CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/16/2017

Nancy Perloff to Launch 'EXPLODITY' at ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Sunday, March 19 at 4PM, Getty Research Institute and ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth invite you to a special presentation and signing by Getty Research Institute Curator Nancy Perloff for the release of her publication, EXPLODITY: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Book signing to follow. Preorder here!

ARTBOOK at Hauser & Wirth Bookstore is pleased to welcome Nancy Perloff for a special presentation and signing of her latest book Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art on Sunday, March 19th at 4pm.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning.

At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. This book is complemented by an interactive website that includes sound recordings of featured poems.

NANCY PERLOFF is curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Trained as a musicologist and as an art historian, she pursues scholarship on the Russian avant-garde, European modernism, and the relationship between music and the visual arts. Her exhibitions at the GRI include Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky (1998–99); Sea Tails: A Video Collaboration (2004); Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917 (2008–9); and she led the curatorial team for World War I: War of Images, Images of War (2014). Perloff is the author of Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford, 1991) and coeditor, with Brian M. Reed, of Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (Getty, 2003). She has written and lectured widely on avant-garde composers such as John Cage and David Tudor. Her exhibition, Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space, will be on view at the GRI from March 28 – July 30, 2017.

ARTBOOK @ HAUSER & WIRTH
Sunday, March 19: 4PM
917 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Phone: 213-988-7413
To preorder a signed copy, email: ARTBOOK @ HAUSER & WIRTH
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