Word: tatlin
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...change started with cubism and widely affected the European avantgarde. Its results range from the futurist sculpture of Italian artists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla to the radical experiments of the Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Puni; from Alexander Archipenko's wall reliefs to Julio Gonzalez's iron constructions and Alexander Calder's fluttering mobiles. Artists as unlike as Naum Gabo and David Smith were affected by it. No sculptor interested in either ideal formal systems or new materials was immune to its promises, and its influence persists to this day. Sculpture had been solid since...
...Tatlin! is an intellectualized version of the New Journalism, and appropriately enough its subjects are safely distanced in the past. Davenport presents the necessary facts and then expands them into a believable story--a story including the "less objective data" that really make up most of our lives, a story allowing for his own interpretation of historical figures and events. Fortunately the book's relative isolation from contemporary events saves it from the dilemmas of New Journalism: the grey area between fantasy and fact is not so controversial when dealing with history...
Despite the fact that Tatlin! offers an intriguing introduction to particular historical figures and events it also suffers at times from an insufferable degree of learning. Sometimes reading parts of it is like entering into the middle of a high-powered philosophical discussion of Hegel. In fact, Tatlin! could be called the first collection of a new genre: the short story of ideas. Like the novel of ideas each story does not simply attempt to mirror reality but to create a new world of the imagination that is a separate and additional part of reality. In a way Davenport...
Both "Herakleitos" and the title story, "Tatlin!" are interesting presentations, although again, somewhat pedagogic. Vladimir Tatlin was the leader of the Russian movement in art called Constructivizm, a Marxist form of structuralism, where form compliments structure for the good of the masses. And Herakleitos is something of a crazy Greek philosopher who thinks "without opposition all things would cease to exist...
...Reading Tatlin! is like sitting down with a friendly old genius. At times his knowledge may annoy you, and at times you will simply have to ignore what he's saying, but don't forget to remember to listen...