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O n December 2, 1913, the curtain rose on a radical new phase of Russian avant-garde art and its expanding treatment of speed. Staging the futurist opera Victory over the Sun at St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theater , Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Matyushin, and Malevich revealed an unprecedented , abstract vision of the era’s dynamism.1 Incorporating transrational poetry by both Khlebnikov (author of the prologue) and Kruchenykh (who, besides penning the libretto, directed the production), innovative set and costume design by Malevich, and a discordant score by Matyushin, Victory over the Sun offered an ideal vehicle for far-reaching aesthetic experimentation.2 Divided into two “actions” (referred to by the Russian neologism deimy) rather than “acts,” the opera boasted a semilogical plot involving two futurian strongmen who, following a violent conquest of the sun, strive to establish a utopian land of fantastical, cosmic dimensions. Treating mimetic art as a relic of the past, the creators of Victory over the Sun amplified the elevated, eternal spirit of their dynamic vision. In the opera’s opening and closing refrain, two strongmen declare, “All is well that begins well! ...There will be no end!”3 Once the futurian strongmen achieve their everlasting utopia, phenomenal reality and logic vanish in favor of acceleration, efficiency, and strength: “Here . . . everything runs [bezhit] without surrender,” remark several athletes, highlighting the endless movement in such a world.4 Even an airplane crash does not hinder the opera’s futurians, most notably an aviator, who enters the stage after his accident laughing and singing in a transrational burst of sounds. Elsewhere a worker cryptically mentions to a bourgeois fat man,“Speed you know is effective, if one puts the wagon filled up with boxes on each of two molars and powder [sic] it with yellow sand and put all this in action then you will see yourself.”5 Fast-paced action, such a semicoherent 129 “Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognize us” Suprematism and Beyond 4 assertion seems to suggest, will enable inhabitants of the future world “to see for themselves,” to perceive reality anew. Staged alongside Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, Victory over the Sun enabled Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Malevich, and Matyushin to present modernity ’s headlong pace through both familiar and highly unconventional images and ideas. The opera’s recognizable manifestations of speed such as airplanes, athletics, and a cast of circuslike characters, combined with transrational verse and Malevich’s costume designs (which required performers to move unnaturally and abruptly on stage), emphasized dynamism’s close link to a futuristic utopia and to the rise of an abstract, otherworldly aesthetic.6 Even Malevich’s decor, which included various geometrical designs, presented arresting signifiers of the dynamic cosmic realm championed in the opera. Victory over the Sun simultaneously widened the scope of various modern leitmotifs initially raised by Larionov and Goncharova, whose rayist movement was in full swing at the time of the opera’s staging. Images of velocity, physicality , and light, as well as ideas of human development and utopianism—all integral to rayism—figured in Victory over the Sun, as the opera’s creators, particularly Malevich, eclipsed rayism with a metaphysical vision that aggressively attacked conventionality and logic. Investigation of the speed of light and its rays had initiated rayism’s precipitous shift toward abstraction, but for Malevich and his colleagues, a more powerful, nonobjective formulation of futurism beckoned. This second of two chapters on Russian painting explores the avant-garde’s postrayist treatment of speed, as Malevich’s suprematist movement along with three-dimensional sculpture/reliefs and protoconstructivist works by such artists as Vladimir Tatlin and Ivan Kliun drew on notions of dynamism prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The chapter will then follow “left” art’s transition away from easel painting to design and three-dimensional composition, analyzing how early Soviet avant-garde artists ushered in a new creative synthesis of the machine and the human body that served as the basis for the movement of constructivism. Progressing, in constructivist Varvara Stepanova’s words, from the“spiritual representationalism”of abstraction to the“conscious direct action” of utilitarian art serving society at large, the constructivists cultivated a heightened sense of rapid mechanical motion in their work to underscore their utopian visions of a new Soviet state and a superior Soviet individual whose rapid evolution corresponded with the emergence of a dynamic, streamlined Marxist order.7 Arising soon after the nonobjective action of suprematism, constructivism signaled increasing ideological prominence for speed throughout...

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