The Life of Littleman

We're Killing Time, Time's Killing Us

Tishkov's installation, "We're Killing Time, Time's Killing Us" (2003)

is made of glass, sand, metal, sculptures, plastic, a side table,

a stuffed animal, and a motor (170dX240h).

"In his unfinished text number seven, "The Sorrowful Remnants

of Events," Aleksandr Vvedensky wrote: "Everything breaks down

into its last fatal parts. Time eats away at the world.

I don't " What was he going to say next?

I think he meant to say, "I don't eat away at time."

That's how the idea of an installation dedicated to time came up.

A couple, sitting at a table, are just killing time - they're eating

away at time. Then time eats away at them - time kills them.

The piece has to change with the passage of time, and so that's

how the idea of a kind of installation I called
'temporal' came up. Every day, every hour, even every

moment of its existence it doesn't look the same as it did before.

At first the couple were killing Time, then Time will kill them.

That's the way Sand and Time work. So now both we and

the sand itself are being swallowed up by the
penetrating azure light of Time - you can't even see

any distinguishing features through the glass."

At first the sand falls on the table, as if it were supposed to be

eaten; then it starts covering up the figures of the man and

woman, and gets almost all the way to the neck by the end

of the exhibit on June 23rd. The sand weighs 2 = tons.

The inner glass is triple-layered, while the outer glass is

"magic," darkening to the color of the Lethe,

the river of oblivion. It darkens to 95% opacity and grows

translucent again in 10 minutes, and the sand falls

ceaselessly. A special built-in vacuum carries small amounts

of sand up to the well on top, so that it doesn't need to be

refilled by hand. For the first time anywhere in the world

you can see this glass in action! Everything changes

every day, every hour,every minute, and never repeats itself.

Cosmogony of Deep-Sea Divers

In My Father's Field

In My Father's Field
multimedia installation (photography, light, audio ) 2006

at Centro per L'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato Italy

Near Belgorod, not far from the border with Ukraine, my father, who was he commander of an artillery platoon, or in hort, the commander of a gun, was taken prisoner by German troops and went missing for the next four years of the war. He then returned to his family in the Urals from Siberia, from the Soviet filtration camps, which is where he ended up after being freed from prison by the Americans. For the whole of the war he was a prisoner in Germany and transported from one camp to another right up to the end of the war. My father said almost nothing about this period of his life. Only once he let slip that his unit, stationed near Belgorod, was encircled in the first days of the war and that they all had to find their own way out of the trap. Everyone wandered in whatever direction they could to escape, after throwing away their weapons and destroying their documents. Early in the morning he was walking across a vast field, hoping to get across the front line, but judging by the German aeroplanes flying eastward, this would be impossible. Coming to the edge of the field, he saw some indistinct human figures in the morning mist; they were pointing at him and shouting in an unfamiliar language. He put his hands up and slowly walked toward them. Thus my father's war ended without ever having really begun. And so when I travelled through the Belgorod region I stared into the distance, into the sodden haze, into the drizzle, trying to spot the lonely figure of my father, slowly stumbling through the field with his hands above his head on his way to meet the unknown. It seemed to me that this field that we were riding across was the very field where it had all happened. I got out of the bus and wandered through the knee-high wet grass toward the forest. The damp fog enveloped my body, transporting me back to the past. To this earth, this grass and this moisture it did not matter who was here now. It could have been me or my father. Time had stopped and was rushing backward. Everything around me turned into infinity. My path along this field had become an eternal return, a symbol of my path and memory. When I saw the hazy outlines of the trees in the distance I felt exactly the same fear
that my father had experienced when he saw the dark trees and the armed German soldiers heading in his direction. For a short time I lost myself and became my father, in much the same way as people lose their sense of identity when they find themselves in the middle of the steppe, forest or desert without any discernible road. All this only remained in my memory, but memory has no purpose in these places, there is only your empty body, as weightless as a dry stem of corn, and the almost unnoticeable pathway leading somewhere through the fog. The anticipation of death is probably akin to walking along such a path. In the black-and-white photograph you can see a man with his hands in the air. He is coming toward us unarmed, without any of life's belonging, having lost everything, completely alone. It is impossible to make out his face. Even if we approach him we still can't understand who it is. He is so far away it seems that any minute now he will dissolve into the fog and disappear like a wisp of smoke. That - he - is me, my father, your father or you yourself standing in that field between the earth and the sky in the void like a little piece of silent eternity, like eternity itself...

L.T.

http://www.centropecci.it/uk/home.htm

Dabloid design

Sweater, wool

Tea-pot

Wallpaper

Table for newspapers

Rocking-chair

Dabloids

In a neurology text is a diagram of a person depicting with the nerve endings.
This person has a small head and big feet, because the greatest num-ber of receptors is concentrated in the soles of the feet. That is science, and here is a fairy tale: Achilles’ soul went into Achilles’ heel, the soul went into heels (Russian tale), and lives there all day. Wisdom, consciousness, life, low and high, movement and intellect are in the foot. Dabloid is the symbol of the path, or Tao, its hieroglyph is made up of two Chinese words: head and foot.
This is the sole of Brahman, the track of God, a symbol of straight-walking man, five toes are the five parts of the world, an attractive creation, simple and furry like a teddy bear.
But the Dabloid is also that which is created by our thoughts, the totality of life condition, the mold of complexes and confusions, a product of consciousness and instincts.

A person live – and his Dabloid lives. One must simply realize that he is, live with him, and await enlightenment. You are aggressive – and your Dabloid becomes red, gathering life forces. You are calm and happy, full of life – your Dabloid is transparent, his surface twinkling in space. Perhaps he will disappear and a blue light will pour around us?

Solveig. Landscape of My Memory

Solveig. Landscape of My Memory

Installation, 2004, video, salt, wood, acrylic glass,

250 х 230 cm; sound: E. Grieg, Solveig’s Song

Memory is a desert that we people with the imagination.

In the landscape of my memory one can see a small town in the Urals Region, factory chimneys, a snow-bound pond and a small figure of a boy going to school along a narrow path through the snowfield. I take this path to travel into the past and to restore by time spots the ideal universe, in which childhood is the time of spiritual depths and infinitely dazzling white snow. Time spots are clearly discernible in the snowy landscape of my memory – Father bringing in a Christmas tree on a sledge, Mother rinsing linen in a black ice-hole, a small house on the shore of the pond, a horse and cart, a haystack, my brothers, dogs, fishermen and passers-by, a small cave in the snow, an angel in the snow-drift and the cemetery. Snow is the time and the white imagined landscape where I lodge my personal memories. It is there, on the barely seen line of the snow horizon, that the earthly and transcendental spheres come together.

Leonid Tishkov

Dabloid journey

Japan, Kamakura, 2000

India, Almora, 1999

An annexation of Dabloid flag in Athens, Greece, 1999

Divers from Heaven at Kiasma museum

Divers from Heaven at Compton Verney Gallery UK

Leonid Tishkov
Divers from Heaven, 2005-2006
Textile and photographs

Utilising old photographs and scarp of fabric found after his mother’s death, Tishkov’s Divers from Heaven refers to the future of man in cosmic creation, as expressed in the writing of the radical spiritual thinker , Nikolay Fyodorov (1829-1903). Fyodorov speaks of time when “…the earth will begin to give back those whom it has swallowed up and will people the heavently starry worlds with them”. (Nikolay Feodorov: What was man created for?)

http://www.comptonverney.org.uk/?page=exhibitions/thefabricofmyth.html
http://thefairlyconstantreader.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-versus-bullies.html