“Poem-paintings” by V. Kamensky: performative gesture and its material embodiment

The paper focuses on the poem-paintings (“stikhokartiny”) by V. Kamensky, verbo-visual texts published in his experimental book “Tango with Cows” (1915). Given that the poems were seen as located halfway between literature and painting, the author tries to account for the hybrid character of the poems by placing them in a wider communicative and aesthetic context. One of the contexts to be taken into consideration is the visual arts background, namely, artistic exhibitions that became a site of meeting for most Futurist poets. Besides providing futurists with publishing and financial resources, visual arts unions and groups exerted conceptual influence on the artists suggesting a new aesthetic orientation. That orientation could be described as stressing the pragmatic dimension of the text over its semantics, choosing an act produced by the words over their literary meaning. Elaborating on that artistic choice, the paper addresses scandal as a PR strategy and asserts that this strategy was promoted by the means of gesture as a device. A few examples and testimonies from Futurist practices are examined as the body of evidence. Then the paper transitions to arguing that gesture as a device for generating an overall pragmatic effect of shock, scandal etc. could be recreated virtually, by material properties of the book. A few examples of Futurist productions are called for to prove the point. Then the paper provides a thorough analysis of one of ferroconcrete poems.