Call for Papers: International Symposium "Tatlin. new art for a new world"

Description of the Conference

Eligible topics for the conference

• Painting. Vladimir Tatlin began his career as a seaman. Until 1913 his artistic activities were limited exclusively to painting and drawing. Interested in the traditional fields of icon-painting and folk art, he later transferred his attention to the most modern avant-garde trends in Russia and Western Europe, more precisely Paris. His entire later work is founded on painting. The exhibition will show a comprehensive selection of his early paintings with their bold expanses of colour, rhythmic curves, and striking use of dark and light outlines. In these eye-catching works Tatlin achieved a highly original synthesis of the Russian tradition and the French avant-garde.
• Counter-reliefs. In the year 1914, Tatlin changed from being an avant-garde painter to being a revolutionary artist: there was already a sense of what was to come in 1917. Only little has been preserved of his painterly reliefs and the counter-reliefs. These works, produced before the October Revolution, constitute his most radical and far-reaching contribution to modern art. In the exhibition the few still existing originals from Moscow and St Petersburg are complemented with a representative selection of the reconstructions made on the basis of photographs, thus shedding light on this crucial aspect in the history of art. Tatlin’s counter-reliefs, with which he aimed to effect a total break with the bourgeois art world in all its forms, are to be understood as a “contre-attaque” in the sense of an increase in energy. As Konstantin Umansky wrote in 1920, “Tatlinism” claimed that the picture as such was dead: “The flat canvas is too restricted for what is three-dimensional.” In Tatlin’s words of 1920: “We no longer believe in the eye: we are subordinating the eye to the sense of touch.” His counter-reliefs shook painting to its foundations and at the same time created a new understanding of artistic material.
• Revolution, architecture and utopia – Tatlin’s tower. Few twentieth-century works of art have acquired such a legendary status as Tatlin’s projected Monument to the Third International of 1919–20, which was to have been 400 metres tall. For various reasons – Civil War, lack of material resources, and the technological limitations of the time – it was never realized. The monument – set parallel to the earth’s axis with four inner bodies rotating each on its own axis at various speeds in accordance with cosmological rhythms and laws – would have been the seat of the hierarchically and justly organized government of a new social order. The rotating spatial bodies of Tatlin’s “world machine” are indicative of revolution in both senses of the word. In 1920 Nikolai Punin praised the design as “an international event within the world of art” and saw it as “the organic synthesis of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting.”
• The flight of the Letatlin. The 1920s saw Tatlin engaging in a search for new dimensions in human flight. In 1929/32 he gave expression to the dreams of a collectively regulated society with his visionary flying machine Letatlin. With his strong penchant for mysticism, Tatlin considered that flying was a kind of primordial human experience lost in the course of evolution and wished to reappropriate it for modern man. Letatlin – a flying machine displaying a remarkable synthesis of art, technology and utopia – can be regarded as the culmination and end result of the exploration of the scope and limits of sculpture that the artist began in Tsarist times with his counter-reliefs and raised onto a monumental scale with the revolutionary tower model. Tatlin’s highly suggestive flying sculpture can be interpreted variously as a metaphor for acceleration, a vehicle for extending the imagination, or a deus ex machina of modernism.
• The theatre as the stage of the new world. Tatlin had a life-long interest in theatre. He was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, with which his own life had certain elements in common. Tatlin took its gripping musical sea-and soul-scapes and attempted to match them with a late Romantic Rayonist painted equivalent, taking tone colour and translating it into colour combinations full of drama and life. The peak of Tatlin’s creative work for the theatre came in 1923 with his staging of Velimir Chlebnikov’s futuristic super saga Zangezi. Tatlin decided “to juxtapose the word constructions with a material construction.” For Tatlin the linguistic material of poetry and the materials of visual art were two articulations of the same world energy. The fascination of his avant-gardistic experiment with Zangezi lay in the synesthetic correspondences he discovered between sounds, colours, textures and light.

Guidelines for submission

Organizer

• Museum Tinguely

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