Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/83

75 Malevich—who was intimately associated with the Cubo-Futurists, and who provided the illustrations for many of their published works —saw Khlebnikov's "transreason" as the equivalent of the "non-objectivity" of his own and other modern painting. He saw it, in other words, as an art-form of the revolution, aiming at the creation of life rather than its mere reflection. The peculiar "activism" of Khlebnikov is noted by Markov, who writes (perhaps unfairly to Mayakovsky and other Futurists):
 * Khlebnikov was the only futurist who not only thought and talked about the future, but tried to do something about it as well.

And although it would be a mistake, perhaps, to associate Khlebnikov's intentions too closely with those of Mayakovsky, Malevich and other modernists who linked their art with the Bolshevik revolution—it remains true that Khlebnikov's work ran parallel with some of the most topical and significant currents of his time.

After the October revolution, the idea that the task of artists was to "change the world" became almost a commonplace. Although Khlebnikov was always too much wrapped in his own dream—world to fit in easily among his colleagues who later formed the "Left Front of the Arts", the fact was that in his own way he had anticipated their "political" or "world-changing" ideas a long time ago in a number of respects. His "transrational language", for example, had been intended not to reflect or express an existing "content" but to create a "content" of its own-to actually abolish war and unite all mankind. And Mayakovsky's ideas for a "Red Art International" and for involvement in the political struggle had long been familiar to Khlebnikovh-in the form, for example, of his schemes for a world government of artists and scientists: the "Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere."