I greatly admire the art of Vitaly Komar as well as his collaborations with Alex Melamid. When Vitaly and Anna Halberstadt were visiting with Susan Bee and me last week, our conversation turned toward Russian Futurism, OBERU, and the more contemporary Moscow Conceptualism. It turns out Vitaly went to art school with Dmitri Prigov, whose Soviet Texts was recently published by Ugly Duckling Press. About Prigov's new book, I wrote: "This Prigov cocktail is a knockout: one part Brecht, one part Jarry, one part OBERIU, a twist of bitters; shaken, not stirred. Prigov is the unparalleled debunker of the Soviet unconscious. His conceptual audacity, verbal pyrotechnics, and hilarious political satire have made him one of the premiere innovative poets and parabolists of the postwar generation. Simon Schuchat brings to life, in English, this essential Russian artist."
Vitaly sent me this essay and I am glad to present it here.
1. The Avant-Garde and the Roots of Unofficial Art
The Russian avant-garde’s revolutionary struggle with the traditions of the old culture led to the division of art into ‘official’ and ‘unofficial.’ Prior to World War I, the first avant-garde opposed the academic salon art that was fashionable at the time. After World War II and Stalin’s death, the second avant-garde opposed official Socialist Realism. However, by that time Soviet Russia’s unofficial artists had shed the naïve nihilism of the early 20th century avant-garde. They were aware of the ancient Roman aphorism: “The new is simply what has been well forgotten.” They believed in the value of pluralism, in the gradual evolution of fashion, and certain traits of their art were reminiscent of late modernism.
A selection of books translated into other languages 2000–2021
Announcement circa 2013 of a selected poems in Romanian.
[The dream, shared with many, was of a poetry that could reach across borders and languages, for which translation of course was the primary tool and the translators the ones who made it happen. For me the process began even earlier than the forty twenty-first-century works that I’m highlighting here, my first translated books being Vroege Gedichten (Early poems), translated into Dutch/Flemish by Jan Mysjkin in 1960, and Poemas Gorky (The Gorky poems), translated into Spanish by Sergio Mondragón and Margaret Randall in 1966.
Concurrent with writing Graphology Poems by hand and in type (typewriter and computer fonts), I have “concretized” poems by photographing them “in situ” — i.e. as printed or written out pages set in trees, against flowers, or as scratchings in dirt, as sticks arranged on a firebreak, or photographed by a third party while holding sheets of poems as “protest placards” — and as textual interjections, overlays, and “culture jamming” of preexisting images/texts. I have also, more prevalently, maybe, made “drawings” and “paintings”… in other words, writing as illustration.
[Just published by Mangos de Hacha and Universidad Autónima de Nuevo León in Mexico, the book consists of extended interviews along with poems, essays, correspondence, and performance & visual works, selected and translated from English by Javier Taboada. What follows is the English version of my own preface and opening poem, to give a small sense of what the book is intended to include. (J.R.)]
Vitaly Komar: The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974
I greatly admire the art of Vitaly Komar as well as his collaborations with Alex Melamid. When Vitaly and Anna Halberstadt were visiting with Susan Bee and me last week, our conversation turned toward Russian Futurism, OBERU, and the more contemporary Moscow Conceptualism. It turns out Vitaly went to art school with Dmitri Prigov, whose Soviet Texts was recently published by Ugly Duckling Press. About Prigov's new book, I wrote: "This Prigov cocktail is a knockout: one part Brecht, one part Jarry, one part OBERIU, a twist of bitters; shaken, not stirred. Prigov is the unparalleled debunker of the Soviet unconscious. His conceptual audacity, verbal pyrotechnics, and hilarious political satire have made him one of the premiere innovative poets and parabolists of the postwar generation. Simon Schuchat brings to life, in English, this essential Russian artist."
Vitaly sent me this essay and I am glad to present it here.
1. The Avant-Garde and the Roots of Unofficial Art
The Russian avant-garde’s revolutionary struggle with the traditions of the old culture led to the division of art into ‘official’ and ‘unofficial.’ Prior to World War I, the first avant-garde opposed the academic salon art that was fashionable at the time. After World War II and Stalin’s death, the second avant-garde opposed official Socialist Realism. However, by that time Soviet Russia’s unofficial artists had shed the naïve nihilism of the early 20th century avant-garde. They were aware of the ancient Roman aphorism: “The new is simply what has been well forgotten.” They believed in the value of pluralism, in the gradual evolution of fashion, and certain traits of their art were reminiscent of late modernism.
Jerome Rothenberg
A selection of books translated into other languages 2000–2021
[The dream, shared with many, was of a poetry that could reach across borders and languages, for which translation of course was the primary tool and the translators the ones who made it happen. For me the process began even earlier than the forty twenty-first-century works that I’m highlighting here, my first translated books being Vroege Gedichten (Early poems), translated into Dutch/Flemish by Jan Mysjkin in 1960, and Poemas Gorky (The Gorky poems), translated into Spanish by Sergio Mondragón and Margaret Randall in 1966.
A poem by Tarik Hamdan
Tarik Hamdan, born in 1984, is a Palestinian poet living in Paris.
I translated this poem a year ago for a video from Trimukhi Platform.
'Graphology' drawing poems, by John Kinsella
Concurrent with writing Graphology Poems by hand and in type (typewriter and computer fonts), I have “concretized” poems by photographing them “in situ” — i.e. as printed or written out pages set in trees, against flowers, or as scratchings in dirt, as sticks arranged on a firebreak, or photographed by a third party while holding sheets of poems as “protest placards” — and as textual interjections, overlays, and “culture jamming” of preexisting images/texts. I have also, more prevalently, maybe, made “drawings” and “paintings” … in other words, writing as illustration.
Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada
El libro de las voces (a new book from Mexico)
[Just published by Mangos de Hacha and Universidad Autónima de Nuevo León in Mexico, the book consists of extended interviews along with poems, essays, correspondence, and performance & visual works, selected and translated from English by Javier Taboada. What follows is the English version of my own preface and opening poem, to give a small sense of what the book is intended to include. (J.R.)]