Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/180

172 To the extent that Trotsky found fault with the Futurists, it was only owing to what he saw as "sins" of a similar nature- sins of over-optimism, of impatience and of "ultra-leftism" which had characterized the Revolution itself. The "formalism" of the Futurists represented an insistence on shaping life, fusing with life and overturning the "contents" of the old world (giving "form" priority over "content" in that sense) in a thoroughly revolutionary way. As Nikolai Punin put it in 1919:


 * Art is form (being), just as socialist theory and Communist revolution is form... The Internationale is just as much a futurist form as any other creative form... I ask what difference is there between the Third Internationale and Tatlin's bas-relief of Khlebnikov's "Martian Trumpet"? To me there is none.

Mayakovsky made a similar claim when he declared:

The revolution of substance socialism—anarchism-is not to be thought of apart from the revolution of form—futurism.

The purpose of the new art was not to communicate ideas (other means were available for that perhaps even a language of numbers, as Khlebnikov suggested ) but to create things and life, and recreate the world. As Brik declared:


 * We don't need your ideas! ... If you are artists, if you can create and make-then make us our human nature, our human things.

It was in this spirit that El Lissitzky declared:

we shall give a new face to this globe. we shall reshape it so thorgughly that the sun will no longer recognize its satellite.

Trotsky agreed that there would come a "time when life will reach such proportions that it will be entirely formed by art..."