Miroljub Todorović

The Russian Neo-Avantgarde: Visual Poetry and Mail Art

The visual poetry and the mail art were certainly the whiphands of the neo-avantgarde in the sixties and seventies. The mail art was that kind of fundamental neo-avantgarde power due to its new artistic sensibility and planetary communications, which turns to unlimited forms and methods of creation through which the main principles of art are radically reevaluated.

The poetic programmes of concrete and visual poetry have fundamentally changed the basic literary principles, leaving the standardized views and methods of linguistic expression, while the complicated aesthetic radiance and the action of the visual poem is based, at its greatest extent, on a material  comprehension of the text perception.

Through the visual poetry and the mail art the first elements of the future planetary way of thinking are also conceived.

During the last decade of the 2oth century, The intermedial researches and various experiments, initiated by the neo-avantgarde, are more present both in the Russian literature and fine arts. There appeared individuals and groups not only in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, but also in Kaliningrad, Kaluga, spreading even to Eysk and the Azov Sea and Kemerovo in the distant Siberia. One of the most agile visual poets and mail-artist, Sergey Segay, who has been acting for more than a decade, having established contacts with numerous avantgarde centres in Europe and America, was living and working in the Russian provinces Eysk.

In Kaliningrad, a literary artistic group, headed by Dmitry Bulatov has already published a voluminous anthology “The Point of Maturing – The Visual Poetry of the 9os”. In this extremely well equipped anthology, of nearly 600 big size pages, a hundred and sixteen  artists (visual poets and mail-artists) of the whole world are presented. The anthology was composed by Dmitry Bulatov. This artist, very often and through critics and essays, analyses the actual position of the avantgarde. According to his opinion, the International Mail-art Network, as an artistic movement of our times, is  even more significant than the Dadaism of the twenties and the Fluxus movement of the sixties, above all by its wideness and completeness, and then also by the creative and innovational charge of its  artistic actions. Besides Bulatov, in Kaliningrad there are Alexander Popadin, Maxim Stepanov, Andrey Tozik Kiriloff and others.

A significant group of artistic research workers in the field of fine arts and literature has assembled in Moscow around Willy R. Melnikov Starquist, a young, very prolific and inventive creator. The members of this group are Alexander Gluschenko, Ariadna Daria Bondareva, Dmitry Petrossian, Vladimir Tolstov, Sasha Babulevich, Andrey Kolosov, Yuri Balashov, etc.   

In Saint-Petersburg we can mention the following names Inga Nagel, Olga Tsekhovnitser, Leonid Aronzon and Julia Klauser.

It is  characteristical and significant for the Russian artists that, besides the experience gathered from the Europe and world avantgarde, they take advantage of the sources of  their own historical avantgarde the Russian Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Zaum,etc. One can feel it in Sergey Segays works and in hhiss Zaumland, but also in the achievements of Dmitry Bulatov, Willy R. Melnikov Starquist, Maxim Stepanov,Andrey Tozik Kiriloff, Alexander Gluschenko, Vladimir Tolstov, Leonid Aronzon and Alexander Popadin.That way the Russian neo-avantgarde artists appear to be worthy heirs and followers of their famous precursors Malevitch, Chlebnikov,Kruchenih,Tatlin, Rodchenko and other great  names from the historical avantgarde at the beginning of this century.  

                                                                                       Translated by Gradimir Đurović