The Spatial Practice of the Avant-garde: Ilia Zdanevich 1912-1919

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method IV: Uneven and Combined Development: Keywords for Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Culture

Abstract

The spatial practice of the historical avant-garde had two distinct dimensions: the first, heteronomous to art, consisted of the wider material infrastructure facilitating human exchange as well as the recuperation and circulation of objects across a now definitively unified globe; the second, proper to art and the discourses of art theory and art history, consisted of the rhetorical and formal practices by which space and the objects in it could be symbolically repurposed. This paper examines the Russian-Georgian writer-artist’s Zdanevich’s earliest manifestos and articles, closely associated with Italian futurism, Russian neo-primitivism, and Georgian vernacular art, as a test case of avant-garde spatiality. Marked by striking cross-scalar leaps between the local-regional (Tbilisi-Caucasian), the national (Georgian and Russian), and the metropolitan-Western (Parisian), Zdanevich’s writings reveal a richly uneven base of nonsynchronous aesthetic forms: vernacular, national, and metropolitan. While the synchronization of the nonsynchronous might be seen as the general effect of avant-garde practice regardless of movement or geographical location, Zdanevich’s writings reflect an aesthetic and political radicalization of this principle that may well be specific to the (Russian) semi-periphery.

Author

• Harsha Ram, UC Berkeley