Aleksandar Bošković: Constructivist Ideological Converter: Serguei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis’ photomontages for Maiakovskii’s poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1925)

On The May 11, 2020

Video-conference seminar

The revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii set out to write a commemorative poem after Lenin’s death, completing it almost a year later. His poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was published by Leningrad’s State Publishing House (Gosizdat) as a separate edition in February 1925, featuring no illustrations. It remains a question of what kind of cinépoetry book it would be had it been accompanied by a series of photomontages that the two constructivist graphic artists, Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis, created soon after, inspired by Maikovskii’s verses. The talk represents a quest for the cinépoetry book’s spectral materiality.

In an aim to capture the ciné-poem’s revolutionary imaginary, the talk offers a speculative theory about the possible effects such a ciné-dispositive—as a visionary, visual agit-technology—would have produced. Based on a dialogue between Maiakovskii’s verses and Senkin and Klutsis’s accompanying poster-like photomontages, Bošković argues that it would be reductionist to read the agit-cinépoetry book as a celebration of Lenin’s personality cult. Instead, he proposes that we should apprehend the work as a Soviet ideological converter: an agit-ciné-dispositive, producing a vertigo effect both verbally and visually, inculcating an experience of excitement and joy in the prosumer, inciting their ideologic conversion through active engagement in participatory and revolutionary culture.

Biography:
Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University.

Photo caption:
Serguei Senkin. “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” Illustration for V. Maiakovskii’s poem. 1920s. Carboard, paper, cut-outs from magazines, collage, gouache. 45,5 x 33cm.
Courtesy of The State Museum of V.V. Maiakovskii, Moscow.