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.

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.

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