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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2016.1216050
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Visual Geometry:
El Lissitzky and 5
the Establishment
of Conceptions Authorq
of Space–Time in 10
user
2 Igor Dukhan
Figure 1
AQ16 El Lissitzky, Constructor (self-
AQ17 portrait). Photomontage. 1924.
Figure 2
El Lissitzky, Illustration to Sikhes
Khulin by M. Broderzohn. Scroll,
lithography, 1917.
Figure 3
El Lissitzky, Front side of the
bolder-packet for Chad Gadia.
Chromolithograph on paper, Kiev,
Kultur-lige, 1919.
of a vital “classicism of the future.”1 Even so, it was only in the 1920s
that “the new classicism,” rather paradoxically, became the distinctive
“synthesis of the avant-garde,” a synthesis moreover in which histori-
cizing and innovative-modernizing tendencies both fought and collabo-
rated. One might recall the principal assertion of the leader of Suprema-
tism Kazimir Malevich in his correspondence with El Lissitzky in 1924:
5
“For me, the New Classicism develops out of the ideology of the general
movement of human activity and therefore the name comes from this
theory of activity.”2 The leader of the radical avant-garde characterized
his entire system as a “new classicism,” historicizing the avant-garde
esprit in a synthetic theory of the new creativity. In contrast, Gino Sev-
erini in his essay of 1921 (1925) criticized avant-garde experimenta- 10
tion in the context of classical categories, observing that his contem-
4 Igor Dukhan
Figure 4
El Lissitzky, “Kunst und
Pangeometrie,” in Carl Einstein and
Paul Westheim (eds), Europa-
AQ18 Almanach (Potsdam: Gustav
AQ19 Kiepenheuer, 1925).
Authorq
uery:
Authorq
D:20161
uery:
8081601
Figure 5
El Lissitzky, ”Kunst und
Pangeometrie,” in Carl Einstein and
Paul Westheim (eds), Europa-
Almanach (Potsdam: Gustav
Kiepenheuer, 1925).
Figure 6
El Lissitzky, Proun 1 E “The City.”
Paper, lithography, 1921.
Figure 7
El Lissitzky, Proun 1 A “The Bridge.”
Paper, gouache, 1919.
general starting point for art and reality, something like Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world.”
For all the impulsiveness of Malevich’s discourse, with its combi- 5
nation of mystical illumination and rational constructs, “The World
as Non-Objectivity” captured a grandiose conception of harmonizing
art and life. The impetuous teleology of the movement towards clari-
ty was born in the transformation of mystical experience into rational
and classical constructions. The treatise’s dedication to Mikhail Ger-
10
shenzon—an outstanding scholar of Alexander Pushkin’s poetry and of
Lissitzky and Space–Time in Avant-garde Art 7
Figure 8
El Lissitzky, Proun 30T. Oil on
canvas, 1920.
Figure 9
El Lissitzky, Proun. Oil on canvas,
1919–20.
Figure 10
El Lissitzky, Kurt Scwitters. Gelatin
silver print, 1924–25.
Figure 11
El Lissitzky, Kurt Scwitters. Gelatin
silver print, 1924–25.
Figure 12
El Lissitzky, Kurt Scwitters. Gelatin
silver print, 1924–25.
Figure 13
El Lissitzky, Hans Arp.
Photomontage, gelatin silver print,
1924–25.
Figure 14
(1)–(8) El Lissitzky, A Tale of Two
Squares, Vitebsk, 1920, Visual book
AQ20 (Berlin: Skythen-Verlag, 1922).
Authorquery:
D:20161808160118+05'30' 13:31:18
--------------------------------------------
Please state what parts (1)â••(8) each
represent in Figure 14 caption
14 Igor Dukhan
and visual synthesis, and in the dynamism of the subject’s position was
creating an artistic whole that approximates to the living interaction of 5
space and time.17
In this context, Lissitzky had the extraordinary conceptual courage
to attempt to explain rationally the new artistic perceptions by means
of their relationship to mathematics. In “Art and Pangeometry”18 the
evolution of the structure of artistic representations was correlated with
10
the development or more accurately with the dissemination and pop-
ularization of the ideas of numbers. In this, Lissitzky, to some degree,
continued the classical tradition of artistic–mathematical studies and of
artists appealing to mathematics as the ideal synthetic representation
of the world for explaining visual puzzles. Lissitzky’s approach raises
associations with the beginning of the first European “theory of paint- 15
ing” by Leon Battista Alberti, where we read “In these short notes about
painting we, above all, in order that our statement will be as clear as
possible, borrow from mathematics those propositions which relate to
our subject and, having mastered them, we give an account of painting,
beginning with its natural origins, in so far as our talent allows. Never- 20
theless … I am not writing as a mathematician but as a painter; mathe-
matics measures the form of an object intellectually, independent of all
its material (Conciossiache i Matematici con lo ingegno solo le spezie
e le forme delle cose, separate da qualsivoglia materia), we, wishing to
represent an object for viewing, will for this purpose use, as they say,
the more accurate Minerva.”19 For Alberti, the “science of painting” 25
was based on the dominating judgment of the eye (“Painting must try
to represent only what is seen”) and this judgment of the eye is the fun-
damental criterion of truth in painting.20
At the very beginning of “Art and Pangeometry,” El Lissitzky ad-
dressed the reader with an almost Albertian appeal to seek mathematic 30
foundations for artistic experiments, taking into account the difference
between the approaches of art and mathematics: “The parallels between
art and mathematics must be drawn very carefully, for every time they
overlap it is fatal for art.”21 The meaning of this appeal is that mathe-
matics must “help” art in its journey from the visible (and restrictedly
35
visible) to the infinite and invisible. It is precisely in this respect that
art fundamentally lags behind the evolution of mathematical develop-
ments.
Pondering the convergence between visual and mathematical prac- tice,
El Lissitzky demonstrated what is extremely rare for an artist—a profound
understanding of the contemporary state of mathematics and 40 its
evolution. While studying in the architectural faculty of the Higher
Technical School at Darmstadt, he had taken courses in mathematics
and during the writing of “Art and Pangeometry” seriously studied
mathematical investigations, noting in a letter of 21 March 1924, “…
Have received the history of mathematics and am reading it, it’s good.”22 45
As his wife, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers noted in her reminiscences, the AQ11
Lissitzky and Space–Time in Avant-garde Art 15
45
16 Igor Dukhan
45
20 Igor Dukhan
sible for the first time to construct a moving image: an artistic image
not constrained by elements or boundaries of the visible, but directly
conveying movement. And although Henri Bergson discerned in cine-
matography the fragmented image of movement and not the sponta-
neity of duration, Gilles Deleuze, picking up the impulse of Bergson’s
thinking, discovered that it is precisely in the language of film that con-
5
sensus makes modality, the congruence with consciousness, movement
and time overcoming those inherent contradictions in Bergson’s ideas.
As Lissitzky saw it, film allows the immediate showing of the “inner”
spontaneous flow of time in the moving image, grasping the living pro-
cess of space–time reality. Lissitzky seems closer to Deleuze’s notion
of film which overcame one of the paradoxical misunderstandings of 10
Henri Bergson’s conception, contained in the last chapter of Creative
Evolution—namely seeing film as a mechanical image of reality.
***
In the perspective of the twentieth-century philosophy of time and
space, El Lissitzky’s investigation stimulated the genesis of a particular 15
space–time discourse, which overcame the differentiation of time and
space in art and mathematics. Beginning with Henri Bergson’s intuition
of duration, and developing these ideas within the Kantian context of
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the inner consciousness of time,
temporality as the spontaneous ecstasy of the inner became contrasted
with space as exterior. In the 1910s, the cubists and futurists had tried 20
to embody Bergson’s intuition of duration in their theory and painting,
which must be considered one of the first experiments in the conceptu-
alization of the language of space–time in the twentieth century.
Direct experimentation with space–time in life cannot but confirm
the immediate connection between time and space, and this associa- 25
tion is expressed variously in the scientific languages of relativity and
topology, and later in the phenomenological investigations of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and in Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of image–time. El Lissitz-
ky’s philosophy of pangeometry attempted to reveal time in spatiality,
the irrational in the visual, and in this effort it had to be applied to the
30
experiment of forming a new artistic language, overcoming the dissoci-
ation between time and space.
Author’s Notes
40
22 Igor Dukhan
45
Lissitzky and Space–Time in Avant-garde Art 23
43. See, for instance, the inscription “constructed 1920 Vitebsk” on the
final page of El Lissitzky’s graphic book, Concerning Two Squares. 5
44. Kazimir Malevich, letter to El Lissitzky, 17 July 1924; reprinted in
Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 297.
45. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 351.
46. Concerning the space–time aspects of El Lissitzky’s photography,
see Leah Dickerman, “El Lissitzky’s Camera Corpus,” in Perloff
10
and Reed (eds), Situating El Lissitzky, 153–76.
47. Margarita Tupitsyn, Ulrich Pohlmann and Matthew Drutt, El
Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design,
Collaboration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1999), 86, illus. 18 and 19.
48. Dickerman, “El Lissitzky’s Camera Corpus,” 159. 15
49. Ibid., 160. AQ15
50. See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the
Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1992); and I.N. Dukhan, “Kubizm i dlitel’nost’: filosofiia vremeni
Anri Bergsona v zerkale avangarda,” Iskusstvoznanie 10, nos 1–2 20
(2010): 455–72.
51. Julia Kristeva, Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1–36.
52. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352. Authorquery:
53. Ibid. D:2016180816
54. Ibid., 353. 25
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