Mikhail Matyushin’s Creative Method and the Russian Avant-Garde

Abstract

The article reveals the connection between the creative method of M. Matyushin and the search for a new spirituality associated with the ideological and aesthetic searches of Russian modernism in the era of the Silver Age. The relevance of the article is due to the need for a comprehensive analysis of the heritage of the Russian avant-garde, because, in the Soviet period, everything that went beyond the method of socialist realism was excluded from public consideration. A new aesthetics of theatrical futurism emerged in 1913 in the experimental opera production “Victory over the Sun”. In 1923, M. Matyushin formulated the program of “extended viewing”, calling it “ZOR-VED”, which came from the Russian words “Vision” + “Knowledge”. The contemplative method he proposed, by analogy with Buddhist practices, made it possible to overcome the fragmentation of the reality perception. The observer was to go beyond the space-time limitations, while the boundaries between the object and the subject would become blurred, removing the animate / inanimate opposition, and an understanding of the integrity of the universe would be achieved. M. Matyushin perceived color as a complex phenomenon, depending on the illumination, color of the environment, movement. The result of the experiments conducted by Matyushin at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINHUK) was the “Guide to Color” (1932). The method of “extended viewing” brought closer a new era of comprehension of the world as a whole, foreshadowing a breakthrough in many areas of knowledge: the sciences of consciousness, philosophy, psychology and even physics. However, in the country of victorious socialism, the experiments, which anticipated the further development of the visual arts of the 20th century, were forcibly stopped. M. Matyushin continued his search for a new spatial aesthetics in his home theater. The novelty of the solution to the problems under consideration is due to the fact that the article introduces a whole layer of rejected culture of the first third of the 20th century into scientific use, analyzes the activities of the little-studied organic direction of the Russian avant-garde, and compares M. Matyushin’s method of “extended viewing” with Buddhist practices.