Abstract

In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944) published a limited edition of Sounds (Klänge), an illustrated book of poems that applied many of the theories discussed in his publication On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). In Sounds, Kandinsky strove to train readers to sensorially perceive images hidden in visual and verbal abstraction. In both word and image, the artist explored various realizations of boundedness, repetition, and concealment with the aim of evoking various effects in readers. Ultimately, according to Kandinsky’s theories, the fluidity between the “seeable” and “unseeable” allowed the “inner sounds” of the book’s words and woodcuts to resonate with readers in moments of perceptual clarity. Published on the brink of World War I, Sounds was released into a world that was about to change drastically. Although it influenced numerous avant-garde artists in the inter- and postwar periods, a newfound pessimism overshadowed Kandinsky’s idealistic aspiration. His utopian belief that abstraction would facilitate the arrival of a “Great Spiritual Epoch” ceded to a view of abstract art as a means of expressing the irrationality and brokenness of things. Today, Sounds is significant because of its influential form and content, its novel multisensorial aims, and its liminal sociohistorical context.

摘要

1912 年，瓦西里·康定斯基（俄罗斯人，1866-1944 年）出版了限量版的《声音》（Klänge），这是一本插图诗集，应用了他在《艺术中的精神》（Über das Geistige in der Kunst， 1911）。在声音中，康定斯基努力训练读者从感官上感知隐藏在视觉和语言抽象中的图像。艺术家在文字和图像上探索了有界、重复和隐藏的各种实现，目的是在读者中唤起各种效果。最终，根据康定斯基的理论，“看得见的”和“看不见的”之间的流动性让书中的文字和木刻的“内在声音”在感性清晰的时刻与读者产生共鸣。在第一次世界大战的边缘出版，声音被释放到一个即将发生巨大变化的世界。尽管它在战间期和战后影响了许多前卫艺术家，但一种新发现的悲观主义掩盖了康定斯基的理想主义抱负。他认为抽象将促进“伟大精神时代”的到来的乌托邦信念，让位于抽象艺术作为表达事物非理性和破碎的手段的观点。今天，Sounds之所以重要，是因为它具有影响力的形式和内容、新颖的多感官目标以及其临界的社会历史背景。