Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems

by Vasily Kamensky

Tango with Cows, shown at right, offers a tour of Moscow's urban entertainment. In his "ferro-concrete" (reinforced concrete) poems, Vasily Kamensky replaced grammar and syntax with a spatial arrangement of words that celebrates concrete as a dynamic force in the invention of the modern city. The artists discarded customary book materials and printed Tango on cheap wallpaper as a parody of urban bourgeois taste. By juxtaposing the urban tango—an erotic Argentine dance that arrived in Russia in 1913 via Paris—with the cows of rural Russia, Kamensky captured the tension poets and artists felt between the recovery of a rural past and the allure of an urban present in creating their art of the future.

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/...

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1914

About the author

Vasily Vasilevich Kamensky (Russian: Василий Васильевич Каменский) (April 5, 1884 - November 11, 1961) was a Russian Futurist poet, playwright, and artist as well as one of the first Russian aviators.