The intellectual biography of Yuri Leiderman at its various stages brought him into contact with both the poetics of the archive and the poetics of reality. He was involved in the Moscow conceptual school of Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky, was part of the group of their most devoted followers (“Medical Hermeneutics”), but then distanced himself precisely at the moment when the work of this circle of artists began to take on the contours of the poetics of the archive. Subsequently, he shared with Oleg Kulik, Anatoly Osmolovsky, and others efforts to renew the value horizons of the Moscow art scene, but distanced himself from them as well when their work began to take on the contours of the poetics of reality. It is absolutely clear to him that the underground tradition is exhausted: it is pointless to revive the past by fetishizing its texts and dogmas. Traditions must be returned to their authentic status, i.e., they must become a fact of history. However, at the same time, it is obvious to him that with the reduction of tradition, the last system that gave ontological status to being disappears. The scale and drama of this catastrophe must be deeply and responsibly understood: after all, blind trust in reality deprives one of distance and, consequently, the possibility of comprehending it.
As a result, Leiderman’s poetics sets itself the task of acquiring a new post-catastrophic identity and can be defined as a negative ontology. The meaning of this poetics lies in the constant appeal to universalist horizons, in the constant construction of ontological structures. Opposing the lapidary nature of the poetics of reality, Leiderman sees special value in speculative sophistication, impeccable logic of cause-and-effect procedures, and the architectonic coherence of his ontological models. However, at the same time, a semantic vacuum is invariably laid at the foundation of his constructions: one of the links in their semantic chain turns out to be open. Thus, Leiderman’s poetics reconstructs ontological values and simultaneously dismantles them. Thus, in the era of the crisis of ontology, striving to avoid ideological ghosts or conservative orthodoxy, he attempts to valorize the very process of seeking ontology.[1]
[1] Misiano V. Yuri Leiderman’s negative ontology / Victor Misiano // La route Jura-Paris /fragments/ / Victor Misiano. – Tours, France: CCC, Galerie Michel Rein, 1995. – (13-19), (taken from the Russian original text by V. Misiano)Comment type: Published comment
Author: Victor Misiano
Bibliography:
Misiano V. Yuri Leiderman’s negative ontology / Victor Misiano // La route Jura-Paris /fragments/ / Victor Misiano. – Tours, France: CCC, Galerie Michel Rein, 1995. – (13-19), (taken from the Russian original text by V. Misiano
