The Hand at Work: The Poetics of Poiesis in the Russian Avant-Garde

Art = New Vision. This formula shaped the avant-garde. With moving images abruptly expanding the boundaries of the visible world, new printing techniques triggering a pictorial turn in graphic art, and literature becoming almost inseparable from visual media, we still regard the avant-garde as heyday for modernism’s obsession with the eye. But what are the blind spots of this optocentrism? Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing, and handcrafting, this study examines key scene...