Adriana zdanevich biography
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Ghosts of the Avant-Garde: On Johanna Drucker’s “Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist”
A remarkable account of the life, work, and afterlife of an elusive modernist artist.
Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist by Johanna Drucker. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 312 pages.
I DON’T KNOW for certain, of course, but chances are that you’re reading this on a computer, smartphone, or suchlike glowing confection of plastic and toxic metals. The book under review is also available in a format compatible with such devices, but the version of it I read was printed on “environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste,” which is good to know — though there’s the rider: “whenever possible.” At least the paper is acid-free. The other details of the book’s manufacture with which the reader is furnished are scanty — we’re not informed what font was used for its script, for instance — though there are the usual credits for the cover image and design.
Who cares? Well, Johanna Drucker, whose career as a professor of bibliographical studies at UCLA has been devoted to modernist book production and the materials of verbal (or perhaps, more properly, alphabetic) artworks, does. And so too, to
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Johanna Drucker’s Iliazd
In 1985, the book artist and future scholar of print and digital aesthetics Johanna Drucker was working on a chapter of her dissertation on Futurist and Dadaist typography in the Bibilothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. Sitting across from her was a fellow American researcher, flipping through a “marvelous” deluxe edition of a livre d’artiste by someone who clearly belonged to one of these movements, but whose work Drucker did not recognize. The researcher explained that the work was by Ilia Zdanevich, better known by his alias Iliazd: a book artist, poet, playwright, novelist, and publisher who had left his native Georgia for Paris in the 1920s. If she was interested, Zdanevich’s widow Hélène lived nearby, and was always glad to speak to scholars about his work. Drucker was intrigued enough to pay a call on “Madame,” but could not have known that soon she would find herself visiting her daily, working with her on Iliazd’s biography, and becoming her confidante. Nor could Drucker have known that the project would only come to fruition thirty-five years later, with the publication of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, or that it would look so different from what Hélène had in mind when she commissioned Drucker to write it.
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