THE STATUE IN THE POETIC MYTHOLOGY OF OSMOLOVSKY
Text by Dmitry Gutov
In August of 2000, together with Osmolovsky, we were invit-ed by Novosibirsk artists to take part in a joint project in theAltai. The plan was that we would be dropped off on a wild shore of Teletskoe Lake, dozens of kilometers from any settlement ofany kind. There, over the course of two weeks, without any links withcivilization or chance of escaping, we were supposed to discuss art andmake creative improvisations. When we were still at Domodedovo air-port, Anatoly told me that we were going to a region where there areencephalitic ticks at the most dangerous time of the year. He explainedhow they strike the gray matter in the brain, and continued with a de-tailed description of the clinical pattern of the illness over the courseof the longish flight to Western Siberia, and then in the bus (from No-vosibirsk to Teletskoe Lake is another 10-hour drive). The first thingthat we saw at the tour base that served as our staging post was a vastsign created by a local artist depicting a tick the size of a cow withthe words: “Caution! There are ticks in the forest!” “I told you,” saidOsmolovsky. Teletskoe Lake stretches out for 77 kilometers, and themotorboat took a long time moving through the somber beauty of themountains that surround the lake. We were looking for a place to pull into. The impatient Novosibirsk artists, periodically seeing a strip of sand,would shout out: “That's an excellent spot!”, but Osmolovsky wouldcrush them with an irrefutable argument: “It's not fashionable.” Finally,we found a suitable spot, we unloaded the tents, our stores of buck-wheat, matches and tinned stewed meat. Watching the boat as it left,Osmolovsky said to me: “They've already sensed that we've arrived.The ticks crawl towards warmth. In a few days they will be here.” Welived with him in the same tent. Every day he carefully examined myclothing and finally, towards the end of our visit, he actually pulled atick off me.1
In the artist's consciousness there is nothing and can be nothingthat is there by chance, nothing that is not very closely linked to whathe is doing in art. Why was this tick that destroyed consciousness soimportant for Osmolovsky, despite the fact that the rest of the partic-ipants in this extreme journey were entirely indifferent to it? In or-der to understand this, we can take Agamben's book “The Open: Manand Animal”, where there is a chapter titled “Tick”2. There, Agamben quotes and comments on a description of the tick provided by one ofthe leading zoologists of the 20th century, Jakob Johann von Uexküll.Agamben describes this extract as the height of modern anti-humanism.Uexküll recounts how the tick hatches from an egg still not entirelyformed, lacking legs and sexual organs. In this condition, it can alreadylie in wait for its victim on the end of a blade of grass, at first attackingcold-blooded lizards. After several molts, the tick acquires the organsthat it has been lacking and begins to hunt warm-blooded creatures.With the aid of its eight paws, this tiny insect climbs on to the end ofa bush branch and from there falls onto its victim in order to suck itsblood. The tick doesn't see colors or sense the aromas of flowers; itdoesn't hear the buzzing of the bees. It is entirely deaf and blind. It'saided in climbing upwards by the light-sensitive cells beneath its in-teguments. Its absence of perception is compensated for by its intensesensitivity to temperature and its highly-specialized sense of smell. Thescent of oily acids flowing out of the skin glands of all mammals induc-es the tick to jump down from the branch, and if it falls on somethingwarm, then it just has to find its way to the skin. It doesn't perceive thetaste of blood, and experiments have shown that the tick will thirstilydrink any liquid provided that it is at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsi-us. Following it's bloody funeral repast, the impregnated female dropsto the ground, lays its eggs and dies. The tick is interested in just threethings within the vast array of what nature has to offer: the scent of oilyacids, a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, and the typology of the skin.Agamben writes: “The tick enters into direct, intensive and passionaterelations with these three elements, the kind that perhaps can't be seenin any other relation linking man with his surrounding world whichwould appear far richer. The tick is these relations, it only lives in themand for them.3”
If we were to search for a metaphor to describe the central themeof Osmolovsky's art, it would be hard to find anything more fitting. Infact, one image could equal it here. The Terminator. James Cameron'sfilm came out in 1984, when Osmolovsky was 15 years old, and it soonmade its way to the USSR along with Perestroika and the first videocassette recorders.
Both the tick and the Terminator represent a programmed, blindforce that bears a mortal threat to the living, a force that knows nodoubt, a force that cannot be reasoned with, and a force that abstractsitself out of all relationships with the world, automatically pursuing itsgoal. The logic of its actions is rigid and merciless, it acts without error or deviation. An image of this kind arises in Eisenstein's notebooks.Here is his note from May 29, 1946. “The image of what is most horri-fying: the last carriage of an extremely long train coming back towardsyou. Unavoidability and implacability.” In this implacability you canfind the course of history itself, where events, like the present day, takeon a fatal character, where everything is preordained and nothing can bedone or changed. Here, man's lot is to merely understand what is hap-pening, and it becomes even clearer what stands behind this phobia oftick encephalitis. Overcoming the central nervous system and the brain,it induces a comatose state in the human that it afflicts, depriving himof even a last chance of perceiving what is happening.4
One of Osmolovsky's earliest works, created for theIstanbul Biennial in 1992, was dedicated to the Terminator. It wasa sculpture of the Terminator cast in metal, twenty percent larger thanhuman scale and created by a Belarussian sculptor. The stump of theTerminator's neck was stuck into the ceiling, as if it had pushed throughit, and at its feet lay several severed sculptural heads of the Mona Lisawith Duchamp mustaches. (Like many other works of the era, it wasdestroyed in the chaos of the 1990s).
The image of the beheaded revolutionaries presented at the exhi-bition at Triumph can already be made out in this part sculpture, partinstallation from twenty-two years ago. This image can also be foundin one of the most important, in the theoretical sense, letters of Engelsto Weydemeyer. (Several years ago we discussed this extract with Ana-toly, so it is well known to him. It is possible that the heads on spearscome directly from this.) “I have a feeling that one fine day, thanks tothe helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will finditself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that arenot immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary andspecifically petty-bourgeois interest; in which event, spurred on by theproletarian populus and bound by our own published statements andplans — more or less wrongly interpreted and more or less impulsivelypushed through in the midst of party strife — we shall find ourselvescompelled to make communist experiments and leaps which no oneknows better than ourselves to be untimely. One then proceeds to loseone’s head — only physique parlant I hope — , a reaction sets in and,until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgment of this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast, whichwouldn’t matter a rap, but, also as bête, and that’s far worse. I don’tvery well see how it could happen otherwise.5”
Several themes run through all of Osmolovsky's work, and the po-litical reaction, the fate of the revolutionaries, the heads broken off, thegrey matter, those deprived of nourishment, relate to the most centralof them. As early as his action on Red Square of April 18, 1991, theywere declared with complete clarity. The action took place by Lenin'smausoleum in the instant when the work that Lenin had set in motionencountered its conclusive defeat. His embalmed body couldn't in anyway fit in with the course of events, and his brain of genius, overcomein the latter years of his life by severe atherosclerosis, had long sincebeen preserved in the form of tens of thousands of very fine slices madefor cytoarchitectural study.
Bound by nature to the carrying out of a single task, revolution,working until the final stages of illness with a phenomenal intellectualpower, this brain died from overuse as a result of extraordinary activityand the consequences of the fateful bullet of Fanny Kaplan, which hita vein in the neck and the carotid artery.
One day, Osmolovsky phoned me and asked if I'd noticed theartistic element — usually incorrectly quoted — in Lenin's statementon the lackeys of capital imagining themselves to be the brains of thenation: “In practice, it's not a brain, it's shit.6” What was important inthis phrase for Anatoly was the visual similarity between the furrowsand convolutions of the brain and those of shit. He intended to do a workon this theme in the form of a brain molded out of excrement. (He hadanother project, where a giant brain inflated with gas was to float in thespace of the gallery, entirely occupying it.) Projects that are imaginedbut not carried out are important in gaining an understanding of anartist, sometimes even more so than those that are completed. Somelight can be thrown onto these works of Osmolovsky's by an interestingthought on the brain to be found in an article by Chernyshevsky, “Criti-cism of philosophical convictions against communal ownership.” In histext, Chernyshevsky defends the following idea: “In its form, the higherlevel of development is similar to the beginning from which it sets off.”“What is this mass,” he asks, “the development of which constitutesthe crown of nature's aspirations? The mass of the brain is somethingindeterminate in its type, it is as if it is a transition from muscles, whichhave such a defining quality in their form and internal structure, and some sort of semi-fluid jelly like those from which the transformationof non-organic material to organic begins. This formless jelly preservesthe outlines that we know only because it is constrained by externalbone enclosures; freed of them, it diffuses, spreading like a piece ofrunny dirt. In its chemical composition, the most characteristic elementis phosphorus, which has an irrepressible tendency to shift to a gaseousstate; the pinnacle of animal life, the highest level achieved by the natu-ral process in its totality, the nervous process lies in a transition of brainmaterial into a gaseous state, in the return of life to a predominance ofthe gaseous form from which planetary development began.”
While Chernyshevsky with his hope for a better future invitesa comparison between the most complex and complete achievementsof the Universe's evolution and the origins from which this entire con-fusion arose, Osmolovsky develops the theme in the opposite direction,which is to say that he takes it forward. In its form, the highest level ofdevelopment turns out to be similar to the finale, to its collapse. He is in-terested in ideas following their downfall, heads removed from bodies,the brain switched off from the arteries that supply it with oxygen, over-come by encephalitis, returning to a gaseous state, the transformation ofthe most complex in the Universe into excrement. Even in icon-paint-ing, which he collects, he is attracted by a moment of agony — the 17thcentury, the Stroganov school of painting. A level of refinement andsophistication that is already touched by putrefaction, beginning to dryout. (“Well, this is already Prokopy Chirin,” is the way that Osmolovskycharacterizes a work of modern art that is distinguished by a very highlevel of refinement. The first time he used that term, was on seeing apiece of fiberboard with two barely noticeable pencil lines drawn on itat the Whitney Biennale.)
As Engels foresaw, the revolutionaries lost their heads and thetriumphant world displays their heads on poles as a lesson to thosewho attempt to knock out of kilter the inexorable course of events thatEisenstein calls the most horrifying and Agamben calls the summit ofanti-humanism. This frightening force in one way or another defines allof Osmolovsky's works. He puts the spectators into a stupor, a sacredhorror in the face of the mechanistic, in the face of the unavoidable. Theaction from the “Manifesto of Netsezudik” of 1993 is constructed onthe concept of continual automatic repetition: “If I throw some shit intothe auditorium and an intellectual says 'it's already been done', then I'llkeep throwing it until he screams 'What kind of hooliganism is this?!”A poem written by him at the end of the 1980s unfolds in the same way:“One, one, one, two, three, one, one, one, two, three, one, one, one, two, three, one, one, one, two, three, one, one, one, two, three, one, one, one,two, three one, one, one, two, three, one, one, one, two, three.” In thiscontext, Osmolovsky's interest in icon-painting can also be understood.In the icon, it is the canon that is important, the powerful element ofrepetition, where the personal and vital exists only in the deviations, theinsignificant divergences from the set pattern.
The exhibition “Leopards burst into the temple”, where specta-tors, from a cage in the center of the gallery, watched the predatorswandering around the room (Regina, March, 1992), also had a storyof looped actions at its core. The leopards burst into the temple andknock over the holy utensils. They return again and again, themselvesbecoming a part of the ritual. The theme of the sacral and the patternof the leopards' skins themselves are later resurrected in Osmolovsky'swooden icons. The dominion of the supernatural over the natural, in-spiring a feeling of fear, penetrates the wooden decorative writing of his“Khleba.” Here, this is achieved by taking it to a mechanistic extremein the production process itself. The scanning of a slice of rye-bread,computer manipulations of the image, and work with an automatedslicing machine all presuppose the absence of the artist's hands actu-ally touching the work. The interference of the organic nature of thebread that could destroy this poetry is removed in a brutal move: thescanned image is divided down the middle, one piece is thrown away,and the second is glued to its mirror image. If the same is done witha human face, removing its natural asymmetry, then we get an imagethat is as regular as it is repulsive. The perfect symmetry is a victory ofgeometry, lifeless, frightening. The bread becomes like Aztec gods re-quiring human blood for support. (These sacrificial offerings are anoth-er of Osmolovsky's interests. We were once invited by a western curatorin Moscow to an early breakfast where Osmolovsky described the ritualkillings practiced by the Aztecs in such detail that the rest of the cafe'sguests couldn't bring themselves to eat.) The plasticity of the “breads”processed with a brown preservative, where it seems as if it has beeneaten away by huge worms, is a return of the texture of excrement, al-beit hyper-enlarged. They are the prototype for an anti-humanist humanprogress that is akin, according to Marx, to “the disgusting pagan idolthat only wanted to drink nectar from the skulls of murdered people.”7
The revolutionaries' severed heads were begun by Osmolovsywith a depiction of Lenin. Lenin as the embodiment of the pitiless forceof history, a force to which he himself fell victim, appears in many ofhis works. One of them, “A Forgotten Face”, was also constructed on the principle of icon-painting: a repeating canonical image with mi-cro-variations. It was done for Robert Wilson's Watermill Center nearNew York. The 36 windows of the facade of the Watermill Center werecovered with 36 examples of photographs of Lenin disguised as theworker Ivanov when, in make-up and a wig, in August of 1917, he washiding from the Provisional Government. In each photograph you couldbarely notice a change in facial expression, and together they formedthe marked backs of a deck of cards. Another two of his projects, wherethe theme of imminent danger was even stronger, were rejected by Wil-son as being too radical. In one of them, at a dinner party for New Yorkbillionaires, a table without legs was to be held by gigantic Mexicans;in the other, the serviettes on the tables were to bear depictions of Leninwith the inscription “He remembers you.” All of this was in Augustof 2001, a couple of weeks before the attack on the skyscrapers of theWorld Trade Center.
We can recall again the ticks and the Terminator. The programmedinstinct to take a victim, with everything that doesn't serve that purposeswitched off or cut out, is the idea behind many of Osmolovsky's per-formances. His action “Crawling” was constructed in this way, its offi-cial title being “The Quiet Parade.” (In a somewhat blurred form it wascarried out on November 10, 1991.) The idea was that the participantshad to crawl after one another on their stomachs during the rush houracross the Garden Ring, before the wheels of the cars, entirely para-lyzing movement in the center of Moscow. The image of a crawling,blind force, was embodied in a sculpture 16 years later in the turrets oftanks torn free, their fixtures and fittings cleared away, along with allthe other details that serve in the tank for the perception of the externalworld (which was stressed by their surfaces being polished to the sheenof a mirror). The climax of this poetic of auto-suggested action, mind-lessly carried out in spite of everything, was reached in Osmolovsky'sperformance in the Studio of Visual Anthropology at a seminar givenby Valery Podoroga on December 9, 1993. In the heat of a discussionon the theme of “Repulsion”, he made an “official declaration”: “ Fromthis moment onwards, I will fight anyone who mentions so much asa word until first blood is drawn.” (After which, a horrific punch-upimmediately ensued.)8
In “The Ukrainian”, all of the subjects that we have identifiedreturn in a new twist. This is a female variant of Frankenstein's mon-ster, a naked Mona Lisa, “Terminator's Bride”, sewn together from the most wonderful parts of the most beautiful girls' bodies. Osmolovskyhere is like the artist of ancient times who believed that absolute beau-ty couldn't be embodied in an actual woman. And everything that isnatural and organic has what Lifshits termed “the noble imperfection oflife.” There, where each finest part has been removed from a totality towhich it never belonged, the link of the whole is achieved only througha violent, mechanical approach, by stitching the parts together. Takingthe principle of the ideal body to an extreme, Osmolovsky, as in thecase with the brain, arrives at the inhuman. Through “girls with an oar”,ancient goddesses and palaeolithic Venuses, he seeks to go even deeper.The idea behind the sculpture turns out to be the sensuality of the insectthat is well known to Russian culture from “The Brothers Karamazov.”“I, brother, am that very same same insect,” Mitya says to Alyosha “andit is said of me specifically. And all of us, the Karamazovs, are the same,and that insect lives in you, an angel, too, and in your blood it stirs upstorms. Storms, because the sensuality is a storm, more storms! Beautyis a horrifying and terrible thing!” In one extract from Lifshits we findthe development of the theme of the ideal and sex among insects. De-scribing how a female scorpion eats a male after he has completed hisprimary function and impregnated her, Lifshits continues: “What is tobe done? The behavior of the female scorpion is a distinctive act in theperformance of its mission and, if you will, it is the ideality of the scor-pion, relative and contradictory, but in principle the same as the fatefulwill of Caesar, Attila and Genghis Khan. It is, essentially, the sorry ex-perience of a level of existence through which solar systems, biologicalspecies and civilizations pass. The ideal can be found in the world, butit doesn't come in through the main door. The love of scorpions presag-es that of Romeo and Juliet.9”
The theme of lifeless material that is capable of becoming a mon-ster-killer was developed by Osmolovsky in 1993 in “Journey of a Net-sezudik to the land of the Brobdingnags.” There, in the form of a blobof a live, warm body it sat on the shoulder of a statue of Mayakovsky,ready at any moment to crash down onto the sharp ledges of the granitepedestal. Roman Yakobson has a renowned text “The statue in the po-etic mythology of Pushkin10”, which provides the perfect commentaryon this performance and “The Ukrainian.” Among the key works byPushkin, Yakobson identifies three where the titles refer not to a livingcentral character, but to a statue. And in each an epithet is employedindicating the material from which it is made: “The Stone Guest”, “The Bronze Horseman” and “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel.” All threesculptures are possessed by the magic of evil and bring destruction tothe hero: Don Juan, Yevgeny and Tsar Dadon.
In Russian tradition, from the time when the Slavic deity Perunwas thrown into the Dnepr River, a cautious approach to the three-di-mensional plastic arts has prevailed. It was always felt that behindthem lay pagan temples, cult figures and idols. With his dissected andstitched up Aphrodite Anadyomene, Osmolovsky is exposing the fearthat is enclosed in any lifeless and motionless anthropomorphic mass,affecting its destructive force. A naked girl, that set the first viewers ofthe Tauride Venus trembling, appears before us in all its monstrosity.
All of this would be unbearably excessive, if it weren't for thetouch of humor (albeit shaded black) that is applied in Osmolovsky'swork. In his latest sculptures it is conveyed, first and foremost, throughimpressionist modeling orientated around the works of Paolo Trubet-sky11. The new, added element in these sculptures that has been ab-sent for the preceding 25 years, is their handmade character and theircloseness to life. They have been developed directly by the artist, notsimply invented, but made by him, and what's more, this has been donein a realist style. (If some object to this term, we can append “naive-re-alist”.) This is a way to interact with what Eisenstein termed “the mosthorrifying,” and it differs in principle from the approach previously em-ployed. This is the degree of the close-range interaction, it is full con-tact, almost a confluence. It's not sitting on the shoulder, it has turnedinto a sculpture in its own right. In Francoise Gilot's reminiscences ofPicasso, there is an important point where Picasso recounts how anawareness of the meaning of African masks helped him to find his wayin painting. These masks, he says, and other objects were created witha holy, magical goal: to establish a medium between man and the un-known, hostile forces surrounding him. To overcome the fear and hor-ror that they inspired by giving them a form and an image. The shred-ded bodies of the “maidens of Avignon,” of course, are recalled in “TheUkrainian,” but the intention is aimed in the reverse direction. From theavant garde to more archaic, academic practices. The era of freezing,at the turn of the 2000s, was linked for Osmolovsky with a rejectionof street performances, with an interest in minimalism and ClementGreenberg (it was thanks to Osmolovsky that “Avant Garde and Kitsch”was first published in Russian). It was then that he began translatingthe content of his actionist practice into an item, a thing, into objects that are self-referential. In 15 years, all the stages in this process havebeen passed. Greenberg was read, mastered, digested and disgorged.The spiritual situation in the country again changed, and Osmolovsky,always looking for trouble, is attracted by that against which Greenbergkicked: kitsch in Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia in the second halfof the 1930s. He persistently mastered this horrifying, compromisedlanguage. Formalism is thrown off with the same decisiveness withwhich performance was previously rejected. Now it is not the minimal-ist object that is important, it is the image, the recognizable depiction ofreality (in keeping with the principle formulated by Greenberg: kitschthrough the academic, everything that is academic is kitsch). He trieson the image of a real artist working on classical casting in bronze. Ifin the 1990s Osmolovsky worked with the wild outbursts of passion onthe street, and in the 2000s with the world of ideal objects orientatedtowards money, then in the modern conditions he is experimenting withthe sense of a new totalitarianism that is hanging thick in the air.
But the message that is contained in all of these metamorphosesremains unchanged. It is a sense of the unstoppable march of time —the steps of the Commander, the fateful will of Attila, the last carriageof a long train reversing towards you, a tick crawling towards the scentof an oily acid
Dmitry Gutov, December 2014
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1. A note from A. Osmolovsky: “The most dangerous period for ticks is in fact notAugust, but May and June. In August, there are not that many of them. But there are some, ofcourse. And at Teletskoe Lake I took two off. One off you, and one off me. They hadn’t had timeto start sucking, which is to say that I was in time. If I hadn’t been paying attention, they wouldhave definitely started sucking.
2. Agamben, G. The Open: Man and Animal. М.: RSUH, 2012. Pages 56 – 59.
3. Ibidem. page 58
4. The themes touched on here were at the center of our discussions in 2003–2004. SeeGutov D., Osmolovsky A. Three Disputes. M.: Grundrisse, 2012. Particularly Letter No 47 byD. Gutov of 28. 01. 2004 (Pages 223—229). In which situations are we dealing with hopeless-ness, with a fatal detorsion of the crooked, and in which does a fork in the road remain, a choiceof paths? That was how the main question was posed.
5. Marx K., Engels F. Works. Vol. 28. Pages 490–491.
6. From a letter to A. M. Gorky of September 15, 1919. Lenin V. I. Collected works, 5th edition Vol. 51. Pages 47–49.
7. Marx K., Engels F. Works. Vol. 9. Page 230.
8. See the description and discussion of this performance in the book: Studio of VisualAnthropology. 1993—1994. М.: Arts Magazine, 2000. Pages 72—77
9. Livshits M. A., Dialogs with Evald Ilienkov. M.: Progress — Tradition, 2003,Page 230.
10. Yakobson R. O. Works on Poetics. M.: Progress, 1987. Pages 145–180.
11. See the description and discussion of this performance in the book: Studio of VisualAnthropology. 1993–1994. М.: Arts Magazine, 2000. Pages 72–77.