El Lissitzky (1890-1941)

Globetrotter( in der Zeit) is one of a series of nine lithographs intended as stage designs for a futuristic opera called Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Michail Matyushin. The opera was performed for the first time in 1913 in Saint Petersburg, directed by Diaghilev with robotic costumes and abstract sets by Malevitch. Involving a plot in which the sun is cast out of the heavens as an outmoded form of light and energy, and superseded by technology, the opera was a radical, utopian vision of the transformation of mankind. Lissitzky’s interpretation of the opera was even more radical than Malevich’s, envisaging the use of mechanical puppets instead of living performers, controlled by a single Schaugestalter (Show-realiser). [The bodies] ‘glide, roll, float, on, in, and over the stage. All the parts of the stage and all the bodies are set in motion by means of electromechanical forces and devices, and the control centre is in the hands of a single individual’ (El Lissitzky, Suprematism in World Reconstruction, quoted in: R. Heller, Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in Germany, 1918-1933, M. & L. Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, p. 340.).