Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde

Conclusion: The End Point of the Infantilist Aesthetic

208 Conclusion The End Point of the Infantilist Aesthetic IN MANY SENSES, the work of Kazimir Malevich, like the late 1920s painting Black Circle (figure 43; Chernyi krug), represents an extreme , if not chronological, end point of avant-garde aesthetics. As with the Suprematist art of Malevich, the infantilist reductionism of form also leads toward the most basic, minimal, and fundamental components of art and signification , as might be represented by this perfect circle.1 If poetic language has been characterized as being babble, doodle, charm, and riddle, then the avant-garde highlights the infantile nature of these basic components of art.2 While this study has endeavored to show how Mikhail Larionov’s NeoPrimitivism reduces art to a child’s scribble, Aleksei Kruchenykh’s CuboFuturism reduces poetry to infant babble, Viktor Shklovsky’s Formalism reduces art to the naive perspective, and Daniil Kharms’s absurdism reduces prose to childish alogism, Malevich offers an example of the infantilist simplification of means in extremis. Just as Daniil Kharms’s trademark conclusion, not to mention Shklovsky’s infantile announcement of “The End” (Konets) of his children’s story, proclaim that the artistic work has ended and reality now resumes, Malevich’s dramatically minimalist designs, if not chronologically final, still put the period at the end of this history of the infantilist aesthetic. This blindingly dark spot contains the profundity of an all-engulfing singularity in a black hole, but perhaps also the all-encompassing originary egg and primordial cell from which modern art and a new approach to meaning may be born again. As we have seen, each of the figures discussed in this study traces a course toward minimalist form through their practice of artistic infantilism in the period discussed here, if not over the entire extent of their career, or after the advent of Socialist Realism.3 More expansively expressed, Mikhail Larionov reduces art according to the formal principles of children’s own drawings and eventually approaches the simple scribble that artificially replicates the rays of light that reach the infantile retina, thereby taking a significant step toward non-objective art. Aleksei Kruchenykh reduces poetry to the babble of the infant that marks the euphony and cacophony of the The End Point of the Infantilist Aesthetic 209 child’s entrance into language and the child’s independent oral play with language, and in so doing hopelessly estranges the signifier and signified. Viktor Shklovsky distills the very nature of art, literature, and theory to the conscious experience of its form registered by the naive perspective that perceives everything with a defamiliarized eye, thereby establishing the fundaments of new critical theory. Whether writing for adults or children, Daniil Kharms constrains his use of language, causation, and meaning in a way that resembles infantile language and children’s cognition, arriving at childish alogism as the perfect vehicle to express the existential absurdity of an estranged modern subject rendered as powerless as a child.4 In this way, the development of each figure during the period studied herein follows a similarly deconstructive course despite the generic boundaries between literature, art, and theory that separate them. As Shklovsky observed in retrospective reflections , “Transrational language is a language of pre-inspiration, the rustling chaos of poetry, pre-book, pre-word chaos out of which everything is Figure 43. Chernyi krug (Black Circle), Kazimir Malevich, ca. 1923. Oil on canvas, 105.5 × 106 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Copyright © 2013, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg Conclusion 210 born and into which everything disappears,”5 underscoring precisely why the prelingual state of infans marked a key stage of the avant-garde’s trajectory. Ultimately, then, the infantilizing aesthetic of the Russian avant-garde moves toward self-obliteration and self-annihilation. The regressive movement of infantile primitivism leads the adult to the child, infant, and embryo in its reversal of the universal developmental trajectory and, unchecked, moves relentlessly onward toward nonexistence.6 Using the model of the infantile , the avant-garde explores the limits of art, language, and logic and deconstructs perception, aesthetics, and interpretation. The historical context of a revolutionary time, both politically and aesthetically, incipient and retrospective, is overlaid with eschatological elements of an apocalyptic time that, in a religious framework, augurs resurrection, redemption, and rebirth. Thus the symbolism of “the resurrection of the word” and the neologism itself—“In the beginning was the Word.” Indeed, modern art passes through the infancy of language and...