The subject of this book could have been formulated in various ways: “The Author in the Cosmos of Ideology” or “The Cosmos as a Symptom of the Neurotic Condition of Totalitarian Society” or simply “The Author as Archive.” But anyway, in this case the three elements – Author, Cosmos and Archive – are crucial to an understanding of social utopias and philosophical, aesthetic and psychoanalytical theories.
The artists, poets and philosophers of the early twentieth century vaguely envisioned the cosmos as a vector of escape into the bright future. As a general rule, however, the fuel used for takeoff was an ideology of one kind or another, together with all its nuances. The Cosmos as an obsessional idea for society as a whole, and in particular for the Author. Malevich, Kandinsky, Filonov, Labas, Williams, and many others are the cosmonauts of their own utopias and concomitant ideologies. The theories of Fedorov, for instance. All these utopias ceased to exist in the 1930s, when the flames of personal utopias gave way to the infernal communist conflagration. Authors who launched themselves into a cosmos turned out to be ideologists of individualism, and therefore enemies of the socialist society that was being built. A society that aspired in its totality towards the ‘heavens’ of a collective world order that had tossed the individual into the combustion chamber of the booster rocket.
Every author actively structures the utopia of his own individual personality and realizes himself in this utopia, expanding its boundaries in all manner of diverse spaces, including the cosmos which, in the final analysis, is the goal towards which his primary ambitions are directed. Of course, the very concept ‘cosmos’ often changes. When the cosmos becomes the real objective of a collective author, ideologies become actively engaged – socialism, communism, Maoism. In contrast with the individual methods and practices for mastering a different space, or religious and psychological methods, the collective methods and practices resemble posters or slogans. Everything about them is sham. From the very beginning real flights into cosmic space were accompanied by a battle of ideologies with banners displayed on both sides. But when the cosmos becomes exclusively an object of scientific research, most people forget about it.
Today there is a notable upsurge of interest in the cosmos both in the West and in modern Russia, which is once again dashing into the abyss of totalitarianism. How many official declarations there have been recently in Russia about flights to Mars and the construction of stations on the moon. The cosmos is again being transformed into an ideological vector, an arena for confrontations between Western and post-Soviet ideologies and the battle between new technologies, a field of military domination.
It is interesting to follow this change in the attitude to the cosmos and the individual as exemplified by Russian artists. The artists of the sixties – Vladimir Nemukhin, Dmitry Plavinsky, Vladimir Weisberg, Mikhail Roginsky and many others – based their work on a personal, existential position, counterposing themselves to the inhuman machine of totalitarian society and the ‘cosmos’ as a collective project. Ilya Kabakov’s albums are already a subtly ironic comment concerning existential problems. Nonetheless in these albums too, people fly and break out into the cosmos. The beginning of Sots Art – the work Laika (1972) by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid – is directly linked with the theme of the cosmos. The absolute irony here is obvious, the emphasis is placed on the dog, not on the first man to fly beyond the bounds of the earth. I think this is a result of Russia’s having lost the space race with the USA, which put the first man on the moon in 1969. After that Cosmos and Author came together on the territory of postmodernism, in the space of self-irony. And they continued to exist in this capacity until very recently. Until one country (Russia again) set course for a return to the homeland of victorious socialism. In short, touchdown has been made in the past, where cosmos and author once again occupy the positions of antagonists.
The first work that I authored, in 1978, the only one on the subject of the cosmos, was called “An Exchange of Information with the Sun.” I was nineteen, I set my thumbprint (a portrait of the Author in-the-making) on a little mirror and directed the reflection towards the sun. The moment the Author appears in the world, the very first thing he does is to assert his presence in the cosmos. Later my authorial ambitions became burdensome to me and led me directly to the archive.
It seems to me that the archive is always an alternative to ‘flights into the cosmos’. It’s not by chance that the first action taken by dictators who are befuddled by one ideology or another and their sidekicks is to close and burn the archives. They annihilate the memory of the past, while constructing the cosmodrome of the future for more zombified subjects. People, as individual archives, are then annihilated ruthlessly. The Cosmos and the Archive are antipodes.
Escape into the archive was no accident for me. The concept of the archive took shape on the Moscow scene in the early 1980s, with the publication of the MANI Files (MANI – Moscow Archive of New Art). The most important element in this title was not the hint at ‘manifesto’, but precisely the archive – the Moscow Archive of New Art. In 1981 Victor Skersis and I compiled the second of the four collections of MANI Files.1 And so at the age of twenty-two I had already accepted the archive as my basic form of activity.
In Russia the early 1980s saw the beginning of a new stage of self-appraisal in a small circle of Moscow artists – a distance appeared that made it obvious who was doing what. The MANI Files are one of the important collective publications of that period, they were a natural form for preserving and at the same time disseminating information in Moscow’s artistic community. This publication could only have come into being in a vacuum, in a setting where Russia completely lacked any institutions of modern art. And it is important that its originators and editors were artists themselves – Andrey Monastyrsky, Victor Skersis and Vadim Zakharov, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Natalya Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov. As a result of this initiative the archive became a distinct genre in modern Russian art. That is my personal opinion. The archive, bookkeeping (see MANI Album No. 5 – Buchgalterium), numerous hierarchies – these all relate to an attempt at a universal accounting of Everything, both serious and otherwise. The archive in the cage of the Soviet system, as a model of freedom, as the defiance of enforced localization, sometimes through a parody of it. The artists themselves created archives and collections. The official Soviet institutions didn’t do that. Moreover, the MANI Files included more than just archive materials. In actual fact a lot of the material dated from the same year in which the files were created. In this sense the concept of an archive signified freedom of action against the background of a totalitarian system. A group of artists from three generations preserved and developed its history in the face of multitudinous prohibitions. The editors asked artists to prepare five copies of their material (at that time any more than five copies of a typewritten text came under the terms of an article of the criminal law – for the distribution of samizdat) and put them in five identical envelopes. The files assembled in this fashion were circulated in artistic circles, including the groups of Kabakov, Monastyrsky, Natalya Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, our group of a younger generation of artists and, if I’m not mistaken, I think one copy was given to the Sots artists, the circle of Prigov, Orlov and Lebedev. Consequently the files made the rounds of the artists and became the information media of that time, and they were called the Archive of New Art. I see no contradiction in this – back then an archive was a more relevant, provocative, far-reaching concept than the manifesto of any group. In effect the archive was a manifesto. The MANI Files were followed by the MANI Albums. Andrey Monastyrsky was the originator and editor of this publication. Six editions were published from 1986 to 1991. Each issue had its own title. For instance, the first was called Ding an Sich, and the second was Rooms. Three issues were compiled together with Joseph Backstein, and one together with Sabina Khensgen. The final editor was Yury Leiderman. The number of copies produced of each of the MANI Albums varied from 3 to 5. It is important here to emphasize the various phases of the archive’s existence in the Moscow circle in pre-perestroika Russia – from collective to personal. I started publishing the journal Pastor in 1992 when I was already in Cologne, continuing the line of small-circulation publications, and it included the same set of names. Unlike the preceding publications, Pastor was an attempt to present the Moscow conceptual discourse in the West. As the publisher, at this important moment – the beginning of the dialogue with western culture – I tried to preserve the context of the methodology and terminology of Moscow conceptualism, which had been developed and established over the years. Pastor became the center of my archive – it published complete lists of the MANI Files and Albums for the first time. The “Dictionary of Terms of Moscow conceptualism,” compiled by Andrey Monastyrsky, was first printed in Pastor. The first issue of the journal appeared in 1992 and the final issue, the eighth, in 2001. The print runs of the issues varied from 30 to 100 copies.
A lot of people collected archives, and some exhibited them later. In 1993 Ilya Kabakov put on an exhibition entitled “The Big Archive” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1995 I put on an exhibition, one title of which was “The Park, the Archive et al.” And later I exhibited my archive very often, actually defining it in conflicting terms: “The Living Archive” and “The Killer Archive.” Over time the archive had killed the artist in me: I was constantly required to collect new materials and process them, spending my time, money and energy on this. I teetered on the brink of this contradiction for a long time.
After finding myself in the West in 1989, I actively pursued the archival line of work, giving it prominence among the others – publisher, collector, artist. It was obvious that, with the promotion of Russian conceptual art in the West after perestroika, western culture, with its system of archives, required material to fill the niche that had appeared (although no one actually asked me in person to do this). In this instance the initiative of the artist was a natural gesture for me. I found myself at the center of a current being channelled from Russia to the West and I started actively recording what was happening around me: the numerous trips by Russian artists, friends and colleagues to solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, America, etc. Unique video material was shot. So my archival obsession turned out to last until 2014. Two hundred and twenty-eight exhibitions by Russian artists (including my own, of course) were captured on video, plus 330 exhibitions recorded in photographs, as well as the numerous movements of artists across countries and continents, readings, drinking sessions, and conversations. And in addition to this, the hundreds of catalogs, posters and invitation tickets that were collected. It is important to mention that I collected a ‘real archive’ – unlike many other artists, who merely dealt with the subject of the archive. Processing the archive and preserving it (digitizing the video and photo materials) required a tremendous effort from me as an artist, and so eventually I had to stop collecting the archive. In this sense I consider 2014 to be the final year. It coincided with an exhibition of my video archive in the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, under the appropriate title “Postscriptum after RIP.”
My activities as archivist, collector and publisher became for me an important platform for reaching an awareness of myself as an artist with expanded opportunities. This is where my understanding of the artist today has found its expression – the artist as institution, the artist functioning freely in culture,2 the author as a multi-faceted figure, who shapes open territory through his activity. I have in mind the position of an artist who takes upon himself the functions of institutions, without being afraid of losing himself as an artist. In my opinion, it is precisely this position, and not simply the production of yet more individual works, that expresses the modern artist’s freedom of activity. In the final analysis, it is a matter of the balance between the parts of this activity. Sooner or later this is disrupted – there is simply no energy left to maintain the balance. An author cannot escape from the cosmos of his or her utopias. He/she is the only cosmonaut on his ship. But when strength departs and it becomes impossible to launch the ship every day, he/she starts raising up a monument to himself. Man, as we know, is weak. In the final reckoning an author is the monument to his own utopia. In 2006 I made a work called “The Author – Monument to Utopia,” dedicated to Pavel Filonov. I took a child’s toy – a lion that moved if you pressed a button on its underside. I increased the length of the lion to almost four meters and used a complicated mechanism to make it move and assume various positions. In this case the lion symbolized the author, or rather, his numerous guises: from a position with the head held high in pride – “I’m a genius” – to the stage of depression and doubts – “I’m shit.” Filonov’s world view is a cosmic image shattered into millions of little pieces. He tried to assemble the little pieces into a jigsaw, his picture of the world. In my work the lion also consisted of large and small pieces trying to assemble themselves into the image of an author of genius, but with every new second the author kept losing the sense of his purpose.
Author, Cosmos, Archive – these are categories, constantly attempting to correlate with each other. A balance between them is only rarely established. For millennia this trinity has been urging humankind on to endless efforts to soar aloft, break away from its material burden, escape, in the final analysis, from the archive of its own ego, but this never happens.
Additional terms used by Vadim Zakharov from The Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow conceptual School3
SKY
(a) Something for which there is no explanation. Its meaning is unknown, its content is incalculable, the causes of its occurrence are inconceivable, its volume defies measurement, it has no boundaries at all, the individual who invented it all has not been found. It arouses indeterminate feelings: inclusion, dissolution, reconnection, fading, suspension. It arouses the following states: mundanity, melancholy, despondence, loneliness, fear, death, happiness, euphoria. It always gives rise to the same questions: How? What for? Why? In what way? Who’s the boss? And it always provokes the same answers: I don’t know! I don’t understand! I can’t explain! I’ve never come across it! Methods for imitating the sky’s absence are: taking no notice, pretending that you already know everything, wearing a cap, pretending to be a fool, complaining of a pain in your back, blaming everything on the imperfection of society, drunkenness, and the depravity of the apparatchiks, and also blanking out your own thoughts and superfluous questions with wine, tobacco, drugs, and obstinacy and by reading literature;
(b) an abiding point of discord between consciousness, the unconscious and the unknown.
SUN
(a) Something small, clever and punctual (sometimes replies to questions it is asked). It helps to overcome depression, but sometimes encourages it and other psychological disorders. During its stage of rising, in combination with lighting effects and the singing of birds, it creates a state of trance, happiness, lambent nuances, cultured conversation, and amatory intrigue, frequently accompanied by tears, sobbing, and a desire for nothing. At the stage of its highest ascent it evokes a feeling of exhaustion, extreme irritation, lust, and desire for a quick death, it encourages migraines, cancer, skin conditions, and infectious diseases. At the stage of its departure it evokes a sense of measure and time, cozy family happiness and impunity, anticipation of evening-time relaxation and tranquility, and desires for indeterminacy;
(b) a heater that torments the memory.
FULL MOON
(a) Something incredible. It is reminiscent of plenitude of power, full flood, full-blooded. It stimulates an upsurge of unequivocal strength in men, animals, seas, oceans, and poets. In man it provokes the following: somnambulism, stupidity, idiocy, ignorance, and vulgarity, making him take the visions, dreams, and phantoms inspired by classic literature for reality.
In animals it provokes a human feeling of exhaustion and serene self-confidence.
It provokes seas and oceans to splash out their ambitions and subconscious into the constraints of the poetic.
It provokes poets to eat the following:
Why or not – I don’t know
To the Moon or to a star
But I tried the Moon with my tongue
In forty-one in Kazan.
(V. NEKRASOV)
(b) A certain lighting device that appears by chance and illuminates sections of the unconscious which consciousness defines as absolutely known.
STARRY NIGHT SKY
(a) This is one hell of a thing. It almost always arouses a feeling of total insignificance, abandonment, idiocy and stupidity, and I think that somewhere deep inside your body and soul the realization emerges that life is not all beer and skittles;
(b) a screen on which your own neuroses are lit up (sometimes in the following forms: objects, pictures, installations, and also major international exhibition spaces).
CRESCENT MOON
I can’t understand or explain. Something very funny and dangerous – “the crescent moon emerged from the mist, clutching a little knife in its fist.”
Notes
1The Mukhomor group began collecting the fifth MANI File in 1983, but it was never completed. Later Georgy Kizevalter became involved in compiling the file but, having failed to appear in its own time, it was never completely assembled. Extracted from the past and presented today, it cannot rank in importance with the first four publications. In its own time it did not convey the uniqueness of collective creative work and did not become a rare form of information exchange in culture. Today it can only be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt to publish a fifth issue, dealing with the political victimization of the Mukhomor group. As a result, three of the five members of the group were crudely and forcefully recruited into the army.
2Functioning in culture is activity that influences an already formed cultural and conceptual space at any of its points with using the following methods: probing, rocking, simulation, substitution, surpassing, restraining, stagnation, and others. The term appeared in 1979 during the period of Vadim Zakharov and Igor Lutz’s co-authorship, was developed by the group SZ in 1980–84 and used in part by Vadim Zakharov and Sergei Anufriev in considering methods of throwing up ideas and total repetitions – in connection with the theme of ‘The Zone’ (1986).(The Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow conceptual School, 1999)
3Compiled by Andrey Monastyrsky, and first published in the journal Pastor, No. 7, 1999.