Life is shorter than the squeal of a sparrow.
Like a dog, regardless, sailing
on an ice floe down the river in spring?
Vasily Kamensky, with illustrations by David and Vladimir Burliuk, ‘Tango s korovami : zhelezobetonnyi︠a︡ poėmy’ (Tango with Cows, 1914), showing “Telephone” (all images courtesy the Getty Research Institute)
So opens the title poem of Tango with Cows, a 1914 book by Vasily Kamensky, with accompanying drawings by David and Vladimir Burliuk. All three artists were members of the group Hylaea, whose 1912 manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” is often cited as formally starting the Russian Futurist movement. Unlike the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which proposed not only a new relationship to art but to all of life as well, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was more specifically concerned with upending the literary status quo. [read more]
…The book, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty — which has made its version available digitally