Item #1241 [THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk. Vasily Kamensky.
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk
[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk

[THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE] Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [i.e. Tango with Cows. Ferro-Concrete Poems] / drawings by Vlad and David Burliuk

Item #1241

Moscow: printed by David Burliuk, the publisher of the 1st magazine of Russian Futurists, 1914. 18 leaves. 19x19,7 cm. One of 300 copies printed. Original wallpaper wrappers. Spine has been carefully restored, as well as the edges of some leaves. Housed in the modern box and the dust-jacket that serve for the protection of this fragile book.

The ultimate rarity and the desiderata of many avant-garde collections.
With this book Kamensky had started several important avant-garde traditions that have influenced the world of publishing and art for years to come. He was the first futurist to experiment exclusively with typography and letterpress - before Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd) who no doubt was inspired by ‘the Tango’. The shape of the book was innovative as well - the square with one corner cut out - was seen as another ’slap in the face’ of the book industry at the time, this starting the carnival of different shapes of the books like in designs of Rodchenko and Lissitzky.
The language in which the poem is written is completely revolutionary as well: the letter is treated as a fonetico-geometrical figure.
Each page is a work of art in itself: Kamensky treated the poems as canvases (hence his participation in one of Bubnovy Valet’s exhibitions with his poems as art). Some of the poems remind the reader of maps or blueprints: being the pilot himself, Kamensky also has kick-started the avant-garde’s fascination with the technology.
Of course, the most famous element of this book - the material on which it was printed. In the words of Y. Gerchiuk ‘the desperately harsh, bourgeois wallpapers’ that give the book the light and color it otherwise would have lacked. It also made this book extremely fragile and easy to fall apart, we know of copies that lack leaves and those losses were almost engineered in the design - with each poem being a separate item.
It’s probably fair to say there’s no aspect of the ‘old world’ Kamensky hasn’t diminished and humiliated with the production of this edition.
In this context it’s interesting to remember that in the late 1917, already after the October revolution, at the Bubnovy Valet’s exhibition, David Burliuk has shown the famous portrait of Kamensky with the halo around his face and the long title that started with ‘the king of poets’. It’s hard not to remember Alexander Blok’s ending to his poem “The Twelve”: “In a wreath of white rose, Ahead of them Christ Jesus goes”.
Year later in his autobiography Kamensky himself perfectly described the aim of his activities: ‘‘We need to destroy the art of the book (the dead form of word-representation by means of paper and fonts) and we need to start the art of life, placing the poems and thoughts on the public walls, houses, fences, factories, roofs, on the wings of airplanes, ships, sails, in the sky by means of electricity, on the dresses’’.

Worldcat locates copies at the Getty, British Library, Yale and Art Institute of Chicago.

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