CFP: Symposium "Tatlin. neue Kunst fuer eine neue Welt"

[Re-posting this CFP from another list, H-ARTHIST]
=======================================

From: Anna Szech <[email protected]>
Date: Jun 28, 2012
Subject: CFP: Symposium "Tatlin. neue Kunst fuer eine neue Welt"
(Basel, 27-29 Sep 12)


International Symposium at Museum Tinguely, Basel on the Occasion of
the Exhibition “Tatlin. new art for a new world“ (6 June – 14 October
2012)

Conference Dates: Thursday, 27 September – Saturday, 29 September 2012
Deadline for submissions: 20 July, 2012

This year the Museum Tinguely in Basel is dedicating its large summer
exhibition to one of the most important figures of the Russian
avant-garde: Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953). It is now almost twenty years
since the last comprehen-sive retrospective to be devoted to this
radically innovative artist. The presented works will include early
paintings, counter-reliefs that reach out into the surrounding space,
reconstructions of his revolutionary tower, and the flying machine
Letatlin. The exhibition is rounded off with examples of his work for
the theatre. The œuvre of this outstanding artist from the watershed
period at the beginning of the twentieth century will be represented in
over one hundred masterpieces, mostly on loan from major collections in
Moscow and St Petersburg. The retrospective exhibition is accompanied
by a catalogue in English and German with Russian abstracts, which is
divided into the following range of topics:

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.

This interdisciplinary symposium aims to explore above mentioned topics
in depth and will also consider and discuss the reception and
interpretation of Tatlin`s works in contemporary art and architecture.
We plan to have talks of 30 minutes in length, followed by discussions.
The papers and conference results will be presented in a subsequent
publication.

We invite outline proposals (of no more than a 1.500 characters)
relating to the topics, a short CV and the list of publications to be
sent to [email protected] by 20 July, 2012.

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Symposium „Tatlin. neue Kunst für eine neue Welt” (Basel, 27-29
Sep 12). In: H-ArtHist, Jun 28, 2012. <http://arthist.net/archive/3550>.

_______________________________________________
Shera mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.oakland.edu/mailman/listinfo/shera