/her faith.
It should be noted, however, that when talking of Russian religious painting one should be
careful to distinguish between the periods before and after the synods of 1666-67, which
rendered all directives concerning icon painting redundant, inaugurating a period of
221
naturalistic and illusionistic depiction . The distinction is important if one is to appreciate
222
the ‘rediscovery’ of old icon painting, what Punin calls Pre-Petran icons (by reference to
Peter the Great who reformed almost all aspects of Russian life), by the Russian artists in the
early years of the twentieth century. For it was only then that the systematic cleaning and

216
K. Onasch, Identity Models of Old Russian Sacred Art, op. cit., p. 196
217
‘The Wanderer Stephen of Novgorod’, in G.P. Majeska, Russian Travellers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, 1984, p. 28
218
cf. John Damascene: “Not in the image but with the image”, in. S. Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilisation, London 1975.
219
‘Anonymus Description’, in G.P. Majeska, Russian Travellers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,
op. cit., p. 132
220
Basil, deacon of Stavronikita Monastery, Mount Athos, Theological Comment, in. M. Hadjidakis, The Cretan Painter
Theophanes; The Frescoes at the Monastery of Stavronikita, Publication of the Stavronikita Monastery, Mount Athos, 1986, p.
15
221
In the mid-seventeenth century, after the advent of the Romanovs, a change in religious attitudes and iconographic style
caused a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church. The opponents of change were known as the ‘Old Believers’. In this regard
Konrad Onasch states: “…the church experienced its deepest identity crisis in the Schism of the Old Believers in the seventeenth
century […]. The new mode of painting, in the minds of many had violated the hitherto prevalent analogous identity structure of
podobie (Greek: homoiosis), the resemblance between man and God the Creator. This can be seen from the quotation of Iosif
Vladimirov who represented this new style against Pleskovic, the defender of the old, conservative art. Many could no longer
identify with, or see their faith confirmed in the icons of the new school. Conversely, large groups of society could no longer
understand the language of the ancient icon painting. […] The synod of 1666-67 rendered directions regarding icon painting
immaterial. […] As the archpriest Avvakum stated: ‘Old Rus no longer exists’”. K. Onasch, Identity Models of Old Russian
Sacred Art, op. cit., pp. 204-205. See also N. Andreyev, Nikon and Avvakum on Icon Painting, in Studies on Muscovy, Western
Influence and Byzantine Inheritance, Variorum Reprints, London 1970, XIII, pp. 37-44
222
N. Punin, Against Cubism, op. cit.

57
 223
restoration of old icons began leading to the Ancient Russian Painting Exhibition of 1913 ,
and in such a context, with the icons becoming an object of scholarly interest (and thus also
‘secularised’), that the structural elements, the specific materials and devices used in these
224
works could be more readily appreciated . Further, this ‘rediscovery’ could function on
many levels within the ongoing debate on art and literature. It could be used, in conjunction
with the lubok and Russian folk art in general, as an example of ‘Russian-ness’, of Russia’s
‘difference’ in relation to the Western European nations, of Russia’s own ‘primitivism’,
which was still to all intents and purposes ‘alive’, as these icons could still function for the
vast majority of the population as religious icons, not as museum pieces. The ‘rediscovery’
could also be used by the Russian Futurists in their attack against ‘public taste’ as the
westernised bourgeois public in Russian cities could not properly appreciate this form of art,
even when it acknowledged its ‘beauty’ in ‘archaeological’ terms. But above, all this
rediscovery brought with it a ‘rethinking’ of the possibilities of the artwork in its relationship
with the viewer, and at a time when established ideas, from Euclidean geometry to mimesis,
were being questioned, such a rediscovery could contribute to the revision of the position of
the viewer – handing over to him/her ‘more’ than had hitherto been deemed permissible. The
viewer was called upon to contemplate, to become a ‘thinking’ or ‘inwardly seeing’ spectator,
rather than a sensorially perceiving onlooker.
It is perhaps no accident – for it belongs to the same Zeitgeist – that this ‘rediscovery’
coincides with the advent of cubism in Europe, and the subsequent dissemination of the new
ideas it carried in Russia.
We have already discussed the relationship of the Russian avant-garde with Parisian Cubism
within the context of the ‘binary forces’ operating in the tortuous process of self-
determination of Russian culture, and within this context Cubism could indeed be seen as a
‘return’ to some of the tenets of Byzantine art, and through its assertion of the picture surface
and its shift away from the ‘window to the world’ approach it provided a new basis for much
of twentieth century art – a point not lost to Clement Greenberg who rather convincingly
225
presented the case in his Byzantine Parallels in 1958 .
However, if to the western eye the ‘return’ was imbued with a sense of ‘exoticism’, similar to
the discovery of ‘negro’ and ‘primitive’ art, the proximity of the icon tradition in Russia could
contribute to a more ‘intimate’ relationship with this form of art.
For this reason, perhaps, the shift to schematization and geometrical abstraction in Russia was
so swift. But if this may sound as too broad a generalization, it could be more plausibly
argued that, for the Russian artists, this was a ‘living’ tradition. From Goncharova’s
‘revivalist’ paintings to Malevich’s presentation of his Black Square in the corner of the room
– in the place were traditionally the icon was hung in Russian peasant homes – at the 0.10
exhibition, it would appear that this ‘indigenous’ tradition is very consciously felt and made
use of.
Thus, to return to the point from which this section began, how do we relate with the notion
of ‘rupture’ (with the mimetic convention) in connection with Tatlin’s reliefs, and in
particular with his Collation of Materials?
In view of what has been suggested above and in conjunction with Tatlin’s self confessed
interest in the icon tradition, it would be reasonable to ask whether the viewer, when facing
the Collation of Materials would be justified in taking it to be an icon of sorts; deconsecrated
perhaps, as we have already suggested with regard to his Sailor self-portrait of 1912, but still
a direct reference to that religious image tradition?
Indeed, it could be even seen as a still consecrated space for it is feasible to view the central
configuration as a reference to a cross, especially the Russian variation thereof [plate 47]. But
if this were to strike one as an extremely unlikely, if not arbitrary and simplistic,
interpretation, the one could suggest the likeness of the axe [plate 48]. The axe, together with

223
The Exhibition was held in Moscow in honour of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. See C. Gray, The Russian
Experiment in Art, op. cit., p. 168
224
On the development of a more ‘detached’ or secular interest in these religious paintings, see R. Hare, The Art and Artists of
Russia, Methuen, London 1965, pp. 25-26
225
C. Greenberg, "Byzantine Parallels," in Art and Culture, Boston; Beacon Press, 1961

58
 226
the icon was traditionally hung in a place of honour on the wall of every peasant hut , [and]
was the universal tool with which a Russian could, according to Tolstoy, ‘both build a house
227
and shape a spoon’”. A similar and perhaps more direct allusion to the axe may be
discerned in another, most probably later, but less articulated and less celebrated construction,
228
which has proven difficult to precisely date [plate 49].
Though not totally ‘impossible’, these references are certainly far-fetched and not really
tenable. True, the allusion to the axe – and thence to the ‘Russian soul’ or to a more modern
aggressive working of metal – may find some support, as it brings to mind Khlebnikov’s line
Tatlin, visionary of the blades (mentioned above), which when related to the pointed outward
thrust of the triangular metal sheet acquires, one could suggest, a quite literal significance.
But surely one could counter-argue that such an interpretation trivializes the poet’s work, and
produces a simplistic reading that verges on the ridiculous. In our attempt to find a solid point
to refer the artwork we run the risk of slipping over.
However, the other allusion may carry more weight, for by way of its construction the
Collation could indeed justify an approach that would link it with the icon tradition. The
surface is a plaster ‘wall’ and the shapes literally project into space toward the viewer. A
similarity exists at a second level, in the evidence, or traces, of its craftsmanship, the process
of their making. Again, we may find a clearer ‘hint’ of this in Tatlin’s later reliefs of 1915-
1916, than in the Collation of Materials of 1914, but even here the viewer becomes very
much conscious of the ‘physical’ process of the articulation of the materials. Related to this,
we find a third level of similarity, though now it becomes fainter: the ‘inlaid’ materials are not
precious or even semi-precious in a financial sense; indeed they might as well be
229
throwaways , but they become precious to the viewer as they are held in the dynamic
tension we described in the opening section of this text, and the viewer concentrates his/her
gaze on them. The intensity produced in the viewer may still carry something of the spiritual
transcendence of the faithful before a religious icon, but it leads to an impasse, and there all
similarity ends. For there is no analogy that can be drawn by the viewer, the work here cannot
act as an aid to communicate with something else – other, that is, than the self-same materials
and shapes before him/her. This is ‘as much as can be seen’, but there is no ‘beyond’ invoked
which it may link us to. The Collation does not rest within nor does it even propose a field of
a ‘common’, ‘habitual’, or somehow ‘shared’ concept of transcendence to which it may be
pointing to.
The work is still keeping us in the balance, offering no sure ground for our approach. And as
the pendulum swings the other way, we may find that even our connection with the devices of
the icon-painting tradition is somewhat stretched.
Yet the work may be taken to be ‘in the process of creating’ its own concept of
transcendence, and to stand as a material ‘incarnation’ of a new approach to the handling of
the materials of art, and to a new notion of composition. In this sense it could be seen as an
emblematic icon, or a symbol of modernity [which to a certain extent it has become even as
we are talking about it in the context of a thesis].
‘In this sense’, then, could Tatlin’s Collation be assigned a role similar to the one claimed by
Malevich’s Black Square?

226
Oleg Tarasov states that “the ‘main corner’ of the Russian peasant house was also the ‘High Jerusalem’, the ‘window to
Heaven’, the ‘image of the other world’. O. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion; Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, op. cit., p. 39.
227
J.H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe; An Interpretative History of Russian Culture, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London,
1966, pp. 26-27
228
C. Gray dates it as produced in 1914, while L.A. Zhadova suggests it ‘1915 or later’. See C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in
Art, op. cit., p. 178, iil. 153; and L.A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin, op. cit., p. 126
229
‘I should like to use things you no longer need – glass, wood, bark, pieces of metal and copper would be good, and anything
else that may catch my fancy”. Tatlin to Khodashevich, quoted in C. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, op. cit., p. 14

59
3.4 Symbol

“Thus nature and the human being constitute two antitheses which are attracted to each other,
but to whom mutual understanding and cooperation are denied, since nature, in reality, is
completely different from the caricature of it formed in the human mind. Everything which
we call nature, in the last analysis, is a figment of the imagination, having no relation
230
whatever with reality.”
This is how Malevich expressed his views to support his abstract magnum opus. “What is the
essence and content of our consciousness,” he asked. And answered: “The inability to
apprehend reality.” Thus, he continued, “the truth concerning reality actually does not interest
us in the least. What interest us is changes in the manifestations of the perceptible.”
Malevich, setting off from experimentations under Cubist and Futurist influences around
1912, developed his cubo-futurist style [plate 50], which through very rapid steps shed any
reference to represented objects, leading in 1915 – or as early as 1913 according to
231
Malevich’s own chronology – to pure abstraction of the ‘zero of form’ of the Black Square
232
[plate 51] . Through this work, which was presented at the 0.10 exhibition together with a
series of other geometrical compositions [plate 52], Malevich proclaimed a new found
freedom in a ‘new realism’ created by ‘Intuitive Reason’, which he named Suprematism, and
which he set out to describe as an artistico-philosophical innovation in his pamphlet From
Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism.
The Black Square occupies a place of prominence in the history of modern art. It emerges
very much as one of the emblems of avant-gardism and the break with the canons of the post-
Renaissance tradition and its ‘mimetic’ convention. In the general climate of the times, as
outlined in previous chapters of this text, where the idea of the ‘new’ prevailed, it was
presented as the ultimate step in the process of doing away with the ‘old’, and as a form that
condensed and expressed the meaning of the current age. For this reason, in a ‘loaded’
gesture, its creator gave it a place of honour in the exhibition room by positioning it, as we
have already mentioned, at the corner traditionally reserved for the ‘holy icon’ in Russian
homes.
In another room of the same building, Tatlin was exhibiting his Corner Counter Reliefs
[plates 31, 34], whose very name and actual corner position may also invoke the ‘sacred’
place of the Russian home. The two artists disagreed about their artistic projects, and even
came to blows. In anger, Tatlin is said to have posted a statement at the entrance of his
233
exhibition room: “Exhibition of Professional Artists Here”.
It could be said that both artists were claiming to be submitting an ‘icon’ for the modern
world, with the one eliminating the illusionistic surface of the two dimensional plane by
reference to it, the other by ‘moving out’ into real space.
The (non-peaceful) coexistence of these two major artists of the Russian avant-garde at 0.10,
gives a particular importance to this exhibition, rendering itself a landmark, and calls for a
comparison of the two outlooks, which may contribute to our quest for an ‘understanding’ of
Tatlin’s Collation of Materials.
For, notwithstanding the differences and disagreements between the two artists, is it possible
to view the Collation in a similar vein as the Black Square, that is, as an emblem or symbol of
modernity?
To be sure we have already indicated that ‘modernity’ even when narrowed down to the
artistic avant-garde, is a multifaceted and often contradictory phenomenon, as the ‘new’ was
not infrequently seen as a carrier of ‘old’ hidden or forgotten ‘truths’.
This contradiction may be discerned in the ‘clash’ of the two artists and could perhaps explain
their divergent views. For Malevich’s rather swift move towards abstraction, accompanied as
it was by a ‘revelatory’ philosophical discourse, is generally seen as coinciding with his
230
K. Malevich, The Non-Objective World, in T. Andersen (ed.), K. Malevich, essays on Art, op. cit., p. 20. The reference is to
Malevich’s 1913 stage and costume designs for the production of the play Victory over the Sun.
231
K. Malevich, Suprematism, in R.L. Herbert (ed.), Modern Artists on Art, op. cit., p. 92
232
K. Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 118
233
J. Milner, Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 105

60
interest in Anthroposophy, Theosophy and the theories of the ‘Fourth Dimension’, relating to
a quasi-mystical, intuitive awareness of authentic cosmic experience. These theories, which
were as much indebted to religious, mainly ‘oriental’, mysticism, as they were to the scientific
breakthrough of non-Euclidian geometry, in terms of ‘negative space’, and of time as a
further, fourth dimension, were disseminated in Russia through the writings and lectures of
the mathematician-cum-mystic P.D. Uspensky, whose emphasis on intuitive feeling as the
234
path to a higher consciousness was closely related to Malevich’s ‘emotion’. Popularised
scientific publications as well as ‘theosophic’ texts have often been cited as possible
influences accounting for Malevich’s concern with the abstraction of geometrical planes, and
in this connection, as R.C. Williams has suggested, special mention should be made of
Bragdon’s attempt to illustrate the possibility of perceiving a fourth dimension in his book
235
Man the Square, on which Uspensky lectured in Petrograd in the winter of 1914-15 . On the
whole, as an intellectual trend, Theosophy and the theories of the Fourth Dimension could
relate to certain issues raised by the Russian Futurists in their publications and especially as
expressed in the well-known production of Kruchenykh’s play Victory over the Sun in 1913,
for which Malevich designed what may be termed ‘proto-Suprematist’ sets [plate 53], a play
which registered a highly vociferous demand for a liberated, authentic human existence,
transcending the constraints of reality mediated by reason: the sun was threatened with arrest
and detention in a concrete box.
It was in such a context that Malevich was to formulate a theory where, in the spiritual quest
for the liberating feeling of true being, the real world of things appeared as a delusion and it
was only in the abstract purity of forms that this liberating feeling could be intuitively
attained.
Here, however, the claim for a radically new path for art is very difficult to maintain. If only
because this quest for an arcane meaning of human existence, which has led certain scholars
236
to liken Malevich’s views with Plato’s theory of Forms , is in no way an overcoming of
Symbolism. On the contrary, Malevich’s utterings on ‘feeling’ and ‘intuition’ can be traced,
as John E. Bowlt has pointed out “to the Russian Symbolist interest in what Rudolph Steiner
[the founder of Anthroposophy] called ‘consciousness through intuition’, a doctrine that drew
237
wide intellectual support in Russia and East Europe in the 1900s and 1910s” . And, more
significantly perhaps, it could be argued that by castigating ‘reason’ as doomed to producing
only a ‘hopeless caricature’ of nature, by placing reality in another universe, beyond,
Malevich seems to be reiterating in a condensed and less florid form Aleksandr Blok’s
238
description of the Symbolist aesthetic experience . Equally it could refer to Andrei Bely’s
already mentioned essay Gorod where “the ‘brain’ hinders spiritual communication between
239
people.” This of course, as has already been mentioned, was a feature of much of the art
and artistic theory; there can be no denying that a symbolist problematic is present in
240
Futurist/Formalist thought, and Shklovsky was later to openly acknowledge this debt. But
in the same breath he was to point out an important differentiating factor, trying to summarise
in a phrase the Futurist/Formalist project: “In opposition to the Symbolists,” he wrote, “the

234
P.D. Uspensky’s Tertium Organum was published in Moscow 1910. On the influence of the fourth dimension as the ‘fourth
element and the highest – Intuition’, see W.S. Simmons, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square and the Genesis of Suprematism;
1909-1915, Garland Pub., New York 1981, pp. 224-53.
235
R.C. Williams, Artists in Revolution, Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925, Indiana 1977, p. 124; see also W.S.
Simmons, ibid., p. 242, for Bragdon’s reference, through Madame Blavatsky, to the mystic Pythagorean ‘tetractys’, the
geometrical representation of the decade, consisting of a quadrilinear triangle, i.e. made up of four rows of dots, one at the apex,
then two below, then three and on the fourth row four dots (see J. Burnett, Greek Philosophy; Thales to Plato, Macmillan,
London 1943, p. 52)
236
i.e. that the true essences are not for the senses to perceive, and that the palpable world is an imperfect copy of the world of
‘ideas’. Hence his condemnation of representational art as a further imperfect copy and a further step away from truth. See Plato,
The Republic, Book X.
237
J.E. Bowlt, H2SO4: Dada in Russia, in S.C. Foster (ed.), Dada/Dimensions, Michigan 1985, p. 254
238
“The symbolist is right from the start a theurge, that is to say the holder of a secret knowledge, behind which is hidden the
secret action, but he sees this secret which will only become universal later, as his own.” A. Blok, On the State of Russian
Symbolism, 1910, in T. Andersen, Art et Poésie Russes, op. cit., p. 32
239
cited in A. Steinberg, Colour and the Embodiment of Theme in Bely’s ‘Urbanistic Novels’, op. cit., p. 191
240
V. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle, op. cit., p. 113

61
poets Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky and Kamensky put forward a different kind of poetics. They
241
required of a thing not so much multiple meaning as perceptibility.”
However, Malevich’s move toward geometric abstraction was increasingly acquiring a
‘symbolic’ outlook, as emblems or pure forms of ideas, and any summary description of
Malevich’s oeuvre will have to agree with Charlotre Douglas’ appraisal that “Malevich’s
242
concept of Art was essentially Symbolist in nature.”
It is perhaps indicative of Malevich’s symbolist tendency, his wish for a reference to a
‘deeper’ meaning, that in June 1916 he expressed his disappointment in the experiments with
zaum language. In a letter to Matyushin he characterised Kruchenykh as one of the new “new
poets who have waged war against thought which has enslaved the free letter […] Hence the
mindless and transrational [zaumnaya] poetry ‘dyur bul shchyl’ or ‘vzdryvul’. The poet has
justified himself by reference to the flagellant Shishov, to the nervous system, religious
ecstasy, and thereby wanted to prove the rightness of the existence of ‘dyr bul’. But”,
Malevich goes on to add, “these references led the poet to a dead end, bringing him to the
same marrow, to the same point as before. The poet does not succeed in explaining the
reasons for the liberation of the letter […]. The word ‘as such’ must be reincarnated ‘into
243
something’ but this remains vague.” A precise, rather than vague, reincarnation, according
to Malevich would be ‘sound masses’, “clearer and more expressive than musical notes”, that
244
would “give our consciousness the possibility of reaching farther away from the earth” . But
this was the escape to the rarefied realms which the Futurist and Formalist discourse was
agonizingly attempting to refute, as when Khlebnikov in describing his ‘Muse’, in
contradistinction to the lofty Symbolist figure, would write: “She has at times not been afraid
to stain the poor flower of her attire or dress’s hem on the farm yard’s warm dung, as she
245
passes.”
Indeed, Malevich seems to doubt the core of the poetics that the Futurists were struggling to
formulate, in their rejection of ‘emotional content’ and of ‘all Talmuds’ that are ‘equally
246
destructive for the word-worker.” But perhaps, more significantly, it is Malevich’s inability
or refusal to accept the ‘vagueness’ or indeterminacy of the word as such, his attempt to
simply transpose it onto a different register of ‘emotional content’ that point to his ultimately
Symbolist worldview.
In view of the above it could, perhaps, be possible to suggest that it was not through sheer
whim or on the basis of personal animosity that Tatlin described Malevich’s work in 1915 as
“the sum of the errors of the past”, and it would thus be particularly difficult to interpret
Tatlin’s reliefs in the way that Andrei B. Nakov proposes, “as a sort of materialist
247
commentary on Suprematism more than a development”. Though it could be perhaps
suggested that the metal triangle, so prominent in Tatlin’s Collation, may be a reference to
Kulbin’s ‘theory of the triangle’, thus positing an ‘intuitionist’ arcane emblem, it is clear that
Tatlin took pains to undermine it as a geometric symbol, by snipping its apex and cutting
through its side along the plaster surface, thus deforming it or ‘defacing’ it. Hence such a
suggestion, that would set up a ‘clash’ between the supporters of the square and the
supporters of the triangle, cannot properly stand. Apart from the fact that Tatlin makes no
direct reference to the ‘sign’ of the triangle as something loaded with meaning (as Malevich
does with regard to his square), and hence does not legitimise such a comparison, there is also
a series of difference that places these works, so to speak, worlds apart. To begin with, the
difference in orientation (toward plane or toward volume) is telling, as is the difference in
media (painted surfaces vs. structured reliefs). And these differences are intimately connected
with the more ‘profound’ one: in the case of Suprematism the geometric planes are still

241
ibid.
242
C. Douglas, Biographical Note, in E. Petrova (ed.), Malevich; Artist and Theoretician, Flammarion, Paris 1990, p. 14
243
G. Janecek, op. cit., p. 117
244
ibid. See also E. Kortyn, K. Malevich: Pisma k MV Matyushina, Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela, Pushkinskogo doma na
1974, Leningrad 1976, pp. 117-195
245
R. Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov a Critical Study, op. cit., p. 36
246
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Word as Such, in Kern G (ed.-trns), Snake Train, op. cit., p. 197
247
Nakov A, To be or to act ; The Problem of Content in Non-objective Art, Artforum, XVI/6 (Feb. 1978), p. 41

62
representations of a reality, of that ‘true’, ‘authentic’ reality existing beyond, abstractions of
cryptic geometry, ‘vehicles’ of meaning that lead us to ‘real’ existence, whereas in Tatlin’s
case the planes, firstly, are not purely geometric, secondly they are ‘real’ in their material
presence, and thirdly they seem to posit no claim other than this actual, material presence in
real space, i.e. linked to no ‘Talmud’. In the former case instances of ‘ideal’ forms are
represented, whereas in the latter concrete forms are presented. This difference, which has
248
been singled out most succinctly by John Milner cannot be overstressed. This is worth
noting not only because it would serve later as an a posteriori justification for a certain kind
of development, as Punin was to put forward in 1921 with reference to post-revolutionary
249
Constructivism and the move towards production-art, but because Suprematism appears to
be claiming to have found the ‘answer’, whereas Tatlin’s reliefs claim, equally forcefully
perhaps, not to have found it.
Suprematism seems right from the start to be fast reconstructing its own code of
decipherment, or as John E. Bowlt argues, to “establish a positive and prescient artistic
250
system” , a system of correspondences we may add, whereas a work such as Tatlin’s
Collation of Materials cannot be relocated in a unitary field of an abstract system, as it shuns
‘ideality’ and engages more directly with the ‘awkward’ world of phenomena – a world
which Malevich has abandoned in search of a ‘perfect’ or harmonious ideality. Indeed
Malevich seems to be adopting the time-honoured goal of art that must ultimately bring
‘harmony to the cacophonous din of life’, and in this Tatlin’s comment on the ‘errors of the
past’ may have some validity.
In this respect Tatlin may be seen as struggling to come to grips with something ‘new’ in
terms of ‘form’ born of our relationship with and handling of materials in the concrete, rather
than falling back on a tradition of ideal forms in the abstract which harks back, ultimately, to
Pythagoras. As he was to formulate it later, it is through “the organic relationship between the
251
material, its tensile capacity, its working character that a vitally inevitable form is born” .
Hence it could be argued that Tatlin’s reliefs cannot be brought under Nakov’s suggestion
that they should be seen as “a reintroduction of the old mimetic convention”, through “a
252
purely descriptive use of Suprematist planes” . For it would seem that such an approach
would consider the various pieces of material in a work such as the Collation merely as
‘shapes’, treating it as a sort of ‘pop-up’ version of Suprematist planes, and not in terms of its
material articulation; as a three-dimensional ‘pattern’, losing sight of the concrete presence of
the materials themselves which, as we have seen in our initial description of the work, may
give rise to a polyvalent, even if generic, signification.
However, is Nakov totally wrong?
Though it would be almost impossible to relate the Collation to Suprematist compositions, as
it antedates them, it could be argued that to a certain extent it engages with formal
investigations along a similar path: indeed as a materialistic ‘commentary; of geometric
planes, which though undermining their pure geometricity is still in dialogue with them.
Hence, the Collation still keeps us in the balance. The use of the word ‘descriptive’ suggested
by Nakov could be admitted, but not the word ‘purely’.
For a similarity does exist. As we mentioned in our initial description of the work, it may be
suggested that the Collation brings to presence the fundamental building blocks of a
vocabulary of art, ‘zeroing in’ as it were to the absolute essentials of the ‘essence’ of art,
leading to an experience not unlike the ‘symbolic’ one claimed by the Black Square. But the
Collation is not only that, and not clearly that.
For Tatlin’s work is more subtle, if only by virtue of the artist’s reticence that accompanies it.
Suprematism, through its programmatic declarations, appears as a closed system, and even as
it emerges it could be said to be already subsumed by the tradition of ‘sacred geometry’.

248
J. Milner, Russian Revolutionary Art, London 1979, p. 23
249
‘Production art’ was a phrase coined later, in 1922, by Formalist critic Osip Brik, who, considering that art in any of its forms
is dead, called artists to design useful objects (see M. Phil thesis, pp. 46-55).
250
J.E. Bowlt, H2SO4: Dada in Russia, in S.C. Foster (ed.), DadaDimensions, op. cit., p. 254
251
V. Tatlin, Art into Technology (1932), in L.A. Zhadova, Tatlin, op. cit., p. 312
252
A.B. Nakov, To be or to act, op. cit., p. 42

63
The Collation is subtler because it touches upon geometry but only fleetingly, it moves in and
out in a constant interplay between the two-dimensional ‘sheets’ and the three-dimensional
‘bodies’ they create in space, and though it can, at times, be seen to share some traits with
Suprematism, its material ‘planes’ cannot be unequivocally be taken as ‘abstract’ and cannot
undertake the symbolic role of the Black Square: they might as well be fragments of concrete
reality, hints or remnants of open-ended references that may imply Cubist influences.

64
3.5 Referent

Looking at Braque’s paper and cardboard construction of 1914 [plate 54] one is struck by the
similarity of the configuration to that of Tatlin’s Collation of the same year. The construction
clearly refers to the still life motif, with a triangular ‘table’ set in a corner, a bottle and a piece
of newspaper on it, together with other more ‘vague’, or abstract, items, one of them, a curved
small piece of white paper, forming a half-cylinder, and reminiscent of a glass or tumbler,
another a triangular solid shaft like piece of folded cardboard, reminiscent of a jug. The
prominence and position of the bottle also bring to mind Tatlin’s somewhat earlier Bottle
relief.
Is it possible that Tatlin may have seen this construction by Braque, which is dated as “after
18 February 1914”, during his visit to Paris?
The dates of Tatlin’s trip to Paris, as we have seen, are somewhat unclear, but if we were to
accept the revised dating proposed by Strigalev and Bowlt as being January to April 1914,
then obviously it would have been possible to have seen it, had he met with Braque. However,
we cannot be sure exactly whom he met in Paris, and even his reported visit to Picasso’s
studio remains obscure, based it would seem mostly on his own account of events. That he
generally knew of Braque’s work there can be no doubt, not only from Schukin’s collection,
but also as some works by French artists including Braque had been shown at the Donkey’s
Tail exhibition of 1913, where Tatlin was one of the Russian participants. However, there is
nothing to verify that he met with Braque, and it is therefore unlikely that he had the chance
to see the construction in question for, as Neil Cox mentions, “Braque’s paper and cardboard
253
sculptures were accessible to those who visited his studio.”
Nonetheless, his visit to Paris coincided with the period in which both Braque and Picasso
were involved with this sort of small-scale sculptures, which Kahnweiler also called ‘reliefs’,
as they are known to have produced such works already by 1912 and Picasso’s constructions
254
had been published and ‘celebrated’ by Apollinaire in Soirées de Paris in November 1913 .
These works could be described as investigations of the third dimension in relation to the
picture surface, as the forms seem to ‘arise from’ the flat surface ‘into’ real space. This
emerges when Picasso’s Guitar cardboard construction is seen in conjunction with the pasted-
paper composition Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass, and the painting Man with Guitar,
which all belong to the same period of 1911-13 [plates…]. Similarly the still life theme
worked on by both Picasso and Braque (as well as the younger Spaniard Juan Gris) in
numerous sketches and compositions, often including collage elements, featuring table, bottle,
glass and newspaper, sometimes set on a wallpaper background, appears to be further
investigated in three-dimensions in Braque’s paper and cardboard construction of 1914,
mentioned above. It was in the same period that the Russian artist Alexander Archipenko,
living at the time in Paris, was working on his ‘sculpto-paintings’ under the influence of
cubism, using diverse materials such as tin, glass, wood and cloth, which were mostly
painted, and articulated in ways to suggest elemental human forms, set against a framed flat
background [plate 55], while the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, who had visited
Archipneko’s studio in 1912, issued the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, calling for
the use of non-traditional materials such as “transparent planes, glass, metal sheeting, wire,
255
street lamps or house-lights” . Boccioni presented his work in Paris, including his now
famous Development of a Bottle in Space [plate 56], a small sculpture of expanding volumes
in silvered bronze, in the summer of 1913. (Though incorporating the element of time, this
was still quite closely linked with the ‘traditional’ notion of sculpture. It was in the following
year that Boccioni was to complete his Dynamism of a Speeding Horse & Houses [plate 57],
which was a much more direct application of his Manifesto in terms both of materials
[cardboard and wood] and composition [articulation of abstracted surfaces], though still with
a clear, even if loose, reference to a recognisably depicted subject matter.)

253
N. Cox, Cubism, Phaidon, London 2000, p.
254
ibid., p. 315
255
U. Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, in U. Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, London 1973, p. 63

65
Thus at the time of Tatlin’s visit to Paris in early 1914, the sculptural development of pictorial
forms was one of the central concerns of the avant-garde artists. The idea of a ‘painterly
relief’ was already developed, and the use of ‘incongruous’ materials and ‘abstracted’ or
‘discontinued’ forms, as well as the theme of still-life (often including a bottle) was very
much in evidence.
These works should be seen as a bold step in the direction of ‘rupture’ with the old
conventions of art, as sculpture had remained less receptive to the new ideas and had retained
a closer link with the mimetic convention, even through the momentous years of the first
decade of the twentieth century. This could be ascribed to the influence of the imposing figure
of Auguste Rodin and his ‘late-romantic’ masterpieces, but in any event by the early 1910s
cubist painting had impacted European art so strongly that the traditional view of sculpture
was giving way. And now the impetus was coming not only from within cubism, but also
from other tendencies, most notably Italian Futurism, that Cubism had paved the way for.
Indeed, the three-dimensional investigations could be seen as a further ‘turning of the screw’
that allowed for a broader and deeper understanding of the new ‘language’ of art that was
emerging.
“The overwhelming novelty for European sculpture of these reliefs,” wrote Kahnweiler about
Picasso’s constructions of 1912-13, “consisted in that they burst open ‘opaque’ – so to speak
– volumes. The form of these tumblers, of these musical instruments, is in no degree
described in its continuity; continuity arises only in the creative imagination of the
256
spectator.” Kahnweiler based his argument on the astute observation that Picasso, together
with Braque, “turned away from imitation because they had discovered that the character of
painting and sculpture is that of script. The products of these arts are signs, emblems, for the
external world, not mirrors reflecting the external world in a more or less distorting manner.
Once this was recognised the plastic arts were freed from the slavery inherent in the
illusionistic styles”. This could be linked with the other, ‘primitivist’, influences on cubism
and the way they were re-worked by Picasso, especially with reference to the African mask:
“The Grebo masks,” Kahnweiler goes on to say, “bore testimony to the conception in all its
purity, that art aims at the creation of signs. The human face ‘seen’, or rather ‘read’, does not
coincide at all with the details of the face, which details, moreover, would have no
significance if isolated. The volume of the face that is ‘seen’, especially, is not to be found in
the true mask, which presents only the contour of that face. The volume is seen somewhere
before the real mask. The epidermis of the face that is seen exists only in the consciousness of
the spectator, who ‘imagines’, who creates the volume of this face in front of the plane
257
surface of the mask.”
258
Such argumentation, slightly different to Apollinaire’s , (and paradoxically undermining the
thrust of Kahnweiler’s initial suggestion that Cubism was a more true depiction of reality)
has, over the last two decades, given rise to an interesting discussion, suggesting that Cubism
is not only an acceptance that there is no ‘objective reality’ towards which the artist must
259
strive, as John Nash has convincingly maintained , but also a process involving the
invention or creation of signs. As Yves Alain Bois has put it, “beginning by reflecting on the
minimal conditions for the readability of pictorial signs, Braque and Picasso came to question
260
all the qualities of these signs.” Or, according to Roger Cranshaw: “The work of Cubism
denies our gaze its customary rites of passage. A work of Cubism (of Braque and Picasso)
cannot necessarily be used as a ‘transition from one existent to the other, from a signifier to a
261
signified’”. Such an effect is further heightened by the use of collage, whose
“extraordinary contribution,” according to Rosalind Krauss, “is that it is the first instance

256
D.H. Kahnweiler, The Sculptures of Picasso, Rodney Philips, London 1949, p. 6
257
ibid.
258
see L.C. Brenning (ed.), Apollinaire on Art; Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918, Thames and Hudson, London 1972, p. 27
259
J. Nash, The Nature of Cubism ; A Study of Conflicting Explanations, Art History, Dec 1980, vol. 3:4, pp. 439
260
Y-A Bois, Kahnvweiler’s Lesson, Representations, Spring 1987, p. 46
261
R.D. Cranshaw, Cubism 1910-12; The Limits of Discourse, Art History, vol. 8, No 4, Dec. 1985, p. 476. The reference within
this quote is to J. Derrida’s Writing and Difference, p. 12

66
within the pictorial arts of anything like a systematic exploration of the conditions of
262
representability by the sign.”
This, in a way, is validated by a reported statement made much later in Picasso’s life,
regarding his and Braque’s work in those years:
We tried to get rid of trompe l’ oeil and to find a trompe l’ esprit. We didn’t any
longer want to fool the eye, we wanted to fool the mind. The sheet of newspaper
was never used in order to make a newspaper. It was used to become a bottle or
something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced
from its habitual definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the
point of arrival. If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle that gives us
something to think about in connection with newspapers and bottles, too. This
displaced object has its strangeness. And this strangeness is what we wanted to
make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was
becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.263
This estranging effect [not unlike the ostranenie of the Russian formalists] stimulates a
completely new way of perceiving; new, that is, in relation to the post-Renaissance
illusionistic tradition, as it creates a different place and role for the viewer. True, this may
recall the position of ‘function’ of the viewer in Byzantine icon-painting. It may be pointing
even further back to a pre-mimetic tradition, such as the paintings of ancient Egypt where
plan-views, frontal and profile depictions co-exist, revealing the ‘permanent’ essence rather
than ‘transient’ appearance of things, requiring the viewer to make the necessary
‘adjustments’ in order to read-in the ‘meaning’ of the picture. Even the words of the
newspaper cuttings, or words and phrases in painted lettering included in other cubist works,
could be said to bear some similarity with the names of saints, descriptive titles of biblical
episodes depicted, or other ‘stories’ to be found in Byzantine icons or Egyptian tomb
decorations. However, here there is a qualitative difference, as the non-mimetic displacement
or estrangement triggered by such devices leads back to the things themselves, not to a
reassuring eternal essence. The adjustment required of the viewer is not formal, conjuring up
the ‘ideal’ form merely invoked by the depiction, i.e. a representation by proxy, as in the old-
mimetic traditions, but semiotic, inferring what lies beyond the pale of representation, as part
of represented reality, i.e. of reality as-much-as-can be represented.
This is borne out by discussions of Picasso’s constructions offered by Neil Cox and Rosalind
Krauss, who both stress the alternative way in which Picasso ‘alludes to the back of things’,
i.e. their unseen side, through semiotic inference rather than by illusionistic representation of
depth and space. This how Cox concludes his presentation of Picasso’s Violin of 1912 [plate
58]: […] the newspaper changes role according to its position: in the ‘background’ it is the
void of shadow, in the body of the violin it is the solidity of wood, This to-and-fro of void and
solid, of front and back, of depth and surface, is Picasso’s way of including what is absent
from Cubism, even if by pointing at the other missing half of presence (e.g. ‘depth’ where
there is only surface. And this new way of pointing is symbolic, or thoroughly semiotic,
rather than iconic, or by resemblance. The ability to conjure up semiotically what is outside
the limits of representational picturing was now inaugurated by newspaper cuttings: the most
abstract of pictorial things (depth, shadow, light, colour) could be ‘said’ if not shown through
the most concrete of pictorial elements (outlines, planes and colours). Furthermore, this subtle
‘linguistic’ evocation of ethereal depth is accompanied by the barrage of gross and worldly
language from Le Journal: ‘Painters beget pictures as princes beget children, not with
264
princesses, but with country girls’, Picasso later joked.”
Thus in this work, the various pieces of material ‘stand for’ the elements of composition,
rather than play the self-effacing role of mere media for its depiction. In this sense, of course,
the newspaper in the background is never really transformed into ‘shadow’; it remains a

262
R. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge Mass., 1985 p. 34
263
Picasso quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, McGraw Hill, New York 1961, p. 77
264
N. Cox, Cubism, op. cit., p. 286

67
newspaper and through its ‘gross and worldly language’ sends us to different directions, not
necessarily only to ‘country maids’.
The next step for Picasso and Braque was to thrust out of the picture surface. As Clement
Greenberg has put it: “It was as though at that instant, he [Picasso] had felt the flatness of
collage as too constricting and had suddenly tried to escape all the way back – or forward – to
literal three-dimensionality. This he did by using utterly literal means to carry the forward
push of the collage (and of Cubism in general) literally into the literal space in front of the
265
picture plane.”
What has been said so far brings us very close to many of the issues raised in our
investigation of Tatlin’s Collation of Materials. Indeed, most of what we have been able to
say about the Collation can only stand ‘semiotically’. Perhaps, Yves Alain Bois is right in
suggesting that Braque’ paper and cardboard ‘still-life’ construction should be seen as a direct
266
antecedent to Tatlin’s Collation of Materials.
But in the writings of all the above scholars a system, or mode of semiosis is suggested, and
quite rightly so. This process of reorganising a system of references, of proposing a code of
decipherment – inherent in Kahnweiler’s views and supported by later comments by the
cubist artists themselves – is present in Bois’ conclusion that Picasso was between 1912 and
1914 primarily concerned with “the infinite combination of arbitrary and non-substantial
267
signs at the heart of a finite system of values.” Thus even in an explosion of infinite
combinations, even if we are sent in a multiplicity of directions, there is some finite stable
ground on which to stand. Even if morphologically ‘unreadable’ a sign might still function as
a value with reference to other values within a system.
The issue that arises here is in some respects similar to the one encountered in connection
with Malevich’s work, namely the positing of a symbolic system to which ‘new’ signs can be
referred. Here, however, a more intricate, less easily determinable system of reference is
suggested. Whereas Malevich seems to know beforehand the ‘idea’ that informs his design –
‘a more perfect image of that noumenal reality’ – Picasso appears to be opposed to the view
of a direct one-way relationship between preconceived ideas and the artefact. In a statement,
some years later, which bears a resemblance to the view expressed by Tatlin concerning the
birth of ‘a new inevitable form’, Picasso criticised, somewhat sarcastically, those who
believed that ‘the artist before setting to work, is already capable of expressing precisely and
268
in words the subject he intends to represent’. Thus, where Malevich seems to impose on his
work a rather simplistic psycho-religious symbolism of inner feeling, Picasso’s and Braque’s
work, if seen in such a theoretical context, would suggest a more delicate system of shifting
equivalences, emphasising the function of the sign in the realm of the aesthetic. Cranshaw’s
observation that a work of Braque’s and Picasso’s Cubism ‘cannot necessarily be used as a
transition from a signifier to a signified’ leads us to what a linguist would call the “dislodging
269
of the concern with ‘facts’ and truth in a verificational sense” as it undermines the
customary relationship between signifier and signified, or in Cranshaw’s words ‘it denies to
270
our gaze its customary rites of passage’ . However, this undermining of customary speech
conventions is, of course, nothing more than the passage of ‘everyday’ speech to ‘poetic’
language, whose function as Paul Ricoeur remarks is precisely that: the upsetting of
customary equivalences, as “poetic language breaks through to a pre-scientific, ante-
predicative level, where the very notions of fact, object, reality and truth, as delimited by
271
epistemology, are called into question by the very means of vacillation of literal reference.”
It is then, one could argue, the merit of Braque’s and Picasso’s cubist work of 1912-1914 to
expose in the sharpest light the truth that all art, to a greater or lesser extent, invents and

265
C. Greenberg, Collage, Art and Culture, Boston, 1961, p. 79
266
Y-A Bois, Kahnweilwer’s Lesson, op. cit., p. 55
267
ibid
268
M. McCully (ed.), A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, Princeton UP 1981, p. 185
269
The reference here is to Ricoeur’s critique of Turbayne’s interpretation of metaphor. See P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor,
op. cit., p. 253
270
R.D. Cranshaw, Cubism 1910-12, op. cit., p. 12
271
P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, op. cit., p. 254

68
creates signs; that all art is, above all, artifice. This artifice is, of course, a semiotic surplus
that tells us of things not explicitly stated or depicted, and which is to be found in all art
forms, including so-called figurative art, which is never mere likeness. However, what is
important here is that this semiotic surplus takes prominence and is exposed as ‘tellable’.
Thus, once such a line of approach is pursued, Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism can be taken to
be bringing forth, as all art but here with an added awareness, the polysemic effect of an
aesthetic metaphor, or what Roland Barthes would term the ‘obtuse’, as opposed to the
‘obvious’ meaning of an image, “a multi-layering of meanings which always lets the previous
meaning continue, as in a geological formation, saying the opposite without giving up the
272
contrary” .
It is here perhaps that we may find room to place Tatlin’s Collation in the company of Braque
and Picasso, if only we were to find some stable point that would enable us to make some
form of contact with the ‘obtuse’ meaning.
The condition for the possibility of relating with the ‘obtuse’ meaning of an image is, if we
273
are to follow Barthes’s reasoning, the non-abandoning of the ‘good faith’ of the referent, a
recognisable element (for instance, in the case of Picasso’s construction, the guitar), which
may serve as a point of departure, allowing for some system of signification, even if not a
‘customary’ one, to be established, or at least to be set in motion. The conscious refusal by
Picasso to abandon the ‘good faith’ – to totally overcome, as it were, figuration – thus
squarely offering the possibility of restructuring a code of decipherment for his cubist work is
evidenced by his own statements: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with
something. Afterwards you may remove all traces of reality. There is no danger then, anyway,
because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark […] Nor is there a ‘figurative’
and ‘non-figurative’ art. Everything appears to us in the guise of a ‘figure’. Even in
metaphysics ideas are expressed by means of symbolic ‘figures’. See how ridiculous it is then
274
to think of painting without ‘figuration’. A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’.”
Thus Picasso can legitimately claim (and validate what we have previously suggested) that
“Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same
elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood
and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not
read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English
language does not exist, and whys should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot
275
understand what I know nothing about?”
If, then, Cubism is only a branch of the broader family of the ‘schools of painting’, the onus is
on the viewer to acquire the tools, to learn the relevant vocabulary for its decipherment, to
learn its ‘English’, which is made possible by the fact that the ‘good faith’ of the referent,
some ‘figurative mark’ is always there.
It is this point that Edward Fry seems to be referring to when he speaks of the similarities and
differences between ‘traditional art’ and Cubism: “Both in traditional art and in Cubism,” he
says, “memory plays an enormous yet hidden role; but in contrast to traditional painting
Cubism replaces the role of remembered iconographic texts with memories of perceptual and
cognitive experience. […] Thus the presence of an exactly requisite number of scrambled or
displaced signs for, say, human features will generate a contextual reading of the signs and
276
create a non-mimetic representation of a human face.”
Could such a ‘contextual reading’ be applied to Tatlin’s Collation? Again, an unequivocal
answer will prove an extremely precarious venture. Certainly a viewer is entitled to read-in an
interpretation of his/her choosing, to recognise a ‘figurative’ mark or trace, drawing from his
own ‘memory of perceptual and cognitive experience’, by seeing, for instance, as has already

272
R. Barthes, L’obvie et l’obtus, Seuil, Paris 1982, p. 51
273
ibid. p. 49
274
P. Picasso, Conversation, 1953, in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, op. cit., p. 270.
275
P. Picasso, Statement (1923), in H.B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, op. cit., p. 264
276
E Fry, Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity, Art Journal. 47;4, 1988, p. 300. In this respect see also C. Green, Cubism and the
possibility of abstract art, in Towards a New Art, Tate, London 1980 pp. 156-158, where the author argues that though non-
mimetic cubism never involved complete rejection of the subject and would not lead to pure abstraction.

69
been suggested, the imprint of a seafarer’s life in the relief (especially when seen through the
angle of [plate 40], or alternatively, as an echo of a still-life by looking upon the piece of
glass as a tumbler and the triangular metal sheet as the corner of a table, very much like in
Braque’s construction. We have already mentioned numerous other possible ‘traces’, which
need not be reiterated here. Even so, more suggestions may be forthcoming: the strip of
asphalt on the left side may be a reference to the tar used in shipbuilding, but it may equally
be a reference to a road, as an exaltation of the new material, the new tarmac surface that was
been laid in the city streets at the time, or, conversely, as an expression of the threat posed by
this ‘unnatural’ covering of the earth, perhaps sending us in the direction of Khlebnikov’s
Crane once again. However, it should be noted that the more ‘figurative’ traces or ‘cognitive’
interpretations are proposed, the more tenuous they become. There is not enough residue of
‘good faith’ to go by.
The elements of the ‘picture’ are too abstract to allow any definitive verdict as to what
figure’s they are traces of. In this respect they relief veers once again toward the geometric
planes of Suprematism. But as we have seen the Collation cannot squarely come under the
sign of the Black Square. But equally, we have seen it cannot unequivocally be taken to
belong to the cubist construction still-life motif. In this respect it may be said to stand ‘in
between’, half way between Malevich and Picasso/Braque.
There can be no denying that the ‘imprint’ of Tatlin’s immediate contact with Cubism is
present in his Collation. We have already mentioned [see p. 50] that this contact may have
suggested a freedom to displace the elements of the composition and to further ‘relegate’ the
narrative elements, seeking a new rhythmic articulation in the interrelation of the fragmented
picture surface.
These possibilities were perhaps further emphasised by Picasso’s constructions which may
have hung on the walls of his studio when Tatlin was reported to have visited him. In any
event some of these, as previously noted, had been published prior to his visit to Paris. The
impact they seem to have had on Tatlin was exceptionally strong, as they related directly with
his concerns as they were determined by the various factors already discussed. For Picasso
they may have been more like work-in-progress rather than the major oeuvres that Tatlin
probably took them to be, so much ‘after his own heart’, as it were. For it has been suggested
that, for Picasso “these constructions perhaps were a means not an end, like Braque’s paper
and cardboard models of the summer of 1912, ‘investigations for form and volume’, aids for
277
painting, so to speak, and not finished sculptural works.”
Though the importance of these works in the development of the cubist ‘project’ should not
be underestimated, it would appear that they do not form a point of departure either for the
relinquishing of all discernible traces of figuration, or for the primacy of the ‘material’ over
the elements which it may be a referent for.
Tatlin may have seized on Picasso’s suggestion of following an ‘inverse process’, of ‘cutting-
out’ certain paintings and then “assembling them according to the indications given by their
278
colour, in order to find oneself in the presence of sculpture” , but whereas in Picasso these
cut-outs may still be related back to the picture surface and, however dislocated or dispersed,
never lose their function as some referent of sorts, in the case of Tatlin, what emerges from
the break up of the picture surface is not abstracted aspects of depicted objects but fragments
of material, fragments of the picture surface-as-material.
It may be possible to relate this to ideas that the Byzantine tradition could generate, or,
perhaps more directly, Khlebnikov’s call for the ‘palpability’ of signs, or even Tatlin’s own
life experience. It is also possible that Tatlin (like most Russian artists as has been suggested)
did not fully ‘understand’ Cubism, or, more precisely, what Picasso (and Braque) were
proposing with their constructions in 1912-1914. Perhaps, as has also been suggested, he used
Cubist ideas in the context of his own investigations.

277
D. Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, Phaidon, London 1971. p. 234, cited in M. Rowell, Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura, October,
7;Winter 1978 pp. 90-91
278
quoted in ibid, p. 90

70
In any event, if we were to take the Collation as his ‘response’ to Cubist constructions, it
could be argued that he grasped primarily their opening out into space, ignoring the subtler
semiotic referencing of forms and materials within a ‘particular circumstance’, of an
‘instance’ of a violin, a guitar, a still life, and that by eliminated almost all features that could
point to such a particular circumstance, created the conditions for a relationship between the
concrete materials present and the ‘concepts’ they may give rise to (thus coming closer to
Suprematism), where the form of the particular instance is not ‘already’ there.
This was attempted, seven years later, in 1921, to be explained by Punin, who described
Tatlin’s ‘painterly reliefs’ as ‘living and real surface areas’ (zhivogo y realnogo prostranstva)
stating in his pamphlet entitled Tatlin: Against Cubism: “the old painting, including Picasso,
adopted form as an element giving colour and surface area. We assert the priority of colour
(material) and surface area (volume) in interaction giving form.”
If this somersault is accepted, it would tend to lead us to an ‘inverted world’, which may go
some way to explaining why the Collation has so far resisted, without necessarily denying,
our attempts to locate in it a trace of some hint of a referent to hold on to. It invents signs
without offering a hint, a figurative trace, a link that would enable the viewer to appreciate the
‘new’ signs as signs. It is as if the primary concern is not with the new sign as an intelligible
entity but with the process, or the ‘moment’ of its invention (‘in interaction giving form’).
Any ‘semiosis’ that we may infer will have to be referred back to the signification of the self-
same materials, such as, at best, the ‘cold’ metal and the ‘warm’ asphalt, the ‘pointed’
protrusion and the ‘flat’ plaster; or the ‘to-and-fro’ of void and solid, where the interplay
between two- and three-dimensionality is not suggested by reference, but by the presence of
the ‘flat’ sheet opening into real space to infer a ‘real’ pyramidal body – precisely, sending us
back to propositions already suggested in the initial description of the work.
If Punin’s description is anything to go by, it could be said that the tension or mutability of
the ‘living surface area’ is never relaxed, as there seems nothing static or unequivocal to be
retrieved. The viewer appears to be confronted not with a foreign language like English (as in
Picasso’s example) which he might hope to learn, but rather with something more akin to
what has been described as “the autarkic, self-enclosed, still to this day undeciphered Linear
279
A script of Bronze Age Crete, which refuses to give up its secret.”
Yet there may be one more attempt to approach it. Is it, in its mute presence, telling us
something? Could it be that, standing in between the ‘referent’ of Cubism and the ‘symbol’ of
Suprematism, it could be taken as an index of a new function of art or a totally different
attitude towards art, a sort of heraldic device that by repelling our attempts to locate it,
‘mocks’ all that is traditionally hallowed in art – anticipating a Dadaist ‘anti-art’ gesture, and
bearing perhaps some resemblance to the, somewhat later, most famous, or infamous, gesture
that overturned the canon of art appreciation: Marcel Duchmap’s Fountain of 1917?

279
N. Nikolaidis, Mythes et Ecriture, in D. Anzieu, F. Carapanos, A. Green et al. in Psychanalyse et culture grecque, Belles
Lettres, Paris 1980, p. 210

71
3.6 Index [Heraldic Device]

A direct link between Tatlin and the Dadaists can be established, and in fact it is writ large on
the poster held by the ‘Berlin Dadaists’ Grosz and Heartfield, in a widely published
photograph of 1921, proclaiming: ‘Art id Dead; Long Live the Machine Art of Tatlin’. But
this is a story of later years, after the war in Europe and after the revolution in Russia – which
had transformed conditions if not human experience as a whole.
The idea of ‘machine art’ either as an encomium of the wondrous machines of the new
industrial world or as an appropriation of its forms or processes may go back to, at least the
Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti published in 1908 (“we will sing the factories hanging from
280
the clouds by the threads of their smoke…”) , and Boccioni’s Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Sculpture of 1912 (“we cannot forget… the in-and-out of a piston in a cylinder, the
281
opening and closing of two cogwheels…”). It will be remembered that the Russian
Futurists too, in 1912, referred to the ‘machine’ in their manifesto The Word as Such (“our
approximation is the machine, impassive-passionate”). It will also be remembered that
Boccioni’s call for new materials in sculpture is in a way realised by Tatlin’s Collation and
the other reliefs of 1914-16. Some elements of engineering ‘technical drawing’ may be found
incorporated in the proto-Dadaist work of Picabia and Duchamp [plates 52-53], while the
admiration of the feats of mechanical engineering was expressed in publications such as the
Soil, in New York, which in 1917 carried photographs of large-scale machinery, described as
282
‘moving sculpture’ .[plate 54]
However, there is a qualitative difference between all this and the ‘machine-art’
proclamations of the early 1920s in Russia which were echoed in Berlin. For revolutionary
events in Russia had accelerated investigations of the relationship between art and the
‘machine’, and had shifted the focus towards a more direct functionalism and the creation of
‘useful objects’. The ‘machine art’ slogan, then, was in effect calling for a dissolution of art
into engineering design, leading to what may be called the impasse, or literal dead-end of
‘production-art’.
We stress the distinction because the tendency to view developments along a linear path of
progression may induce one to see-in elements in a work only by ‘hindsight’. But a later event
cannot necessarily serve as an explanation of an earlier one, and especially as the ‘meantime’
includes a war and a revolution; what transpired later need not necessarily be seen as a natural
evolution of pre-war and pre-revolutionary events. Even though Tatlin himself was to view
his reliefs as a foreshadowing or ‘preparation’ of post-revolutionary Constructivism, a post-
factum explanation, in such circumstances, always carries the danger of a need for
vindication, where the earlier work must be presented as something that ‘foresaw’ what was
to follow. And though not totally unrelated, one would be hard put to posit a direct
relationship between the early dadaist proclamations expressing disgust and rage at the
madness of the world at war, and a statement such as the one that appeared at the Berlin Dada
Fair of 1920, that Dada is on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, and as such, indeed, it
283
upholds Tatlin’s ‘machine-art’. What may link them is the certainty that art, in its habitual
sense, is a spent force.
Thus, we should be careful to specify that though the idea of an ‘end’ or ‘death’ of art was not
explicitly stated until about 1920, when indeed there appears a confluence of currents that had
developed out of Dada (especially in the post-war Berlin-Dada version) and out of Tatlin’s
work with materials (as full-blown post-revolutionary ‘Constructivism’), the idea that art had
exhausted itself was present, and that it may be possible by looking at Tatlin’s Collation and

280
F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, in H.B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, op. cit., p. 286
281
U. Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, in ibid. p. 303
282
D. Ades, N. Cox, D. Hopkins, Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London 1999, p. 126
283
The slogans that appeared on the walls of the exhibition rooms were part of a series of ‘Berlin Dada slogans’, the full version
of which, according to Hannah Hoch was as follows: ‘Dada is on the side of the revolutionary proletariat. Open up at last your
head. Let it free for the demands of our age. Down with art. Down with bourgeois intellectualism. Art is dead. Long Live the
machine art of Tatlin. Dada is the voluntary destruction of the bourgeois world of ideas.’ E. Roditi, Interview with Hannah Hoch,
Art, New York December 1959, cited by E.H. Chipp, op. cit., p. 376. [see plate 55]

72
the early manifestations of Dadaism, to discern several common elements that would bring
them together under the rubric of ‘anti-art’.
Having said this, we should also add that it is highly unlikely that the first, Zurich Dadaists in
1916 knew of Tatlin’s work of 1914-15, i.e. just before and after the outbreak of the war, as it
is equally most probable that Duchamp, in the United States from 1915 to 1919 (where he
presented his Fountain in 1917[plate 56]), was not aware of this obscure Russian artist’s
investigations.
Hence, it should also be clarified that no factual connection is attempted between the
Collation and the Dada poems/happenings or Duchamp’s Fountain; they are merely
investigated as indices of the same sensibility, of pushing art beyond the limits of any
habitually accepted ‘conception’ of art.
Rosalind Krauss has talked extensively about the ‘indexical’ quality of several manifestations
of modern art, a theme succinctly summarised in a couple of phrases by Margaret Iversen,
who locates Duchamp’s Fountain within the category of the ‘index’ in the sense posited by
284
the Semiotics of C.S. Peirce. However, here the use of the term ‘index’ is intended in the
simplest sense, offered in Peirce’s primary example, like smoke being the index which
indicates fire – where the ‘fire’ is the ‘end of art’.
One common element could be the notion of ‘no-sense’ art that is not tantamount to
‘nonsense’. A Dada poem for instance, such as Hugo Ball’s famous Karawane, as an
assemblage of phonemes that do not accede to any habitual meaning, may, through zaum
poetry, be linked to Tatlin’s work. This would be more immediately felt in the ‘dyr bul
shchyl’ version of Kruchenykh, but also in the already mentioned Zaklyatie Smekhom
(‘Incantation by Laughter’) and Pereverten (‘Turnabout’) by Khlebnikov, as well as in the
more ‘extreme’ Bobeobi, and Gau-gau-gau, which can all be dated from about 1908 to 1915.
Similar in ‘phonemic’ utterances is the super-tale or trans-tale (za-povest) Zangezi completed
shortly before Khlebnikov’s death and published in 1922.
If, then, we were to follow one of the possible lines of approach, we could see the Collation
as a piecing together of such ‘phonemes’ in material form providing no clear statement. Thus
it could be possible to draw a parallel between Tatlin’s work and Hans Arp’s early abstract
drawings, which were later developed into constructions and configurations [plates 57-58]
offering no ready explanation by reference. In a way Tatlin’s work, in its piecing together,
may be also seen as anticipating Kurt Schwitters ‘merz’[plate 59] constructions, especially if
looked at in conjunction with Tatlin’s somewhat later Staro Basman and May pieces (1916)
[plates 60-61] and the probably earlier and more ‘flat’ ‘Painterly Relief’ (1913-14) [plate 62].
Indeed this last work brings to mind the Dadaists’ recollection that they “painted’ with
285
scissors, adhesives, plaster, sacking, paper and other new tools and materials”.
True, Tatlin’s Collation and a Hugo Ball Poem or a Hans Arp configuration, once they upset
the habitual expectations and destabilise the ground of one’s approach, may open out to
almost limitless tentative interpretations. Or, as Hans Richter put it, once “the safety valve
was off, however unsafe and unknown the territory into which we now sailed, leapt, drove or
286
tumbled, we were all sure where our path lay… And the paths led in all directions.”
However, there is an aggressive energy in Dada, an admixture of rage and exuberance, a
pandemonium as Richter would describe it, clearly sensed in the poetry and in the
descriptions of the happenings, but also in the anguished grace of Arp’s powerfully flowing
287
lines, often produced in a sort of frenzy of activity . Such a ‘feeling’ does not come through
Tatlin’s Collation. Perhaps it is because the war has not started yet, nor the revolution.
But even after the war and the revolution Tatlin’s anti-art stance would not be one of an all-
out attack, but rather of a dissolution of art into engineering and the design of useful things. In
288
any event, this comes later, and it is a story told elsewhere . In as much as the Collation is

284
see M. Iversen, Saussure vs, Peirce, in Rees AL & Borzello F (eds.), The New Art History, Camden Press, London 1986, p. 89
285
H. Richter, Dada art and anti-art, Thames and Hudson, London 1964, p. 49
286
ibid, p. 57
287
ibdid., pp. 44-45
288
see M.Phil thesis pp. 46-55

73
concerned it is more likely, as our initial description and discussion so far may have shown,
that the work is still in the process of undermining our habitual relationship with the artwork,
and in this sense it emerges as less assertive.
One of the most frequently used adjectives used in relation to Dada is ‘anarchic’, and this is a
description that can be accepted for most of the work created under the sign of Dadaism.
Tatlin’s Collation in its baffling presence and the overall configuration, which verges on the
‘schizophrenic’ as we have suggested, may also fit such a description, supported further by
the most ‘aggressive’ Russian Futurist statements (such as throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky
289
and Tolstoy off the steamship of the modern ). But the articulation of the materials and their
quasi-geometric shape weaken any ‘anarchic’ impact. The Collation appears to be not
frenetically but rather methodically, or ‘concernedly’ made, and this has a sobering effect.
And even if one were to take the various pieces of material as chance objects, randomly
collated, their assemblage cannot be compared with the chance coming together of torn pieces
of drawings, which, as has been reported, provided Hans Arp with the final version of a
290
composition he had been unsuccessfully trying to produce.
The Collation, once again refuses, as it were, to go all the way, and to become an insignia of
the demise of art. If it is seen as pushing beyond the limits, it does so from ‘within’, not
through an ‘attack’ but through a disintegration of ‘defence’.
Comparing the Collation with another type of ‘work’ that undermines the whole conception
of art, Duchamp’s Fountain presented within the context of the so-called ‘New York Dada’ in
1917, it becomes immediately apparent that there are some clear differences in terms of
outward appearance and the use of materials. However, they may be said to produce similar
effects in the viewer by causing a dislocation of one’s position vis-à-vis the artwork, making
one wonder whether one is faced with recognisable work of art, and hence think about art’s
role, status and function.
The story of the first appearance of Duchamp’s Fountain two years after his arrival in the
United States is well known: In the second issue of the periodical The Blind Man of the
American ‘Society of Independent Artists’, in May 1917, a picture of urinal, turned upside
down, appeared with the caption: “Fountain by R. Mutt; the exhibit refused by the
Independents”. The issue carried an unsigned editorial (written by Marcel Duchamp) entitled
‘The Richard Mutt Case’, and an article by Louise Norton, ‘The Buddha of the Bathroom’.
The editorial was quite short and read as follows:
They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit.
Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion the article
disappeared and never was exhibited.
What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain: -
1. Some contended that it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing
Now Mr Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath is
immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show-windows.
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no
importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its
useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a
new thought for that object.
As for the plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given
are her plumbing and her bridges.291
Duchamp’s ‘work’ has acquired mythical proportions. It belongs to the broader context of
Dadaist anti-art, but its repercussions are legion. In many respects it can be seen as a
watershed, after which art could never be the same again. The main thrust of this

289
V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, The Word as Such, in Kern G. (ed.-trns), op. cit., p. 197
290
Hans Richter relates: “Dissatisfied with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Arp finally tore it up, and let the
pieces flutter to the floor of his studio on the Zeltweg. Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper on the
floor and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power he had tried in vain to achieve.” H. Richter, Dada
art and anti-art, op. cit., p. 51. See also p. 55.
291
D. Ades, N. Cox, D. Hopkins, Duchamp, op. cit., p. 127

74
transformation can be found in the phrase from the above text: ‘created a new thought for that
object’. This takes the viewer as consciously engaged with the artwork and opens the way to
developments that would culminate with the Conceptual art of the 1960s and, perhaps,
beyond with the current dissolution of all systems in art. But perhaps more importantly, the
new thought for such an object, so distinctively un-artistic in the traditional sense, provokes a
question about art, a questioning of art’s position in our world. And this has tended to become
one of the principal tenets of artistic production in the late twentieth century.
In this sense, as the fountainhead of Conceptual art, positing a viewer that thinks of art and
‘questioning’ art, Duchamp’s Fountain may be seen, on the basis of what has been said so far,
as sharing something common with Tatlin’s Collation.
Further, if the materials in Tatlin’s Collation are to be taken as ‘objets trouvés’ (with the cut
‘glass tumbler’ offering some support to this view), then a similarity could be discerned with
the ‘ready-made’ nature of Duchamp’s Fountain. They could thus share in the ‘plagiarism’
referred to in the second ‘accusation’ mentioned by Duchamp as levelled against his
Fountain.
However, any such similarity is hardly tenable, for even as an ‘assisted ready-made’, the
Collation is not openly disclosing this ‘character’ but, if anything, it is ‘trying’ to conceal it,
as we can only suggest that the glass half-cylinder is indeed a glass tumbler, or that any of the
materials are ‘random’ and not ‘concernedly’ fashioned. And even if we were to compare the
292
Fountain with later objects produced by Tatlin, such a chair or a stove [plates 63-64] , again
the similarity cannot hold, for it immediately becomes clear that Tatlin in those cases is acting
as a designer/engineer and not a user of ready-mades.
But more important perhaps is the difference with regard to the first point in the ‘debate’ on
the Fountain, mentioned by Duchamp, namely the issue of vulgarity and immorality.
The gesture of Duchamp, to bring into the exhibition hall a ‘base’ object, such as a urinal,
raises a host of issues related to what European civilization had hitherto taken art to be: a
‘lofty’ enterprise of the ‘spirit’ which though not ignoring sensuality, ‘spiritualised’ it and
considered the bodily functions as ‘obscene’.
Beyond the scatological references, which here remain as mere references, the Fountain
raises the issue of the ‘body’ as the locus of repressed desire and its treatment by art. It raises
the question of what is ‘morally’ acceptable, to even think about the body in the context of
art, and thus puts this whole ‘context’ to question.
To be sure, both the gesture, and the protestations at its ‘censoring’, put forward by Duchamp
can be seen as being made with ‘tongue in cheek’ (and this can be further supported by the
presentation a few years later of LHOOQ) [plate 65]. But the time was propitious even for
such proposals, and the Fountain was no mere flash in the pan; it caused a profound shock
that shook the received notions of art as we know it. Hence it can rightly be seen as an index
or as the heraldic insignia of the end of that art.
Though Tatlin’s Collation may point to some of the same questions, such as ‘but is this art?’
or ‘what exactly is art’, the above issues regarding morality, obscenity and the like, provoked
by the Fountain can in no way be read in the Collation. If it engages the body, it does so only
in terms of the senses before the body can be ‘thought of’ as involving obscenity or desire.
There is nothing ‘shocking’ in the Collation. Once again, it emerges as less aggressive, or
assertive, as we already suggested. It remains steadfast to its indeterminacy and does not refer
to the demolition of generally accepted concepts, at least as openly as Duchamp’s Fountain.
For all its links with the loud noises of Russian Futurism, for all its contribution to the
grandiloquent proclamations of the ‘new’, the Collation, strangely, also imparts a low-key,
almost melancholy, feeling – emphasised perhaps by the fact that it is ‘presumed lost or
destroyed’.
Even at the apex of his career, even when he became famous, the ‘high-priest’ of
‘revolutionary’ art, and the European artists now came to visit him, he cut a somewhat
contradictory figure. This is what Georg Grosz had to say, in his memoirs published in 1955,
of his visit to Tatlin’s home in Petersburg in 1922:

292
designed by Tatlin in the early 1920s, in the context of ‘production art’.

75
 I met Tatlin, the great fool, once again. He was living in a small, ancient and
decrepit apartment. Some of the hens he kept slept on his bed. In a corner they laid
eggs. We drank tea, and Tatlin talked of Berlin, and of the Wertheim store and of
his performance for the court. Behind him a mattress, entirely consumed by rust,
was leaning against the wall; on it sat a couple of sleeping hens, their heads in their
feathers. This was the good Tatlin’s frame, and when he played his homemade
balalaika – it was growing dark already outside the uncurtained window, the panes
of which had been replaced in places by small pieces of wood – he gave the
impression not of an ultra-modern Constructivist, but of a piece of the genuine,
ancient Russia, as if from a book by Gogol; and there was suddenly a melancholy
humour in the room.
I never saw him after that, and never heard any more talk of him or of the once so
busily discussed ‘Tatlinism”. He is said to have died alone and forgotten.293

293
G. Grosz, Eine kleines ja un eine grosses nein, Hamburg 1955 pp. 172-73. (English translation from T. Andersen, Vladimir
Tatlin, op. cit., p. 86)

76
4. Readings
4.1 Text
During long periods of history, the mode of human
sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode
of existence. The manner in which human sense
perception is organised, the medium in which it is
accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by
historical circumstances as well. The fifth century with
its great shifts of population, saw the birth of late
Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there
developed not only an art different from that of
antiquity but also a new kind of perception.

W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction.

In the various approaches to this object, that the viewer takes in good faith to be a work of art,
a ‘reading’ of it is implied as being an instance of a general atmosphere of ‘avant-gardism’, an
atmosphere arising from the context of European culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
The work is thus taken as a sort of document of the age that in some way or other contains
and expresses this atmosphere or ‘spirit of the age’, which usually goes by the name of
Zeitgeist. The educated viewer, who knows that German compound words seem to effectively
condense meaning within cultural discourses, will be tempted to see in this document an
expression of a kunstwollen of that period (if we are allowed to somewhat distort Riegl’s
294
concept and allow it to stand almost literally), in the sense of a will or urge that emerged
within the artistic milieu, determined by the concrete conditions of crisis and hope, to produce
totally novel forms of expression that transgress the canons of traditional ‘beautiful forms’. In
a sense, the work is expected to be ‘strange’ and intractable, because – the viewer knows –
such was the ‘spirit’ of the age. The distortion and/or rejection of the traditional belle forme as
developed since the Italian Renaissance is hardly a surprise. Thus a second term may be
borrowed from art-theory, this time perhaps closer to its author’s definition: The overall
dissonance, fragmentation, abstraction and the like may be seen as the Symbolic Form of the
era, in the sense that Panofsky suggests that linear perspective was a ‘symbolic form’ of the
295
Renaissance. Such a ‘reading’ of early twentieth century art can be further supported by
recourse to literature, in the same sense that Gombrich uses the ‘realistic descriptions’ of the
296
Homeric epics to explain the move to figurative art in Classical Greece.
These devices are useful in appreciating overall changes in art history, especially when a rift
becomes apparent that seems to lead to a transformation of the mode of representation, such
as can be seen in the early years of the twentieth century.
These devices are all implicit in our argumentation and have been made used of in this
discussion. But if they have the advantage of allowing one to appreciate the context of the
‘age’ of the works and the conditions of their production, they certainly need to be handled
with care. For there is a risk of seeing the character of the Zeitgeist as resulting from the use
of a ‘symbolic form’ rather than vice versa. Art history (even as ‘cultural history’) is not fully
equipped to take up the task of defining an age, of rigorously identifying the transformations
in the social relations that contribute to transform the imago mundi of a society, and hence its
mode of representation. ‘Monetary economy’, ‘individualism’, ‘anthropocentrism’ may
provide a chain that can be linked to the advent of ‘realistic’ figurative art in classical Greece,
but the cross-cutting required through so many disciplines in order to properly ‘prove’ that
link is not only a mammoth task, but it may also speak of spurious science.
But this risk should not lead one to reject these devices outright. Once context is driven out
completely one does not know where one stands. This was the case in our initial ‘purely
analytical’ exploration of the work where the question whether one should look at the object

294
see A. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry (1901), Giorgio Bretschenider Editore, Rome, 1985 pp. 10-11
295
see E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Zone Books, New York 1997, pp. 49-50 and 59-61
296
E.H. Gombrich, Thoughts on the Greek Revolution, in Art and Illusion, Phaidon, London 1977, p. 110

77
was still hanging in the balance. But even the mere ‘onlooker’ is not devoid of context. If he
decides to turn his back to the object we have been examining it is because it does not fulfil
expectations formed in a different context, and has not yet reconciled himself with the ‘rift’ in
the mode of representation. It does not, broadly speaking, fit his notion of ‘beautiful forms’ in
some traditional sense he is still carrying and hence he becomes impatient with its
‘intractable’ character. Such an attitude, however, may lead to even more spurious science.
“The twentieth-century western civilisation,” writes the ‘analytic’ philosopher Guy Sircello in
his New Theory of Beauty, “is paradoxical because although it has produced beauties in
abundance, it has not paid serious attention to understanding beauty. Many of its artists either
ignore beauty or spurn it. Although they have not been able to stamp it out, they have often
succeeded – albeit not so often as legend pretends – in making beauty artistically beside the
point. Intellectuals and academics, who might have been expected, because of tradition, to
take the idea of beauty seriously, have usually been overimpressed by contemporary artistic
programmes and have decided that beauty is culturally irrelevant, that ‘nobody’ talks about it
297
anymore” .
The conclusion from the above would be that twentieth-century artists and academics are just
plain silly.
But even such a writer has to, at least, pay lip service to ‘alienation’ arising from a ‘malaise’ –
even if only to dismiss it as a ‘chic’ reaction of weirdly behaving people. For any brief look at
the story of the ‘definition’ of beauty from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century
would show that there is a shift away from a notion based on the concepts of proportion,
harmony and likeness, a shift away from the grace and joy of beauty into something darker.
From Keats’s “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”, and Stendhal’s “beauty is a promise of
happiness” we move through Gautier’s “l’ art pour l’ art” to Baudelaire’s “the beautiful is
always bizarre”, and thence to Rilke who tells us that “then, beauty is none other than the
beginning of terror we are just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely
298
disdains to destroy us” (the next step is perhaps Breton’s “beauty will be convulsive or will
299
not be at all”) .
This can, and has often been seen as a move away from the beautiful towards the sublime.
This shift according to an interpretation based on the ‘symbolic form’ device may speak
volumes. In such a framework all phenomena, such as abstraction, formal distortion, even the
impenetrability of the ‘word as such’, as the ‘ineffable’, fall into place. The interest in
Byzantine art as well as primitive cultures is also ‘explained’. So perhaps would be the great
élan into the unknown.
Man’s malaise, anguish, despair and alienation, even his extreme hopes ‘naturally’ throw up a
‘symbolic form’ where the beautiful could have no place.
Seen in this way, then, the modern art can be taken to contain elements of the ‘sublime’ in
either the Burkean or Kantian senses, which could be crudely condensed in either the
300
monstrous or the absolute abstraction. Such interpretations have been made , but they could
easily lead to mistaken conclusions, as they would ultimately tend to situate modern art in
general, and the avant-garde art of the 1910s in particular (and within it Tatlin’s Collation of
Materials), somewhere along the ‘normal’ flow of alternating styles.
A reading of avant-garde art as a ‘mere’ shift toward the sublime would have to be based on
the broadest of generalisations, revolving around the two words ‘incongruously’ joined in
Rilke’s quote: Beauty and Terror.
True, a sense of redeeming beauty and chastising terror may be seen as informing man’s
creations since time immemorial. Such as would see that artistic production arising from a
sensibility shaped by the ‘deal’ struck with nature since at least the bronze-age civilisations.
We delight in natural forms and in human abstractions thereof; in good measure and
exaggeration; in the graceful and the awesome. For we are conditioned by the promise of

297
G. Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 5
298
R-M. Rilke, Duino Elegies, op. cit., First Elegy, p. 25
299
André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, Weidenfeld, New York 1960, p. 160
300
for a brief but succinct exposition see P. Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Post-modernism, Oxford UP, 1993, pp. 192-3

78
salvation and the fear of punishment. The periodic emphasis on either side of these pairings
brings forth the sequence of modifications we usually call history of styles.
But is such a reading viable? It could be, if properly investigated, but perhaps with regard
only to specific ‘segments’ of the overall phenomenon of modern art; it could be with regard
to specific trends, or artists, or some individual works, but not as a comprehensive
interpretation. A sense of the sublime could apply to aspects of early twentieth century art, a
trend, for instance, such as expressionism, or artists such as Malevich or Mondrian, or
individual works such as Picasso’s Demoiselles, for whatever such general comments are
worth, but can it apply to Tatlin’s Collation of Materials which is the issue here?
In treating the work as a document of its age, we should perhaps try to read it carefully as a
text. It cannot readily be taken, on face value as it were, as an expression of anguish and
deformity nor as of pure abstraction, though elements of both ‘types’ may be found, in the
‘intensity’ of the articulation of the material, and in the geometricity of its components parts.
But the tension is not ‘apparent’; it is not explicitly stated. It had to be discovered through a
detailed observation, as we saw in our initial description; the work does not bring it to the
fore. Rather, it is an underlying tension relating more to structure than emotion. Similarly we
have seen that the ‘pure’ geometricity is retracted.
Still, as a ‘text’ that ‘tells’ of a historical conjuncture it may be pointing, in the manner of a
modern-time Vienna Genesis, to a ‘new kind of perception’. And certainly it could ‘come
down’ to us as a document that salvages the experience of that turning-point. In this sense the
Collation could belong to a class of artwork of the ‘new’ that we have talked about; a
‘category’ which can house the Collation together with a number of other works. However, in
our preceding discussion we have seen that it is not easy to identify it with any of the more
‘historically famous’ instances of that class, which could be condensed in the labels of
‘Cubism’, ‘Suprematism’, and ‘Dada’. We have seen that even within ‘Russian Futurism’ it is
not the most ‘representative’ instance, as it occupies a very specific position that cannot be
squarely placed in either of the two predominant trends which, broadly speaking, tend either
to the ‘east’ or to the ‘west’. It could be argued that it runs in close parallel to zaum poetry,
but again it cannot be properly taken as its visual counterpart. Indeed, the preceding analysis
has, it is hoped, shown that the way we can talk about consists mostly in what ‘it is not’ and
what ‘it may be’. The work offers some hints that could allow one to place it in some
‘category’ or other, and yet any decisive verdict would seem out of place. The Collation of
Materials seems to inhabit a place in-between any possible readings.
It could be then, that it is telling us a story of the ‘in-between’.
With respect to this it would be worth noting that though certain of Tatlin’s subsequent
constructions may allow some room for biographical interpretations, such as John Milner and
Camilla Gray have suggested, the Collation does not appear as conducive to that kind of
‘reduction’. It cannot be directly related to a specific experience or urge that could be inferred
from the work. However, carefully ‘read’ as a text, it should perhaps be related not to a
specific, but to a ‘generic’ experience.
In our brief outline of the historical context of avant-gardism we spoke of vacuum of
intellectual authority, which is similar to a vacuum of power in a revolutionary situation.
Thus, if we were to pin the work down as an expression of ‘symbolic form’, it would have to
be related to that vacuum where everything hangs in the balance. The ‘in-between’ is the only
place where a proposition can be situated. Thus the viewer’s indecision to bring it under a
category may be attributed to the work itself.
[Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence]
If the artist’s statements be allowed to stand as a gloss on the work, then his saying that the
year 1914, in which the Collation of Materials was produced, was a watershed in his career,
then the in-between motif is strengthened. The work is indeed located right on the boundary
in another sense as well: it comes immediately after the artist’s return to Russia from Western
Europe. A meeting point between Russian Futurism and French Cubism may be discerned, as
well as the edges of eastern mysticism and western rationalism. Equally it could be seen as an
affront to art as belle forme and yet a respectful bow to art as organisation and balance of

79
material. On the boundary, then, at a moment of fusion of influences but also of a vacuum and
indecision.

80
4.2. Thing

The secret self-tyranny, the cruelty of the artist, this

delight in giving a form to oneself as a piece of
refractory and suffering material, in burning in a will,
a critique, a contempt, a negation; this sinister and
ghastly labour of love on the part of a soul whose will
is cloven in two within itself.

F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

We have seen that the work passes through between the referent and the symbol, but in an
ambivalent way: it hints at some remnant of a representational figuration but yet it does not
provide enough ‘information’ for us to conclude so; it may be something recalling a still life
and yet it is not that. At the same time it displays elements of a symbol, as it could be a
geometric abstraction but, then, it tends to negate geometricity by deforming the shapes. It
could be a cipher from a code, an incantation, an emblem of sorts, but it does not transmit
enough information to allow us to say that it is. In the same sense, as we have also seen, it
could be and not be an icon/hieroglyph or an index: It could be likened to an icon (though
completely un-iconic) as a palpable concretisation of something ‘unseen’, but makes no
reference to anything beyond its own concrete materials; nor can it in any conceivable way be
seen as a cipher of a hieroglyphic code, though somehow it attracts such an interpretation. It
cannot be seen an emotive expression, of something like angst or elation or even as the
flourish of the ‘signature’ of the artist, though it ‘speaks of’ the artist. Nor can it be taken as a
statement of violation of one’s expectations of art, as a ready-made incongruously displayed
as art, and yet there are elements of that in it as well. It can be read as a text of its time but it
relates a story of the ‘in-between’, of boundaries and of an existence in limbo, which does not
seem to settle here or there.
However, of one thing we can be certain; namely that it is a mark. A question mark perhaps
as we suggested at the outset, but not only that. It is also, as we have just seen, a text speaking
of the boundary and indecision; a text made of materials, which involves, as we saw in our
initial description, a host of issues relating to the structuring and construction of a
composition, which is neither properly three-dimensional nor two-dimensional and
simultaneously both. It is a mark that hints at multiple directions in terms of translating it into
something other, but resists all attempts of an ‘in other words’ type of explanation. It is a text
which ‘handles’ this indecision in materials.
The Collation, then, may suggest both representation and abstraction, but cannot be located in
either field. Indeed the work seems to mock any scholar that would place his money on either
side.
In passing through the infinitesimal crack, as it were, between representation and abstraction
(between icon/hieroglyph and the index), along their boundaries, the ‘handling’ of indecision
may be taking anything given to be certain as uncertain, everything familiar as uncanny. And
perhaps this is the right way to proceed if a revision of what is ‘given’ needs to be made.
What is recognised is recognised as such due to a system of recognition (classification,
typology and the like), so one would need to look at it all over again, to see it in a different
way – and ‘in a new light’ as the saying goes.
There is, then, some merit in the slogan calling us to ‘see and not recognise’. We have already
mentioned this distinction, and suggested that it is crucial, for it appears as a principal concern
in the Futurist and Formalist milieu. It could be said to be part and parcel of the overall effort
to redefine the experience of the lifeworld in the context of modernity, in the early twentieth
century.
The educated viewer would have to recapitulate on certain themes already touched upon, in
order to re-organise his/her approach to the work. Primarily this would mean to revisit that
sense of alienation, which as we have already noted emerged together with European urban
and industrial civilisation. Simply summarised it may appear almost naïve, as the feeling that
experience, in the modern industrial world of mass-society, was numbed and stifled through

81
norms, classification and, generally, routine, and hence called for something ‘new’, for a way
to ‘rejuvenate’ experience and bring forth the sense of excitement, of fascination or
astonishment in the world, i.e. a feeling of blissful ‘oneness’ with this place we inhabit. And
indeed at times this is how it comes through in Futurist and Formalist writings. However,
there are ‘deeper’ and more philosophical paths of approach. For astonishment is a whole way
of dealing with the world in conditions of pure and unmediated, i.e. authentic and
autonomous, experience. This astonishment, often linked with the Greek notion of
thaumazein, derived from thauma, a miracle, was seen as what could intensify the lived
experience enabling man to wonder at the sheer existence of things, thus sensing his being to
the full. His being in this world of concrete things, which he may know to be there, which he
can enumerate, designate, classify and so on, but which he does not feel fully with his senses,
he does not properly experience, ergo: he does not properly see.
Here we revisit a characteristic passage from Shklovsky’s text tellingly entitled the
Resurrection of the Word, which appeared in 1916: “We are like the violinist who has ceased
to feel the bow and the chords; we have ceased to be artists in our everyday life, we no longer
love our houses, our clothes, and very easily depart from a life we do not apprehend. Only the
creation of new forms of art can reinstate in man the feeling of the world, resurrect things and
301
kill off pessimism.”
Now we may more fully appreciate the suggestion implied here, namely that of ‘becoming
artists in our everyday life’, a phrase very often referred to in discussions of the ‘project’ of
302
modern art in general, and the Russian avant-garde in particular. On the face of it such an
idea may again sound naïve, but besides the fact that the current concept (and practice) of
‘life-styles’ seems to partly validate it, the goal of merging art with everyday life appears as a
‘goal’ only because they have been separated. This separation is, however, a sine qua non of
modernity with its dependence on rationality, as is – paradoxically perhaps – the awareness of
the trauma it causes. This is a paradox we are still living with, and speaks of an uncomfortable
position, encapsulated in Rilke’s verse:
and even the noticing beasts are aware
that we don’t feel securely at home
in this interpreted world.303
The interpretation sought by the rational mind, through objective contemplation, logical
analysis, scientific classification and the like, is thus seen to lead to technical diagnoses of the
phenomena in nature and society, remaining for ever quantitative, and failing to grasp the
qualitative aspect of lived experience. Moreover, always dealing abstractly in ‘universal’
terms one does not appear concerned with concrete individuals. This critique can be traced
back to, at least, Kierkegaard and emerges in manifold versions throughout the ‘experience of
modernity’. It is this experience that perhaps informed Nietzsche’s outbursts and his scathing
attack on contemporary culture or, in a less ‘emotional’ way, led Husserl in the early
twentieth century to speak deprecatingly of the technical experts who were no longer able to
304
philosophise. The unphilosophical experts bent on ‘interpreting’ the world were unable to
grasp it as a comprehensive whole, and to experience it in concrete terms. In such conditions,
it could be said that obsessed with instrumentality, with informational functionality, language
lost its genius of nomination and gathering of meaning, a genius we are still able to
acknowledge in poetry.
Indeed, the attempt to recuperate what cannot be properly interpreted may be seen, among
many other things, in the quest to ‘scientifically’ demonstrate the function of ‘poetic use’ in
everyday language and in a communicative act, even the most simple and mundane, which
have already mentioned with reference to Jakobson. It can also be seen in the re-evaluation of
‘mythical’ thought in the work of social-anthropologists, but perhaps more importantly in

301
V. Shklovsky, The Resurrection of the Word, in S. Bann and J.E. Bowlt (eds.), Russian Formalism, op. cit., p. 46
302
cf. Tatlin’s slogan ‘art into life’. See Tatlin’s letter to Novitskii (1927) where he claims to be the ‘founder of the idea of art-
into-life’ (in L.A. Zhadova, Tatlin, op. cit., p. 261)
303
R-M Rilke, First Elegy, The Duino Elegies, op. cit., p. 25
304
E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, op. cit., p. 11

82
philosophical thought through phenomenology, primarily, but also through a revision and
critique of the rational-determinist aspects of Marxism. In the writings of as diverse figures as
Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, we find a similar quest, following different paths
perhaps, to attain a form of ‘poetical thinking’ that could be read ‘between the lines’ as it
were.
In Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art we find a sentence that bears a similarity with the
views of Shklovsky quoted above and expands Husserl’s position:
305
“We hear a door closing but we never hear the mere sound” . That is to say that we cannot
divorce the concept from the concrete experience. If we do, we do so at the peril of emptying
the concept from its substance and the experience from its meaningfulness. We would thus be
like the violinist in Shklovsky’s passage who touches bow and string but cannot feel them any
more, or Husserl’s unphilosophical experts. The phenomena of this world need to be grasped
by a comprehensive process of “circumspection”, incorporating, one could say, both synthesis
and analysis at once.
But even in this sense the Collation of Materials ‘surprises’ us for it can be seen both as a
concrete thing and as pure self-referential form but somehow we cannot tell what either
aspect exactly is. It could be said that by positing itself in constant ambivalence between the
two the Collation occupies once more the ‘boundary’ between them, this time perhaps a
shifting one. For it seems to be turning us now to the one side, now to the other. It may be a
pure concept in its apparent abstraction, and its ‘formlessness’ may be a function of ‘pure’
wonder at the forms that may appear in this world. And if we have ceased to recognise but
still see, without any familiar meaning yet given, such as would somehow condition our
perception, then in a more rigorous formulation we might already be in the phenomenological
domain. Here we are told one seeks to liberate perception of experience in its ultimate
originality, and here the Formalists’ suggestion ‘to break off the familiarity with the world’
seems to come very close to the demand ‘to bracket the world’ expressed by Edmund Husserl
in his attempt to pinpoint the moment of authentic experience. A further similarity emerges in
that when Husserl attempts to describe the ‘primary experience’ he stresses that it is ‘the
experience of the absence or uselessness of signs’, positing ‘non signification’ as the principle
306
of principles.
Thus if we are to break off our familiarity with the world in order to “see” (as the Formalists
would suggest), if we are to restore astonishment, the original wonder at the world – the
philosophical thaumazein – (as the Phenomenologists would urge us) in order to ‘resurrect’
our dimmed or numbed perception, then one could say that this can only be attained through
what the phenomenological vocabulary calls “the original experience of the world, an
experience still unacquainted with any […] idealizations but whose necessary foundation it
307
is.”
This last proviso, the phrase ‘but whose necessary foundation it is’, is important as it implies
that the wonder cannot go on indefinitely. It is not as if, like Miranda in Shakespeare’s
Tempest we keep repeating the ‘Oh brave new world’ exclamation. If we do, then any object
would appear as wondrous as the next, and we would be forever mesmerized by everything
‘emerging’ – which is the ‘essence’ of nature, as the initial meaning of the Greek word physis
(nature) as ‘growing’ or ‘bringing forth’ would suggest. Such a transcendent mode cannot be
maintained for long; a process of differentiation would have to commence at some point,
leading ultimately to some sort of conceptualisation or idealisation. As we have suggested
earlier, once context is completely driven out then all discussion may as well cease. The thrust
of the phenomenological argument would seem to go back to square one, as it were, from our
condition of numbness and indifference to the world, in order to make a clean start. But not in
order to jump back to our old, already known, ideas and prejudices, but rather to experience
the whole process all over again, starting to reappraise the context. In this, the starting point

305
M. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in D.F. Krell (ed.), M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, Routledge, London 2004, p.
152
306
J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, op. cit., p. 60
307
E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment; Investigations in a Genealogy of Morals, op. cit., p. 45

83
is crucial; crucial in the sense that it is a moment where a spark ignites the process of
cognition, while the world is still perceived in wonder.
Such a view seems to emerge through the statement by Jakobson that we have repeatedly
referred to, namely that “we easily cease to be conscious of the form of words in everyday
language; this language dies, becomes petrified, whereas we are compelled to perceive the
308
form of the poetical neologism, which is given to us, so to speak, in statu nascendi.”
We revisit the ‘nascent state’ of the neologism, because it may now provide us with a further
insight: What we perceive, what we “see”, according to such argumentation, would be what
we have not-yet-seen as a whole, something which is coming into being, which is formed, to
our astonishment, as we perceive it.
But still, we cannot make out exactly what we are perceiving. The poetic neologism of zaum,
even in its most ‘extreme’ utterance, such as Kruchenykh’s ‘dyr bul shchyl’ hints at
something; something like the ‘Russian soul’ as its author would have it, and it could be
conceivably argued that there is something ‘primevally Russian’ in the sound, or that it
encapsulates the ‘essence’ of the Russian tongue as a phonetic, vocal system, and such like,
setting of the process towards some conceptualisation, without leading us beyond the limits of
acceptable discussion.
Can one find such a hint to such an ‘essence’ in the Collation of Materials? Here the neutral
title of the work is suddenly shaken from its rigidity and comes alive for a while. Is there,
finally, something that we can safely take home?
The work could perhaps be, then, the ‘essence’ of formal articulation manifested in a concrete
thing, a thing that gathers, to follow Heidegger’s etymology of the German ding as an
309
assembly. It gathers matter in the form of recognisable material, which is as much as we
can tell at our first encounter with it. But it is not ‘any thing’, any material object we chance
310
upon, but an object to be observed, a willed object, that was ‘concernedly made’ which
allows it to be a thing in the Greek sense of the word, a pragma, (from the verb pratto, ‘to
act/do’) or a poiema, something created (from the verb poieo, ‘to make/create’, from which
also ‘poem’ and ‘poetry’ are derived). But then pragma in Heidegger’s sense is something
311
‘useful’ a Zeug, which refers to a ‘tool’ or ‘equipment’ . But how could we take the
Collation as Zeug? Of course an assembly in Greek is syllogos (from syn+logos, which
translates into Latin as collegium), and the root leg- of logos refers to selecting, gathering,
laying, saying, and from there to speech and order, with its derivatives of lexis and logic.
(Needless to point out that this root is still present in current English, in se-lect-ing, electing,
dyslectic etc.).
In this sense, as selecting, gathering and laying, the Collation may be accepted as not yet fully
a thing, for it is not fully given over to us to do something with it; but, still, as something that
concerns us, it may be taken to be a ‘thing’ that could perhaps become a ‘tool’. It may, that is,
be accepted as a thing as it accedes to the status of Zeug.
It is perhaps a poiema that brings forth the process of poiein, a pragma that speaks of the act
of prattein.
But even so we cannot find or envision a ‘truth’ to house it or even a place where it could be
ready to hand. For in Heidegger’s world the things have to come together and ultimately
disclose a ‘truth’, an aletheia – a recuperation of what has been forgotten as the etymology of
the Greek word as unconcealment suggests – which renders us capable to experience the
312
reality, the Being, of the world. Even in the work of art, which Heidegger takes to be a
radically self-sufficient entity in which nothing but art is manifest, there is a truth content
relevant to the experience of Being. In his Origins of the Work of Art, Heidegger uses his
(now famous) example of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes. His reading of the aletheia relating to
earth, toil, humanity and world, disclosed therein may stand, and has been ably supported by

308
R. Jakobson, Noveisaja Russkaja Poesija, Typografija Politika, Prague 1921, p. 47
309
M. Heidegger, Das Ding, in Vorträge un Aufsätze, Tübingen 1954, pp. 172-73. Also it will be remembered that the Russian
word podbor allows for this meaning.
310
see G. Steiner, Heidegger, Fontana, London 1982, pp. 86-88
311
see M. Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell, Oxford 1993, pp. 95-99
312
M. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in D.F. Krell (ed.), M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 176 ff.

84
 313
Derrida’s essay entitled La vérité en peinture, a phrase taken from Cezanne’s writings. But
the Collation does not offer such a ‘convenient’ starting point as the recognisable Dutch clogs
in Van Gogh’s painting. To be sure, ‘abstract art’ is not beyond Heidegger’s terms of
reference, and though, bringing the Collation into that kind of reading, it cannot be seen
prima faciae as disclosing some kind of aletheia, such as we could talk about, it may finally
be taken to be ‘disclosing’ a sort of energy that stimulates what could be described as
‘generic’ states of experience already suggested in our description of the work. In such a
‘primal’ state it could refer to the most basic experience of being in this world, which is
314
founded in an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ in the concrete form of ‘earth’ and ‘sky’. Thus, in the
‘self-presence’ of the materials within this frame (or enclosure), the work creates not mere
space but a place for the materials to dwell. To dwell, as these specific materials with these
particular shapes are gathered, forming a concrete configuration, which by virtue of its
concreteness and three-dimensionality is for ever-changing under our gaze as there is an
indeterminable – or even infinite – number of viewing positions we can adopt, not unlike a
landscape. The real space created by our encounter becomes a location for our body (and
sensory perception), and a site for our experience (and psychological response). In this
dwelling, that takes place on the earth and under the sky, the Collation can encompass the
references – intimated by scholars – to the sail of the ship and to winged flight, though the
surface of the ‘earth’ evoked is not a terra firma but the shifting, unstable expanse of the sea,
and the sky is not a sheltering dome but a target to be stricken. It could be also a home with its
table and glass, and the path leading to it, as it could be the workshop of a maker of things.
It would, then, be possible to talk about the Collation as scholars have talked about
installations. Indeed Julia Kristeva speaks of this activity in rather similar terms: “An
installation calls on the participation of the whole body through the senses. The sense of sight,
of course, but also hearing, touch and sometimes even smell. Instead of producing ‘works’, it
is as though artists were inventing quasi-sacred spaces for us. Instead of asking us to
contemplate images, it is as though they were asking us to commune with other beings, or
315
with Beings itself.”
Seen in this light, the materiality, the directions, tension and ‘moment’ of the component parts
of the Collation that we observed in our initial description of the work may disclose such an
aletheia of primal existence within the world.
But is there something in this work that we can hold on to which could substantiate such a
claim? On what indisputable evidence could we declare at this point the case closed? There is
nothing that we can see as ‘primal’ or ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’; nothing to characterise the
pieces of material other than their randomness. Thus we have to take the ‘generic’ states in
the sense precisely of ‘being generated’, at the instant of their birth, as the viewer chances
upon them and begins to experience them. But in such an experience it could be said that
things are perceived as merely random things, without a truth content other than being thrown
in this world. Is, then, the Collation of Materials here before us in the same sense that a stone
is before the mason picks it up to make some ‘thing’ of it?
The shuttling process from affirmation to negation seems endless. For at one instant we think
we see a content, or a role that may be ascribed to it, and at the next we feel that it is only an
object ‘thrown’ before us. We now see the actor but almost immediately we then see ‘just’ the
person, we fleetingly glimpse the ‘accidents’ but cannot bring them to ‘substance’.
We sense that there is a statement being made – which we understand in the ‘programmatic’
declarations – but it does not seem to add up to anything coherent in the actual work before
us. For Shklovsky may well call for ‘new forms’ of art to resurrect our feeling for the world,
and the Collation may indeed appear as ‘new’ but how can we relate to its form and how can
it help us resurrect our dead spirits? Again, it may well a be a thing, as an assemblage, but
what it gathers seem to be fragments, splinters, so tantalizing little that though intriguing

313
P. Cézanne, Letter to Emile Bernard, 23 October 1905, in J, Rewald, Cézanne: Letters, London 1941, pp. 251-253
314
M. Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, in D.F. Krell (ed.), M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 351
315
J. Kristeva, What Good Are Artists Today?, in Chambert C., Strategies for Survival-Now!; A Global Perspective on Ethnicity,
Body and Breakdown of Artistic Systems, The Swedish Art Critics Association Press, Lund 1995, p. 27

85
cannot be integrated in the concrete world, ready to hand. It certainly appears as an object to
wonder at, but again in an admixture of ‘miraculous’ astonishment and ‘plain’ bafflement.
Could it we compare it to that fraction of an instant when the mason senses that this stone
before him may be building block? The moment when it emerges to be ‘ready to hand’? The
moment that we may realise that in its articulation of materials it brings forth the primal
experience, the truth, of making? Is it ‘pure’ art?
In this sense it would appear that the work in its presence as a thing ‘gives’ us some inkling of
meaning. But then, the question seems to come back: A stone picked up by the mason to be
used how, in what kind of building? Does not ‘pure making’ send us back to the
‘schizophrenic table’?
However, in this infinitesimal glimpse of a hold upon the work, the tantalizingly little that it
affords as being ready to hand but unassuredly so, as being something concernedly made but
still unclear, allows us to expect something of the work. It allows us to accept it as still
acceding to the status of a ‘proper’ thing, still gathering its truth content but not yet there, and
thus, like a zaum neologism, as seeking its own meaning, before any allusion, even one made
but its author, can be properly conceived.
So, if this ‘thing’ were to come ‘under’ some form of designation it would be closer to a
process in the making, closer to that ‘ghastly labour of love’ described in Nietzsche’s passage
quoted above. And in this sense, if we have to bring into some ‘category’ or other, then it
could taken as similar to the bricoleur’s work, where “in this continual reconstruction from
the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means:
316
the signified changes into the signifier and vice versa.”
However even though the Collation may resemble bricolage, it is not merely that. For in its
exposition it appears as ‘finished’. But the constant reversal of roles in its component parts
never congeals into an unequivocal state, and the work is never properly finished, but sensed
as a ‘whole’ in the actuality of its process. Therefore it does not inhere a quality of the non-
finito, but in its ‘finished’ state imparts a sense of still becoming something, not yet
definitively settled, a sense reinforced by the changing ‘aspects’ when seen in its ‘real’
reconstructed presence in ‘real’ time and place.
Now, if the viewer were to accept to consider it as not yet there, as still unsettled even in its
finished state, then he/she is called to respond to a rather heavy demand: A demand for an
acknowledgement of indeterminacy as the ground of the work and also an awareness of its
procedural nature, i.e. a process whose the outcome is still unknown.

316
C. Levi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage, Plon, Paris 1962, p. 28

86
4.3 Semeion / Point
SOCRATES: But still, since we must not shrink from any risk, what
if we should try to do a shameless deed?
THEAETETUS: What is it?
SOCRATES: To undertake to tell what is really to know.
THEAETETUS: And why is that shameless?
SOCRATES: You seem not to remember that our whole talk from
the beginning has been a search for knowledge, because we did
not know what it is.
Plato, Theaetetus

Tatlin’s cut glass tumbler, his use of construction material (sheet metal, plaster, asphalt etc.)
could well serve this constant shift of signifier to signified and vice versa, and in this constant
re-appraisal of the role of the shapes and materials can have as its ‘ground’ that ‘constant
blizzard of associations’ that Shklovsky spoke of. This ‘blizzard’ may be further elucidated
by re-visiting Lacan’s ‘unconscious signifying chain’ which “consists of signifiers and
elements of language which have the particularity of escaping all logic in their
317
combination.”
The reference to Lacan was to be expected. For since his writings became mainstream
together with those of a significant number of writers mostly of what is called the French
post-structuralist school, we have been made much more receptive to the idea of
indeterminacy in any communicative act.
What we are seeking in Lacan’s ideas is the point that, such illogical utterances appear to be
‘truer’ expressions of one’s experiences than ‘proper’ language may, by its nature, ever allow
to be expressed. For language, according to Lacan and a large part of mainstream thought, is a
pre-existing system that is ‘given’ to the subject, and thus sets ab initio a constraint, as to
what and how may be expressed. However, this system is never absolutely adhered to, and
speech acts are highly complex structures. The advent of linguistics in combination with
psychoanalysis has shown how precarious any explanation of ‘meaning’ in language is, by
demonstrating the contingent nature of the linguistic sign, which according to one of the
founders of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure is on both sides (the signifier and the signified)
318
‘psychological’. The simple reciprocity between the word and the thing it designates is
undermined from the start.
Indeed, for Lacan there can be no properly so called ‘signified’ in speech, but only a complex
interplay of ‘meanings’ that move backwards and forwards affecting and counter-affecting
each other in an interrelation of dizzying intensity between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’,
319
‘dream images’ and ‘latent dream thoughts’, ‘repressed wishes’ and ‘neurotic symptoms’.
This is so because, according to Lacan, before the infant subject appears in the world there is
already a whole system or structure of socio-cultural and linguistic symbolisms that come to
impose themselves as orders on the emerging subject. For in order that the infant can gain
access to this pre-fashioned world, in order to acquire its individuality (in the family, in
society, in its exchange with the ‘other’) it must make use of a sign or symbol of the world’s
already existing structure, a sign or symbol for the object of its need, its desire, or more
generally, it intimate lived experience, its ‘truth’ as Lacan sometimes calls it; a sign or symbol
that is given or ‘offered’ to the subject in the form of language. And according to the well
known Saussurean definition “language is a system of inter-related terms in which the value
320
of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.” To use
Saussure’s own terminology we could say that the relationship between a signifier and its
signified is effected through the mediation of the whole corpus of the signs of language.
Through use of this structured edifice of language the intimate lived experience (le vécu)

317
A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 141
318
see J. Culler, Saussure, Fontana, London 1976, p.
319
In ‘The Agency of the letter in the unconscious’, op. cit., pp. 163-165, Lacan maintains that the signifier and the signified are
two distinct orders, separated by a line which is resistance to signification. ‘It is in the chain of signification that the meaning
insists without ever any of its elements making up the signification.”. See also A. Lemaire, Jaques Lacan, op. cit., p. 40.
320
F. de Saussure, Cours général de linguistique, op. cit., p. 114

87
which can be assimilated to this language “will be” as Anika Lemaire has pointed out,
“mediated in thought by the interrelations between the signifiers which will be substituted for
321
it (le vécu) in increasing numbers as time passes.” The entry, then, into the world of a
human individual is not an entry into reality, as an intimately lived experience, but into a
symbolic order. The unending process of man’s distancing from his own truth, what Lacan
calls méconnaissance, is unleashed. For, as he puts it “the world of words creates the world of
things”.
However, Lacan argues, despite this constant ‘distancing’, the true lived experience leaves a
sort of residue in the form of the repressed wish, which may find expression, albeit still
mediated through words, in the speech of the unconscious (dreams, lapsus etc.). Simplifying
in the extreme, we would say that what differentiates this ‘inner’ discourse is that the content,
meaning or expressing of these signifiers ‘uttered’ are not those of the ‘external’ symbolic
order. Lacan put it in this way: “There may be a totally different inscription of the same
signifier in consciousness and in the unconscious. These inscriptions are the same on the
plane of the signifier, but they are, on the other hand, different in that they turn their battery to
occupy topographically different places. That a certain significant formation be at one level or
other is precisely what will ensure it a different import on the chain of associations on the
322
whole.”
Thus, following such argumentation, it could be said that a closer proximity to the truth of
experience will be found in the half-articulated utterings that ‘escaping all logic’ may not be
inserted in the habitual or pre-existing symbolic order.
Now, if the viewer of the Collation of Materials finds himself, to his ‘astonishment’, caught
up in a process of constant re-appraisal where nothing seems ever to congeal into a
determinable, ‘knowable’ signified, into a recognisable feature to which the viewer could
refer, i.e. anchor his observation in something which he could intelligibly speak about, it
would then appear that what is utterable in relation to the Collation of Materials is not
necessarily ‘meaningful’, or ‘logical’ in the habitual sense; and as we have seen so far what
can be said is something akin to stammering, full of indecision, assertions and retractions, ‘ifs
and ‘buts’, and observations ranging from the extravagant to the understatement.
This indecision, however, with regard to the Collation of Materials has brought us close to a
line of thought, with increasing currency in the last three decades, which tends to question the
determinability of a final unequivocal meaning of an utterance. It is in this spirit that Derrida,
writing on the meaning of the verb ‘to be’ suggests: “If one were seeking an answer in the
323
form of a word, it would fall neither to philosophy nor to linguistics (as such) to say it.”
The implication that some forms of ‘indeterminate’ usage of language, for instance literary or
poetical, might lead us closer to ‘saying’ a meaningful answer to that question, is taken by
Derrida’s fellow-traveller Paul De Man who states: “Literature as well as criticism – the
difference between them being delusive – is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most
rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and
324
modifies himself.” The untenability of the determination of ‘meaning’ is echoed in Lacan’s
325
dictum that “any form of identity is a mirage” , and is further elaborated by Julia Kristeva
who coins the term ‘semiotic significance’ as opposed to ‘symbolic signification’. “If the
symbolic,” says Kristeva, “establishes the limits and the unity of a signifying practice, the
semiotic registers in that practice the effect of that which cannot be pinned down as a sign,
whether signifier or signified. It is therefore in so called poetic language, and by extension in
the arts, that the full complexity of the process of the ‘signified’ comes into play, since it
affects not only the contents, ideologies and narrative structures but even the system of
language itself”.

321
A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 6.
322
ibid. p. 130.
323
J. Derrida, The Supplement of the Copula, in J.V. Harari, Textual Strategies, Methuen, London 1980, p. 120.
324
P. de Man, Semiology and Rhetoric, in ibid., p. 140.
325
J. Lacan, The Function of Field and Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in Ecrits, op. cit., p. 80; see also the Freudian
Thing, in ibid., p. 126.

88
All this seems to undermine even the deepest underlying norms of communication through
language, i.e. the operative schemata by which we engage in effective discourse. Though
allowing for a margin in which this ‘operative’ function may still retain some currency (as in
the texts presenting these ‘undermining’ ideas, as well as in types of discourse such as this
thesis), this line of thought, through an endless probing of language, which is after all an
‘arbitrary’ construct of the human brain, has led to the positing of a ‘principle of uncertainty’
326
(and a certain interpretation of undecidability) , and has shown the inexhaustible variety of
‘possible’ meanings, thus rendering it very difficult to accept even these fundamental
operative schemata, the ‘deep structures’ as they have been called in linguistics (after
327
Chomsky ), as ‘universals’. This, most obviously, has the implication of requiring a re-
definition of the subject itself.
Thus Kristeva: “We shall see that when the speaking subject is no longer considered as the
phenomenological transcendental ego nor the Cartesian ego but rather as a subject in
procession/on trial [sujet en procès] as is the case in the practice of the text, deep structure or
at least transformational rules are disturbed and, with it, the possibility of semantic and/or
328
grammatical categorical interpretation”
The similarities of these thoughts, indeed perhaps Kristeva’s indebtedness, to Formalist and
Futurist ideas can be clearly observed in the above passages. It would seem then, that
Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh and Tatlin in their ‘indeterminacy’ and their struggle to overcome
Symbolism emerge, together with the Formalist theorists, as among the pioneers of a
discourse or mode of thinking that considers the ‘symbolic’ as a distorting factor which tends
to impose a restrictive formal identity of meaning on an infinitely heterogeneous reality.
The inadequacy of any direct inference of meaning based on a fixed and clear-cut relationship
of equivalence between the word and what it designates, between signifier and signified, was
already sensed in the epoch of the first conscious use of language, the time of the first thought
on language in pre-classical Greece. Any student of Heraclitus knows that the ‘the Lord
329
whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign’ . (The Greek verbs
used are ‘telling’ and should be mentioned here as their derivatives are still present in most
European languages, and certainly in English: The oracle neither legei nor apocryptei; it
semainei. To wit: It neither provides a logos as intelligible speech, nor something cryptic,
apocryphal or hidden; it merely provides a semeion, a semiosis or signification). There is, that
is, a true but indeterminate meaning between an explicit utterance and a confused medley of
words and/or sounds, a point between sense and nonsense, which brings forth something
worth listening to. G.S. Kirk’s rationalising explanation of this fragment is that “the method
adopted by Apollo in his Delphic pronouncements is praised because a sign may accord better
330
than a misleading statement with the nature of an underlying truth” . The problem of
understanding what Heraclitus is exactly saying or may mean (which can lead to a debate
among scholars and reside forever in some form of indeterminacy) is caused by the fact that
one tries to propose an exegesis of what happens or what ‘gives’ with the utterances at Delphi
in the first place. That such a problem exists was felt by the Socratic Plato, who sensed that in
talking about the way in which we establish meaning and knowledge we are left not knowing
where we are. For if we do not know what true knowledge is and are seeking it, why will we
331
know that we have found it when we do? The Theaetetus in which this question is asked
and acknowledged as valid is appropriately subtitled: Peri Epistemes, Peirastikos (On
Knowledge; Tentative Exposition). For, despite Plato’s later writings, what can be strictly
said on the subject is only ‘tentative’.
‘Despite Plato’s later writings’: This little secondary phrase carries some significance. The
viewer as polymath, needs here to summon what is at stake in the ‘crisis’ of the European
spirit at the turn of the twentieth century. Even allowing for fragmented and somewhat

326
J. Derrida, The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils, Diacritics, vol. XIX, 1983, p. 14
327
see N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, Mouton, The Hague, 1957
328
J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, op. cit., p. 37
329
G.S. Kirk, JE Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press [1957] 1985, p. 209
330
ibid., p. 210
331
Plato, Theaetetus, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press 196D, pp. 202,204

89
superficial information he/she may possess, it is to be understood that much of the criticism
against the old, established order by the heralds of the ‘new’ hinged in some way or another
on what had happened to the European intellect since ‘Plato’s later writings’. For it was in
those writings that the static eidos emerges, which, via Rome and Christianity shaped the way
European culture looked at the world. Phenomenology and Marxist dialectics were attempts
to undermine it as inadequate and falsifying in the modern context of world and society.
Nowhere was this more explicitly spelled out than in Heidegger’s writings, in which the
whole of ‘western metaphysics’ starting from Plato theory of forms is blamed for a gross
miscarriage of philosophy.
In this sense the viewer, unable to recognise something stable and familiar in the Collation of
Materials, may, by summoning such thoughts, see in the work which neither says nor refuses
to say, offering glimpses of ‘recognisability’ and simultaneously subtly retracting them, the
viewer then, taken as a polymath, may see a possible critique of that ‘theory of forms’. In its
apparent ‘formlessness’ it may be taken as a semeion, a sign, which initially means a point
that becomes visible, the minutest visible ‘thing’. A point, that is, made visible on a plane
bearing no presence other than itself, full of possibilities of extending into line and shape, in
two or three dimensions – the work of art in statu nascendi, one could say. In offering all the
multiple ‘tentative’ references we have so far traced in our analysis only to take them back,
like Delphic Apollo, offering only a blizzard of ‘bits and pieces’ of associations which never
become clear, a blizzard that can never be calmed, but can only be grasped as a pregnant
mass, remaining forever refractory, and as such becomes, within the broader ‘atmosphere’ of
its age, a comprehensive criticism of the western tradition of representation as a whole. A
criticism sensed through the viewer’s inability to decide, through the viewer’s hesitation to
firmly locate it in any of the general categories he/she usually goes by, and to allow the
‘tentative’ to become a sufficient condition. A criticism which shakes the ‘deep structures’ of
communication, thus requiring a re-definition of the subject who is looking at the work.

90
4.4 Sema / Signal
What is ‘familiarly known’ is not properly known. Just for the reason that
it is ‘familiar’. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the
commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as
well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that
account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot,
but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on are
uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid and become fixed
points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing
flits between these points, and in consequence goes on merely along the
surface.
G.W,F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

As an enigmatic utterance that neither speaks nor conceals, but pregnant with ‘tentative’
meanings, it may take the fine-tuned ear of a trained interpreter such as were the initiated
priests at the Delphic oracle to identify a signal that could throw light on it.
Indeed the issue of training ourselves in order to grasp the notion of the ‘tentative’
propositions in literature and art, is not unknown in much of the discussion on modern art – it
comes under the name of ‘rising consciousness’ – and one of its most straightforward
presentations is to be found in Umberto Eco’s Open Work, already touched upon.
In our first encounter with this text we tended to dismiss the argument of ‘openness’ of the
unending chain of associations with regard to avant-gardism, suggesting that it should be seen
as inhering in every form of art, and not something uniquely attributable to works such as the
Collation of Materials. However, we may need to revisit Eco’s position as, following what
has emerged in the ensuing discussion. For a distinction should be made between those works
whose chains of association is based on something recognisable, and hence may be to a large
extent determinable and decipherable by reference, and those whose starting point and only
recognisable ground is an indeterminate process, and hence the chain of associations appears
to be ‘out of control’.
In the final chapter of the book Eco discusses what he calls ‘the poetics of the Open Work’
using James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake as a prime example. This famous work by Joyce not
only shares the same ‘atmosphere’ with the broader avant-garde of the early twentieth
century, but also bears some more particular affinity to zaum language. In this respect, it is
interesting that in an attempt to ‘defend’ it by suggesting how it could be read, Joyce’s
younger friend and disciple Samuel Beckett proposes, on the instance of the rantings of an
inebriated person, something very close to the suggestion that in Khlebnikov’s Incantation by
Laughter the words are laughing as they are read. In his essay Dante…Bruno, Vico…Joyce,
Beckett writes: “Take the passage at the end of Shaun’s pastoral […]. The language is drunk.
332
The very words are tilted and effervescent” . Equally, Beckett proposes (as one of several
333
possible lines of approach) that in order to read this text, one has to think etymologically) ,
bringing to mind Jakobson’s approach to zaum.
In his discussion, Eco suggests that “the most complete definition of the work – which has
elsewhere been described as Slipping Beauty by an association of the idea of lapsus and that
of the Sleeping Beauty and of oneiric delirium – will be found in the famous illegible
334
letter . Illegible letter precisely because one can interpret it according to a multitude of
senses. One can indefinitely wonder on the meaning of the letter as a whole, or that of every
335
single phrase, or every single word…” On the basis of this, Eco maintains that “the force of
336
the text resides precisely in this permanent ambiguity.”

332
S. Beckett, Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in
Progress, Faber and Faber, London 1929, p. 14
333
ibid. p. 11
334
J. Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, Faber & Faber, London 1969, pp. 104-125
335
U. Eco, L’oeuvre ouverte, op. cit., pp. 267-68
336
ibid.

91
Indeed this permanent ambiguity has been with us all along in our attempt to deal with
Tatlin’s Collation of Materials, and has been escorting us through the writings of the Futurist
poets and Formalist theorists.
But what must be stressed here is that underlying Eco’s analysis is a clash between the ‘loose’
freedom of association and the ‘strict’ code of reference, or what he calls somewhat
sarcastically (in agreement with the avant-garde) the ‘belle forme’. The ‘open work’
according to Eco appears as part of a liberating process, or rather struggle, whose origins and
conditions may be found in the cultural crisis that characterise the advent (and the history) of
the twentieth century. Through the poetics of the ‘open work’ “the discontinuity of experience
337
supplants as a value a continuity that had become conventional.” Here is a culture, he
exclaims, where “diverse methods of research receive an organic unity not of a law that
would assign it an identical outcome, but a unity in the sense that one considers them as valid
precisely in as much as they contradict and complement each other, entering into dialectical
338
opposition engendering thus new perspectives and broader fields of information.” But this
‘new’ culture goes against the grain. Reverting to the Husserlian notion of ‘crisis’, Eco takes
it a step further: “The crisis that runs through our bourgeois society results partly from the
incapacity of the average man to resist the system of received forms, which are supplied from
339
the exterior and which are not required through a personal exploration of reality.”
The call for a ‘starker dasein’ that would overcome the ‘averageness’ of man and move on to
a ‘personal’ and deeper quest of what is actually happening is heard once more. But here it is
linked to a broader thematic; that of the rising consciousness that realises the sham nature of
the belle forme; that realises that the unity offered by the received order falsifies the reality
which is in actual reality fragmented, unsettled and full of possibilities.
We are now in the domain of a theory that sees art, if we are allowed to put it crudely, as an
‘aide’ to consciousness in its struggle to comprehend the falsity of its own condition, within
the context of an oppressive world, and to envision what still ‘may be’ within a context of
freedom. This view expressed by a long line of Marxist thinkers, but perhaps most subtly and
comprehensively by Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse and T.W. Adorno (or the so-called
‘Frankfurt School’), sees in the work of the avant-grade the formation of an ‘anti-culture’ that
is in direct collision with the dominant cultural norms of bourgeois society. This has been
very clearly summarized, by Adorno’s disciple Jurgen Habermas, who in his work
Legitimation Crisis states: “The modern trend has radicalised the autonomy of bourgeois art
vis-à-vis contexts of employment external to art. This development produces, for the first
time, a counterculture, arising from the centre of bourgeois society itself and hostile to
possessive-individualistic, achievement-and-advantage-oriented lifestyle of the bourgeoisie.
Bohemianism – first established in Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century – embodied a
critical pretension that had appeared unpolemically in the aura of bourgeois art. The ‘alter
ego’ of the commodity owner – the ‘human being’ which the bourgeois could at one time
encounter in the solitary contemplation of a work of art – thereupon split off from him and
confronted him in the artistic avant-garde, as a hostile power, at best a seducer. In the
artistically beautiful, the bourgeoisie once could experience primarily its own ideals and the
redemption, however fictive, of a promise of happiness that was merely suspended in
everyday life. But in radicalised art, it soon had to recognise the negation rather than the
340
complement of its social practice.”
Thus the ‘rupture’ is a radical break with the whole vision of the world. “The truth”,
concludes Habermas, “thereby comes to light that in bourgeois society art expresses not the
promise but the irretrievable sacrifice of bourgeois rationalisation, the plainly incompatible
341
experiences and not the esoteric fulfilment of withheld, but merely deferred, gratification.”

337
ibid., p. 107
338
ibid.
339
ibid.
340
J Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Heinemann, London 1976, p. 85
341
ibid.

92
In these ‘plainly incompatible experiences’, representations that seek to recuperate or round
off the jagged heterogeneity into a ‘unified’ homogeneous whole can only lead to a false
consciousness. Indeed, such a line of thought will tend to reveal that in the context of this
social formation any fixed and accepted representation, functioning as universally valid,
would have to refer only to some imaginary coherence or ‘compatibility’, for in the
‘refractory material’ of the concrete conditions of this lifeworld a real coherence may prove
impossible. This imaginary coherence is Ideology.
Ideology as a network of commonly (or at least widely) held values, recuperates the dispersal
of the real world and provides a sense of unity and identity. But in so doing it moves us away
from the actual lived experience, distorting our understanding of where and how we are, if not
staving off the possibility of getting closer to such an understanding. For it cannot give a
sense of unity, but only a semblance.
To further elaborate this point we may turn to a concise and succinct description of ideology
and its function offered by the neo-Marxist thinker C. Poulantzas: “Ideology consists of a
relatively coherent ensemble of representations, values and beliefs.[…] The status of the
ideological derives from the fact that it reflects the manner in which the agents of a formation,
the bearers of its structures, live their conditions of existence; i.e. it reflects this relation to
these conditions as it is ‘lived’ by them. Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents’
activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience. To this extent
ideologies fix a relatively coherent universe not only as a real but also an imaginary relation.
[…] Ideology, as a specific instance of a mode of production and social formation, in that it
offers an imaginary coherence to the unity governing the real contradictions of the ensemble
of the formation, it reflects the unity of a social formation. From this point of view, its
specific, real role as a unifier is not that of constituting the unity of a formation but that of
342
reflecting that unity by reconstructing it on an imaginary plane.”
It is in this sense that the quotation from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, presented in the
beginning of this section, may act as the outline of a method for this ‘starker dasein’ that has
to rise from the mists of ‘averageness’ and the make-believe of Ideology into the light of a
‘personal exploration’ and true consciousness.
Here, of course, the issue of the subject of this process, or struggle, is inevitably raised. This
issue is in turn, equally inevitably, linked to the question of ‘who is looking?’ that was put in
relation to Tatlin’s Collation of Materials.
We have so far referred to the viewer (as opposed to the mere onlooker) of the Collation,
admittedly with a slight hint of sarcasm, as a ‘polymath’. But as it transpires we need a more
rigorous definition that would see him as a subject determined by conjuncture. This subject, it
would seem, is not a transcendental subject as posited by traditional philosophy, ‘man in
general’ as it were, but a specific type of person who feels the malaise, produced by the
concrete conditions of this world and society at this given time, and strives to overcome it.
This is the ‘starker Dasein’ as opposed to ‘average man’, i.e. a conscious subject who
undertakes a personal exploration placing under constant scrutiny all that is ‘familiarly
known’ within the context of the modern/bourgeois world. The subject of this exploration is
thus revealed as a historical subject who finds him/herself caught within the clash between
dominant culture and counterculture, in a constant, unending process of decision making.
He/she needs to see the signal that will enable him/her to discern the difference between the
two cultures and is never at ease.
This is a subject that ‘looks ahead’ and has been taken for granted throughout the modern era,
343
at least since Voltaire , but more particularly so in the opening decades of the twentieth
century, the time of futurisms of various kinds. There is a presentiment of something better to
come, and this is nowhere felt stronger than in art. As far as it can be talked about, this
presentiment point to a place not yet known, and is thus qualified as utopian. And this is a tall

342
N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Class, NLB, London 1968, pp. 206-207
343
Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne: «Un jour tout sera bien, voilà notre espérance /Tout est bien aujourd'hui, voilà
l'illusion ».

93
order for the subject to tackle, for such a presentiment must be differentiated from mere
clairvoyance, as it is an ‘intuition’ of a different kind.
In his long essay entitled The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Ernst Bloch attempts to
describe what he calls ‘the conscious and known activity within the not-yet-conscious [noch
nicht bewusste]’ as follows:
“The intended look ahead is finicky, not dreary. This look requires in advance that the
presentiment be sane and also not gloomy as if it were stuck in the basement. That
presentiment, in its dusk, is not meant to become aware although it may be directed toward
tomorrow. Since science is absent, something hysterical and something superstitious have
settled here as well. Certain psychic conditions like clairvoyance have been described as
presentiments or, more precisely, as stupor. But this is degeneracy, whereas the real
presentiment, of course, cannot reach down, nor does it want to. Given that the so-called sight
still exists something tricky is inherent; […] Yet, nothing is more certain that, in this case, the
future that folklore tells about, as it is in prophecy, is a totally false one, a repetition, a
prearranged plot in an everlasting cycle. […] Therefore the productive presentiment, even in
the form of the so-called intuition, is something entirely different from instinct that had
become aware of itself. This presentiment does not remain gloomy and tricky or even dense.
It is strong and healthy from the beginning. It is openly aware of itself as something not-yet-
conscious. In its alertness it shows a zest to learn. It reveals the ability to look around while
344
foreseeing, to have circumspection, even to be cautious in pre-caution.”
Thus the ‘uneasy’ starker dasein that has thus become a ‘finicky viewer’ would tend to find
any representation expressed in terms of unity and identity suspect. For it is not validated by
the subject’s lived experience, which in its tension tends, on the contrary, towards dispersal
and difference. Even the broadest symbols, he/she is aware, are contingent upon historical
circumstance; even language is never the same.
That the symbol is contingent upon social context is easy to understand. Once again we may
refer to Ernst Bloch, who pointed out that the archetypal symbol of Prometheus as an
emblematic figure of human freedom oppressed by the cruel laws of the Gods, did not always
function as such. In the proper context of Greek religion, says Bloch, Prometheus was
considered as merely a thief that stole fire from the Gods and thus ought to be punished and
one had to wait till the romantic era “in order to see this infamous titan being celebrated as the
345
leader of man’s attack on heaven.” Similarly the myth of Icarus, which springs to mind in
relation to Tatlin, who in a sort of ‘last stand’ before the final ‘condemnation’ by the
Bolshevik Party and the demise of avant-gardism in Russia, set to building a flying machine
he called Letatlin (a compound from the verb letat’, to fly, and his own name) [plate 66-
346
67] . Icarus in the proper didactic context of the myth is seen as a foolish, light-headed
young man unheedful of danger and the ‘impossible’, but he can also be seen as symbolising
the idea of a utopian leap to reach the sun. Characteristically perhaps in Tatlin’s case both
aspects may apply.
That language is contingent upon cultural context has been brilliantly demonstrated by Michel
Foucault in the introduction to his Birth of a Clinic, where he demonstrates the difference
between the outlandish imagery in the diagnosis by a mid-eighteenth century doctor, and the
technically precise description of a similar ailment by a doctor in the 1820s. If today we reject
the eighteenth century doctor’s observations, says Foucault, it is only because a different
system of signification has been adopted, a different relationship between words and things
has been established. “But,” he asks, “how can we be sure that the he did not see what he says
347
he saw?” It would be safer to conclude that he did, for such was the guiding spirit of
‘ideology’ at the time, that ‘unified’ experience in this way. Similarly, in more distant times
perhaps, myths were taken to be fact, or as the young Lukacs has put it: “What today can only
be seen through a utopian view was really present to the visionary eye; epic poets in those
344
E. Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature; Selected Essays, MIT, 1988, p. 103
345
E. Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, Payot, Paris 1981, p. 152
346
This was a glider whose design was based on the study of the flight of birds, most probably inspired by the work of the
German engineer Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) and Leonardo da Vinci.
347
M. Foucault, The Birth of a Clinic, Tavistock, London 1976, p. 6

94
times did not have to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendental reality, as the
only existing one, they could be simple narrators of events. Just as the Assyrians who drew
348
winged beasts doubtless regarded themselves, and rightly, as naturalists.”
Thus the ‘finicky viewer’, aware of these contingencies, constantly seeking the signal of that
‘context’, that overriding totalising view of the world that gives the specific meaning to
things, in order to negotiate his process in the world is that non-transcendental subject
described in the previous section, a subject in process and on trial.
For he/she has to be weary of any unity and identity, and has to be watchful, so as to be on the
‘right side’ of the collision. He/she has to accept what the lived experience in this world, in
this society, is: to be thrown in a constant struggle between the obscurity of the immediate
present that has not yet fully taken shape, and – in the flow of things – never does, and the
idea which, believing itself formed, collides with this half-articulated, not yet realised
actuality. In this sense any ‘unifying’ symbol will have to turn its eyes away from that
collision. The dialectical process of consciousness strives, by superseding and breaking down
fixed and determined thoughts, or, to be more precise, thoughts that are believed to be fixed
and determined, to constantly – endlessly – clear this obscurity, and can thus be never at ease.
Hs/she will have to accept that some obscurity will have to remain, unless some mystificatory
teleology is posited, a mystification that goes by the name of Ideology.
This remnant of obscurity that has dogged us all along our discussion of Tatlin’s Collation of
Materials may thus be grasped by the ‘conscious viewer’ as something more than mere
indecision on the boundary, or the suggestion of the tentative nature of human utterances. In
its constant unsettledness, its unease, in its ‘shaking’ of ‘deep structure’, it may be seen as a
signal of something belonging to the ‘counter-culture’ as described above: as a consciously
‘open’ work, ‘doggedly’ on the boundary, which is using its ‘thingness’ and the tentative
utterance not only as a critique of received tradition, but a critique of tradition as ideology.

348
G. Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, Merlin London 1971, p. 47

95
4.5 Fact
Not the old. Not the new, but the necessary.

V. Tatlin,
[Quoted in N. Punin’s article
“State Exhibition”]

That the last comment in the previous section may sound far-fetched is again due to the
uncertain qualities of the Collation. The difficulty in agreeing to place it within a given
typology, even that of ‘counter-culture’, remains.
The ‘refusal’ of the work to come under any ‘truth’ or category is, for the conscious viewer,
an indication of its factual nature. Its tentative, unsettled character comes together in its
facticity as something made – a pragma (Latin facinus) still in the act. The work remains
unmediated by any designation that would refer to something previous to its existence or
something broader than it. It merely is; it is as that which it was made to be and in this it
exists in absolute autonomy. That any type-casting even that of ‘counter-culture’ and
‘ideological critique’, may appear to a certain degree as arbitrary, shows precisely that the
work ‘adheres’ to its autonomy, as it does not offer itself to any form of over-determination.
Standing before the viewer what it primarily makes manifest is the process of its making. It is
the concrete materials and their actual articulation. The materials do not inhere any quality
other than their materiality, and their forms have been, most probably willingly, shaped so as
not to be reducible to any regularity or canon. Their articulation is not some great feat of
engineering, but a registering of opposing forces precariously balanced out. There is nothing
grand or impressive in the work as a whole. The overall composition appears meaningless if
one is looking at it as a configuration, a ‘shape’ or a ‘form’. It requires an interest of a
different kind that focuses on it as a process, to bring forth the sense of critique. This critique
is what can ‘embrace’ the indeterminate configurations resulting from this process, and give
some sort of ‘direction’ to that outcome that keeps changing according to the infinite angles
of view one may take up in looking at the work, in its concrete presence as an object. It is a
process to be followed by the conscious viewer, who will have to look carefully to identify
the exact shape of the pieces of material, to feel their texture and face the problem of their
articulation. In the absence, through the irony of history, of this object, the urge to reconstitute
it arises once this process is sensed as the only way to ‘see’ the work. But the shapes of the
pieces not being ‘precise’ or ‘regular’ it transpires that it is very difficult to be accurately
measured and replicated. Similarly the materials, found in Russia ninety years ago, in the
vicinity of the artist’s concrete existence, cannot be identified, and even as tin, iron, glass,
asphalt and plaster again cannot be properly reproduced. They can only be replicated by
approximation, and any cutting, any folding will also inevitably bear some differences, as the
‘imprint’ of any tool, or the force of the hand will unavoidably produce a slightly different
line or shape. To be sure, any copy, of a painting, of a statue, will bear such infinitesimal
differences, or even greater ones, but there they are recuperated by the recognisability of the
overall shape, and are considered as a lack of skill on the part of the ‘copier’. Here they
cannot be so recuperated, and they thus bring to light the inevitability of difference in any
process of replication, which is not attributable only to ‘lack of skill’ but also, and perhaps
more so, to ‘lack’ of identity of time and place. Further, as the information regarding its exact
size cannot be retrieved, again a limitation is posed in its reconstitution. Finally the problem
of their articulation is left with its re-constructor. No exact replica may in fact be made. The
conscious viewer that treats the work as work, can reproduce it only in the sense of re-
enacting it or performing it like an actor does his role.
The emphasis on the process of work, of performing the act, is present in Tatlin’s own words,
to be found in his oft-quoted statement, whose implications however rarely sink in.
The Constructivists in inverted commas worked in materials but in an abstract
fashion, as a formal problem, mechanically applying technique to their art.
Constructivism in inverted commas did not take into account the organic

96
 relation between material and the tensile capacity, its working character.
Essentially it is only as outcome of the dynamic force resulting from their
material relations that a vitally inevitable form is born.349
Form is what is born from a process that ‘inevitably’ results from the specific handling of the
concrete materials, and not by reference to some pre-existing formal concept. The conscious
viewer, constantly ‘uneasy’, can understand this: the outcome is not given, is not ‘yet-known’,
it is in the process that the ‘essence’ of the form resides – in the making.
Anyone who concernedly looks at Tatlin’s work will know that. Indeed, many of Tatlin’s
works have attracted interest with regard to their reconstruction. Even if at times this is
motivated more by an archaeological spirit, due to their disappearance in history (which may
be another aspect of ‘concern’), the urge to reconstruction is evident. This is not only the case
with the Collation of Materials. In 1981 Martyn Chalk reproduced the Collation [plate 68]
together with another six works by Tatlin. Thirteen years before that, Troels Andersen had led
the reconstruction of the Monument to the Third International at the Stockholm Moderna
Musseet, a work often referred to as Tatlin’s Tower. This was repeated at the ‘Art in
Revolution’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1971 [plate 69], and several
reconstructions have followed since, with the latest being a somewhat small-scale one at the
Costakis Collection exhibition in Athens in 1996. Even a bamboo version of the model was
made in 1999 by artist David Parfitt at the Brighton Fringe Festival, which attracted some
350
media attention, before ‘going up in smoke’ . However, Tatlin’s work ‘attracted
reconstruction’ even during the artist’s lifetime, as can be seen in the often reproduced
photograph of a May Day parade in 1925 in Leningrad, extensively discussed in my M.Phil.
351
thesis [plate 70]. The conclusion (supported by Stephen Bann’s analysis that showed it is
352
“no longer either in material or invention the tower that the artist planned” ) was that
Tatlin’s tower is not Tatlin’s tower. What is reproduced is the core of its shape, such as would
become a graphic image, a ‘heraldic device’ of ‘revolutionism’, or even a logotype for a left-
353
wing publishing company [plate 71] .
This is perhaps a legitimate inscription of Tatlin’s work in the real flow of events, but this
will have the viewer literally flitting forever along the surface, unable to grasp either the work
or the revolution it is supposed to encapsulate. But even if we were to accept to discuss this
‘legitimate’ claim with regard to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, such a
discussion, interpreting the Collation of Materials as a heraldic device or a hieroglyph, as we
have already seen, cannot stand for long. Such a ‘reading’ to the work would tend to almost
exclusively focus on it as an outer shell or outline, and the core of the artist’s invention, the
handling of materials and the form resulting from their tensile capacity is lost. Tatlin himself
would point to that difference, in his criticism of his fellow-travellers in constructivism such
as Rodchenko and Stepanova, to whom the passage referred to above, is most certainly
addressed. For they, perhaps under an initial influence of Malevich's symbolic geometricity,
seemed to be more concerned with the formal rather than material aspects of their work
354
[plates 72-73]. And that is why Tatlin called the ‘constructivists in inverted commas’.
To be sure, with regard to the Monument it could be argued that Tatlin does not fully adhere
to his own stated position as it does indeed carry certain geometrical elements, that may be
reducible to a graphic stamp or heraldic device, as a logotype for a publishing house, or it
355
may be transposed to the design of a stage set, as with the production of Zangezi [plate 74].
But not so the Collation of Materials: Because these two works belong to different ‘eras’.

349
V. Tatlin, Art into Technology (1932), in L.A. Zhadova, Tatlin, op. cit., p. 312
350
F. Gibbons, The Tower that Vladimir didn’t build, The Guardian, Saturday Review,29 May 1999.
351
M.Phil Thesis pp. 91-92 and 135n2. The definitive publication of the photograph is to be found in V.P. Tolstoy (ed.),
Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo; oformleniye prazdnevst, Moscow 1984, vol I (Texts), Doc. No 3, pp. 140-142 and vol II
(Pictures) Nos. 216-241.
352
S. Bann, Abstract Art – A Language?, in Towards a New Art, Background to Abstract Art 1910-1920, Tate Gallery, London
1980, p. 137
353
The publishing firm is NLB (New Left Books), as suggested by Stephen Bann in Abstract Art – A Language?, op. cit., p. 137
354
This point has been extensively discussed in my M.Phil. Thesis, pp. 66-68
355
The similarities between the overall form of the ‘Tower’ and the stage set for Zangezi are discussed in my M.Phil. Thesis, p.
97

97
This is a point that the line of investigation proposed in this essay should have made clear.
For the starting point of this investigation is not the artist’s career taken as a unified whole
which, when looked at at any given moment, would bring out the ‘essence’ of the artist. The
starting point is the art object itself. It may provide for a multitude of possible ‘next’ steps.
But these next steps are conditioned by concrete reality. Tatlin himself had to ‘review’ his
work after the experience of political revolution, in order to realign that work with events, and
suggest a more specific meaning, thus narrowing the possibilities it once offered. In his
already quoted statement that “what happened from the social aspect in 1917 was realized in
our work as pictorial artists in 1914, when ‘materials volume and construction’ were accepted
as our foundations”, we may detect a certain anachronism in an attempt to find a post-factum
‘foundation’ for that work (and perhaps setting on a track that led to an impasse).
This creates a whole ‘atmosphere’ surrounding the work, and has provided the basis for what
may be called the ‘mainstream’ approach to Tatlin’s early constructions. It speaks of a
romantic and nostalgic attitude to revolution as a vaguely defined or superficially seen élan,
more attractive in its ‘forlorn’ qualities and ‘lost illusions’, and in which we have no part in
our current daily existence.
Martyn Chalk’s reconstruction of the Collation seems to follow this ‘mainstream’ approach
and to be more interested in the overall shape, in its outward appearance rather than its inner
material articulation. But perhaps more importantly he appears to be more concerned with the
‘archaeological’ nostalgia of the lost work. It is not only that his proposal looks like it has lost
the dynamism sensed in the ‘original’ photographs, but also that it speaks more of
‘restoration’ than ‘reconstruction’. This is made evident by the fact that the quality of the
photograph in the catalogue tends to reproduce the low definition of the ‘original’
photographs. Even the texture of the paper attempts to reproduce the feeling of the old. It is a
grainy yellowish paper that stands in sharp contrast to the remainder of the catalogue entitled
356
Configuration 1910-1940 , made of glossy white pages with colour photographs in high
definition, reproducing inter alia extant works by Russian and other European artists of the
same period. The work is thus ‘pushed back’ in time bearing no relevance to the present
moment. Though shown at the exhibition as a concrete object, its author chooses to record it
as a reminiscence and not a presence. Its materiality and concrete articulation is lost, even as
it is exhibited as a material object.
This not suggest that the reconstruction presented here is more skilful, more accurate, more
‘materially present’ and the like. Contemporary technology and skilled technicians, if the
right price is paid, can produce a replica in all respects, including texture, identical to the
object in the photograph. The issue is not one of accuracy, but one of attitude.
To be sure even my attitude is not devoid of that ‘archaeological and nostalgic spirit’ I am
criticising. The difference may be in the level of self-conscious awareness of it, or rather in
the ‘role’ assigned to it.
It may be the difference between restoration and reconstruction. For restoration seems to have
a ready answer to the question ‘why look at it?’ and this answer being: Because it is part of
the canonised history of art. Again, it is a ‘legitimate’ answer, but as we have seen it may
provoke equally ‘legitimate’ objections as to whether it should be canonised. In any event,
restoration would tend to be more concerned with the formal ‘appearance’ of the work rather
than its material presence, and it is this emphasis on ‘appearances’ that leads to the ‘nostalgic’
or ‘archaeological’ reproduction we referred to above.
In reconstruction, on the other hand, the question as to why we should look at it is not offered
an unequivocal answer, and a proposal is made to go back to the drawing-board, as it were,
and test any hypothesis all over again. In this process the work is released from its rigidity
and comes alive.
It is in the process of the making and the resulting ‘facticity’ that the refractory nature we
have traced becomes more emphatically apparent (brought into sharper relief, as it were). But
what happens as the objects ‘stands’ is that this refractory nature is not a figure of speech, it is

356
M. Chalk, Missing, Presumed Destroyed; Seven Reconstructions by Artist V.E. Tatlin, in Configuration 1910-1940,
Exhibition Catalogue, Annely Juda Fine Art, London 1981.

98
a quality of the object. Its formless shape that may hint to some recognisable fragments and
yet not, its alternating three and two-dimensionality, all that plainly comes together in its
facticity. Indeed, it is in the process of its re-enactment that involved re-introducing it to
geometry and perspective projections (in order to arrive at an exact measurement of the
pieces) only to blur this geometry once again into a more ‘accurate’ replication of what
irregularities the photographs give, that this ‘refractory’ nature is experienced as a negation of
the canon, as a negation of our ‘habitual’ manner. It is in this process of going in and out of
regular planes and solids, of regularity and irregularity, that the work emerges in a negativity
in which the phrases we sometimes use as quotes within the accepted process of an academic
text may be substantiated not in their abstract generality but concretely. ‘Everything turning
into its opposite’, the phrase by Marx ‘dropped’ somewhere along the line, is something one
actually does in this re-enactment of this object.
And as has transpired in the preceding discussion, it is not mere bricolage, but an articulated
mass of material, not schizophrenically but concernedly, even logically, made; it is a point to
which I willingly turn my gaze, and which gives out a signal of indeterminacy as ‘thoughtful’
critique that finally, through the actual process of affirmation and negation, congeals in the
act.
This need not surprise us too much. The currently dominant theories of communication based
on linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis as well the theories of reception of literature and
art, which have both informed our discussion, would tend to conclude that any final verdict on
‘signification’ and ‘meaning’ will have to remain inconclusive. Only here, the full
consequences of this are accepted. Finally, the act itself is the only thing we can go by.
Not exactly a referent, not exactly a heraldic device or symbol, not exactly a hieroglyph, I
cannot make out its image in any sense other than what was made out of the process of its
making. Its is in the making of the object that one has to carefully confound any reference to
an image or allusion to a concept, in a well-thought out process which negates any
meaningful totalising image, which thus becomes an imageless act.
At this point, for some reason – which will have to remain somewhat indeterminate but not
unfathomable – we meet up once more with Rilke. It is a phrase from the Ninth Duino Elegy
which refers ‘tellingly’ to a tun ohne bildung.
Speaking with a grave sense of urgency, in the 1910s at a time when he experienced “all that
misery, confusion and disfigurement of the world” and felt there was “no one we can make
357
use of”, he conjures up, within the general motif of Klage (Lament) , a process of man’s
profoundest alienation, pointing the finger at this imageless act as that which ‘causes’ the
vacuum of the era:
More than ever
Things we can live with are falling away, for that
Which is oustingly taking their place is an act without image.358
Once more we meet up with the ‘poison of modernism’. The image is perhaps that which can
link us with an original meaning; that which gives things the ‘meaningfulness’ we can live
with in this world. In the fact of its re-enactment, the Collation has indeed left us totally
defenceless.
Our inability to establish a concept for the work, to establish what it represents, may perhaps
be seen as a ‘refusal’ by the work to relate with the ‘ready-made’ meanings that make us feel
at home in the world.
The conscious viewer, become a making viewer, can only re-present it, and come face-to-face
with it alone.
But the work is not properly there. Presumed lost or destroyed, it cannot come under the
simplest copula of the type ‘it is this’. Even as we say that it merely is, strictly speaking it is
not.

357
J.B. Leishman and S. Spender, Commentary to R-M Rilke, Duino Elegies, op. cit., p. 140
358
ibid. Ninth Elegy, p. 85

99
4.6 The Copula
The extreme futuristic rejection of the past is an
expression of bohemian nihilism and not of proletarian
revolutionism… We the Marxists stepped into the
revolution, while Futurism just fell on it.
L. Trotsky, On Futurism

Perhaps the last paragraphs of the previous section have taken dangerously close to the outer
limits of acceptable academic language. Inevitably, such an acceptable discourse must
prevail, within the conventional co-ordinates, and a ‘truth’, or just the simplest ‘copula’, must
be found to house the Collation of Materials. Or else, the work may stand as a res nullius,
subject to the whims of subjective intuition for any chance interpretation anyone may wish to
accord it.
As we have suggested, this work may come under the general category of avant-gardism, but
it holds a very particular if not unique position, in that it pursues a number of key issues
within that category in a most thorough and relentless manner. Thorough and relentless in that
it never allows itself to reach the edges of either affirmation of negation. It is neither an
encomium nor an affront to art, it neither celebrates nor mourns, it is neither elated nor
anguished. Most trends of avant-gardism would seem to more readily fall on either side of
these pairings. This would include Russian Futurism as well, which, in its splintering of
groups, as we have seen, can be found on both sides of the spectrum. But the Collation of
Materials has throughout our analysis and our strategies of approach and ‘reading’ doggedly
refused to fall in line.
If we were to bring together a series of comments made on the way, we could see it as a
compendium of several general artistic tenets and devices. A study in composition, a broadly
speaking psychosomatic relationship with articulated elements within a plane or field, a heap
of fragments of our environment, man-made or natural, concernedly put together, conjuring
up of possible suggestive images by indirect reference or implication; but all merely hinted at
only to have their traces effaced as it were in the next instant.
Seen in this way, as a particular instance of avant-gardism, it may be positioned at the
crossroads of opposing polarities that we have traced in our discussion. Tatlin appears to
occupy the ‘in-between’ or ‘no-man’s-land’ in such a binary topography. Typically Russian
one might say, but more characteristically European of the watershed that was the advent of
the twentieth century.
But what does it manifest at this crossroads with its resistance to any fixed reference? As an
unmediated fact we have found it to be a work of art in its most radical autonomy. It is a pure
investigation of form and material independent of any other constraints external to it. As an
investigation it appears a conscious reflective effort to deal with the generic questions of
artistic creation, as a work-process determined by the concrete materials at hand. In that
sense, as an autonomous work of art concerned with the ‘generative’ process, the conclusion
offered in the last section, that it speaks of a moment when everything was possible (which is
the only ‘possible’ answer if no fixed references can be determined), may refer to a wholesale
re-writing of what art is and thus come under the sign of revolution. Revolution not in the
vague sense of revolutionism and rebelliousness so often associated with the avant-garde, but
in connection to a more precise notion of how it proceeds to create something new without
recourse to pre-existing conceptions. As a bare, autonomous fact that cannot properly fit into
any pre-existing symbolic or ideological order, the Collation comes close to an ‘idea’ that can
express its ‘essence’: the ‘revolutionary phrase’, which has no use for recollections and
references beyond or other than itself, as it ‘breaks out’ of conceptualisation into the concrete
act, or Praxis within the actual world. The reference is to Karl Marx’s rather forgotten
conclusion on the revolutionary struggles in Europe:
Earlier revolutions required recollections from the past in order to delude
themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own
content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury

100
 the dead. There, the phrase went beyond the content; here, the content
goes beyond the phrase.359
This move beyond words to a content through action may indeed be a way of coming to terms
with a work like the Collation of Materials, as the urge to re-enact it may indicate. Such a
‘revolutionary’ treatment of the work, that sees it as loaded or pregnant with content that
cannot be properly articulated in a phrase, save perhaps some hints and fleeting allusions,
may resolve a number of issues relating to the intractability of the Collation. If we were to see
this content as an investigation toward a redefinition of art in the context of emerging new
conditions, then obviously if it were to be effective, it would have no full and systematic
vocabulary to rely on. The statu nascendi and the not-yet present suddenly fall into place.
Indeed, Marx’s theory of Praxis may offer a way to come to terms with a work such as the
Collation. Its refractory nature, the difficulty of conjuring up a meaning that would make us
feel that we belong to this world, we have already mentioned, may suggest a critique of any
totalising or mystifying ideology and its concrete presence pertains to a factual process rather
than to representation. If such a reading be allowed, then the Collation may be a ‘likeness’ of
Marx’s Eighth Thesis on Feurbach: “All the mysteries that lead theory to mysticism find their
360
logical solution in human action and in the understanding of this action.”
In this sense, the overcoming of our habitual notion of art, the end of art ‘as we know it’, also
falls into place.
We need not dwell here for long, however. If things seem to fall into place they do so only for
a split-second, as long as a blink of the eye can last. True, this augenblick may be also
something we can find to be of interest in the Collation. But the place we have come to is
rather desolate. There is none we can talk to. For there is neither nature nor home to which we
may relate. And in any event, human action in its concrete unfolding in historical time has
shown itself to be very much part of “all these mysteries”. In actual fact the revolutionary
content never went beyond the phrase.
Hence, even if we have arrived at a way of ‘making sense’ of this work, this should be no
cause for jubilation. As ‘a real object in real space’, in the this-here world, the Collation
cannot be properly sustained. Here the position on the ‘border’ that we have often referred to
with regard to Tatlin, becomes not one of ambivalence, but of confusion, and the boundary
becomes a ‘threshold’ of sorts. For the artistic work process is now mediated by imperatives
of a different ‘order’ which mean that even within the context of the revolutionary phrase and
human action (in the real world), its autonomy, its critique, its factual presence itself, will
have to be compromised. The artwork must cross the threshold and become an expression of
something else, and this appeared to be the issue of contention in the whole story of the
Russian avant-garde after the Bolshevik revolution, encapsulated in the passage from an
article by Trotsky in 1923, quoted above. Once entered into such a discourse this ‘point of
reference’ leads to the confusion that is written all over the history of the Russian avant-garde
from the heady days of 1917 to its final ‘deletion’ in the early 1930s.
It is the confusion that Shklovsky sensed, as early as 1922, when he wrote in his Sentimental
Journey the now famous passage about the ‘falling stone’: I am sorry that I fought in Galicia,
that I got mixed up in armoured cars in Petersburg, that I fought along the Dnieper. I changed
nothing. And now I’m thinking that I should have probably let the revolution go past me…
When you fall like a stone you don’t need to think; when you think, you don’t need to fall. I
361
confused two occupations. I’m only a falling stone.”
The trap is eloquently revealed. Once the work is reined in and brought under a category,
even one so ‘open’ and ‘unforeseeable’ as that of the ‘revolutionary phrase’, it has to ‘explain
itself’ (as a reprimanding teacher would call upon a misbehaving pupil to do); it thus
abandons its autonomy, and finally and inevitably shrinks into nothing more than a

359
K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte [1852], in K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, vol 8, Berlin 1964, p.
117. The original German reads: Dort ging die Phrase über der Inhalt, hier geht der Inhalt über die Phrase hinaus.
360
K. Marx and F. Engels, Theses on Feuerbach, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971
361
V. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, op. cit., p. 133. The reference here is to Spinoza [Letter LXII (LVIII)]. See The Chief
Works of Benedict Spinoza, Translated from the Latin with an Introduction by R.H.M. Elwes, Dover Books, New York 1955,
vol. II, p. 390

101
revolutionary slogan and becomes dependant on revolutionary politics. It has to think, or else
it falls.
And what it has to ‘think’ can be only its own demise. This was done by Tatlin’s own hand,
as it were, when he noted after the event that ‘his’ artistic revolution of 1914 was the same as
the socio-political revolution of 1917.
It could be that an autonomous work of art cannot be properly talked about, or even properly
conceived. Perhaps as soon as we talk about it becomes heteronomous, dependant on
conceptualisations. Perhaps this is, inescapably, the ‘nature’ of our talking about it, in any
operative and effective sense. In any event, this, it appears, is what happened to art once it
sought an explanation and justification for itself. At least Adorono is quite categorical about
it:
“One would have thought,” we read in the first page of his Aesthetic Theory, “that the loss of
an intuitive and naïve approach to art would be offset by an increased reflection which seizes
upon the chance to fill the void of infinite possibilities. This has not happened. What looked
at first like an expansion of art turned out to be its contraction. The great expanse of the
unforeseen which revolutionary artistic movements began to explore around 1910 did not live
up to the promise and adventure it held out. What has happened instead is that the process
begun at the time came to corrode the very same categories which were its own reason for
being. An ever increasing number of things artistic were drawn into an eddy of new taboos,
and rather than enjoy the newly won freedom, artists everywhere were quick to look for some
362
presumed foundation for what they were doing.”
What Adorno implies here may describe the process whereby the least definable aspects of
the avant-garde of the 1910s became defined in the 1920s, as, for instance, Dada gave way to
Surrealism or as aspects of early Russian Futurism became Suprematism and post-
revolutionary Constructivism. That is, when the initial ‘trends’ ceased to be a critique and fell
back on an ideology of sorts.
Could it be, then, that Tatlin’s Collation of Materials can be taken to be as an exemplar of
that brief moment where reflection seized upon the chance to fill the void of infinite
possibilities, exploring the great expanse of the unforeseen, before seeking a foundation for
itself?
Adorno’s words are loaded, and they call for a completely different approach to art, through a
revolutionary consciousness that requires no foundations, or in Marx’s word ‘no recollections
from the past’. This is a tall order that blocks any homecoming. The ‘plunge into the
unknown to find the new’ is here led to its ultimate and extreme consequences.
But was it not impossible to fill the void of infinite possibilities, or to intelligibly explore the
expanse of the unforeseen? How could such a stand be held out for long?
In our still lingering aporia regarding the Collation we might let it ‘fall’, which would mean
to place it in that impasse described by Egon Schiele in his already mentioned diary entry of
1912: “Kunst kann nicht modern sein. Kunst ist urewig”.
This was perhaps the exploration that artists were already feeling was an impossible task: To
break with the origins. And perhaps our inability to settle for a final solution with the
Collation is due to the absence of that ‘urewig’ in this work; the absence of an image ‘we can
live with’. Could it be that the continuing instability arises from the fact that we are here
faced with a genuine modern artwork, which took all that talk of rupture and new beginnings
seriously, and thus attempts to shake off the origins, to sever the links with the ‘ursprung’?
And could it be that once one starts looking for a foundation for what one is doing, to
‘explain’ it, one has to relate to some form of ‘origin’, has to fall back on what is already
meaningful, and thus inescapably reverts to what Adorno calls the naïve approach to art?
It is not really given to us to know. It could well be that the position suggested for the work is
untenable; as we said, it cannot be held for long. For it is most probable that Rilke is right and
that it is impossible to live without those things that link us to the origins. Even the revolution
could not live with a content that went beyond the phrase; it had to fall back to a myth of

362
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul. London 1986, p. 1

102
origins, to an ideology. And as Giorgio Agamben has convincingly argued, even Marx’s
363
notion of Praxis is constituted on the premise of fulfilling man’s original essence.
And even this work, in its reference to known shapes, to the dynamics of composition, to its
‘concerned’ making, harks back to some sort of ‘origins’. In its structural contradiction,
common to most of Russian Futurism, like zaum poetry, like ‘dyr bul shchyl’, it shatters
tradition only to leap over it backwards to a more primeval substratum. And even in its
indeterminacy the origins can receive it, to be made ‘use of’. For it emerges as a ‘protean’
image; a protean image forever changing, offering countless readings which never settle,
which can never be fully described, but which nonetheless disclose an ‘idea’ that we have
come to accept with regard to any form of communicative act: the unending chain of the
polyvalent signifiers which never settle ‘once and for all’ and can be made use of only
circumstantially in an operative sense within specific contexts, as we have tried to show in
our reading of the ‘semiotic’. This in part is the legacy of Russian Futurism itself through
zaum, Shklovsky and Jakobson.
However here, this idea is earnestly confronted. In the original myth, Proteus is finally pinned
down, immobilized by Menelaus, who makes him give the answer to his question. Here it has
proven impossible to emulate the Homeric hero’s success. And even if we ‘have come to
accept’ the impossibility of establishing unequivocal signifieds, we have also learned to live
with polyvalent signifiers within some form of an effective, even if merely ‘circumstantially
operative’, communicative code. But in our tortuous attempt to locate such a code in the
Collation we have found that no sooner does it appear to emerge than it is hastily retracted. It
is as if we are faced here with polyvalence before it becomes an ‘idea’, before it becomes re-
presented in a concept. The communicative act remains unstable as an act, and it is only as
such that we can talk about it – not as representation. The utterance is still reverberating; we
are still in the process of hearing it.
What we are left with, is, then, an object as a process in the making, the presence of materials
worked on and articulated, giving rise to changing forms that are ‘almost’ determinable, but
never fully so. This may be the ‘absolute origin’ of the human ‘essence’, but one would be
hard put to generalise in this sense with regard merely to the Collation. As a process that
manifests matter handled by human labour producing form, it is a form resulting only from
the concrete qualities of this specific matter and of this specific human labour, left forever
open to the viewer’s perception to interpret. This is, perhaps, as much as can be said, and
indeed it leaves us quite defenceless.
In this sense, it could be said that we are in the presence of the art-work as such with which
we are always ‘face to face alone’, with which our perception, itself forever changing, as our
approach is always and inevitably over-determined by the concrete contexts of the specific
moments of our approach, can never settle because even our link with the origin that may
provide ‘meaning’ and the basis for ‘representation’, can never be a stable given, can never be
a constant but only a variable.
Each augenblick is different. Hence we can relate to it not in the affirmative but only through
the interrogative: is it an indication of the fact that the whirlwind of associations gives rise to
a constant variability, where there can be no sure foothold, a hint that the origins, even as a
last resort, can offer no sure refuge? That there is no home to go back to?
Perhaps. But if so, ‘can we live with it’? Or is it simply ‘falling apart’?
Thus, finally, having reached this point, we could say that, in effect, the conscious viewer,
become making viewer, through the re-enactment of the object’s presence comes face to face
with himself as a sujet en procès without recourse to some ‘other’ transcendental realm,
endlessly trying to understand the ideologies that constitute him as a subject.
It seems rather impossible to live with that. For it cannot even be said that this ‘presumed lost
or destroyed’ work is. The very copula, the mere ‘it is’ cannot properly stand. It may emerge,
fleetingly perhaps, in its re-enactment. And this ‘may be’ is as much as the ‘copula’ of
language can provide us as a final refuge to house us.

363
G. Agamben, The Man Without Content, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 84-85

103
5. Translation
In every true work of art there is a place where a cool breeze
like that of an approaching dawn breathes on whoever puts
himself there. It follows from this that art, which was often
enough regarded as refractory toward any relationship with
progress, can serve as its authentic distinctiveness. Progress is
at home not in the continuity of the flow of time, but in its
interferences: wherever something genuinely new makes itself
felt for the first time with the sobriety of dawn.

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

At some point we talked of translation. This whole text is an attempt to translate a work of art
that appeared in Russia at the eve of the Great War in 1914, a work which itself translates
what the artist had to give. Translation constitutes a seemingly endless task, as there is always
‘another way of putting it’, and as we always mean much more than what we actually say in
the first place anyway. The ‘stabilising’ suggestion with regard to this work offered at the
close of the preceding discussion can certainly allow for other ways of ‘putting it’, and in any
event we cannot be sure of what its creator meant to say through it.
Meaning being loose even as it becomes fixed in an utterance, it follows that in translation it
will be even looser. The danger with any translation is that it tries to ‘explain’ what it
understands and the more successful it is the greater the risk of collapsing into
unintelligibility.
In his famous essay on the Task of the Translator Walter Benjamin conjures up the figure of
Hoelderlin struggling to translate from the original Greek. It is because his translations are
‘the most perfect rendering of their texts as their prototype is to their model’ that they “are
subject to the danger inherent in all translations: the gates of a language thus expanded and
364
modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence.”
The risk with lesser translations is smaller because the stakes are not as high. In any event, the
gates of language threaten to slam shut on the conclusion of the previous section of this text.
For it, precisely, had to become so broad that it could mean anything or nothing.
To be sure, in our exploration, we have come very close to actually feeling what the
phenomenologists, and especially Merleau-Ponty, call the ‘quasi-corporeality of signifying’.
The fact that signification emerges in the act, through our body when we speak: “…The
spoken word (the one I utter or the one I hear) is pregnant with a meaning which can be read
in the very texture of the linguistic gesture (to the point that a hesitation, an alteration of the
voice, or the choice of a certain syntax suffices to modify it), and yet is never contained in
that gesture, every expression always appearing to me as a trace, no idea being given to me
except in transparency, and every attempt to close our hand on the thought that dwells in the
365
spoken word leaving only a bit of verbal material in our fingers.”
In this seemingly endless task we have tried to translate the artwork into words, and, mutatis
mutandis, we have followed, like all translations, Hoelderlin’s path as described by Benjamin.
Aware of the incongruousness of the comparison we only refer to it by analogy:
“Hoelederlin’s translations from Sophocles,” says Benjamin, “were his last work; in them
meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths
366
of language.”
The incessant shuttling between what is being meant and what is being said has a dizzying
effect. There is however a stop, according to Benjamin: “It is vouchsafed to Holy Writ alone,
in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of
367
revelation.” Here, the gap is bridged between what one says and what one ‘wants to say’.

364
W. Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, Fontana, London 1975, p. 81
365
M. Merleau-Ponty, On the Phenomenology of Language, in Phenomenology, Language and Sociology; Selected essays
(edited by J. O’Neil), Heinemann, London 1974, p. 86
366
ibid
367
ibid, p. 82

104
Here, the text is identical to truth. It is true in all its literalness without the mediation of
meaning.
Benjamin himself tried to emulate this ‘Holy Writ’ in his own writing, or at least declared his
intention to do so. During his trip to Moscow in 1926 he wrote to his editor that he wanted to
write a description of the city in which ‘all factuality is already theory’, and which would
‘thereby refrain from any deductive abstraction, from any prognostication, and even within
368
certain limits, from any judgement.”
The precondition for such a project is, of course, the determination of the ‘truth content’
within the subject-matter treated. This is seen most clearly in Heidegger’s attempt to translate
the aletheia (truth) in the utterings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, where the words reveal
the unforgetfulness (a-lethe) of the essence of Being, indeed almost breaking the limits of
369
endurance of language.
However, in our case, the truth content of the work has eluded us because we have been
unable to unequivocally determine its subject matter in which it may dwell. We have been
shuttling between what is said and what is meant, only to find that there may be yet another
way of putting it. In this sense, the best we can do is to retell what it says by reconstructing it,
by performing to its ‘score’ as much as we can understand it – refraining from any deductive
abstraction, and letting it stand as a fact. But perhaps our difficulty is part of the ‘truth
content’ of the work, and the theory is already there: Perhaps the truth is that there is no truth
to be grasped.
My Birthday. Sinister thunder over Tsarskoye Selo. Every night on my way
home I used to walk through the city of the insane and I always used to think of
someone I knew in the army, Private Lysak, he was crazy and kept whispering over and
over:
“Truth, no truth; truth, no truth”.
His quickening whisper would keep getting faster and faster and softer and
softer, and the poor guy would jump into bed and hide under the covers, pull them up
until only his eyes were showing, as if he wanted to get away from someone, but he
never stopped that inhumanly fast whisper. Then, very slowly, he would sit up in bed
and his whisper would get louder and louder and he would squat there absolutely
rigid, his eyes round as a hawk’s and all yellow, and then all of a sudden he would
straighten up and start shaking his bed and yelling “TRUTH”, screaming like crazy so
that the whole building echoed and the windows rattled.
“Where is truth?” he shouted. “Bring me the truth! Bring it here!”
Then he sat down. He had a long wiry moustache and yellow eyes, and he
would sit there trying to catch sparks from the fire with his bare hands, only there
wasn’t any fire. By that time the attendants would come running from all over. It was
like notes from the field of the dead, flickers of heat lightning over the distant field of
death, a sign of the dawn of the century. He was a big powerful man, and he looked
like a prophet in his hospital bed.370
Thus Khlebnikov at the ‘dawn of the century’. Not unlike Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, the oft-
quoted ‘melancholy’ angel of history who sees only a single catastrophe where we see a chain
of events, piling wreckage upon wreckage before his feet, and inexorably pushed by a storm
371
towards the future with his face to the past, a storm we call ‘progress’ , Khlebnikov’s
Private Lysak, sends a signal from the field of death for the birth of the new century, where
truth is only a mirage.
But the attendants are already rushing in. We have to leave private Lysak, and come back to
the viewer, the viewer-performer of Tatlin’s work, who (almost one century later), if he is to

368
W. Benjamin, Letter to M. Buber, quoted by G. Scholem, Preface, in G. Smith (ed.), Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diaries,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass.1986, p. 6
369
see M. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, Harper and Row, New York 1986.[For instance p. 73, where a fragment from
Heraclitus, rendered by Kirk et al. as ‘Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all is one’ (The presocratic
Philosophers, op. cit., p. 87), is translated into German and thence to English thus: ‘Attuned not to me but to the Laying that
gathers, letting the Same lie: the fateful occurs (the Laying that gathers): One unifying all.’]
370
V. Khlebnikov, October on the Neva, in C. Douglas (ed.), V. Khlebnikov, The King of Time, op. cit., p. 106.
371
W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, op. cit., p. 259

105
propose a ‘thesis’, will have to position himself and make a decision. The question is the
same as the one that was initially put to the ‘mere’ onlooker. Only now, the conditions are
changed. A lot of supporting evidence has been admitted. An informed verdict could now be
pronounced, and a translation of the work offered.
At this point, the final metaphorical utterance that would stabilise the work, that would
answer the question, is called for. We have sought it in several of ways, but the constant
variability of the work, its continuing ambivalence, has refused to settle for any of the
propositions. The recurring dilemma that has remained unanswered since the beginning needs
finally to be confronted; an in-other-words type of phrase, figure of speech needs finally to be
found as a metaphor that will encapsulate it. But it should be evident by now that the work
itself is to be confronted as a dilemma: the additional finalising metaphor may be one too
many, trivializing the work or placing it in a straitjacket; while not adding it may be one
372
metaphor too few, leaving the work for ever indeterminable .
And this should be evident because throughout this text we have had to qualify most of our
suggestions as either ‘far-fetched’ or as inferring too little, within the context of a discussion
that could claim a broader audience. But at the end of the day I can only speak for myself.
With my limited intellectual powers, my scanty technical skills, and my doubtful artistic
sensibility, I tried my best to think about, to work out and to recreate this object. When all is
said and done, what do I make of all this? How do I answer to the ‘either-or’?
Though I would have wished it otherwise, i.e. to have proven that it is a breakthrough from
the contemplative concept into revolutionary praxis, whereby it could satisfy the condition of
the one metaphor ‘too few’, I feel I have to opt for that one metaphor ‘too many’ for my own
personal translation. I revert to the original process of poiesis rather than praxis and sense an
element of sorrow, something of a lament, in my relationship with the work. In my present
condition in the world I feel that such a praxis is something I cannot properly ‘make use of’,
and that the work’s ambivalence, though fecund, is in the end disconcerting, something I
‘cannot live with’. The starker dasein cannot be attained, the presentiment cannot be but
somewhat gloomy (and not exactly sane), and I can see the work only as a brief flash that
lights possibilities for a content beyond the phrase; but only as a brief flash and nothing more
– and which, in its re-enactment, keeps just fretting and strutting upon the stage.
Like Private Lysak I am trying to catch sparks, only there is no fire.
But if the work is such a spark without fire, then we could come up with a ‘final translation’:
In trying to piece together what has been half-heartedly hinted at with regard to the
defenceless sujet en procès who can never attain a ‘truth content’ with any semblance of
permanence, we could say that something of true relevance emerges here: if the work indeed
manifests a sense that the origins, even as a last resort, cannot offer a sure refuge, refuting the
‘urewig’, it equally intimates that moving the other way, to progress, offers no certainty of
hope, refuting the ‘healthy presentiment’. What remains in the middle is not a present
moment of authentic existence as a redeeming philosophical trend may have wished, but a
moment of mere existence as self-presence, as a historical reading would tell us.
Neither here nor there, but in-between: An unredeemable in-between. This is an impossible
place to stand. The breeze we feel, putting ourselves there, is not exactly ‘cool like that of an
approaching dawn’. But perhaps there is a ‘truth’ somewhere in that, telling us that the
‘melancholy angel’ of history is doing his job.
However, let not the angel have the last word, but a lesser being. Anyway, there can be no
final translation; there is always another way of putting it, and the work has consistently
refused ‘closure’. For all that I can say, it remains forever unfinished.
As a Greek speaker, I may be allowed to proceed to this last association: ‘finished’ is teleion,
perfect, from telos (finis, end). Thus in the end the work would be without an end, ateles, or
imperfect; a non-finito of sorts, but not of the ‘habitual’ kind, as it does not provide us with a

372
on the idea of the impossibility of the ultimate metaphor that can yield the meaning in philosophical discourse see J. Derrida,
White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy (in Margins of Philosophy), Harvester Press 1982, especially the
concluding remarks in Chapter II, pp. 228-9.

106
recognisable starting-point. It is ‘unfinished’ all the way. And in that, it acknowledges its own
‘imperfection’, it speaks of the ateles.
Thus, it could become almost anything; the possibilities appear as infinite. Within the
unfolding historical time it could congeal and become stabilised assuming a definite form at
various instances, alighting at various stops along the way: It could be pointing indeed to the
‘Tower’ and Constructivism; it could become a symbolic or heraldic device of modernity; it
could be a variant of cubist investigation of forms and space; it could be taken as an icon of
the crossroads of the east and west, of the uncivilised and the overcivilised; it could be ‘an
imageless act’ in the sense of being devoid of an ideology to lean on; it could refer to an
‘absolute origin’ of matter and human labour brought together; or, equally, it could be
pointing to an impasse, foretelling its own demise.
The possibilities realised so far would tend to indicate that the ‘destiny’ of the work has been
fulfilled. In as much as we can say today, it might as well remain in peace, presumed lost or
destroyed, in the fading photograph of an ageing book.

107
Some Closing Remarks

The patient and kind reader who has followed this text so far may object that too great a
premium is placed on this specific work by Tatlin, that too many readings are forced upon it.
Though this is not uncommon in discussions of art, it is a legitimate objection and has been
acknowledged right from the start. In fact it has never left us throughout the discussion. But,
equally, we have hinted at specific ‘conditions’ of reception by the viewer, whose attitude
toward the work may be taken as a constituent component of the ‘work as a whole’. However,
even though not totally uninfluenced, the thesis did not seek recourse to a ‘theory of
373
reception’, as expressed by Jauss and others , that could have placed overdue emphasis on
the side of the interpreter, rather than on the actual work.
The attempt here made is not to posit the ideal viewer but to seek him. The ideological
baggage we carry cannot be shed completely, and we have suggested all along that the
generally unclear but quite resilient conceptions we carry about art, which operate across the
spectrum from figuration to abstraction, from the beautiful to the sublime, place such a work
as Tatlin’s Collation, at our first encounter with it, beyond the pale of any discussion.
However, a critique of such conceptions becomes necessary once we decide to stop and spend
some time with this work. A certain reflexive attitude is required. We need to abandon what
374
Adorno calls the ‘intuitive and naïve approach to art’ which has no use for reflection. This
has been also pointed out by Bakhtin, who notes that “on the level of habitual thinking, the
reality matched against art is already aesthetised” and that “very often when accusing modern
art for its break with reality, we match against it the reality of the old ‘classical’ art, seeing in
375
it a sort of neutral reality.” To overcome this is not easy, and this text has suggested a
process whereby the viewer ‘builds up’ his/her approach. The viewer has to become involved
with the work within the context of an act of communication. S/he needs to be an ‘educated’
subject, conversant with the story of art, or even more so a polymath cognisant of what has
been said about this story; s/he needs to be concerned and to reflect on what is seen, to be a
thinker; s/he needs to engage with the work as a ‘starker dasein’ of a rising consciousness,
which remains forever uneasy, finally to settle for a tentative re-making of the work, as a
possible experience of what it can re-present. These ‘steps’ in our way of seeing are difficult
to determine with any degree of precision (for who and when can one qualify as ‘educated’ or
as a ‘thinker’, or what is exactly one’s ‘consciousness’?). Indeed, in the concrete it is
impossible to define them as they also involve a host of psychological factors and issues
relating to the actual ‘moment’ of perception of each individual viewer. To be sure, these are
limitations arising in any theory of perception. But in their generality, these ‘steps’ in the
approach of any individual partaking of ‘western’ culture, are equally part and parcel of ‘our’
cultural baggage, hovering somewhere near our general and unclear notions of what art is and
does.
It is interesting, however, that once stated in the terms suggested above, i.e. leading to the
starker dasein of rising consciousness, they tend to make us uneasy. For they seem to lead us
uncomfortably far from our cosy common sense. So, we tend to discredit these ideas as, in the
final analysis, too undemocratic or too aristocratic. Hence, most of the issues remain purely
academic. But it is thus that we arrive at a situation where scholars in all earnestness engaged
in research of the artist’s work may not resist the temptation to crack a joke with no ill intent
(in the same way that proven anti-racist whites or gentiles may say a few jokes among
themselves about Blacks or Jews), a joke about ‘such’ art with the question: But why do we
still look at it?
The point is taken, we can laugh or giggle. Indeed why on earth do we? And having said that,
we can go on with our research and write volumes about ‘art and revolution’ or ‘art in
revolution’ or what have you.

373
H.R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Literary Reception, University of Minnesota Press, 1982
374
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 1
375
M. Bakhtin, Problems of Literature and Aesthetics (Voprosi Literaturi I Estetiki) [Greek Translation]. Plethron Publishers,
Athens 1980, p. 51

108
The giggle implies the deeper question ‘how can we tell whether this is art?’ Is this as much
as art can give at that particular time? Is this among the master-pieces, the capolavori, the
peak of artistic labour of its era? How can we differentiate it from mere caprice or even
hackwork? The question already contains the answer: We can never be sure.
Thus, this work destabilises us right from the start, placing a doubt over what is invariably
taken for granted when we talk about art, its origin, function and the rest. Supposing, by
positing this uncertainty as a starting point, a Yes/No type of response to the question, we
have tried to investigate it by focusing, as much as this is possible, solely on the work and its
immediate context. Allowing for the ‘No’ to stand as a justifiable answer we have tried to
keep hold of the ‘Yes’, and demonstrated, it is hoped, that this work may provoke a wealth of
propositions put forward in our contemporary western culture concerning art, society,
communication and the perception of the subject and our world. It can also point to a wealth
of possible connections with later and current trends and undercurrents in art and theory that
would require several theses to tackle, from conceptual art, to installations, to the current
‘overcoming of all art systems’ and more. And as such it may be seen to suggest an
‘impossible’ position we nonetheless occupy in our contemporary world, beyond origins and
progress.
The investigation started with what is present before us or ‘at hand’, i.e. the object, then
traversed a historical cultural context to return to the facticity of the object once more. This
trajectory may help in showing that there is a need for a different, more reflective attitude,
less ready to move on to generalisations and conceptualisations, more open to ‘tentative’
suggestions, and less inclined to fit artistic production into systems, or individual works into
logically sequenced ‘careers’.
Granted, these ‘careers’ were loaded with historical import, as the artists of the Russian avant-
garde were caught up in the actual revolution in that country, with ramifications throughout
the world.
Thus, the historiography of the Russian avant-garde – due also to a number of factors
connected mainly with socio-cultural ‘revolutionary’ events in the late 1960s and early 1970s
– remained for a long time dominated not so much by an interest in the internal structure of
works produced immediately before and after the October Revolution in Russia, as it was by a
discussion on the utopian/ modernist project in its generality. What was debated in connection
with the Russian avant-garde was primarily the theme of ‘Art in Revolution’ – as exemplified
in the Hayward Gallery Exhibition in London, in 1971. The glorification of Tatlin, at this
exhibition, seemed to establish a notion of continuity in his work, where the ‘painterly reliefs’
were seen simply as preparatory steps leading to the extreme radicalisation of ‘production art’
in the early 1920s. Tatlin’s work, perhaps more so than that of any other Russian avant-garde
artists of the time, has been viewed mostly in its externality, and scholarship has found it
difficult to shift the focus – as even ambitious major works on the period, such as Christina
Lodder’s Russian Constructivism or Marjorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment, do not seem to
avoid the ‘developmental’ logic, the ultimate reduction to a somewhat ill-defined
‘revolutionism’ of the artworks’ function. The ‘watershed’ of 1914 is not taken up too
seriously, nor are the implications of Tatlin’s post-factum justification of the work produced
in that year investigated.
Thus thirty years on, and after the collapse of the last remnants of misguided revolution that
376
‘wasted its poets’ , we can look nostalgically back in time and the ‘high priest’ of
revolutionary art may now be metamorphosed assuming a different persona, that of the
tragically doomed perpetrator of hubris, designing a mythical tower and building a flying-
machine. ‘Inevitably’ the grand symbols of Babel and Icarus, as already mentioned, spring to
mind. This form of Tatlin wrought of the materials of his art, follows the line of the
‘Constructivists in inverted commas’, and treats him ‘in an abstract fashion as a formal
problem’.
However, a more ‘concerned’ look at the actual ‘handling of materials’ has shown that before
reaching the rubrics of ‘revolution’ and ‘tragic fall’, we encounter on the way a wealth of

376
see R. Jakobson, O pokoleni rasstrativshem svoikh; smert Vladimira Mayakovskogo, Berlin 1931

109
possible and contradictory suggestions, that may re-engender interest in what happens on the
way, and perhaps by the way, in the process of the making of a concrete work of art at a
specific historical conjuncture, which one would have thought is a conjuncture that still very
much concerns us. The issues raised by the avant-garde (such as those of the autonomy of the
work of art, of the work of art that needs a reflective approach, the work of art that contributes
to the development of a counter-culture and the like) are not treated abstractly, with the
artwork serving as illustration in the discussion, but inversely an attempt is made to find out
how they are raised in the actual artwork, if they are, with the discussion serving as
illustration of what the artwork ‘gives’.
And what it has given us in terms of the ‘art in revolution’ motif is that the work of 1914, and
in particular the Collation of Materials, should be seen as going to a great extent against the
main thrust of such a motif.
This in turn arose from the concrete investigation of indeterminacy traced first in the actual
work and the articulation of its materials, and then in comparison to other artworks, bringing
forth the sense of the ‘border’ or ‘in-between’ with regard to the position of the work. It was
this position that formed the basis for a discussion with regard to theories relating to the
function of signs, which brought up the more general issues of the reflective attitude, of
avant-gardism as counter culture and the problem of the autonomous work of art. This
discussion led to a tentative conclusion that the Collation of Materials could be taken to be a
singular case, if seen within the context of the specific ‘moment’ of its production, and not
necessarily as a link in the chain of the artist’s career. A singular case ‘condensing’ very
intensely a number of features of avant-gardism, revolutionary in some respects and primarily
in their dialectical ‘negativity’, but before they became confused with the ‘motif’ of political
revolution.
What is ‘revolutionary’ here is, perhaps, the destabilisation of all that is ‘given’ through
tradition, and the positing of a need for a re-appraisal of man’s position in a newly emerging
world, which we are still struggling to come to terms with.
This is not an easy struggle, and at the moment we are not faring very well, it seems. As
revolution has faded away anyway, while ‘ideology’ is fast reasserting itself in different
guises, and art is desperately, and recklessly, struggling for its autonomy to the point of
abandoning all systems, but at the same time dispersing into the cultural market-place, this
brief candle of Tatlin’s may suggest a useful legacy that could perhaps rekindle interest in
some lost causes.

110
BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Ades D, Cox N, Hopkins D, Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London 1999

2. Ades D, Dada-Constructivism, Annely Juda Fine Art, London 1984
3. Adorno TW, Aesthetic Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1986
4. Agamben G, The Man without Content, Stanford UP 1994
5. Andersen T & Grigorieva Ks (eds.), Art et poésie russes, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
1979
6. Andersen T, Vladimir Tatlin, Moderna Museet (exhibition Catalogue), Stockholm 1968
7. Andreyev N, Studies in Muscovy; Western Influence and Byzantine Inheritance, Variorum
Reprints, London 1970 (XIII)
8. Arnheim R, Art and Visual Perception; A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of
California Press, 1974
9. Bakhtin M, Problems of Literature and Aesthetics (Voprosi Literaturi I Estetiki) [Greek
Translation]. Plethron Publishers, Athens 1980
10. Balmont K, An Elementary Statement about Symbolist Poetry (1900) (in R.E. Petersen (ed);
1986)
11. Bann S (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism; Documents of 20th century Art, London 1974
12. Bann S, Abstract Art – a Language?, Towards a New Art, Background to Abstract Art, Tate
Gallery, London 1980
13. Bann S & Bowlt JE (eds.), Russian Formalism; a collection of articles in translation,
Edinburgh 1973
14. Baran H, Xlebnikov’s Poetic Logic and Poetic Illogic, (in A. Nilsson; 1986)
15. Barron S & Tuchman M (eds.) The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930 Exhibition Catalogue,
County Museum of Art Los Angeles, MIT Press 1980
16. Barnard L, The Theology of Images, in A. Brier and J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm, Papers
given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham,
March 1975,
17. Barooshian V, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930; a Study in Avant-Garde, Mouton, The
Hague 1974
18. Barthes R, L’obvie et l’obtus, Essais Critiques III, Seuil, Paris 1982
19. Beaujour E, Zaum, in Dada/Surrealism No. 2 1972
20. Beckett S, Bruno… Dante, Vico… Joyce, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress, Faber and Faber, London 1929, p. 14
21. Bely A, Symbolism and Contemporary Russian Culture (in R.E. Petersen; 1986)
22. Bely A, The Forms of Art, in A. Bely, The Dramatic Symphony & The Forms of Art,
Polygon, Edinburgh 1986
23. Benjamin W, Moscow Diaries, Harvard University Press, 1986 (Gary Smith ed.)
24. Benjamin W, The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, Fontana, London 1973 (Hannah
Arendt ed.)
25. Benjamin W, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, Fontana, London 1973
(Hannah Arendt ed.)
26. Bennett T, Formalism and Marxism, Methuen, London 1986
27. Berger J, The Moment of Cubism, in the Look of Things, Penguin, London 1971
28. Bergson H, La pensée et le mouvant, Paris 1934
29. Bergson H, Time and Free Will, Allen and Unwin, London 1959
30. Berman M, All that is Solid Melts into Air, The Experience of Modernity, Verso, London
1985
31. Billington JH, The Icon and The Axe; An Interpretative History of Russian Culture,
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1966

111
32. Birnholz A.C., Forms, angles, and corners: on meaning in Russian avant-garde art, Arts
Magazine LI/6 (Feb. 1977), pp. 101-108
33. Bloch E, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, MIT Press 1988
34. Bloch E, Experimentum Mundi, Payot, Paris 1981
35. Blok A, On the Present Status of Russian Symbolism (in RE Petersen; 1986)
36. Bois Y-A, Kahnvweiler’s Lesson, Representations, Spring 1987
37. Bois Y-A, The Semiology of Cubism. In Picasso and Braque: A Symposium. Museum of
Modern Art. NY 1992
38. Bowlt JE (ed), Russian Art of the Avant Garde, Thames an Hudson, London, 1988
39. Bowlt JE, Un Voyage dans l’espace: l’ oeuvre de Vladimir Tatlin, in Cahiers du Musée d’Art
Moderne, Paris, 1979, no 2, pp. 216-227
40. Bowlt JE, H2SO4: Dada in Russia, in S.C. Foster (ed), Dada/Dimensions, Michigan 1985
41. Brown EJ, Introduction to G. Kern (ed.-trnsl), Velimir Khlebnikov; Snake Train, Poetry and
Prose; 1976
42. Bürger P, Theory of the Avant Garde, Manchester University Press, 1984
43. Burke E, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
Facsimile edition, Scholar Press, Menston, England, 1970
44. Carrick N, Daniil Kharms; Theologian of the Absurd, Birmingham Slavonic Studies No. 28:
1998
45. Carrier D, Baudrillard as Philosopher, or the End of Abstract Painting, Arts Magazine, Vol. 63
No 1, 1988
46. Chalk M, Missing, Presumed Destroyed; Seven Reconstructions by Artist V.E. Tatlin, in
Configuration 1910-1940, Exhibition Catalogue, Annely Juda Fine Art, London 1981.
47. Chardziev N, Poeziya i zhivopis, in K istorii Russkogo Avangarda, Hylea Prints, Stockholm
1976
48. Chipp HB (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, California UP 1968
49. Clair J, Considérations sur l’état des beaux-arts, Gallimard Paris, 1983
50. Compton S, The World Backwards; Futurist Books 1912-1916, British Museum London 1986
51. Cooke C, Russian Avant-Garde, Academy Editions, London 1995
52. Cooke R, Velimir Khlebnikov a Critical Study, Cambridge UP, 1987
53. Cornford FM, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, Routledge, London 1970
54. Cox N, Cubism, Phaidon, London 2000
55. Cranshaw RD, Cubism 1910-12; The Limits of Discourse, Art History, Vol. 8, No 4, Dec.
1985
56. Crowther P, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Oxford University Press, 1993
57. Crowther P, The Postmodern Sublime, in The Contemporary Sublime, Art and Design No 4
1995, Academy Editions, London
58. Culler J, Saussure, Fontana, London 1976
59. Deleuze G and Guattari F, Anti-Oedipus, Athlone, London 1985
60. de Man P, Semiology and Rhetoric, in J.V. Harari, Textual Strategies, Methuen, London 1980
61. Derrida J, La vérité en peinture, Flammarion, Paris 1978
62. Derrida J, L’écriture et la différence, Flammarion, Paris 1979
63. Derrida J, Speech and Phenomena, and other essays on Husserl’s theory of Signs,
Northwestern UP, Evaston 1973
64. Derrida J, The Supplement of the Copula, (in J.V. Harari (ed.): 1980)
65. Derrida J, White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy (in Margins of Philosophy),
Harvester Press 1982
66. Douglas C, The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism, Art Journal, New York, 1975, Spring,
vol. 34/4 pp 229-239
67. Douglas C (ed) Schmidt P (trnsl), Velimir Khlebnikov; The King of Time, Harvard 1985

112
68. Eagle H, Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism, in A. Lawton (ed.), Russian
Futurism through its Manifestos, Cornell UP, 1988
69. Eckerman, Conversations with Geoethe, Everyman, London 1935
70. Eco U, The Open Work (French translation) L’ oeuvre ouverte, Seuil, Paris 1965
71. Elderfield J, Kurt Schwitters, London 1985
72. Elsworth J, Introduction to A. Bely, The Forms of Art, Polygon, Edinburgh 1986
73. Elsworth J (ed), The Silver Age of Russian Literature, Selected papers from the Fourth World
Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate 1990, St. Martin’s Press,
Macmillan, London 1992
74. Erlich V, Russian Formalism; History-Doctrine, The Hague 1955
75. Fernie E, Art History and its Methods, Phaidon, London 1999
76. Foucault M, Birth of a Clinic, Tavistock, London 1973
77. Frangopoulos M (ed. trnsl. intro.), Zaum; Khlebnikov’s Poetry, Manifestoes and Visions,
Hestia, Athens 1995
78. Frank I (ed.), The Theory of Decorative Art; An Anthology of European and American
Writings, 1750-1940, Yale University Press, 2000
79. Frankfort H, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, Pelican London 1970
80. Fer B, Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 12 No 1,
1989
81. Fry E, Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity, Art Journal. 47;4, 1988, pp. 296-306
82. Gadamer H-G, Hegel’s Dialectic, Yale University Press, 1976
83. Gibian G (ed), Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, The Man with the Black Coat;
Russian Literature of the Absurd, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1997
84. Gibian G & Tjalsma HW (eds.), Russian Modernism, Culture and the Avant Grade 1900-
1930, Cornell UP, 1976
85. Gilot F and Lake C, Life with Picasso, McGraw Hill, New York 1961
86. Golding J, Cubism; A History and an Analysis 1907-1914, Faber & Faber, London 1988
87. Golding J, The Black Square
88. Gombrich EH, Art and Illusion, Phaidon, London, 1977
89. Grabar A, The Message of Byzantine Art, 9th Council of Europe Exhibition, Catalogue,
Athens 1964 (in Greek and French)
90. Gray C, The Russian Experiment in Art. Thames and Hudson, London 1986
91. Gray C, Futurism-Suprematism-Constructivism, Soviet Survey No 1,1959 pp. 32-39
92. Gray C (curator), Art in Revolution (Exhibition Caralogue), Hayward Gallery, London 26
Feb. – 18 Apr. 1971
93. Green C, Cubism and the Possibility of Abstract Art, in Towards a New Art, Background to
Abstract Art, Tate Gallery, London 1980
94. Greenberg C, Collage, Art and Culture, Beacon Press Boston, 1961
95. Grygar M, Remarques sur la dénomination poétique chez Khlebnikov, Poetic International
Review for the Theory of Literature, IV [TA Van Dijk (ed.)] The Hague 1973.
96. Habermas J, Legitimation Crisis, Heinemann, London 1976
97. Hackett CA, Rimbaud; A Critical Introduction, Cambridge UP 1981
98. Hadjidakis M, O Kritikos Zographos Theophanes (The Cretan Painter Theophanes; The
Frescoes at the Monastery of Stavronikita), Publication of the Stavronikita Monastery, Mount
Athos, 1986
99. Hare R, The Art and Artists of Russia, Methuen, London 1965
100. Hamilton GH, The Art and Architecture of Russia, Penguin, London 1954
101. Hamilton GH, Sculpture and Painting in Europe 1880-1940, Penguin, London 1982
102. Hawkes T, Structuralism and Semiotics, Methuen, London 1985
103. Hegel GWFH, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Penguin; London 1993
104. Hegel GWFH, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Allen & Unwin, London 1966

113
105. Heidegger M, Building Dwelling Thinking, Harper and Row, New York 1977
106. Heidegger M, Early Greek Thinking, Harper and Row, New York 1986
107. Heidegger M, The Origin of the Work of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2002
108. Heidegger M, Das Ding, in Vorträge un Aufsätze, Tübingen 1954
109. Heisenberg W, Physics and Philosophy [1959], Penguin, London 2000
110. Herbert RL, (ed.) Modern Artists on Art, New Jersey 1964
111. Humphries R, Kurt Schwitters, an Introduction, in Kurt Schwitters (Catalogue Exhibition)
Tate Gallery, London 6 Nov. 1985–5 Jan. 1986
112. Husserl E, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern
UP, Evaston 1970
113. Husserl E, Experience and Judgment; Investigations in a Genealogy of Morals, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London 1973
114. Innis RE (ed.), Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, Harper Collins, New York1986
115. Ivanov V., The Precepts of Symbolism (in RE Petersen; 1986)
116. Ivask G, Russian Modernist Poets and the Mystic Sectarians (in G Gibian and HW Tjalsma;
1976)
117. Iversen M, Saussure vs, Peirce, in Rees AL & Borzello F (eds), New Art History, Camden
Press, London 1986
118. Jakobson R, Huit questions de poétique, Seuil, Paris, 1977
119. Jakobson R, Linguistics and Poetics, in T. Seabok (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 1960
pp. 350-377.
120. Jakobson R, Noveisaja Russkaja Poesija, Typografija Politika, Prague 1921
121. Janecek G, A Zaum Classification, Canadian-American Slavic Studies XX, No 1-2, 1986
122. Janecek G, The Look of Russian Literature; Avant-Garde Experiments 1900-1930, Princeton
UP, 1984
123. Jauss HR, Towards an Aesthetic of Literary Reception, University of Minnesota Press, 1982
124. Kahnweiler DH, The Sculptures of Picasso, London 1949
125. Kandinsky W, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York 1947
126. Kant I, The Critique of Practical Judgment, Hafner New York 1968
127. Kelly C and Lovell S (eds), Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, Cambridge
University Press 2000
128. Kelly C, Painting and Autobiography, in Kelly C and Lovell S (eds), Russian Literature,
Modernism and the Visual Arts, Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 58-87
129. Kern G (ed.-trns) Velimir Khlebnikov; Snake Train, Poetry and Prose, Ann Arbor, 1976
130. Khlebnikov V, Tvoreniya (Collected Works), Moscow 1986
131. Kirk GS, Heraclitus; The Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge UP, 1958
132. Kirk GS, Raven JE & Schofield M, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge UP 1985
133. Kortyn E, KS Malevich: Pisma k MV Matyushina (KS Malevich: Letters to MV Matyushin),
Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela, Pushkinskogo doma na 1974, Leningrad 1976
134. Krauss R, Re-Presenting Picasso, Art in America, Dec. 1980
135. Krauss R, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge Mass.,
1985
136. Krell DF (ed.), Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, Routledge, London 2004
137. Kristeva J, Language, The unknown; An Initiation into Linguistics, Columbia NY 1989
138. Kristeva J., Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia, New York 1984
139. Kristeva J., What Good are Artists Today?, in Chambert C, Strategies for Survival-Now!; A
Global Perspective on Ethnicity, Body and Breakdown of Artistic Systems, The Swedish Art
Critics Association Press, Lund 1995
140. Lacan J, Ecrits, Routledge, London 1985
141. Lachat P, L’influence de Bergson sur l’évolution de la pensée contemporaine, in Actes du Xe
Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophie de langues françaises, Congrès Bergson, Paris 1959

114
142. Lawton A, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos 1912-1928, Cornell 1988
143. LEF, Zhurnal levogo fronta, iskusstv. Otvetstvennyi, redaktor V.V. Mayakovsky, Nos 1-5,
Moscow 1923-24.
144. Lemaire A, Lacan, Routledge, London 1982
145. Levi-Strauss C, La Pensée Sauvage, Plon, Paris 1962
146. Licht F (curator), Boccioni, Dinamismo di un Cavallo in Corsa e Case, Exhibition Catalogue,
Peggy Guggenheim, Venice 1996
147. Lodder C, Russian Constructivism, Yale University Press, 1987
148. Lönnqvist B, Xlebnikov’s Plays and the Folk-Theater Tradition (in A Nilsson; 1985)
149. Lotman IM & Uspenskii BA, Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture in AD
Nakhimovsky & A Stone-Nakhimovsky (eds), The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History,
Cornell, 1985
150. Lotman Y, Struktura khudozestvenogo teksta, (The structure of the painterly text) Isskustvo,
Moscow 1971
151. Lukacs G, Theory of the Novel, Merlin, London 1971
152. McCully M (ed.), A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences Princeton UP
1981, p.185
153. Majeska GP, Russian Travellers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, 1984
154. Malevich K, Essays on Art 1915-1933 (ed. T. Andersen) London 1967-69 (3 vols)
155. Marcuse H, The Aesthetic Dimension, Macmillan, London 1979
156. Markov V, Russian Futurism; A History, Berkeley & Los Angeles UCP, 1968
157. Markov V, The Longer Poems of Velimir Xlebnikov, Berkeley 1962
158. Marx K, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, Progress Publishers, Moscow
1971
159. Marx K, Theses on Feuerbach, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971
160. Medvedev PN & Bakhtin MM, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship; A Critical
Introduction to Sociological Poetics, Baltimore 1978
161. Mercade V, Le renouveau de l’art pictural russe, Lausanne 1971
162. Merezhovsky D, On the Reasons of the Decline (1892) (in RE Petersen; 1986)
163. Merleau-Ponty M, On the Phenomenology of Language, in Phenomenology, Language and
Sociology; Selected essays (edited by J. O’Neil), Heinemann, London 1974
164. Milner J, Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, Yale University Press, 1986
165. Milner J, Russian Revolutionary Art, London 1979
166. Milner-Galland R, Khlebnikov’s Eye, in Kelly C and Lovell S (eds), Russian Literature,
Modernism and the Visual Arts, Cambridge UP 2000, pp. 197-219
167. Nakhimovsky AD & Stone-Nakhimovsky A, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History,
Cornell, 1985
168. Nakov AB, To be or to act ; The Problem of Content in Non-objective Art, Artforum, XVI/6
(Feb. 1978), pp. 40-45
169. Nakov AB, Abstrait/Concret, art non-objectif russe et polonais, Minuit, Paris 1981
170. Nakov AB, Tatlin’s Dream: Russian Suprematist and Constructivist Art, Fisher Fine Art, 1973
171. Nash J, The Nature of Cubism ; A Study of Conflicting Explanations, Art History, Dec 1980,
vol. 3:4, pp. 435-447
172. Nietzsche F, The Genealogy of Morals, Penguin, London 1986
173. Nietzsche F, Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin, London 1986
174. Nilsson A (ed.), Chlebnikov Symposium, Stockholm 1985
175. Norberg-Schulz C, Genius Loci, Academy Editions, London 1973
176. Onasch K., Russian Icons, Faber and Faber London 1966

115
177. Onasch K, Identity Models of Old Russian Sacred Art, in H. Birnbaum and M.S. Flier (eds.),
Medieval Russian Culture, California Slavic Studies XII, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1980
178. Ouspensky L and Lossky V, The Meaning of Icons, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
Crestwood, New York 1982
179. Panofsky E, History of the Human Proportions, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Penguin,
London 1993
180. Panofsky E, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Zone Books, NY, 2002
181. Perloff M, The Futurist Moment, Avant-garde, avant-guerre and the language of rupture,
Chicago 1988
182. Peterson RE, Russian Symbolism; An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings, Ardis
Ann Arbor, Michigan1986
183. Petrova E (ed.), Malevich; Artist and Theoretician, Flammarion, Paris 1990
184. Plato, Theaetetus, LOEB Harvard University Press, 1976
185. Plato, The Republic, LOEB Harvard University Press, 1971
186. Pomorska K, Russian Formalism and its Poetic Ambience, The Hague 1968
187. Poulantzas N, Political Power and Social Class, NLB, London 1968
188. Punin N, Protiv Kubizma (Against Cubism), Peterburg 1921
189. Rees AL & Borzello F (eds), New Art History, Camden Press, London 1986
190. Richter H, Dada Art and Anti-Art, Thames and Hudson, London 1978
191. Ricoeur P, The Rule of Metaphor, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1986
192. Riegl A, Late Roman Art Industry (1901) (in E. Fernie; 1999)
193. Rilke RM, The Duino Elegies, (Dual Language edition; trnsl., intro. & comm. JB Leishman
and S Spender), Hogarth Press, London 1968.
194. Rowell M, The Cubist Experiment in Russia, in Cubist Drawings 1907-1929 (ex. cat. JC Lee
Gallery), Houston, 1982, pp 63-78
195. Rowell M and Rudenstein AZ (eds.), Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the
George Costakis Collection (Exhibition Catalog) Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York,
1982
196. Rowell M, Vladimir Tatlin; Form/Faktura, October, 7;Winter 1978 pp. 83-108
197. Rowell M and Wye D (eds.), The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 (Exhibition
Catalog), Museum of Modern Art, New York 2002
198. Runciman S, Byzantine Style and Civilisation, London 1975
199. Sarabianov DV, Tatlin’s Painting (in L Zhadova ed, Tatlin; 1988)
200. Sardelis K., Theophanes o Ellēnas, (Theophanes the Greek), Goumas, Athens 1978
201. Schiele E, Prison Diaries, in Comini A, Schiele in Prison, Thames & Hudson, London 1974
202. Seabok T, (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 1960
203. Shklovsky V, A Sentimental Journey, Memoirs 1917-1922, Cornel, Ithaca NY 1970
204. Shklovsky V, Mayakovsky and his Circle, Pluto Press, London 1974
205. Shklovsky V, The Resurrection of the Word (in Bann & Bowlt; 1973)
206. Simmons WS, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square and the Genesis of Suprematism; 1909-1915,
Garland Pub., New York 1981
207. Sircello G, A New Theory of Beauty. Princeton Essays on the Arts, Princeton University
Press, 1975
208. Smith G. (ed.), On Walter Benjamin; Critical Essays and Recollections, MIT 1991
209. Steiner G, After Babel; Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford UP 1998
210. Steiner G, Heidegger, Fontana, London 1982
211. Steiner R, Theosophy (Greek translation) Kedros, Athens1994
212. Strigalev AA, From Painting to the Construction of Matter (in L.A. Zhadova (ed), Tatlin,
Thames and Hudson, London 1988)
213. Talbot-Rice D, Art of the Byzantine Era, Thames and Hudson, London 1986

116
214. Talbot-Rice T, A Concise History of Russian Art, Thames and Hudson, London 1963
215. Tarasov O, Icon and Devotion; Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, Reaktion Books, London
2002
216. Tiedeman R, Dialectics at a Standstill; Approaches to the Passagen-Werk, in G. Smith (ed.),
On Walter Benjamin, MIT 1986
217. Todorov T, Theories du symbole, Seuil, Paris 1977
218. Tolstoy VP (ed.), Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo; oformleniye prazdnevst, (2 vols),
Moscow 1984
219. Uspensky PD, Tertium Organum; the Third Canon of Thought, a Key to the Enigmas of the
World, New York 1970
220. Vroon R, Xlebnikov’s Shorter Poems; A Key to the Coinages, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1983
221. Vzdornov GI, Freski Feoafana Greka v tserkvi Spasa Preobrazheniya v Novgorode (Frescoes
of Theophanes the Greek at the Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour in Novgorod),
Moscow 1976
222. Weidlé W, The Poison of Modernism, (in G Gibian and HW Tjalsma; 1976)
223. Weitzmann K, The Icon – Holy Images, Chatto and Windus, London 1978
224. Wellek R, Russian Formalism (in G Gibian & HW Tjalsma; 1976)
225. Williams RC, Artists in Revolution, Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925, Indiana
1977
226. Zhadova LA, Malevich, Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930, London
1982
227. Zhadova LA (ed), Tatlin, Thames and Hudson, London 1988

117
SUMMARY
So much has been written and said about the art of the heroic phase of Russian avant-garde art
that yet another statement may seem superfluous. However, perhaps more so than most early
twentieth century artistic currents, the Russian avant-garde seems to suffer from a levelling
approach, linking the artists’ endeavours to a broadly and superficially defined
‘revolutionism’, which not only has the effect of blurring the lines of demarcation between
artists and trends within it, as well as of imposing a certain developmental coherence on the
artists’ careers, but also of losing sight of whatever ‘revolutionary content’ there may be
found in their work. For we are led to a tautology: the work was revolutionary because it
happened within a revolutionary age.
But when it comes to the actual works themselves that were produced in the earlier stages, i.e.
during the emergence of the Russian avant-garde, then the discussion seems to be confined
within the formal analysis, which does not offer a lot to go by. For, if seen separately and not
as ‘preparatory’ steps for some grander project, they appear incomprehensible, forever
enclosed in a kind of ‘self-reference’ that bemuses the viewer, leading to the aporia: ‘why do
we still look at them?’
The thesis focuses on a specific work of the early Russian avant-garde, namely Tatlin’s
Collation of Materials of 1914, a work that defies interpretation and appears as the epitome of
‘self-referentiality’. As the work is ‘presumed lost or destroyed’ and only photographs,
offering two views, remain, a reconstruction is here submitted to support the investigation.
The discussion of this work and its context attempts to situate it within the history of avant-
garde art in a way that questions its usual classification as a preliminary exploration that
prepares the way for Tatlin’s more famous constructivist work after the Russian revolution of
1917. Rather, the work is seen as a culmination of the handling of material forms in its own
right, suggesting an ‘artistic revolution’ that the linking with the political events after 1917
only undermined and negated.
The text, discursive in style, is divided into four parts and follows a processional logic. Part
One starts, by way of introduction, with a detailed description of the work on the basis of the
extant photographs, then presents it as a reconstructed object and finally engages with the
questions it may give rise to in connection with its non-representational nature. These
questions bring about the need to dwell on the cultural context of the period in which the
work was produced, and thus Part Two addresses, in general terms, the overall ‘spirit of the
age’ and, in more detail, the Russian Futurist milieu and Tatlin’s career immediately prior to
the production of the Collation. Part three engages with a discussion of the work in relation to
the broad contemporary themes of non-representational art, namely traditional iconography
(Byzantine heritage), synthetic cubism (Picasso), suprematism (Malevich) and the ready-
made (Duchamp), suggesting that it may contain elements of all the above but at the same
time be quite unlike any of these, as emerging in a constant ambivalence.
This theme of ambivalence is then investigated in the final section or Part Four, where
successive readings are proposed, treating it as a record of the age, a thing, a signal, a sign
and an act, suggesting a more profound engagement of the viewer in successive stages,
(through the standpoint of a critique) leading to the limit of a ‘contemplative’ approach which
cannot resolve the issue unless it breaks through to the actual ‘making’ of the work.
A final ‘translation’ of the work is offered, suggesting that it belies the grand attempts to
ground the art work within a meaningful ‘original essence’ of being, and that it is trivialized if
seen as a precursor of social revolution. If anything, the specific work in question appears as
an act indicating a transitory, imperfect mere existence in the world in this era of ours. This
may carry some import as an interesting reminder of lost causes.

118
LIST OF ILLUSTRATION PLATES

Plate 1
Vladimir Tatlin,, Collation of Materials, 1914 (side view)
Plate 2
Vladimir Tatlin, Bottle 1913
Plate 3
Pablo Picasso, Bouteille de Vieux Marc, 1913
Plate 4
Georges Braque,Fruit-bowl, Bottle and Glasses, 1912
Plate 5
Juan Gris, Guitar, Glasses and Bottle, 1914
Plate 6
Vladimir Tatlin, Fisherman, 1913
Plate 7
Vladimir Tatlin Compositional Analysis, 1913
Plate 8
Vladimir Tatlin, Collation of Materials, 1914 (front view)
Plate 9
Vladimir Tatlin, Painterly Reliefs, 1913-14
Presented at the ‘First Exhibition of Reliefs’[pervaya vistavka reliefov]
(from the pamphlet issued for the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915)
Plate 10
Pablo Picasso, Bouteille et Guitare, 1913
Plate 11
Mikhail Larionov, Portrait of V.E. Tatlin, 1911-12
Plate 12
Mikhail Larionov, Portrait of Velimir Khlebnikov, 1909
Plate 13
Mikhail Larionov, Portrait of David Burliuk, 1909
Photographs of V. Khlebnikov & D. Burliuk
Plate 14
Natalia Goncharova, The Evangelists, 1911
Plate 15
Natalia Goncharova, Vision – From the ‘War’ Cycle, 1914
Plate 16
David Burliuk, Portrait of Benedikt Livshits, 1911
Plate 17
Vladimir Tatlin, Drawing for the Union of Youth production of ‘The Play about the Tsar Maximilian
and his Arrogant Son Adolf’, 1911 (Dir. M. Bonch-Tomashevsky)
Plate 18
Vladimir Tatlin, Illustration to a poem by Khlebnikov in Worldbackwards, 1912
Plate 19
Vladimir Tatlin, Costume Designs for Glinka’s opera ‘Ivan Susanin’, 1913
Plate 20
Pablo Picasso, Dryad (Nude in a Forest), 1908
Plate 21
Vladimir Tatlin, Self-Portrait as Sailor, 1912
Plate 22
Vladimir Tatlin, Seated Nude, 1912
Plate 23
Vladimir Tatlin. Reclining Nude, 1913
Plate 24
Vladimir Tatlin, Corner-Counter Relief, 1914-15 [cat. No. 132]
Plate 25
Vladimir Tatlin Monument to the Third International, 1919 (Drawing)
Plate 26
Vladimir Tatlin, Sailor on Ship, 1929 (Book Illustration)
Plate 27
Vladimir Tatlin Corner-Counter Relief, 1914-15 [cat. No. 133]

119
Plate 28
Vladimir Tatlin Counter Relief, 1915
Plate 29
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International Model (Detail) 1920
Plate 30
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International Drawing (Detail), 1920
Plate 31
Vladimir Virgin, Constantinople, c. 1120 (Transported to Russia)
Plate 32
The ‘Three Circles” Technique from the Painter’s Manual of Mount Athos (After Erwin Panofsky)
Plate 33
Theophanes the Greek The Hospitality of Abraham (Detail)
Church of the Transfiguration of The Saviour, Novgorod, c. 1375
Plate 34
Theophanes the Greek, Angel, c. 1375
Plate 35
Theophanes the Greek, Angel, c. 1375
Plate 36
Theophanes the Greek, Stylite, c. 1375
Plate 37
Theophanes the Greek, The Righteous Adam, c. 1375
Plate 38
Inverted Perspective (AfterRudolf Arnheim)
Plate 39
Andrei Rublev, The Holy Trinity, c. 1420
Plate 40
Photograph of Tatlin Reconstruction from below left
Plate 41
Photograph of Tatlin Reconstruction from below centre
Plate 42
Vladimir Tatlin, Counter Relief, date unknown, (probably after 1915)
Plate 43
Kasimir Malevich, The Knife-Grinder, 1913
Plate 44
Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915
Plate 45
0.10 Exhibition, Presentation of the works by Kasimir Malevich, 1915
Plate 46
Kasimir Malevich, Stage Designs (Backloth) for the production of the playVictory over the Sun, 1913
Plate 47
Georges Braque, Paper and cardboard construction Photographed after 18 February1914
Plate 48
Alexander Archipenko, Medrano, 1913-14
Plate 49
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Bottle in Space, 1913
Plate 50
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Speeding Horse & Houses, 1914
Plate 51
Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1912
Plate 52
Francis Picabia, Portrait of a Young American Girlin the state of nudity, 1915
Plate 53
Marcel Duchamp Chocolate Grinder II, 1914
Plate 54
Illustration from the Moving Sculpture Series Reproduced in Robert Coady’s review The Soil, No 2,
January 1917
Plate 55
George Grosz and John Heartfield with poster at the Dada Fair Berlin, 1920
Plate 56
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

120
Plate 57
Hans Arp, Drawing, 1917
Plate 58
Hans Arp, Configuration, 1928
Plate 59
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 32 A. D as Kirschbild, 1921
Plate 60
Vladimir Tatlin, Study for Board No. 1 Staro-Basman, 1917
Plate 61
Vladimir Tatlin Composition (The Month of May), 1916
Plate 62
Vladimir Tatlin, Painterly Relief, 1913-14
Plate 63
Photograph of Vladimir Tatlin wearing the coat he designed for Leningrad Clothes, 1923-24
in front of stove designed by the artist for economy of fuel
Plate 64
Vladimir Tatlin, Chair, c. 1927(Bentwood with moulded seat)
Plate 65
Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ, 1919
Plate 66
Vladimir Tatlin, Letatlin, 1929-1932
Plate 67
Vladimir Tatlin , Letatlin (Diagram of pilot’s position) c. 1932
Plate 68
Martyn Chalk, Reconstruction of Tatlin’s Collation of Materials, 1981
Plate 69
C. Cross, J. Dixon, S. Rindl, P. Watson and C. Woodward,
Reconstruction of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1971
Plate 70
Photograph of May Day Parade, Leningrad, 1925
Plate 71
Varvara Stepanova, Textile Design, 1924
Plate 72
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Space and Furniture Design for a Workers’ Club, Exhibited at the Paris
Exhibition of Decorative Arts, 1925
Plate 73
Photograph from the performance of Khlebnikov’s play Zangezi, Petrograd, 9 May 1923
Designed and produced by V. Tatlin

121
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Photograph 1. Reconstruction side view

Photograph 2. Reconstruction front view
Photograph 3. Reconstruction side view (lower angle)
Photograph 4. Reconstruction seen from the left
Photograph 5. Reconstruction detail
Photograph 6. Reconstruction detail
Photograph 7. Reconstruction seen from below right
Photograph 8. The finishing touch
Photograph 9. The final model (a)
Photograph 10. The final model (b)
Photograph 11. Rough working model, Front View
Photograph 12. Rough working model, Side View
Photograph 13. First mock-up
Photograph 14. The ‘triangle’ facing the sun

LIST OF DRAWINGS

Drawing 1. Presentation of the calculation of the distance from the tip of the ‘triangle’ to the
surface (pencil drawing)
Drawing 2. Rough presentation of the method of calculation of the distance from the tip of the
‘triangle’ to the surface (on photographic reproductions of the artwork)
Drawing 3. AutoCad 2000 presentation of the calculation of the size of the triangle in Tatlin’s
Collation of Materials and the distance from its tip to the surface
Drawing 4. Actual size of triangular sheet of metal to be reconstructed, and measurement of
inclination from surface.

122
Plate 1
Vladimir Tatlin
Collation of Materials 1914
(front view)

123
Plate 2 Plate 3
Vladimir Tatlin Pablo Picasso
Bottle 1913 Bouteille de Vieux Marc, 1913

Plate 4 Plate 5
Georges Braque Juan Gris
Fruit-bowl, Bottle and Glasses, 1912 Guitar, Glasses and Bottle 1914

124
Plate 6 Plate 7
Vladimir Tatlin Vladimir Tatlin
Fisherman 1913 Compositional Analysis, 1913

Plate 8
Vladimir Tatlin
Collation of Materials 1914
(side view)

125
Plate 9
Vladimir Tatlin
Painterly Reliefs, 1913-14
Presented at the ‘First Exhibition of Reliefs’[pervaya vistavka reliefov]
(from the pamphlet issued for the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915)

Plate 10
Pablo Picasso
Bouteille et Guitar, 1913

126
 Plate 11
Mikhail Larionov
Portrait of V.E. Tatlin, 1911-12

Plate 12 Plate 13
Mikhail Larionov Mikhail Larionov
Portrait of Velimir Khlebnikov,1909 Portrait of David Burliuk, 1909

Photograph of Photograph of
V. Khlebnikov D. Burliuk

127
Plate 14
Natalia Goncharova
The Evangelists 1911

Plate 15
Natalia Goncharova
Vision – From the ‘War’ Cycle, 1914

128
Plate 16
David Burliuk
Portrait of Benedikt Livshits, 1911

129
Plate 17
Vladimir Tatlin
Drawing for the Union of Youth production
of ‘The Play about the Tsar Maximilian and his
Arrogant Son Adolf’,1911
(Dir. M. Bonch-Tomashevsky)

130
 Plate 18
Vladimir Tatlin
Illustration to a poem by Khlebnikov
in Worldbackwards, 1912

Plate 19
Vladimir Tatlin
Costume Designs
For Glinka’s opera ‘Ivan Susanin’, 1913

131
Plate 20
Pablo Picasso
Dryad (Nude in a Forest), 1908

132
Plate 21
Vladimir Tatlin
Self-Portrait as Sailor, 1912

Plate 22
Vladimir Tatlin
Seated Nude, 1912

Plate23
Vladimir Tatlin
Reclining Nude

133
Plate 24
Vladimir Tatlin
Corner-Counter Relief, 1914-15
[cat. No. 132]

134
Plate 25 Plate 26
Vladimir Tatlin Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International, 1919 Sailor on Ship 1929
(Drawing) (Book Illustration)

135
Plate 27 Plate 28
Vladimir Tatlin Vladimir Tatlin
Corner-Counter Relief, 1914-15 Counter Relief, 1915
[cat. No. 133]

136
 Plate 29
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International
Model
(Detail)

Plate 30
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International
Drawing
(Detail)

137
Plate 31
Vladimir Virgin
Constantinople, c. 1120 (Transported to Russia)

Plate 32
The ‘Three Circles” Technique
from the Painter’s Manual of Mount Athos
(After Erwin Panofsky)

138
Plate 33 Detail of Plate 23
Theophanes the Greek
The Hospitality of Abraham (Detail)
Church of the Transfiguration of
The Saviour, Novgorod c. 1375

Plate 34 Plate 35 Detail of Plate 21

Theophanes the Greek Theophanes the Greek
Angel Angel

Plate 36 Plate 37 Detail of Plate 22

Theophanes the Greek Theophanes the Greek
Stylite The Righteous Adam

139
Plate 38
Inverted Perspective (AfterRudolf Arnheim)

Plate 39
Andrei Rublev
The Holy Trinity, c. 1420

140
Plate 40 Plate 41
Photograph of Reconstruction Photograph of Reconstruction
from below left from below centre

Plate 42
Vladimir Tatlin
Counter Relief, date unknown
(probably after 1915)

141
Plate 43
Kasimir Malevich
The Knife-Grinder

Plate 44
Kasimir Malevich
Black Square, 1915

Plate 45
0.10 Exhibition, Presentation of the works by Kasimir Malevich, 1915

142
Plate 46
Kasimir Malevich
Stage Designs (Backloth) for the production of the play
Victory over the Sun, 1913

143
Plate 47
Georges Braque
Paper and cardboard construction
Photographed after 18 February1914

144
Plate 48
Alexander Archipenko
Medrano, 1913-14

145
 Plate 49
Umberto Boccioni
Dynamism of a Bottle in Space, 1913

Plate 50
Umberto Boccioni
Dynamism of a Speeding Horse & Houses, 1914

146
Plate 51
Pablo Picasso
Violin, 1912

147
Plate 52 Plate 53
Francis Picabia Marcel Duchamp
Portrait of a Young American Girl Chocolate Grinder II, 1914
in the state of nudity, 1915

148
Plate 54
Illustration from the Moving Sculpture Series
Reproduced in Robert Coady’s review
The Soil, No 2, January 1917

149
 Plate 55
Two Photographs from the Dada Fair, Berlin 1920
Left: Right
George Grosz and John Heartfield Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch

150
Plate 56
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain, 1917

151
 Plate 57
Hans Arp
Drawing, 1917

Plate 58
Hans Arp
Configuration, 1928

152
Plate 59
Kurt Schwitters
Merzbild 32 A. D as Kirschbild, 1921

153
Plate 60 Plate 61
Vladimir Tatlin, Vladimir Tatlin
Study for Board No. 1 Staro-Basman, 1917 Composition (The Month of May), 1916

Plate 62
Vladimir Tatlin
Painterly Relief, 1913-14

154
Plate 63 Plate 64
Photograph of Vladimir Tatlin Vladimir Tatlin
wearing the coat he designed for Chair, c. 1927
Leningrad Clothes, 1923-24 (Bentwood with moulded seat)
in front of stove designed by the artist
for economy of fuel

155
Plate 65
Marcel Duchamp
LHOOQ, 1919

156
Plate 66
Vladimir Tatlin
Letatlin, 1929-1932

Plate 67
Vladimir Tatlin
Letatlin, (Diagram of pilot’s position) c. 1932

157
Plate 68
Martyn Chalk,
Reconstruction of tatlin’s Collation of Materials, 1981

158
Plate 69
C. Cross, J. Dixon, S. Rindl, P. Watson and C. Woodward
Reconstruction of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1971

159
Plate 70
Photograph of May Day Parade, Leningrad 1925

160
Plate 71
Varvara Stepanova
Textile Design, 1924

Plate 72
Aleksandr Rodchenko
Space and Furniture Design for a Workers’ Club
Exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts, 1925

161
Plate 73
Photograph from the performance of Khlebniko’v play Zangezi, Petrograd, 9 May 1923
Designed and produced by V. Tatlin

162
Drawing 1. Presentation of the calculation of the distance from the tip of the ‘triangle’ to the surface
(pencil drawing)

163
 B0 A B

A0

E
E0

V
H0
H1
F0 G0 G
F H
F1

D0
PP

C0 D C

Drawing 2. Rough presentation of the method of calculation of the distance from the tip of the triangle to the surface
165
 Y

DB’=88mm B’ B’E=130mm X
D E

Z Y

B
F
G

C
GG’=90mm

B’
F’
A X
G’ D’ D’B’’=88mm B’’ B’’C’=130 mm C

Drawing 3. AutoCad 2000 presentation of the calculation of the size of the triangle in
Tatlin’s Collation of Materials and the distance from its tip to the surface
167
 Calculation of side lengths
Actual Triangle Size
Angles
A= 74ο 134 131
A
B= 52ο
C= 54ο 90

Side length
AB=13.4cm 98 95
AC=13.1cm
BC=15.9cm

Triangle Height
AH=10.6cm
Calculation of inclination

106
90

B C 55

Drawing 4. Actual size of triangular sheet of metal to be reconstructed, and measurement of inclination from surface.

168
Photograph 1 Photograph 2
Reconstruction side view Reconstruction front view

169
Photograph 3 Photograph 4
Reconstruction side view (lower angle) Reconstruction seen from the left

Photograph 5 Photograph 6
Reconstruction detail Reconstruction detail

Photograph 1
Reconstruction seen from below right

170