[Avant-garde russe] ─ Alexandr Rodtchenko ─ Alexei Khruchenykh

N'a pas figuré à l'exposition The Russian Avant-Garde Book de New York, Moma, mais le catalogue mentionne tout de même brièvement l'ouvrage p. 46.

G. Janececk, "Kruchenuhk contra Guttenberg", in The Russian Avant-Garde Book , p. 41-49.

Bibliographie de Kruchenykh pour la période caucasienne (1918 et 1922), compilée par le poète lui-même en 1932, n° 37 (en ligne : http://www.raruss.ru/avant-garde/page-rag2/935-kruchenykh-catalogue.html ).

Natalia Ignatova, "Коллаж в книгах русского авангарда", in Антиквариат, предметы искусства и коллекционирования, № 18 (июнь 2004), стр. 54 ["Collage dans des livres de l'avant-garde russe", dans Antiquités, art et objets de collection, n° 18 (juin 2004), p. 54], en ligne : https://antiqueland.ru/articles/1335/

"Dix numéros distincts intitulés Révolte furent publiés sous l’enseigne du "41 degrés" dans le Caucase. Ils ont été imprimés au duplicateur, et certaines pages ont été réalisées sur du papier carbone. Le premier numéro comprenait des œuvres d'A. Khruchenyhk et de V. Khlebnikov, tandis que les suivants contenaient uniquement des textes de Khruchenyhk. Le neuvième numéro, intitulé "Le Bouc américain", est le seul orné d'un collage d'Alexandre Rodchenko. Ce collage est réalisé en papier glacé rouge et complété par des lignes coloriées au crayon, caractéristiques du style de Rodchenko. Tous les collages de cette édition, dont le tirage n’a pas dépassé 10 exemplaires, sont uniques." (Natalia Ignatova, texte original : "Десять отдельных выпусков под названием «Мятеж» были изданы под маркой «41 градус» на Кавказе. Они отпечатаны на гектографе, а часть листов сделана под копировальную бумагу. I выпуск включал произведения А.Кручёных и В.Хлебникова, остальные — тексты Кручёных. IX выпуск под названием Козел-американец» — единственный из всех украшен коллажем работы Александра Родченко. Он выполнен из красной глянцевой бумаги и дополнен характерными для манеры Родченко цветными линиями, сделанными карандашом (илл. 17). Все коллажи в этом издании, тираж которого не превысил 10 экземпляров, различны.").

En janvier 1920, au début de l'année durant laquelle il réalise ce collage, Rodchenko écrit :

"I have about twenty finished sketches for paintings...

I've cut out twenty sheets of Whatman paper the size of the glass; I'll make colored drawings.

I'm thinking of calling the new pieces "Linism."

The surface is dispensed with logically, and to express the greater constructiveness, the architecturality of the composition, the old favorite of paintings— texture—is dispensed with as well.

Work—is a pleasure.

Life-is a torment.

I just want one thing: to work like a machine for one year and do everything that is given to me for my whole life...."

(cité dans Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future. Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, New York, Moma, 2005).

"Kruchenykh's final assault on Gutenberg may have been particularly motivated by economic and physical necessity. The method of production that went into the works that Kruchenykh labeled "Autographic Books (Hectograph)," 1917-2024 must have been dictated in large part by lack of both money and available printing resources. Essentially each was a booklet or chapbook consisting of a small set of pages (typically ten to twenty leaves) produced in various ways not requiring a printing press or lithography. Most often they are hectography, but there is also carbon copy, rubber stamp, typescript, and simple penciled manuscript. The paper used was whatever was at hand, ranging from stationery to lined school-notebook paper and graph paper. In other words, Kruchenykh basically made use of office supplies available to someone working as a draftsman for the Erzrum Railway, as he was at the time. Since hectography could create a goodly number of copies from a single original before the stencil wore out and the copies became too light to be usable, pages produced this way turn up con-stantly. Carbon copies, of course, are limited to five to ten copies at most, the top one of which is the original manuscript and the backmost copies of which are faint and fuzzy to the point of illegibility.

Some of the items have printed covers evidently produced in Tiflis (Tbilisi) by 41° with the help of ll'ia Zdanevich and showing the influence of his typographic styling (Melancholy in a Robe [1919; p. 118], and the series Zamaul [1919; pp. 112, 113], numbered 1-4, and Mutiny [1920], numbered 1-10); but most have covers that are handmade. A complete set of the entire hectographic series has yet to be assembled, but analysis of a number of them has revealed that they have been organized in a unique way. The principle of somewhat haphazard assembly had been established already in Worldbackwards, but here it is taken much farther. In the Gutenberg context, one tends to assume that there is a distinction to be made between a book and a manu-script, that is, a manuscript exists in a single handwritten copy while a book exists in multiple (numerous) identical copies, and one copy of a work with a given title will have the same contents as another. What if a title was merely the rubric for an ad-hoc assemblage of miscellaneous pages from an available stock? What if many different titles contained a similar assemblage of pages from the same stock? What if only a single copy of a given title was made?" (G. Janececk, "Kruchenuhk contra Guttenberg", in Moma, p. 45-45).