“Corner Counter Relief” Vladimir Tatlin,1914
What is Faktura?
According to the text, faktura is “understood simultaneously as material heterogeneity and materiological determination.”
But what exactly does that mean?
Faktura was a shift from cubism that no longer put the artist in charge, but instead the materials.
If the artist became an agent of the will of the material, then its subjective hand was rendered irrelevant.
In faktura, the material is no longer controlled. The materials themselves becomes the centerpiece and transcend themselves. It deals with spacial recognition and interaction with its surroundings, and allows the artwork to take up its true space, not to be controlled or contorted by an artist.
In this sense, materiological determination became a guiding force for the manufacture
of Tatlin’s reliefs. This not only distinguished them from Cubist assemblages, but also brought
them closer to the tradition of icons.
Tatlin showed his first reliefs in 1914, in his Moscow studio called The First Exhibition of Painterly Reliefs.
“The Bottle” Vladimir Tatlin, 1913
This is an assemblage on a wooden board, consisting of a curved sheet of tin fixed at the center; to the upper left, a flat sheet framing a silhouette of a bottle carved into the board, with string crisscrossing the cavity and holding a shoe last; and to the lower right, a piece of wallpaper glued to the board. Tatlin derived form from the materials’ own qualities. Tatlin’s reliefs not only distinguished themselves from cubism but also brought them closer to the tradition of icons.
It is the spatial tension between matter and void, between art and reality, what the counter-reliefs are about.