Reading Against the Frame: Photomontage and Trans Aesthetics in the Russian Avant-Garde

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

Towards a Trans Modernism: Material Discontinuities, (Re)imagined Histories

Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.”[1] In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’ experiments attest to a structuring ambivalence about whether and how the “unpresentable” might be made visible on the surface, whether of a body or a body of work. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, this ambivalence assumes heightened political stakes, and art objects appear correspondingly riven with dialectical tensions; much as they celebrate the destructive potential of their own novelty, they cannot quite relinquish the dream of the artwork as seamless totality. How answerable must the made body be, they ask, to a public? To history? Thus, I suggest that we might understand the art of the early Soviet avant-garde—both in its motivating questions and in the answers its new forms encode—as surprisingly trans.

From a phenomenological standpoint, such a reading is not far-fetched. Compared with the spectrality of the as-yet-unrealized trans body, or—in the case of achieved gender transition, its no-longer-visible past—even the most conceptual art works feel far from abstract. To be trans (in the broadest sense of that term) is to perceive, with immediacy, the always-already-mediated nature of one’s flesh.[2] It is to live with a constant awareness of the body’s historicity, as it seeks to disentangle itself from both the lived praxis and the conceptual nexus of being/having been “the other” gender. But to be trans is also to be possessed of a different, mental image: a vision of a truly-gendered (or genderless) self whose hold on one is no less powerful for lacking the body’s—or words’, or pictures’—material support. Trans gender, then, is a paradox: an identity founded on a metamorphosis. It is, as Judith Butler and others have described, an accretion of actions, a habitus or performance, and yet not reducible to how a body looks or moves.[3] “Trans” plays at the boundaries where determinism borders on agency; it seeks what the Soviet avant-garde sought: not merely a shift in the visible world, but to be material differently.

For gender nonconforming viewers, an under-recognized value of works of art thus resides in their capacity to serve as models of “unpresentable” embodiment. In the absence of historical images, or a well-established cultural imaginary that sees trans lives as viable, the viewer without access to such content becomes ever more keenly attuned to works whose own subversive qualities invite one to read against the frame: to undertake what Tim Dean describes as “a strategic practice or . . . style of constituting the [normative] archive’s legibility” in ways that “unsettle those orders of knowledge established in and through official archives.”[4] Thus, older works of art that seem, as if by luck, to get something “correct” about one’s embodied experience can spur a recognition by means of méconnaissance, evoking a sense of parallelism askew.[5]

Queer theory is no stranger to this kind of reading/viewing practice, theorized by José Esteban Muñoz: “To disidentify,” he writes, “is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.”[6] Disidentification draws power from ambivalence, as it

neither opts to assimilate within . . . [an existing] structure nor strictly opposes it. . . . Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism) . . . [disidentification] tries to transform a cultural logic from within. (Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11–12)

Far from eschewing mainstream cultural forms, disidentification owes much of its subversive force to how closely, even earnestly, it cleaves to normative cultural frameworks, only to reinhabit them in ways that reveal their (repressed or merely unrecognized) queer potential. Disidentificatory practices and performances pose “a challenge,” in the words of Diana Fuss, “to the silent presumption that identities wholly correspond to identifications and that sexuality [or gender] is a seamless, monolithic, unfractured whole.”[7] At the heart of trans gender, then, is the knowledge that any body continuous with one’s internal world must be constructed through a metamorphosis with unpredictable effects. To claim a trans identity is to sacrifice the external illusion of seamless, continuous gender in the name of a future embodiment in which the materiality of flesh and one’s self-perception can coexist.[8] And since, in the words of Marquis Bey, identity categories like race and gender cannot “be ‘found’ on or in the body in some legible and transparent way,” we need more capacious, diverse, and nuanced models for conceiving of trans embodiment and relationality.[9] Might disidentifications with art works of earlier times and places offer us this chance?

Within the field of trans studies, such questions have tended to receive less attention than the more pressing imperatives to define trans gender and defend its viability. This crucial work takes many forms, including medico-bureaucratic histories of trans identity, ethnographic approaches to the values and practices of trans communities, attempts to situate trans within the often-fraught entanglements of queer and feminist theory, and examinations of how the ongoing regulation of trans life continues to “create structured insecurity and (mal)distribute life chances across [gender non-conforming] populations.”[10] As increased trans visibility and gains for civil rights have led to a growing wave of anti-transgender legislation in the US and elsewhere, this focus on identity makes sense; the threats trans people face will not be solved by a revolution in aesthetics. And yet, as tools for understanding the embodied experience of trans gender, the identity politics frameworks so integral to efforts at LGBTQ+ advocacy and solidarity fall short. Queer and trans studies scholars limit ourselves when we apply identitarian paradigms too rigidly to literature and the arts, whether it be by restricting our focus to contemporary works—those made by trans practitioners or those that represent trans life directly—or by claiming that “trans” describes the lived experiences of gender non-conforming figures from the past.[11]

If “trans” names not only an identity but an aesthetic—one that reflects a distinctive range of orientations and affects that disrupt or exceed normative unities of gender, time, and space—we might learn much from shifting our attention temporarily away from identity politics frameworks that define trans art in terms of its maker’s gender or its literal content, and towards the materials and methods whereby such a trans aesthetic can take shape. The conceptual tools for this endeavor, as I hope to show, may come from places, times, and works where one never expected to find them—indeed, from contexts that lack an awareness of “trans” as a category. This way of looking allows us, in the words of Emmanuel David, to “reimagine the contours of trans visual and material culture” across a broader range of global and historical contexts.[12] Furthermore, it suggests that, prior to and beyond identity claims that serve political mobilization, the identification that makes a new life conceivable may not be with a person or label, but with a medium.[13]

In its emphasis on trans gender’s affective and sensory dimensions, this focus on medium shares an affinity with the work of theorists like Jeanne Vaccaro, who looks to textile arts for ways to rethink “the politics of crafting a handmade transgender materiality,” and micha cárdenas, who locates in a series of “poetic operations—cutting, stitching, and shifting—” a model for how “to move through and across multiple fields of mediation, to see from many viewpoints, and to come together to build a trans of color poetics.”[14] Such scholarship takes seriously the dream of a trans “archive of feelings,” and the wish to see oneself as part of a longer history.[15] And yet, its aim is not recuperative of the past, but descriptive of a trans phenomenology: of how it feels to linger in what Hil Malatino calls an “interregnum, in the crucial and transformative moments between . . . the regime of what was and the promise of what might be.”[16]

Needless to say, any proposal of a singular, monolithic trans aesthetic would contravene the multiplicity and surprise that are two of gender- and genre-crossing art’s greatest affordances. Instead, we might focus on how art works that espouse a trans way of seeing and being raise certain questions. For instance: if the body is a frame, what materials and methods could render one’s inner “picture” of oneself visible? How can a medium represent trans temporality, when the timescale on which one experiences one’s body—as a made thing with an only-partly-evident history—and the timescale on which others encounter it are so radically different? Insofar as mass-reproduced, filmic media offers a new analogy between the mutability of the image in time and the contingent, malleable nature of the body, how can one square the utopian promise of the “new person” with the fact that plasticity is not infinite? What is to be done with the residues of the life lived, of the person one was?

This very trans set of concerns is also distinctly modernist, reflecting a sensibility torn between desire for, and fear of, the present’s overwhelming presence; the promise of utopia; and the threat of apocalypse. The result is an aesthetic of ambivalence, engaged with Osip Mandelstam’s Acmeist “nostalgia for world culture” or T. S. Eliot’s attempts to shore fragments against ruins and, at the same time, invested in the Futurist dream of subjectless art, or the work as transcendent totality.[17] Within the modernist period, this rivenness tends to get cast in gendered terms. It leads not only to a rejection of the feminine as high art’s abjected other, but to a conflict between competing visions of masculinity: the “romantic individualism” of the nineteenth century and the early-twentieth-century ideal of “anti-sentimental technicism.”[18] And while numerous critics have read high-modernist aesthetic innovations under the sign of threatened, fragmented, or wounded masculinity, most have done so without contesting the premise that embodied experiences—or the means of representing them—can be coded in terms of binary, enduring gender categories to begin with.[19]

We might more fully understand the avant-garde’s preoccupation with gender and genre alike by recognizing how new (mass-produced, filmic) media occasioned an analogy between the mutability of images in time and the plasticity of bodies whose dissident materialities undermined fixed gender roles—or, for that matter, the supposedly “natural” truth of sex.[20] After all, it was precisely at “the turn of the twentieth century,” as Jules Gill-Peterson has shown, that “sex was brought under the jurisdiction of a modernizing project of medicine that sought to alter its form” in order to stabilize binary sexual categories when faced with subjects who failed or refused to fit within them.[21] And despite their starkly different contexts, both the early development of (what we now call) transgender medicine and the Soviet avant-gardists’ efforts to produce the “new Soviet subject” by means of the “reeducation of the senses” are characterized by twin projects of reimagining and regulation.[22] At the same time that Dziga Vertov theorized the power of filmic media to inculcate kinooshchushchenie (cinematic sensation) in proletarian viewers, thereby reshaping their understanding of the new society and their proper roles within it, medical clinics—primarily in Germany and the US—had begun to treat certain uneasily or “abnormally” sexed bodies as media in their own right, ripe for transformation into exempla of normative gender.

Indeed, one might read the reactionary misogyny of much modernist cultural production and the early Soviet theorists’ emphasis on medium as two sides of the same coin, both arising at least partly in response to anxieties about the contingent plasticity of the body and its textual/aesthetic analogue, the sign. In the early twentieth century—once, in Fredric Jameson’s words, “[science had] reached the limits of perception”—the affordances of new technologies (such as the camera) to revolutionize and extend that perception also held a countervailing threat: namely, that “you can see only as much as your model permits you to see; that the methodological starting point does more than simply reveal, it actually creates, the object of study.”[23] Photomontage is a perfect case study for this conundrum, since the same aspects of the medium—clarity, indexicality, immediacy—that endowed it with rhetorical force also had the power to subvert any linear argument from within. By abdicating film’s temporal progression, photomontage revealed how the camera’s “exact fixation” of “visual fact” could, without any loss of specificity, cut against the grain of narrative teleology.[24] The medium’s trans aesthetic inheres in its ambivalence about the nature of its own materials and structuration, dramatized by how it both depends upon and undermines the paradigm of visibility.

The Faktura of the New Person

Every revolution begins in perception; each revolt, being at once illegal and ineluctable, demands that its participants reconceptualize their relationship to the law.[25] As the early Soviet avant-gardists understood, the events of October 1917 thus raised not only the question of which classic works to “throw . . . off the steamship of modernity,” but that of which parts of the past could be kept, co-opted into service as the basis for the production of a new society.[26] And as the ravages of revolution, world war, and the civil war persisted in many citizens’ memories and material lives, filmic media promised not only to revolutionize perception, but to allow its artist-engineers to narrativize recent history.[27] Photomontage was seen as particularly promising in this regard, since it adopted certain filmic features—“alterations, conflicts, resolutions, and resonances”—but also enacted a reversion from temporality to spatiality, as if it sought to preserve and dissect the era’s attendant affects systematically.[28] In the words of Sergei Oushakine, the medium embodied “a new method of work with representational materials and, at the same time, a new metaphor for revolutionary epistemology.”[29]

Photomontage’s dialectic between materials and metaphors offered avant-garde artists a model for how to recast the largest questions facing the new Communist regime—for instance, what vision of collectivity would motivate proletarian audiences to understand their place in a transformed society?—as questions of medium and technique. Hence the ascendence of the master term faktura, a concept denoting, in Nikolai Tarabukin’s 1916 definition, “the material or medium (colors, sounds, words) and the construction, through which the material is organized into a coherent whole.”[30] Faktura was inherently political for photomontage practitioners like Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, and El Lissitzky, who understood an artist’s choice of media and methods as inciting, on a smaller scale, the revolution in consciousness necessary to create a shared Soviet identity that did not exist prior to its representation. An art of the people and about them was crucial for the proletariat to become, in György Lukács’s words, “both the subject and the object of knowledge,” conscious of itself as the engine of history: “only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them into a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality.”[31]

With this aim in mind, Rodchenko and his contemporaries sought to illustrate to masses both the threats the Soviet project faced and the glorious future it promised. As a sculptor, painter, and metalworker, as well as the head of the Metalwork Faculty at the State Higher Artistic and Technical School, or VKHUTEMAS, Rodchenko thus turned to photomontage with aims that were, in essence, pedagogical.[32] But for the purpose of inculcating mass proletarian consciousness, the plasticity of filmic media was both its greatest affordance and its most intractable obstacle. After all, photographs, unlike paintings, always show more of the world—and in more granular detail—than any photographer could intend, such that their excess of visual data may invite interpretations that run counter to the aims of an authoritarian state.[33] This hermeneutic instability is a feature that avant-garde photographers exploit—emboldened, through the advent of film, to break their art’s implicit contract with sight. Now that “photography and cinema [had] made struggling for exact likeness childish,” what remained but to reveal the structures and processes undergirding the visible world?[34] This was the attitude with which Dziga Vertov spoke of film montage’s capacity “to show that which the eye does not see—to show truth, the microscope and telescope of time, the negative of time, the possibility of seeing without frontiers or distances . . . a kind of Communist decoding of reality.”[35]

In the midst of film’s utopian perceptual possibilities, a sense of “stuckness” between the two imperatives facing the new Marxist art—to render the new society as a static, repeatable blueprint, and to narrativize the radical present within an ongoing history—becomes definitional of early Soviet photomontage. A kind of late-style photography, wounded but also transformed by film’s system of splices and cuts, photomontage draws rhetorical power from its capacity to internalize gaps; it brings history’s discontinuities and overlaps, accretions and contradictions, within one frame. For the Berlin Dada circle who invented it, as for their Soviet contemporaries, this method was understood, in Rosalind Krauss’s account, as “a means of infiltrating the mere picture of reality with its meaning.”[36] This self-reflexive, malleable medium was thus inherently rhetorical, but its rhetoric could serve divergent ideological ends. Hence the intensifying, post-revolutionary political pressure on members of the Futurist circle to rebrand themselves as Constructivists, and to align their work’s faktura with nation-building aims by reframing it as “factography.”[37] Nevertheless, in the early 1920s, faktura remains a formal correlative for efforts to unify the new art’s seemingly irreconcilable elements: everyday life and historical theodicy, a diachronic awareness of context and the anti-narrative shock of the present. Art, in a very trans turn of events, could be the model for a new life—not the other way around. But only works with a properly revolutionary relationship to their materials, only those whose faktura situated the present and future in “correct” relation to the past, would be up to the task. Rodchenko and his circle hoped that, by integrating film’s plasticities of time and scale into one still, composite image, photomontage might serve the aim described by Sergei Tret’iakov: nothing less than “the production of a new human being through art.”[38]

To be trans is also to learn, to be taught: how can one be a new person?[39] And as Rodchenko and his counterparts sought to cast the revolutionary present in the light of the history it had rejected but not yet outdistanced, they faced a set of complexities characteristic of trans experience. As in the case of trans gender, it was compelling to believe that the body of the new Soviet state could be both healed and transformed by means of its own “raw materials.” But if Vertov had claimed, in “WE,” that “Kinopravda [film-truth] was made with materials as a house is built with bricks,” the resultant image-constructions were anything but monolithic (Vertov, “WE”). Indeed, the same aspects of photomontage (clarity, indexicality, immediacy) that gave faktura its rhetorical strength also had the power to subvert any linear argument from within. Adopting Muñoz’s term, we might see photomontage as a disidentificatory medium: one whose ambivalent embrace of the plasticities of film could both serve and undercut the Soviet Union’s nation-building aims.[40]

This quite unbricklike, polysemous quality of photographs was partly a function of their aforementioned habit of exposing more of the world than suited the aims of a univocal State. But the paradox inherent in the medium ran deeper: the same modern technologies—photography among them—that had made the construction of an industrialized, socialist society possible had, as Rancière describes, borne in their wake “the destructive presentiment” of their own arbitrariness, a sinking sense that “the wish to transform the world is not underwritten by any objective reality.”[41] Even if every photo-fragment bore evidence of a revolution in human life, neither the fragment nor the composite proved that the transformation was destined, let alone justified; and yet, the result was no less real, irrevocable, and deeply felt. What if the same could be said about the teleology of the trans body?

As Grace Lavery points out, trans people who seek either medical or bureaucratic gender affirmation are “required to . . . become people who always knew, . . . not merely a postulated subject capable of expressing, but a subject incapable of not expressing.”[42] And yet, as far as contemporary science can tell, trans gender does not inhere in any particular part of one’s flesh; even in the case of medico-surgical interventions, there is no single appendage or lack, no blood panel, genotype, or scar, to which one can point as hard proof of trans “identity.” For most trans people, an inner inconsistency persists even beyond any “achievement” of a visible, seemingly secure gender identity, especially since one’s ability to be seen as male/female/nonbinary remains subject, always, to how other people (mis)read the materiality of one’s body. In this sense, we might understand the trans aesthetic of photomontage as an embrace of the medium’s constructed and contingent qualities. In addition to “cracking open the code of the majority,” such revolutionary aesthetic praxis “proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality” (Muñoz, Disidentifications, 31). In Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s Pro Eto (About That), the rare conjunction of photomontage with literary text offers a chance to grasp this non-teleological, even anti-realist, faktura in all its uneasy concreteness.

“With the Nails of My Eyes”: Making Space, Holding Time in Pro Eto

Pro Eto, Mayakovsky’s book-length poem, illustrated with a series of ten photomontages by Rodchenko and published in 1923, was the first literary work to feature photocollage compositions referred to, in print, as “photomontage.” As emblematized in its iconic cover image of Lilia Brik’s face, it was also the first book to feature multiple photographs of both its poet-speaker, the real-life Mayakovsky, and the lover for whom he pines (fig. 1). Pro Eto thus marks itself as a highly personal endeavor, and yet one whose restlessly experimental, genre-bending quality evidences a fraught attempt to scale up from the personal to the collective. Pro Eto’s unprecedented use of photomontage to depict the conflict between private and public life enables it to embody a phenomenology poised between incompatible temporalities, scales of experience, and versions of the self. The work’s trans aesthetic inheres not in any explicitly gender-bending subject matter, nor in its creator’s identity, but rather in the dialectical interplay between its materials and its mode of construction. Its juxtapositions of past and present, self and other(s), image and text, incite an awareness of simultaneous “stuckness” and plasticity. Its trans aesthetic lingers in—makes material—the promises and aporias of relationality, which structures not only the speaker’s interactions, but his phenomenology, in which flesh and fantasy, emergence and historicity, loss and change coexist.[43]

It is ironic that such a phenomenology should be found in the work of this legendarily hyper-masculine (and, by many accounts, misogynistic) author—let alone the one whom Stalin posthumously enshrined as “the greatest poet of our Soviet era.”[44] The many afterlives of the Mayakovsky myth make Pro Eto’s trans aesthetic all the more intriguing, since the work models, on the level of structure, a far more conflicted and changeable relationship to gender roles than the poet’s biography admits. Pro Eto’s uncanny, unintentional success at capturing a trans phenomenology has a great deal to teach us—first of all, about the affordances and limitations of photographic media for representing the paradox of an “identity” with difference at its heart. As part of a broader wave of Soviet aesthetic experiments to enact an as-yet-abstract future, Pro Eto also reveals the affect of revolution’s aftermath to be more complex and conflicted than existing accounts of the avant-garde—including Mayakovsky’s own—suggest.

The premise of Pro Eto is simple: the poet has separated from his lover. From the start, the lyric speaker, whom the poem encourages readers to identify with Mayakovsky, finds himself caught in a nexus of binary oppositions, including presence and absence, body and voice, fact and imagination—and, most obviously, image and text. The transness of Pro Eto is, in part, the outcome of the poet’s struggle to represent—indeed, to bring into being by means of representations—a new self coherent and self-contained enough to transcend his dialectical impasse. With its asymmetrical, step-down lines whose assonances ricochet unpredictably off one another, Pro Eto feels as trapped in its own ambivalence as the poet is in his exile from his beloved. The very title of the work (About That) gestures sardonically at the inadmissibility of its subject: individual love in the era of building the Soviet nation; and yet Mayakovsky’s lyric voice, however strident, cannot break the walls of his “Reading Gaol.”[45]

Hemmed in by particulars—not least, the particularity of his echo-tormented mind—the speaker enacts linguistic distortions and displacements to render his own state of radical permeability. When he hears that his beloved is sick but is unable to reach her, the density of assonance, internal rhyme, and repetition lends the absurd outcome a sense of ineluctability:

The word for a bedstead (железки; zhelezki) not only yields up, with its consonants reversed, the verb “to lie” (лежит; lezhit), but gives way to the homophone for “(lacrimal) glands” (желёзки; zhelyozki), justifying, by an internal logic, the submersion of the bed in a lake of the poet’s overabundant tears. A similar set of transmutations occurs in the succeeding lines, when the word for bedclothes (постель; postel’) joins with the assonance between trepletsia (треплется; to whip or flutter, as in a breeze) and the repeated zhelezkam to yield pleskom, or “with a splash” (плеском), thereby immersing the speaker in his own effusions of grief. In Mayakovsky’s hands, the word does, indeed, become a kind of raw material—but one whose first, “unprocessed” appearance is revealed, through each new iteration, to have encoded within it all the possibilities of its subsequent transformations.

As the poem’s relentless sonic and semantic shifts propel the plot, the objects they denote are likewise transformed, with hyperbolically violent effects: Lilia Brik’s phone number, released along the telephone wire, becomes a bullet; the sparks struck by the phone call set off an earthquake; and the telephone receiver turns into a spear that pierces the chest of the speaker, whom jealousy has transmogrified into a polar bear.[46] Even as the endless manipulability—indeed, the immateriality of language—makes such transformations possible, the dense verbal textures of Mayakovsky’s lines rehearse the obduracy of any “outside,” whether literal or linguistic. This is one aspect of the poem’s trans aesthetic: its medium is at once too material and not quite material enough—shockingly ripe for transformation, yet immutable, inescapable.

The materiality of Pro Eto’s represented world, emphasized and, as it were, confirmed by the materiality of the photomontages’ image-fragments, is crucial for multiple reasons. For one thing, this concreteness gave credence to the most popular interpretation of the poem, which Mayakovsky himself promoted. Pro Eto was not, he insisted, a member of that unspeakably outdated genre, the love lyric; instead, its central conflict between lovers was an allegory for the battle of revolutionary consciousness against the encroachment of retrogressive banality (byt).[47] Since the late nineteenth century, this concept—originally a more neutral term for “everyday life,” had come, as Svetlana Boym explains, “to designate the reign of stagnation and routine, of daily transience without transcendence . . . the order of chaos and contingency that precludes any illumination.”[48] In this reading, the tawdry clutter of the Pro Eto’s domestic setting embodies the dangers of a retrograde ethos of private ownership. Throughout the poem, the objects and spaces of everyday life threaten to engulf the speaker’s revolutionary spirit in the “domestic trash” that rendered the new Soviet middle class complacent, self-interested, and implicitly effeminate.[49] Rodchenko’s photomontages give a material form to this critique of accumulation, as photo-fragments of bourgeois objects accrete to the point of bewilderment. In one image, multiple portraits of Lilia Brik stare out accusingly from a floral divan, an armchair set, a ruffle-choked bed (fig. 2). In another, a caftan-clad peasant stands in profile, small enough to fit on a serving tray, while enormous silver spoons blot out his face (fig. 3). A magazine photograph of a “giant” in a well-appointed apartment, his head almost scraping the ceiling as his “normal”-sized female companion stares, echoes the sense of entrapment.

It was convenient—indeed, politically necessary—for Mayakovsky to align this brazenly autobiographical poem, overflowing with intense emotions, with the project of defeating byt: that aspect of life which Trotsky, among others, condemned as most recalcitrantly oriented towards the past, and thus most capable of undermining revolutionary action.[50] And yet, we oversimplify Pro Eto if we take the poet at his word. As Rodchenko’s illustrations attest, the complexity of the speaker’s entanglements (both actual and phantasmatic) is evident in the poem’s oscillation between nostalgia and (self-)destruction. The object-world is not so much the poet’s antagonist as it is the screen against which he projects the conflict between the self to itself—riven as it is with hopes, embodied memories, dreads, and inarticulate fantasies—and the self to/with/among others.

Although these quintessentially modernist themes of alienation and the pressures of the public sphere are not unique to Mayakovsky (or, for that matter, to trans experience), Pro Eto is unique in how it exploits the potentials of photomontage to both open and populate gaps in the poem’s narrative, thereby rendering the speaker’s conflicted affect material in new ways.[51] And while the “battle against byt” narrative would have us believe that the speaker’s fraught relationship to his beloved, his emotions, and his memories is merely a foil for the broader avant-garde struggle to represent the relationship of the new Communist society to its past, Rodchenko’s photomontages complicate this reading. Again and again, the poet-speaker’s ambivalence—embodied in the repetition and juxtaposition of objects—overpowers his (much more abstract) ideological commitments. It is hard to deny a sense of visual pleasure, even nostalgic delight, in the very images the poem claims it wants to consign to the dustbin of history. This is a feeling to which the speaker at last admits, when, towards the end of the poem, he demands: «Что мне делать, / если я / во всю, / всей сердечной мерою, / в жизнь сию, / сей / мир / верил, / верую?» (“What can I do, / if I / altogether, / with all my heart’s measure / in this life, / this / world / believed, / believe?”).[52]

These lines might provoke us to return to the view expressed by Christina Lodder, Boris Groys, and others that the Constructivist incorporation of representational imagery was merely a concession to a Party state that would increasingly demand of art “a combination of the most matter-of-fact, everyday reality with the most heroic prospects.”[53] These pressures were undoubtedly influential, but we might also see Pro Eto’s inclusion of personal, everyday elements more “transly”: as a testament to the impossibility of not situating oneself within life as it is—for love, if for no other reason—however fervently one wishes to transcend it. Earlier avant-garde compositions by painters like Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Lissitzky in the 1910s had exiled the artist’s embodiment from their compositions to so great an extent that they posed as pure materiality, transcendence of the physical by its own means. Now, in a sort of return of the repressed, Rodchenko’s Pro Eto photomontages are haunted not only by the very kinds of representational imagery that the artists of the prior decade had foresworn, but by photographs of the poet himself.[54]

Thus, throughout the Pro Eto collages, Mayakovsky stands, sits, and squats, juxtaposed with visual off-rhymes: fighter jet, onion dome, polar bear, dinosaur, telephone. Out of place, out of scale, these object-echoes, possible only on the plane of flatness, seem to wink at the imperfect conjunction of the hero’s emotion and any images commandeered to capture it. The deliberate confusions of size present in Rodchenko’s illustrations—the nine-foot-tall man reprinted smaller than a butter knife, or Mayakovsky shrunk to fit in a mirror above a vanity—echo this recurrent theme (fig. 3). The very act of making oneself into art in this way begs certain questions. For instance: which version (which feeling, which person) is real, and which is the copy? On what possible scale can the poet square his unspeakable love (the “that” of the title) for Lilia with his love for Soviet society? How can one not merely represent revolutionary values but live them, given that certain identities come to seem possible—as certain parallels become perceptible—only on the grid of stilled time, through the operations of memory?

One critical factor compounds the poem’s relentless air of claustrophobia: the only objects available to fill the scene of revolution are the rejected ones. When the speaker returns home for Christmas—that pre-revolutionary holiday—the framed photo of Marx, the red geraniums, the samovar, and the ominous embrace of complacency it offers («Весь самовар рассиялся в лучики— / хочет обнять в самоварные ручки») torment him (Mayakovsky, Pro Eto, 24). This is the darker side of the poet’s verbal alchemy: just as this private experience must be cast in a shared language in order to transcend its inchoate state, Pro Eto must stage the fight against byt by means of an aggressive recombination of the very elements that constitute it. And when, just before the poem’s final section, the speaker makes his most full-throated disavowal of the past, the result is not just a reckoning with his “impurely” proletarian roots, but a litany that fragments his body:

Mayakovsky could scarcely proffer more physical evidence to certify his loathing for the old life. But the new Soviet state appears, in contrast, remarkably disembodied, symbolized only by a red flag (and that, in the form of an adjective). There is, as yet, no concrete other world, nor any alternative grammar to structure the words of the would-be New Soviet speaker—no choice but to be the subject of the sentence that comes after God.

The achievement of Rodchenko’s photomontages is that they manage to represent this paradoxical feeling that undergirds all of Pro Eto, which we might call a post-revolutionary affect. For much as photomontage itself can be seen as an example of late style, a post-filmic reversion to the stillness and materiality of the photographic image, Pro Eto arrives late to the scene of a revolution whose destructive effects are ongoing but which has yet to deliver on its grandest promises. Hence the poet’s final call for resurrection, which refers not only to himself, but to a range of emotions—utopian hopes and fears, shared faith in a communist future—that spurred the October uprising and will be necessary if it is to realize its goals. In the wake of historic upheaval, Pro Eto’s drive for transcendence is undercut by an ambivalence that Raymond Williams has described as the “tragic aspect of revolution”: namely, “that revolution—the long revolution against human alienation—produces, in real historical circumstances, its own new kinds of alienation, which it must struggle to understand.”[55] A revolution is also a turning—back, not just away.

Photomontage performs this perpetual turning through a disidentification with its own materials. It sublates its photo-fragments not into a higher unity, but into a conflicted, dialectical assemblage, one that preserves the gaps between binary terms and incommensurate scales: present and past, nation and self, image and text (Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 3–34). The poem’s scattershot plot likewise recycles its characters and objects in ever-new configurations but seems unable to supplant or save them. Prior to the poem’s deus ex machina finale of reconciliation, in Mayakovsky’s words and Rodchenko’s illustrations alike, the objects of the poet’s inner world and outer life are equally real, equally precise (fig. 4).[56] And because the faktura of photomontage renders all of the poem’s images equivalent, the disavowed past and the ideal future appear equidistant.

Here, too, the trans aesthetic of Pro Eto comes into view, as it rejects equally two opposite possibilities: that of an Eliotic “escape from personality,” and that of the seamlessly consistent, self-identical “identity.”[57] Much as the image-fragments of photomontage, ripped from their original contexts, have lost none of their concreteness or materiality, Pro Eto rejects these dreams of absolute identity (of the New Soviet Man with the nation, or even of the self with itself) in a way that preserves, even honors, the structure of the desire underlying them. In these compositions, we find, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, the false crossed out but not erased.[58] It is this exactitude of preservation that endows the objects of photomontage with post-revolutionary affect: they appear at once absurd and detestable, melancholy and nostalgic. However much Pro Eto may fight to fend the old life off, its fragments stick like a sob in the century’s throat. Likewise, a disavowed gender identity—the wrong pronouns, dead name, old body—refers, apostrophically, to a self that can no more be claimed than renounced completely.

The pathos of Rodchenko’s photomontage stems from its attempt to make this contradiction at the heart of images—both fact and absence, both index and ghost—speak of the present’s ambivalence about the past. Rodchenko’s collages, like Mayakovsky’s verse, seek nothing less than to invent a new mode of being-in-the-world, and yet, Pro Eto can only achieve this out of compromised remnants—which means that the composition must, in one gesture, apotropaically fend off the past and preserve it. Theodor Adorno might as well have been writing about photomontage when he called the work of art “a configuration that is both a critique of this alienated superficial form [of a world] and an attempt to build a non-alienated reality, a reality in which we critically find ourselves, out of the elements of that same reality.”[59] As for the future self, it is invisible, a world apart. All one has to touch it with is art.

And it may be unlivable. No revolutionary knows that the life after will be better. In the absence of a habitable narrative, how can the avant-gardist (or, for that matter, the trans individual) survive except on hopes that swing from utopian to apocalyptic? Perhaps this perspective invites us to see the Constructivist emphasis on faktura in a new light. Like the term “montage,” whose French original denotes both the process and the product of editing, the concept of faktura refers, in the words of Constructivist Alexei Gan, to both “the organic condition of the worked-over material” and “the whole process of the working of [that] material . . . in its integrity.”[60] By constellating the means and ends of art-making dialectically, this concept enables the artist to position the work in relation to its own past and future, such that “the transformation of raw material into one form or another continues to remind us of its primary form and conveys to us the next possibility of its transformation” (Gan, “Constructivism,” 343). Revolution, like transition, does not end.[61]

Transformations/Remainders: In Praise of the Gap

We know the rest of the story: the death of the Russian avant-garde, both literally and aesthetically, through a combination of post-NEP poverty, increasingly draconian controls over aesthetic production, and the forceful repression of non-conforming artists by means of blacklisting, hunger, exile, torture, and assassination. Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, prefigured in so many of his poems, came with a legendary note in which he lamented that “love’s boat [has] shattered against byt” («любовная лодка разбилась о быт»), and acquired the weight of a symbolic ending for many of the avant-garde generation.[62] And if the revolution had proven, and even reveled in, the plasticity of the sign, the Stalinist era called for a restabilization of discourse through the consolidation of a universal signifying system. Thus, photomontage—like Rodchenko’s photography—increasingly sought to frame its messages as unitary, its fragments as individual pieces of evidence in a dossier of Soviet greatness.[63] The much-lauded transparency and immediacy of photography revealed itself to have been, all along, surveillance’s twin; avant-garde strategies for the “deautomatization of perception” were co-opted for precisely the opposite effect: in Boris Groys’ words, “to automatize consciousness, to shape it in the desired mold by controlling its environment, its base, its subconscious.”[64]

From a nation-building perspective, then, it is not surprising that monolithic photomontages like Gustav Klutsis’s Let Us Fulfill the Plan of Great Works (Выполним план великих работ, 1930) would prove more politically effective than Rodchenko’s Pro Eto illustrations. To the question of how to render memory collective—how to posit a shared history in the name of a collective future, and yet keep both past and future particular—early Soviet photomontage had offered inconsistent and unsatisfying answers. And to the extent that such works had sought to incite political change by aesthetic means, their failure to do so may have been a function of their success at representing something else: not the jubilant proletarian rush of regime downfall or the triumph of rebuilding, but a trans aesthetic, rife with contradictions.

As in the case of Pro Eto, works that invite such (dis)identificatory relations can be invaluable to trans self-creation; they can serve as material correlatives for an inchoate experience of embodiment—one whose gendered past, present, and future may not be legible on, or coterminous with, the body. And yet, the shortcomings of Pro Eto and many other early Soviet works as mass art also point to the limits of such identifications with a medium. For one thing, media (like the words we use to discuss them) are culturally and historically specific. For another, art works, and identifications therewith, do not—despite the hopes that avant-gardists shared with Lenin and Stalin—teach one how to live. Rigorous engagements with questions of medium and technique and real-world political action to incite material change come to seem, as Adorno said of modernism and mass culture, “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”[65]

The incommensurability of these scales is a knowledge which one finds thematized in works like Pro Eto, whose insuperable rift between lovers mimes the impossibility of bridging private emotion and collective life. This disjuncture reappears, indeed, as soon as one looks to art of the past in efforts to unearth a trans aesthetic avant la lettre. The crux of the problem lies in the distance between two notions of “trans”: first, as used to designate a set of revolutionary aesthetic practices that trouble the binaries of gender, inside and outside, image and text, self and other(s); and second, as a paradoxical identity founded on ongoing change: a mode of being-in-the-world claimed, and lived, with mortal stakes. A challenge analogous to Pro Eto’s thus attends anyone who seeks to undertake a media archaeology of trans aesthetics without draining the term “trans” of its political salience. Can an engagement with the trans resonances of works from the past help us do justice to the particularities of trans experience as it is lived, while positing a foundation on which a more inclusive and livable trans politics can be built?

My aim here has been to show that such acts of reading against the frame, while no replacement for a robust, diverse, and ever-expanding field of cultural production by trans artists and writers, can broaden our sense of what it might mean to represent in a trans way. In cultural objects made with other audiences in mind, we can find models of trans embodiment, memory, and relationality without erasing the distance between, for instance, the Soviet Union in 1923 and the United States one century later. To do so is, on the broadest level, to follow the early avant-garde’s lead, insofar as its works, in Rancière’s account, “attest to th[e] unpresentability that seizes hold of thought, . . . [and] inscribe the shock of the material, [and] testify to the original gap.”[66] Within this compositional space of opposites—call them presence and absence, figure and ground, silence and speech—new modes of existence can start to assume their as-yet-unpresentable shape.

Early Soviet photomontage fails as political agitation in the same measure that it excels at capturing this dialectical stance: neither the self nor the world is ever seen “as it is,” but always seen as.[67] And because to be trans is to see oneself as—and to be read as, a certain gender (or not), over against the inherited frame—art may come closest to capturing this truth of trans experience precisely when it aligns itself with trans gender’s unrepresentable aspects. It can do this not solely through an identitarian focus on trans content, nor through the excavation of gender non-conformity in earlier eras, but by pursuing an engagement with the faktura of trans experience: the materials and methods whereby it renders “impossible” bodies concrete, conceivable. Then, there is no dearth of past models for (re)materializing the self, but a multiplicity. The once-forbidding opacity of earlier artworks comes to seem an inviting provocation to reimagine to our trans histories and futures in light of the material, political, and affective ties that bind us, both to our former selves and to each other.

A self, of course, is no more an identity than an artwork is a revolution. But a medium that mines “the original gap” between these scales of experience, one which dares to refigure that gap as a site of ambivalent sympathy and incomplete belief, offers what no monolithic art can: a means of being answerable to the past, of surviving one’s body.