25.2.09
19.2.09
18.2.09
Ladomir. Objects of Utopia
"Seven answers of Leonid Tishkov to the questions
by A.Petrovichev ( Krokin gallery) about the exhibition
LADOMIR. OBJECTS of UTOPIA"
AP Leonid, poetry is an essential element of your art. Are you focused on Khlebnikov at the moment?
LT I was surrounded by the poetry of Khlebnikov for many years and took a great liking to it. Khlebnikov isn't just a poet for me, he is an artist, in the full meaning of the word. Moreover, he is a product of art himself, his life is closely related with his creative works. I am deeply impressed with all the things he has said, written, or composed.
Is there much we need?
A slice of bread
A drop of milk
And all these clouds above
Are our salt
Everything that we see and that surrounds us, like bread, pasta or salt can be blessed with the genius of poetry. Velimir Khlebnikov was an ideal artist of the 20-th century. Many artists associated their creative works with his poetry. I had a video exhibit Solveig, which depicted the sky made of Velimir's salt. I have accompanied my kinetic exhibit Cicadae which is made of cocktail straws with a quote from Khlebnikov.
With golden of tiniest strings
A Grasshopper Bird weaved a nest of grass and hopes
On my breast
'Din-Din-Din', Zinziver burst out suddenly
And revived in me so soft memories!
So mildest delight!
Such sound of electronic engines together with lightest and thinnest cocktail straws, a wasted item, turn into live reflective reed. As Anna Akhmatova noted once:
If you could know
what shit the poems are made of
Would you feel ashamed?*
For me, any art is a sublimation of poetry, in the first place. We can show anything poetic and tactile through visual images? The more ephemeral the material the more likely it coincides with my understanding of poetry and life; I mean life as it is. The feeling that our existence is ephemeral and heavenly, and that everything is fragile and passing is one of the core topics in my art.
AP Does spaghetti go in line with this value category?
LT Absolutely. A side look will prove that pasta are rather poetic; they can be seen as a source for unspent poetry.
AP And how did you come across such a material?
LT Well it was like this, quite spontaneously, at first glance. The door of my kitchen cupboard opened, and a pile of spaghetti dropped down on the table. Immediately a very airy and unusual structure emerged. As an artist, I could not resist the urge and had to give it my full attention. The structure was so delicate, so architectonic! Kazimir Malevich would have described this structure as a colony of super type elements created by dynamic circumstances. And then, my narrative-and-poetry approach turned on.
I am only engaged into creation of poetic things. I have discovered, a very powerful image potential in spaghetti. This is because constructivism and futurism come from Italy, together with pasta. Philippo Tommaso Marinetti, founding father of futurism, comes from Italy, too. Pasta is a very futurism-like material.
I have studied the structure of pasta, and explored the links to pasta or spaghetti and art in Internet. In the Internet, they're appeared a slogan "Spaghetti is an art"! It turned out, that there were many books, surveys and researches about this. Cooks make so many recipes with this product!
Pasta is a common name for the product. There are spaghetti and pasta. After careful studies I was surprised at the compatibility of its diameters and length, as well as number of articles with different producers. I was surprised at the standards that exist for this product. It is really remarkable and mysterious! There is a global pasta mafia on the planet, as if an image of Global Government.
Suddenly, Mr. Khlebnikov's Budetlyanin (would-be man), a Chairman of the Globe, and Italian pasta futurism coincided together.
AP Nevertheless, Budetlyanin isn't a direct analogue with futurism. They have common idea, but different grounds and fuel.
LT Well, I transform the futurism idea into Budetlyanin one. My idea is more ideal, less mechanical or rational than that of the Italians. Russian Budetlyanins were missionary utopists. They were dreaming about an ideal future, they have invented a wonderful country Ladomir (Harmonious world). And I built Ladomir out of pasta. Ladomir is a world of dreams, it's an imaginary world. Pasta - what a wonderful material this is - to take it seriously? A material without any future? That's arguably for futurists, but evident for the Budetlyanins.
If you touch the exhibition accidentally, it would fall apart, and that's the poetic core. That's the core idea, that's the idea of a fragile cloud-castle, of their fiction. Archtectones appealing to Malevich works are mirages in this case. Everything is shadowy and phantom-like in the exhibit. We have staircases by Nikolay Fedorov leading to the sky, which are impossible to climb up for an ordinary person. But a soaring man can do so, he is that very resurrected Father. These radio towers receive radio waves of our souls. When we go to see the exhibition something starts vibrating in our souls.
The form as if spread all over the space resembles constructivism drawings or paintings by El Lisitsky. The form is completely speculative, it exists in ephemeral material. You can imagine that what you cannot build. It is imaginary country. That is why Ladomir poem surrounds the exhibit as a refrain or epigraph. Furthermore, I go into other things. As Khlebnikov wrote, Ladomir is a world of full harmony, there are people of different color, intentions, and beliefs living there. They come in, unite and create a new stunning world. It is wonderful and it is also splendid.
I think that the goal of the painter is to make the idea the Absolute. The others make their lives comfortable, but who is going to speak about ideal? So, Khlebnikov is an example for me, a priest of flowers, Gul Mulla, who goes along the desert carrying his poems in a backpack. There comes the night, he lights the fire, builds strange radio towers out of dry branches, to be able to transmit his poems to all of us, who have ever lived and also to the living.
AP You have sculptured 317 Khlebnikovs.
LT At Sometime, Victor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov created a formula, he derived that there should be 317 Chairmen of the Globe. He was one of the first to preach the unity of the whole world. My chairmen are made of bread, that's another metaphor, and rather complicated one. The bread is an archetypical thing, spaghetti is derivative from bread, either rye or wheat. There are 317 chairmen and they are situated everywhere in the gallery. Someone is sitting in an airplane and others are climbing up the staircase. It isn't the main thing. More importantly, they are made of bread and are prototypes of chairmen of the Globe mentioned by Khlebnikov. To be more exact, these are their souls, I name them Khlebnikovs.
AP So, the exhibit will have a big pasta theme?
LT My installation reminds of hypertext. New towers, new pasta shapes are added are growing like fractal, and the gallery turns into strange sparkling space. The material is so important here, it is a new esthetic approach, a principal application to the new, unexpected material, and to the new form. I am not a pioneer, both Americans and Europeans were involved into such creative work. Joseph Boyes, for example. For me, as well as for him, the poetry of the material is very important.
The modern art is poetical both in Russia and in the West. I am completely sure of that. An artist works both with the material and the text. The modern art is searching for the new plastics. It leaves conceptualism and practical things in favor of abstractionism. It starts seeing something new, formatted into post-conceptualism language. Exactly here the text is appearing. Therefore, pasta brings a lot of information. First of all, it is a product. People eat a lot of pasta. People work to earn money to buy food, work hard to eat well.
Suddenly, there appears an artist who builds post-constructivist object out of pasta instead of eating it (real Italian one, rather expensive, buy the way). Why? It is kind of light version of criticism of consuming, though not involving deconstructions. It is full of ephemeral, dematerialization, and devaluation of the social function, to put it my way. This is actual both worldwide and Russian-style. We are not even sure how to utilize spaghetti after the exhibition. What shall we do with it? Just throw it away, or distribute between low-income people, may be.
AP The West if reflecting, while Russian artists thinks in ideal categories, right?
LT Nevertheless, I understand myself as an International artist, I don't put border in this respect, and I find similar-sounding artists in different cultures. Division into the artists of plastics or critically minded artists, or symbolic-minded artists is not topical today. I fell in common with Ilya Kabakov, for example. A Case in the Museum. My bread figures are kind of tribute to this artist. For him also an involvement by the spectator in the exhibition is very important. Together with him, I believe that is it important for the visitor to be involved in the exhibits as a co-creator, and not just to passively wander around.
Shared emotions and shared visions enter into this world of towers, staircases, monuments, the world of pasta in my case, is important. However visitors should be very cautious, as exhibits are so fragile. The visitor's can quite easily becomes one of the inhabitants of Ladomir. They should be very delicate and cautious to be able to live in the reality of sparkling, dough and tube mass.
AP Leonid, poetry is an essential element of your art. Are you focused on Khlebnikov at the moment?
LT I was surrounded by the poetry of Khlebnikov for many years and took a great liking to it. Khlebnikov isn't just a poet for me, he is an artist, in the full meaning of the word. Moreover, he is a product of art himself, his life is closely related with his creative works. I am deeply impressed with all the things he has said, written, or composed.
Is there much we need?
A slice of bread
A drop of milk
And all these clouds above
Are our salt
Everything that we see and that surrounds us, like bread, pasta or salt can be blessed with the genius of poetry. Velimir Khlebnikov was an ideal artist of the 20-th century. Many artists associated their creative works with his poetry. I had a video exhibit Solveig, which depicted the sky made of Velimir's salt. I have accompanied my kinetic exhibit Cicadae which is made of cocktail straws with a quote from Khlebnikov.
With golden of tiniest strings
A Grasshopper Bird weaved a nest of grass and hopes
On my breast
'Din-Din-Din', Zinziver burst out suddenly
And revived in me so soft memories!
So mildest delight!
Such sound of electronic engines together with lightest and thinnest cocktail straws, a wasted item, turn into live reflective reed. As Anna Akhmatova noted once:
If you could know
what shit the poems are made of
Would you feel ashamed?*
For me, any art is a sublimation of poetry, in the first place. We can show anything poetic and tactile through visual images? The more ephemeral the material the more likely it coincides with my understanding of poetry and life; I mean life as it is. The feeling that our existence is ephemeral and heavenly, and that everything is fragile and passing is one of the core topics in my art.
AP Does spaghetti go in line with this value category?
LT Absolutely. A side look will prove that pasta are rather poetic; they can be seen as a source for unspent poetry.
AP And how did you come across such a material?
LT Well it was like this, quite spontaneously, at first glance. The door of my kitchen cupboard opened, and a pile of spaghetti dropped down on the table. Immediately a very airy and unusual structure emerged. As an artist, I could not resist the urge and had to give it my full attention. The structure was so delicate, so architectonic! Kazimir Malevich would have described this structure as a colony of super type elements created by dynamic circumstances. And then, my narrative-and-poetry approach turned on.
I am only engaged into creation of poetic things. I have discovered, a very powerful image potential in spaghetti. This is because constructivism and futurism come from Italy, together with pasta. Philippo Tommaso Marinetti, founding father of futurism, comes from Italy, too. Pasta is a very futurism-like material.
I have studied the structure of pasta, and explored the links to pasta or spaghetti and art in Internet. In the Internet, they're appeared a slogan "Spaghetti is an art"! It turned out, that there were many books, surveys and researches about this. Cooks make so many recipes with this product!
Pasta is a common name for the product. There are spaghetti and pasta. After careful studies I was surprised at the compatibility of its diameters and length, as well as number of articles with different producers. I was surprised at the standards that exist for this product. It is really remarkable and mysterious! There is a global pasta mafia on the planet, as if an image of Global Government.
Suddenly, Mr. Khlebnikov's Budetlyanin (would-be man), a Chairman of the Globe, and Italian pasta futurism coincided together.
AP Nevertheless, Budetlyanin isn't a direct analogue with futurism. They have common idea, but different grounds and fuel.
LT Well, I transform the futurism idea into Budetlyanin one. My idea is more ideal, less mechanical or rational than that of the Italians. Russian Budetlyanins were missionary utopists. They were dreaming about an ideal future, they have invented a wonderful country Ladomir (Harmonious world). And I built Ladomir out of pasta. Ladomir is a world of dreams, it's an imaginary world. Pasta - what a wonderful material this is - to take it seriously? A material without any future? That's arguably for futurists, but evident for the Budetlyanins.
If you touch the exhibition accidentally, it would fall apart, and that's the poetic core. That's the core idea, that's the idea of a fragile cloud-castle, of their fiction. Archtectones appealing to Malevich works are mirages in this case. Everything is shadowy and phantom-like in the exhibit. We have staircases by Nikolay Fedorov leading to the sky, which are impossible to climb up for an ordinary person. But a soaring man can do so, he is that very resurrected Father. These radio towers receive radio waves of our souls. When we go to see the exhibition something starts vibrating in our souls.
The form as if spread all over the space resembles constructivism drawings or paintings by El Lisitsky. The form is completely speculative, it exists in ephemeral material. You can imagine that what you cannot build. It is imaginary country. That is why Ladomir poem surrounds the exhibit as a refrain or epigraph. Furthermore, I go into other things. As Khlebnikov wrote, Ladomir is a world of full harmony, there are people of different color, intentions, and beliefs living there. They come in, unite and create a new stunning world. It is wonderful and it is also splendid.
I think that the goal of the painter is to make the idea the Absolute. The others make their lives comfortable, but who is going to speak about ideal? So, Khlebnikov is an example for me, a priest of flowers, Gul Mulla, who goes along the desert carrying his poems in a backpack. There comes the night, he lights the fire, builds strange radio towers out of dry branches, to be able to transmit his poems to all of us, who have ever lived and also to the living.
AP You have sculptured 317 Khlebnikovs.
LT At Sometime, Victor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov created a formula, he derived that there should be 317 Chairmen of the Globe. He was one of the first to preach the unity of the whole world. My chairmen are made of bread, that's another metaphor, and rather complicated one. The bread is an archetypical thing, spaghetti is derivative from bread, either rye or wheat. There are 317 chairmen and they are situated everywhere in the gallery. Someone is sitting in an airplane and others are climbing up the staircase. It isn't the main thing. More importantly, they are made of bread and are prototypes of chairmen of the Globe mentioned by Khlebnikov. To be more exact, these are their souls, I name them Khlebnikovs.
AP So, the exhibit will have a big pasta theme?
LT My installation reminds of hypertext. New towers, new pasta shapes are added are growing like fractal, and the gallery turns into strange sparkling space. The material is so important here, it is a new esthetic approach, a principal application to the new, unexpected material, and to the new form. I am not a pioneer, both Americans and Europeans were involved into such creative work. Joseph Boyes, for example. For me, as well as for him, the poetry of the material is very important.
The modern art is poetical both in Russia and in the West. I am completely sure of that. An artist works both with the material and the text. The modern art is searching for the new plastics. It leaves conceptualism and practical things in favor of abstractionism. It starts seeing something new, formatted into post-conceptualism language. Exactly here the text is appearing. Therefore, pasta brings a lot of information. First of all, it is a product. People eat a lot of pasta. People work to earn money to buy food, work hard to eat well.
Suddenly, there appears an artist who builds post-constructivist object out of pasta instead of eating it (real Italian one, rather expensive, buy the way). Why? It is kind of light version of criticism of consuming, though not involving deconstructions. It is full of ephemeral, dematerialization, and devaluation of the social function, to put it my way. This is actual both worldwide and Russian-style. We are not even sure how to utilize spaghetti after the exhibition. What shall we do with it? Just throw it away, or distribute between low-income people, may be.
AP The West if reflecting, while Russian artists thinks in ideal categories, right?
LT Nevertheless, I understand myself as an International artist, I don't put border in this respect, and I find similar-sounding artists in different cultures. Division into the artists of plastics or critically minded artists, or symbolic-minded artists is not topical today. I fell in common with Ilya Kabakov, for example. A Case in the Museum. My bread figures are kind of tribute to this artist. For him also an involvement by the spectator in the exhibition is very important. Together with him, I believe that is it important for the visitor to be involved in the exhibits as a co-creator, and not just to passively wander around.
Shared emotions and shared visions enter into this world of towers, staircases, monuments, the world of pasta in my case, is important. However visitors should be very cautious, as exhibits are so fragile. The visitor's can quite easily becomes one of the inhabitants of Ladomir. They should be very delicate and cautious to be able to live in the reality of sparkling, dough and tube mass.
3.2.09
Look Homeward in Another Mythology
LOOK HOMEWARD
We leave home and come back Home. Everything remained
the same in that house as when we’d left it and yet everything
was different -- it was illumined with the light of eternity, the
light of universal farewell. In this world of eternal returns any
phenomenon of the present carries within itself the past and the
future, that is the eternity itself.
Everything here, at the edge of the eternity, becomes a
symbol and is multiplied through similarities, as a crystal in
its matrix, in the solution of its soul, becomes overgrown with
its past experiences and turns into a magic creature capable of
expressing its secret thoughts about the subconscious events of
its innermost life, in the language of the objects from the external
world. Thus the artist spins a thread out of the formless cloud of
being, twisting it round the spindle of his imagination to create
his mythological world.
I’m returning Home where the walls are transparent and the
ceiling is pierced with stars while inside everything is timeless,
even sacred for the home-comer: the bed covered with a bedspread
of light, a pair of heavenly skies, a wardrobe inhabited by various
creatures, a loaf of bread sleeping on the table, and the twin salt
shadows on the floor.
When I look at the salt I recall my childhood, endless winters,
the snow, long ski-outings in the forest. When I look at the sugar
I recall nothing.
Under the bed lies the same knitted rug my mother had
made out of strips of my old clothes. It was a kind of placenta
from which the fetus of my unconscious wooly life received its
nourishment.
Father and mother, who blended into a single father-mother
for me now, look at me from the depth of an old felt boot. And here
is myself striving skywards but not yet a heavenly diver who had
been shaped by all those living with me at the edge of Eternity.
Having become a “Knitling” I emerge from my personal
space as if from the forest and elevate my personal fate towards
that of humanity; I become a knitted Urals Golem and assume an
archetypical form.
And already I am speaking with a thousand voices as I lift
what I have depicted from the transient one-time world into the
sphere of eternity.
We leave home and come back Home. Everything remained
the same in that house as when we’d left it and yet everything
was different -- it was illumined with the light of eternity, the
light of universal farewell. In this world of eternal returns any
phenomenon of the present carries within itself the past and the
future, that is the eternity itself.
Everything here, at the edge of the eternity, becomes a
symbol and is multiplied through similarities, as a crystal in
its matrix, in the solution of its soul, becomes overgrown with
its past experiences and turns into a magic creature capable of
expressing its secret thoughts about the subconscious events of
its innermost life, in the language of the objects from the external
world. Thus the artist spins a thread out of the formless cloud of
being, twisting it round the spindle of his imagination to create
his mythological world.
I’m returning Home where the walls are transparent and the
ceiling is pierced with stars while inside everything is timeless,
even sacred for the home-comer: the bed covered with a bedspread
of light, a pair of heavenly skies, a wardrobe inhabited by various
creatures, a loaf of bread sleeping on the table, and the twin salt
shadows on the floor.
When I look at the salt I recall my childhood, endless winters,
the snow, long ski-outings in the forest. When I look at the sugar
I recall nothing.
Under the bed lies the same knitted rug my mother had
made out of strips of my old clothes. It was a kind of placenta
from which the fetus of my unconscious wooly life received its
nourishment.
Father and mother, who blended into a single father-mother
for me now, look at me from the depth of an old felt boot. And here
is myself striving skywards but not yet a heavenly diver who had
been shaped by all those living with me at the edge of Eternity.
Having become a “Knitling” I emerge from my personal
space as if from the forest and elevate my personal fate towards
that of humanity; I become a knitted Urals Golem and assume an
archetypical form.
And already I am speaking with a thousand voices as I lift
what I have depicted from the transient one-time world into the
sphere of eternity.
28.1.09
Deep Sea Divers II
Diving Into the Russian PsycheBy Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 15, 2001; Page C05
When communism fell back in 1991, Russian artists lost their favorite
target -- and the central focus of their work. These days, confronted with
a squishy democracy, artists are turning out personal, narrative works --
stuff that would have been squashed by the old regime.
"Now that the Soviet Union is over, artists are trying to recapture a
sense of what it means to be Russian," explains area printmaker Dennis
O'Neil. He should know -- for the last decade, he's presided over Russian
American artist exchanges through the Moscow Studio project and, more
recently, his Hand Print Workshop International in Alexandria. Many
artists, he says, have responded by "inventing personal mythologies."
You'd be hard-pressed to find a better -- or more literal -- example of
the recent fixation on legend than the drawings of Moscow artist Leonid
Tishkov. For more than 10 years, the 47-year-old artist has drawn scenes
from the lives of his kooky vodolazes (deep-sea divers) -- over and over
again. Although many of his drawings and screen prints speak to
particulars of the Russian psyche, his show "Vodolazes," on view now at
the District of Columbia Arts Center in Adams-Morgan, isn't just a course
in cultural anthropology. Many illustrate psychic conundrums most everyone
will find familiar.
Why the single-minded devotion to soggy heroes? "I use to explain
different social and psychological problems," Tishkov tells me in
fragmented English. "For me, deep-sea diver is a form of language. The
pictures are like parables, or poems."
Call them odes to discomfort. These divers aren't suited up in the latest
Lycra freedom fabric; their outfits haven't been high tech since Jules
Verne published "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." These are bulky diving
suits capped by bulbous metal helmets punctuated by tiny glass faceplates
and oxygen tubes that trail off beyond the drawing's frame like some
cosmic umbilical cord. According to Tishkov's lore, vodolazes are the
delicate subconscious requiring shelter from psychic pain; their suits
protect them from the hostile environment of daily living.
Sounds like the stuff of frothy soap operas. Thankfully, Tishkov's surreal
humor takes the edge off the melodrama. In the 40-odd India ink drawings
in this show, he's put his divers in all sorts of wacky situations -- some
absurd, where stick-straight vodolazes float through the air like autumn
leaves; others show them acting like watery gremlins, goofing off in
someone's bathtub. Like his hero, macabre cartoonist Charles Addams,
Tishkov has created his own breed of mostly harmless -- but undeniably
weird -- monsters. And like Addams, his style is illustrative, too --
characters are outlined and filled in with washes of gray and occasional
splashes of color. The drawings are then captioned in Russian in Tishkov's
shaky script, and translated to English below in neat gray type. The
prints, presented on DCAC's walls in groups of 12 or 15, could be a suite
of New Yorker cartoons.
These drawings may look like comics, but they act like shrinks. Prints
such as "He thinks that he's walking along an endless seabed," in which a
vodolaz sleepwalks across a rocky countryside with his head stuck in a
fish tank, point out prickly psychic conundrums. It's a vision of
single-mindedness, that, according to the artist, is a particularly
Russian predilection.
For the most part, Russia's woes are the same as most everyone's. "Russian
and American looks different only on the outside," Tishkov says. The
artist knows this much from experience -- he went to medical school before
becoming an artist. Although he quickly traded scalpel for paintbrush, he
left medicine figuring that if the innards are the same, so is the psyche.
Those bulky wet suits are just window dressing, he says. "When open window
for deep-sea diver, it's the same."
Despite Tishkov's pluralist intentions, a number of his drawings end up
lost in translation. Even with the artist as cultural tour guide, I didn't
get the image with a birch tree growing out of the diver's helmet. The
piece is supposedly a riff on Russian nationalist fervor (the birch being
the Russian state tree).
Sometimes not getting the joke is the whole point. One drawing has a big
vodolaz, fat and happy under an umbrella during a rainstorm; two
littlevodolazes crouch up top, shivering as they get pelted. The caption,
"The little Vodolaz up top is soaked through, but the big one underneath
is as dry as can be," seems obvious enough. Turns out the duh-factor is
intentional: Russians accept inequality unblinkingly. Class stratification
is as unremarkable as a weather report.
Tishkov's images add up to a portrait of Russian society taken from a
decidedly unflattering angle. The handful of divers sitting on rocks
looking down at their feet while "Waiting for the Flood" might as well be
expecting Godot.
These divers are good-natured, but weary and slumbering. Tishkov shows us
a society making do with the oldest technology -- and drowsy from lack of
oxygen.
Vodolazes, at the District of Columbia Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW,
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 2-7 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 2-10 p.m.,
202-462-7833, to April 8.
24.1.09
Deep Sea Divers - Vodolazy
They're inserting his brain so that he can submerge
At night little girl set off for water but she came back with
a couple of Vodolazes
The dry season has arrived and the Vodolazes which haven't
managed to leave the desert turn into potatoes
A demostration of how to make mincemeat - a lesson
for young Vodolazes
They came to warm themselves up
We never guessed that he had a whole world inside his head
The suffocating lead the unseeing
Keep your head on a short tube
Mom's bought a beautiful bow for her little girl
You'll always find a fisherman sitting over a sleeping Vodolaz
This is some kind of treatment - transfusing miniature
Vodolazes into the real thing
Look pop it turns out he was an egg-head
When you're not at home Vodolazes bathe in your bathroom
The grain test: this one has pecked out but those ones didn't
This is what the Vodolazes' sun is like
With one ear to the ground the other ear begins to sprout
When he's grown-up he still carries around his guardian Vodolaz
Fall comes - the Vodolazes turn yellow
break away from the trees and fall to the ground
He's lost his little window and now he'll never find it
The long and winding road leads to yourself
Pop, what's that prickly and scary thing?
A Vodolaz in the snow - a sure sign that spring is on its way
Waking Dreams (to the "Deep Sea Divers" project)
Sarah Tanguy, Curator of exhibition VODOLAZES (NW Washington,
DC) February 2004.
"As Vishnu created the world in his sleep, I imagined my world
of divers, creatures without faces, their hearts kept deep
within diving suits, when I immersed myself in sleep, in the
depths of subconscious, where underwater fish surrounded their
loneliness with Christmas trees."
Leonid Tishkov
Since 1989, Leonid Tishkov has been creating a growing family
of Deep Sea Divers. Produced from the artist's own
subconscious, these mysterious characters thrive in an
unpredictable world full of surrealist imagery and absurdist
text. Beyond their cartoonish appearance, they present a black
and white mirror of our own life, where distorted reflections
of our fears and fantasies embody our existential alienation
and acute self-awareness.
Tishkov grew up in a lakeshore village surrounded by the woods
and mountains of the Urals. Steeped in folklore and rooted in
the earth, the picturesque Nizhnie Sergi verges on the
symbolic border with Asia. After almost drowning at age six,
the artist acquired a fear of water and never learned to swim.
Considered strange and unsociable, he engrossed himself in
observing nature and devouring books. In the early seventies
at the height of the Cold War, he moved to Moscow to study
medicine. It was only a matter of time before he realized his
poetic temperament was better suited for the arts. Years
later, his work, whether it is painting, sculpture, drawing,
prints, writing, performance, or video, still bears the
formative influence of his village experience and medical
training.
A Vodolaz (voh-doe-laz) or DSD is a creature first and
foremost of the unconscious, protected by a diving suit and
kept alive by an oxygen line. Its exact nature changes
constantly. It is only in the shedding of its black exterior,
its social skin, that its inside reveals itself, and a DSD
attains freedom and understanding. This lifeline bears an
immediate and strange analogy to the human umbilicus: the DSD
carries a phantom cord that is pulled at death, when it
returns to a state prior to birth. On a meta-level, the artist
considers the underwater world of the DSDs to be a fitting
model for Russia itself: not yet fully engaged, its people
still slumber and move slowly.
Tishkov's works on paper weave enigmatic narratives onto
abstract compositions of shapes and words." What joy a new
dress can bring!" features a young DSD arms wide open and
facing a kneeling, sympathetic mother. Another domestic scene
presents a Vodalazes objects from velvet. 1995 mother and
father DSD taking their trusting daughter for a dip. Other
drawings reference art history, including The Potato Sitters.
This forlorn image of DSDs in a field alludes to Van Gogh's
Potato Eaters, while underscoring the importance of potatoes
in the Russian diet. "The Suffocating lead the unseeing,"
re-interprets Bruegel the Elder's haunting portrayal of the
plague into a gripping vision offailed leadership.
By contrast, many show a single DSD, such as one who has lost
his helmet's little window or another who wanders aimlessly
with his helmet constrained in a fish tank. Several others use
metamorphosis to make their point. In one scene, the helmet of
a standing DSD has transmuted into an onion dome radiating
light. It reads simply: "One turned into a church, while the
other one got down on his knees." Another shows a birch tree
sprouting from the torso of a DSD, and serves as a metaphor
for the nationalist agenda currently being cultivated by
Russia's leaders. In a sad indictment of American infiltration
into traditional culture, still another depicts the head of a
DSD as a Big Mac.
Both psychoanalyst and patient, Tishkov plunges underwater to
explore his own unconscious, resurfacing with frenzied
fragments of knowledge that he recycles into fantastical
tales. While his repetition of a central image and his playing
with language reflect a conceptual bent, his work is
essentially surrealist, privileging the dream and the
emotions. In his fervent and ongoing battle against
conventional logic, he reconciles the banal and the absurd
into koans of haunting beauty and allusive meaning.
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