Formalist critic Roman Jakobson noted that the Russians travelled toward the October Revolution ‘through a realization of the violence of artistic form’ that in the West had culminated in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, executed in the same year. This talk explores this and other acknowledgements (by Hans Richter, Osip Brik, and Ilya Ehrenburg) of “dada tactics” in the Russian avant-garde with a goal to build a long, protracted bridge between the Dadaists and those Russian artists who visited or lived in Europe and the US in the early 1920s. Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Mikhail Larionov, Ivan Puni, Sergei Sharshun, and Ilia Zdanevich joined various Dadaist factions, exhibited in Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery, and organized and participated in key Dadaist events. Also discussed are Lissitzky’s popularization in Germany of Malevich’s and his own nonobjectivity, and Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International that Berlin Dadaists labeled an epitome of antiart.
Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn is a Russian-born American scholar, curator and critic. Her books and exhibitions include Soviet Photograph (1996), Malevich and Film (2002), Against Kandinsky (2006), Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (2009), and Moscow Vanguard Art (2017). Recently she co-edited Anti-Shows: APTART 1982-84 (2017) and edited Russian Dada, published by MIT Press in conjunction with a homonymous exhibition that Tupitsyn curated at Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid in 2018.
Organised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch