Vasily Kamensky: Tango With Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914) [Russian]

Tango With Cows is an artists’ book by the Russian futurist poet Vasily Kamensky, with three drawings by the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk. Printed in an edition of 300, the work has become famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper, with a series of concrete poems – visual poems that employ unusual typographic layouts for expressive effect – printed onto the recto of each page.

Beginning with a drawing by Vladimir Burliuk of a woman, the poems are split into two sections; the first contains 8 concrete poems that use multiple fonts and unusual spacings to express sounds and textures. Telephone, for instance, starts with ‘Telephone No. 2B_128 / rgrgrrrrrr______rrg’. The second group of 6 are arranged within diagonal grids, that evoke both the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, and the moulds that are used to make reinforced concrete. These poems refer directly to aerial views, maps and floor-plans. (from Wikipedia)

Tango s korovami: zhelezobetonnye poemy [Танго С Коровами: Железобетонныя Поэмы]
Published in Moscow, 1914
36 pages
via Archive.org

PDF
PDF (single-page PDF of a volume bound in a slightly different order)
Eduardo Kac’s translation of the poem “Telephone”
TangoWithCows.com, a project to translate the book into English (forthcoming mid-2014)

Arndt Niebisch: Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication (2012)

“The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century inhabited the media discourses of their time like parasites, constantly irritating and taking from them. Dadaists ripped images of a mechanically reproduced world out of newspapers and magazines and reassembled them in their collages. Futurists instrumentalized the brevity of telegraph messages for their free word poetics. Artists such as F.T. Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo constantly abused existing media technologies and hijacked public communication. This study traces these subversive tactics from avant-garde poetry to media technological experiments with radio tubes.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Avant-Gardes in Performance series
ISBN 1137276851, 9781137276858
250 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2016-3-15)

Klaxon: mensário de arte moderna, No. 1-9 (1922-23) [Portuguese]

Lançada em São Paulo no mesmo ano que se realiza a Semana de Arte Moderna, Klaxon (1922-1923) é a primeira revista modernista do Brasil.

Em “O Alegre combate de Klaxon”, excelente introdução á edição fac-similar da revista, Mário da Silva Brito afirma que “em Klaxon aparece, sob forma de artigos, poemas, comentários, críticas de arte, piadas e farpas zombeteiras, o estado de espírito do grupo de jovens que elaborou a ideologia modernista”. Do comitê de redação, participam ativamente Menotti del Picchia e Guilherme de Almeida. Porém , ainda que a revista não o registre de forma explícita, sabe-se hoje, por intermédio de Aracy Amaral, que Mário de Andrade foi “diretor e líder da revista“. Mesmo assim, de um número para outro prevalece o espírito de grupo anunciado no texto introdutório : “KLAXON tem uma alma coletiva”. Essa apresentação tem todas as características de um manifesto e, embora venha assinada pela Redação, ela é, segundo Mário da Silva Brito, de autoria de Mario de Andrade. (source)

Published in São Paulo, Brazil
via Brasiliana USP

commentary (Jorge Schwartz, in Portuguese)
Klaxon at Wikipedia (in Portuguese)

PDF (all issues, ZIP)
Download Issue 1 (May 1922), Issue 2 (June 1922), Issue 3 (July 1922), Issue 4 (Aug 1922), Issue 5 (Sep 1922), Issue 6 (Oct 1922), Issue 7 (Nov 1922), Issue 8-9 (Dec 1922-Jan 1923).