In the text Instead of a Manifesto about the leading figure of the Transfurist group, Ry Nikonova (Anna Tarshis), we read: «Ry finds it ‘boring’ to paint the borderline, quantum, dualistic or disk paintings she has invented.
Ry writes the SYSTEM of techniques, while poems and paintings are merely incidental.» Indeed, while it was natural for avant-garde artists to see their manifestos and theoretical writings as an extension of their creative practices, Nikonova often emphasized that her System of Interconnected Styles, with Illustrations and Commentaries was primary, whereas her own artistic work served merely to implement the principles articulated and stratified in that system of forms and techniques.
She later explained: «I crave constraints and rules by which literature would evolve, as music does, ” referring to «Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, ” and spoke of her goal «to systematize meaning in the same way Mendeleev systematized nature—to find a pocket for every semantic ball.» This inversion of theory and practice both set her apart from other Transfurist poets, assigning her the role of the group’s chief theorist, and referred to a broader twentieth-century avant-garde tradition—from Valery Bryusov to the Leningrad neo-futurist Alexander Kondratov’s My Trinities—in which art was understood as a «systemic» enterprise, governed by a predetermined generative «program.»
Moreover, outside the context of the System, which Nikonova-Tarshis expressed in a range of theoretical and practice-based works, from Lyuboyaz to Tonezharl, much of her artistic practice remains opaque, precisely because of the close interconnection between her theoretical inquiry and creative experimentation.
