Among the fourteen artists presenting work at Zero-Ten, The Last Futuristic Exhibition of Painting, the names of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. For both artists, by then outspoken rivals, the exhibition was an opportunity to consolidate their place in avant-garde at a decisive point in their careers. The work they presented heralded a new direction in their work and in Russian art in general. The enmity between Malevich and Tatlin prompted both artists to produce brochures endorsing their pieces in the exhibition. Tatlin’s booklet along with two photographs, are the only documentation we now have of his contribution to the show The cover of the booklet shows one of the two corner counter-reliefs: a composition of iron and copper sheets, suspended in a corner by rigging affixed to the walls. Most of the knowledge we have of Tatlin’s reliefs is based on photographs of the time, appearing in catalogues or taken by close acquaintances. Tatlin produced at least sixteen experimental constructions with materials over the course of approximately five years (1913-1917), using many terms: board composition, painterly relief, selection of materials, counter-relief, and corner counter-relief. Some pieces have been found, or have been reconstructed since the 1980s. Due to this limited documentation, the exact chronology of Tatlin’s reliefs remains only tentative.
Tatlin showed his first reliefs in May 1914, in a five-day exhibition in his Moscow studio called The First Exhibition of Painterly Reliefs. One of the pieces he presented is known as Bottle, produced in 1913. This is an assembalage 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. While Picasso’s assemblage utilized malleable materials indiscriminately to suggest form, Tatlin derived form from the materials own qualities.
This important difference brings us to another principle of faktura, that of materiological determination. Partly motivated by the rejection of authorial supremacy in academic practices, avant-garde Russian artists progressively interpreted faktura as a way to relinquish authority over the work of art by allowing the material to guide its production. For Tatlin, materiological determination meant that the reliefs would not respond to a preconceived metaphor or subject matter, instead the materials would speak for themselves.