Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/62

54 "I" which could look on things from all sides at once was obviously a disintegrated or multiple "1", an "I" which was already a "We". As the Russian suprematist painter, Malevich, put it, with the arrival of Cubism there now spoke through art
 * not only the individual "egg", but the "ego" of an elemental world movement...

Or as Paul Laporte later wrote of the Cubists:


 * They are no longer limited to their human isolation and to a local relationship but are themselves integrated into a universal relationship.

Given this "universal" relationship to other human beings and to the world, the thirst for an art-form to transcend the entire globe became felt. Apollinaire asked why-—in an era of the telephone, the wireless and aviation, and when the new communications media ranged over the continents, embracing a vast diversity of human experience——it should be assumed that the poet "should not have at least an equal freedom...in confronting space." Writing of the new artists whose world had been transformed by science, he explained that they were bound to attempt to match the demands of the age with a totally new and globe—embracing art:


 * One should not be astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they set themselves to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of words) in which, like conductors of an orchestra of un—