Page 38 - Making Books
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Lev Rubinshtein
Коммуналка
Kommunalka
Moscow: Goppe, 2008
190 x 375 mm. 20 pages
Edition: 10, copy № 3/10 signed by the author
The poet Lev Rubinshtein (born 1941) is one of the founders of Moscow
Conceptualism. During the 19760s and 1970s he developed his minimal
poetry using index cards that were circulating throughout Moscow. The
Kommunalka, the communal quarter, where people were forced to live
close together, was nearly always a source for irritations. For this story
Rubinshtein did not use verses but short sentences in prose to depict
the reality in which the inhabitants had to comply to a multitude of rules
and requirements. In his use of a comic-like set of illustrations combined
with original photos from the period, Goppe fuses reality with artistic
interpretation, just as Rubinshtein did in his poetry.
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