Showing posts tagged El Lissitzky
Image from El Lissitzky’s Suprematist story — of two squares [Suprematicheskii Skaz], 1922. Alain Badiou writes: Even though Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable seek out and encounter other supposed subjects, they move towards their own solitude. The tone of The Unnamable could even be described as starkly solipsistic. Without doubt it is in Beckett’s theatre, with the couples of Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot) or Hamm and Clov (Endgame), that something which will not cease to be at the heart of Beckett’s fictions comes to the fore: the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and lastly, love. Both to defer and to beckon death through distance, Malone recounts all the elements that this love contains: “…what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company…” View high resolution

Image from El Lissitzky’s Suprematist story — of two squares [Suprematicheskii Skaz], 1922.

Alain Badiou writes:

Even though Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable seek out and encounter other supposed subjects, they move towards their own solitude. The tone of The Unnamable could even be described as starkly solipsistic. Without doubt it is in Beckett’s theatre, with the couples of Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot) or Hamm and Clov (Endgame), that something which will not cease to be at the heart of Beckett’s fictions comes to the fore: the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and lastly, love. Both to defer and to beckon death through distance, Malone recounts all the elements that this love contains: “…what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company…”

Page from Dlia Golosa [For the Voice], a collaboration between El Lissitzky and Maykovsky originally published in 1923. Mayakovsky’s “She Loves Me” (translation via Discernible Sound): She loves me? Not? I twist my arms like I’m crazy and breaking my fingers, I fling them away thus people pluck petals of first-found daisies and guess on them, sending them flying in May I won’t hide the grayness that the razor reveals Let the ringing silver of decades grow dense but I pray that I never regain in these years the disgraceful common sense View high resolution

Page from Dlia Golosa [For the Voice], a collaboration between El Lissitzky and Maykovsky originally published in 1923.

Mayakovsky’s “She Loves Me” (translation via Discernible Sound):

She loves me? Not? I twist my arms like I’m crazy
and breaking my fingers, I fling them away
thus people pluck petals of first-found daisies
and guess on them, sending them flying in May
I won’t hide the grayness that the razor reveals
Let the ringing silver of decades grow dense
but I pray that I never regain in these years
the disgraceful common sense

El Lissitzky, Neuer [New Man], litograph from the series Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun”. Lissitzky worked to adapt the 1913 opera Victory over the Sun for a cast of mechanical puppets. Copies of the prints are held in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia. Theodor Adorno writes: Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile. While obstinately seeking to establish aesthetic truth, and trapping themselves thereby in an irresoluble dialectic, they stumble on the real truth… (extract from section 47 of Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005)). View high resolution

El Lissitzky, Neuer [New Man], litograph from the series Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun”. Lissitzky worked to adapt the 1913 opera Victory over the Sun for a cast of mechanical puppets. Copies of the prints are held in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia.

Theodor Adorno writes:

Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile. While obstinately seeking to establish aesthetic truth, and trapping themselves thereby in an irresoluble dialectic, they stumble on the real truth… (extract from section 47 of Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005)).