Description

Scribentismus: 35 Years of Zaum

by Valeri Scherstjanoi

Valeri Scherstjanoi’s work holds script, score, and image at once. Look at almost any page in this book and you first see abstract calligraphy: gestural, rhythmic, visually complete. But Scherstjanoi also built sign systems, including a separate class of signs for vocal events that standard phonetics has no clean symbols for: swallowing, slurping, lip trembling, laughter, caesuras. The keys exist. Apply one, and portions of the visual field yield readable text. Apply another — and hear a sonoric score. Set the keys aside, and the marks return to pure visual rhythm. The same object presents several realities, and which one you encounter depends entirely on the instrument you bring.

Born in a Gulag camp in Kazakhstan in 1950, Scherstjanoi studied German and Romance languages in the Soviet Union and moved to East Germany in 1979, beginning as a sound poet and translator who carried Russian Futurism, Zaum, and Dada into live performance. His mentor was Carlfriedrich Claus, the visual-poetry pioneer. Like Vilen Barsky, Sergey Sigey, and Ry Nikonova — the other major Russophone experimentalists who settled in Germany — he eventually became a polyartist, moving from sonoric poetry into visual scores, visual poetry, asemic writing, and visual art.

This book follows that development chronologically, from the drawings, Zaum poems, and typewriter works of the early 1980s to the declaration that closed the thirty-five-year arc in 2018. The arc moves from settled meaning toward sustained superposition — several states present at once, none canceling the others. Scherstjanoi stands in a direct line from Khlebnikov, and he spent thirty-five years carrying that impulse into a region where writing hovers between script and image: legible if one brings the key, purely visual if one does not, and most fully itself in the charged interval between the two.

—from an introduction by Igor V. Satanovsky