Slavs and Tatars Love Letters

Way back in the days of Art & Language, Guerilla Art Action Group, the Red Herring, and Red Crayola, political activism and fine art were fused in dry little pamphlets, clangy rock music tapes sold for a few bucks, and a kind of art production that said “we know how to make art but we won’t.” Some of the Conceptlers painted better than others, but all of them, all of them, came out of art school. Picasso and not Breshnev were their secret Leitfäden, and an aesthetics of this time has still to be written.

Oh, times have changed.

With a mix of high and low registers, ribald humour and esoteric discourse, Long Legged Linguistics aims to tell the voluptuous account of alphabet politics in the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Block [sic] through the unlikely perspective of mercenary sexuality. The first installment of Long Legged Linguistics, Slavs and Tatars’ Love Letters - the book - (forthcoming in 2013) explores notions of gender, power, and resistance amongst [sic] others through cases of linguistic submission and empowerment, namely [sic].

Love Letters (wool, yarn, 2013) takes an original Mayakovsky drawing and features several failed attempts to assign Cyrillic letters or graphemes to sounds or phonemes (from Polish to Abkhaz, Moldovan to Tajik) that did not previously exist in a Cyrillic alphabet.

Way back in the days of Art & Language, Guerilla Art Action Group, the Red Herring, and Red Crayola, political activism and fine art were fused in dry little pamphlets, clangy rock music tapes sold for a few bucks, and a kind of art production that said “we know how to make art but we won’t.” Some of the Conceptlers painted better than others, but all of them, all of them, came out of art school. Picasso and not Breshnev were their secret Leitfäden, and an aesthetics of this time has still to be written. Oh, times have changed. With a mix of high and low registers, ribald humour and esoteric discourse, Long Legged Linguistics aims to tell the voluptuous account of alphabet politics in the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Block through the unlikely perspective of mercenary sexuality. The first installment of Long Legged Linguistics, Slavs and Tatars’ Love Letters - the book - (forthcoming in 2013) explores notions of gender, power, and resistance amongst others through cases of linguistic submission and empowerment, namely. Love Letters (wool, yarn, 2013) takes an original Mayakovsky drawing and features several failed attempts to assign Cyrillic letters or graphemes to sounds or phonemes (from Polish to Abkhaz, Moldovan to Tajik) that did not previously exist in a Cyrillic alphabet.