1. IMAGE: Verses without words in a cubist costume. Hugo Ball in Cabaret Voltaire.

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1 Cabaret Voltaire, 5th March Dr Alexey Makhrov Russian Cubo-Futurism and parallels to Dada movement. 1. IMAGE: Verses without words in a cubist costume. Hugo Ball in Cabaret Voltaire. In 1916, a group of non-conformist artists and performers, such as Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire. The name of Dada was randomly chosen in a dictionary and was deliberately meaningless (French children used this word to mean 'a horse'). The movement was born out of disgust for the war and the cultural values which, the Dadaists thought, brought Europe to the brink of destruction. The Dadaists were radically anti-art and anti-bourgeois, they abandoned conventional logic and traditional approaches to art. For example, Hugo Ball's phonetic or sound poems defied common sense and operated with sounds which made no meaning. His costume demonstrates that he was influenced by the ideas of the Cubists who in their paintings broke the outlines of the human body into geometric forms. Épater la bourgeoisie or to shock and scandalise the middle-class public was one of the purposes of Dadaist performances. "Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog." Tristan Tzara. From "Lecture on Dada" Many ideas of Dada were prefigured in Russia, for instance, the rejection of the tradition, "liberation" of words in poetry, experiments with sounds and staging provocative performances. POETRY IMAGE: Portrait of the poet Vasilii Kamenskii He was a futurist poet and, appropriately for a Futurist, a pilot (it is suggested that he invented the Russian word for an airplane - samolet). In the portrait, Kamenskii is represented as a saint. Influence of Russian icons (religious images). Rays of light of different colours 1

2 emanate from the poet. Texts are incorporated into the picture. Inscription along the "halo": "King of Poets Fighter-Bard Futurist Vasily Kamensky 1917 Republic Russia". An excerpt from a poem by Vasilii Kamenskii to the right of his head: "On the ocean's wing we'll blow about the earth And fly to the great divide On a tropical island (palm) we drink the wine of nuts. In the cool southern shade of the banana trees a musician a sounder a cockatoo. Wash in the dew of Paradise Dry yourself with the end of a rainbow Or the air [of the Motherland] The soul refreshes And I'd rather not know of earthly Calcutta Bombay Petrograd and [Venice]..." In this poem, Kamenskii experiments with words, creates new ones and defies logic. 3. IMAGES: Photographs of David Burliuk and Vladimir Maiakovksii. The Group "Gileya" was formed ca. 1910: David Burliuk (a prominent figure of Russian avantgarde poetry and painting), Velemir Khlebnikov (innovator and inventor of words), Vladimir Maiakovskii (futurist and later a famous Soviet poet), Vasilii Kamenskii and others. The photographs of Burliuk and Maiakovskii reveal their non-conformism, for example, Burliuk is wearing a waistcoat of bright colours and a wooden spoon in the pocket of his jacket, his face is painted. In 1913 the writer Kornei Chukovskii adopted the term Cubo-Futurists to describe the poetry of Gileya group. Russia was exposed to both French Cubism and Italian Futurism. The Russians travelled and studied in Europe, the works of Cubists, such as Picasso and Braque, were exhibited in Russia. However the members of the group tried to distance themselves from the West and to go back to Russian roots. In that they are different from Dada, which was an international movement. The title of the Gileya group refers to the name given by ancient Greeks to the wild areas populated by the Scythians in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine. 4. Just like the Dadaists a couple of years later, the Russian Cubo-Futurists issued provocative publications, such as a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1913 written by Burliuk, Mayakovskii, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov: "We alone are the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the word. 2

3 The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity." Other scandalous manifestos: Croaked Moon, A Trap for Judges, Secret Vices of the Academicians. The public was both amused and scandalised by the events organised by Cubo- Futurists which often ended in fights and the police was called. 5. IMAGES: Alexei Kruchenykh. Poem Dyr Bul Shchyl. Mikhail Larionov. Portrait of Alexei Kruchenykh Alexey Kruchenykh's zaum poetry. The zaum means beyond the mind, beyond sense, beyond reason. Conventional logic no longer applies. Poetry does not need a specific meaning or content. A higher transrational logic substitutes for the conventional logic, whereas the words, syllables, letters and sounds are liberated from the dictates of the common sense and accepted meanings. Example: Dyr bul shchyl ubeshchur skum vy so bu r l ez (1913) The poem literally makes no sense at all. It is a collection of sounds independent of the task of representing anything. They represent their own reality. This poetry is deliberately unesthetic and disharmonious. It represents a clear parallel to the phonetic poem by Ball. Kruchenykh declared that "there was more nationally Russian in that transrational poem than in all poems by Pushkin put together". 3

4 6. PAINTING IMAGE: Malevich "Englishman in Moscow" (1914). Sdvig (Dislocation) - the accepted conventional order of objects is violated thereby revealing a more intense sensation of reality. Fragmentation, illogical juxtapositions of objects is characteristic for Cubo-Futurist paintings. The linear perspective is abandoned as is the concept of the three-dimensional space. Flatness of painting as a result: small and big objects are combined on the same plane in the foreground. Influence of Russian icons and zaum in the inclusion of texts and the arbitrary scale of objects. The texts written on the canvas: "partial eclipse of the sun" - Russian futurists challenged the sun as a trivial old-fashioned symbol of beauty, "racing club" - advertising, not classical art, was a source of inspiration, it also reflects the idea of speed. Modern society is represented by electric light, but it illogically emanates from a fish. The painting is full of movement which is emphasised by arrows. A spoon is an allusion to "demonstrations" of the Futurists, e.g. Burliuk and Malevich, who walked through Moscow with spoons stuck into the buttonhole. 7. IMAGES: Kazimir Malevich. Sportsman. Design for a costume for "Victory over the Sun" Photograph of Mikhail Matiushin, Alexei Kruchenykh and Kazimir Malevich. The opera The Victory over the Sun by Malevich was performed in The idea of the opera was elaborated at First Congress of Russian Futurists in 1913 which was attended by only three delegates: the composer Matiushin, the poet Kruchenykh and the artist Malevich. The sun is defeated together with the romantic notions of beauty which have lost meaning in the modern world. The name of the theatre was budetlyanin and the movement was called budetlyanstvo. Derived from the future tense of the Russian verb "to be", it signifies the future achieved by budetlyane by means of higher intuition. 4

5 The idea of the "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk) is embodied in the opera. Three arts - music full of dissonance, transrational poetry and Cubo-Futurist images - express the same idea of the victory over the useless cultural tradition and the opening the way for future art. For the first time Malevich employed here the motif of the Black Square which substituted the circle of the sun. The Black Square, later turned into a painting, became a key work of the suprematist movement, one of the highest achievements of Russian avant-garde. The costumes for the opera have much in common with the cubist costume of Hugo Ball in the Cabaret Voltaire. They consist of geometric forms, which together with strong light deformed the figures of actors thereby challenging the accepted ideas of beauty, whereas the backdrops represent machines. This emphasises the victory of active creativity of man over the passive forms of nature. CONCLUSION: There are clear parallels and there may have been links between the experiments of Russian Cubo-Futurists in poetry, painting and theatre and the performances in the Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball's friend Russian artist Vasilii Kandinskii could have told him during their meetings in Munich about the latest artistic developments in Russia. Both the Cubo-Futurists and the Dadaists made a vital contribution to the development of 20 th century art. 5