Art Criticism Evgeny GUTSUL With Masoch – through life In 1858, with the publication of the novel “Galician Story,” the rise to the pinnacle of world fame began for the native of Lviv, Baron von Sacher-Masoch. 140 years is quite a sufficient period, it seemed to me, to finally sort out the controversial moments in the biography and work of the scandalous writer. For this purpose, I obtained the coordinates of the Masoch Foundation, registered in the baron’s homeland, and went to meet with the masochism specialists. Honestly prepared for a serious conversation, I developed beautiful questions, such as “Was Masoch a masochist or was he a victim of slander by his own wife?”, or “Do you see an ideological closeness between Sacher-Masoch and Nietzsche in the sense that the former developed the cult of the superwoman, and the latter – the superman?”, or “Fill with content the statement of the French researcher Gilles Deleuze, who claimed that Masoch desexualized love and sexualized the entire history of mankind”… Not particularly reacting to my prepared questions, two of the three founders of the foundation, Igor Podolchak and Igor Dyurich (the third, Roman Viktyuk, is currently “temporarily” in Moscow), began to intensively introduce me to the course of the young creator. Binding me by the position of a polite guest, they began to lash out with sententiae about the “Black Square” as the final point of realistic art, about the crisis of objective reflection of the world, about the relevance of subjective artistic perception of the world, about the nature of creativity, about the place of the artist in this world, about the godlikeness of the artist creating his own world… For me, who always took socio-political disciplines seriously at universities, such pleasure was somewhat unexpected… But I stood firm – the hosts’ arguments could not shake my faith in objective materialism and rationalism… At my timid “But what about Masoch after all?..” the Igors bluntly stated that they do not deal with him, that he is more interesting as a myth… That Masoch was a rather mediocre writer. That in fact Masoch gained worldwide fame by accident. (Krafft-Ebing, who introduced the term masochism, might not have read Sacher-Masoch, might have found an example for the phenomenon in some work from the ancient period… Just as Sigmund Freud named another manifestation of sexual attraction after King Oedipus…) For the founders, the name Masoch turned out to be just a certain label indicating the direction of the foundation’s activities. Masoch is meant by the Igors to signal the foundation’s connection to this geographical area (born and raised in Galicia) and to find [Absurd] [Avant-garde (-ism)] [Contemporary Art] [Actionism] [Action] [Alk-Art] [Alternative Fashion] [Underground] [Apt-Art] [“Art”] [Audience] [Poor Art] [“Boys”] [Paper Architecture] [Biennale] [Vernissage] [Video Art] [Newspaper Criticism] [Galleries] [“Kindergarten”] [Design] [Dealers] [Discourse] [Documentation] [HOUSE] [Food] [Animals] [Magazines] [“West”] [Ideology] [Isolation] [Icon] [Installation] [Institutions] [Internet] [Interpretation] [Irony] [“Kabakov”] [As If] [KGB] [KLAVA] [Collective Creativity] [“Collective Actions”] [Comics] [Communal Apartment] [Context] [Conceptualism (including “Moscow Romantic”)] [Concept] [Critics] [Cult Status] [Cultural Policy] [Curator] [Marginality] [Medical Hermeneutics] [Mystification] [Mitki] [Modernism] [Brawl] [Museum of Contemporary Art] [“Fly Agarics”] [Naive Art] [Drugs] [Necrorealism] [Neoacademism] [Unofficial Art] [Net Art] [Nicomunenuzhnosť] [New] [NOMA] [Nonconformism] [Performance] [“Peppers”] [Pornography] [Postmodernism] [Indifference] [Project] [Psychoanalysis] [Pushkinskaya 10] [Radical Art] [Ready-made] [“Russian Boom”] [Contemporary Art Market] [Simulationism] [Scandal] [Squats] [Complicity] [Social Art] [Social Realism] [Judgment] [Text] [Transgression] [Party] [Feldman Ronald] [Feminism] [Photography] [Artistic Gesture] [Artistic Process] [Artist] [Happening] [Russian Art Championship] [“World Champions”] [“South Russian Wave”] [I] [Art Fairs] 09.06.2016 ART ALPHABET GiF.Ru | With Masoch – through life http://azbuka.gif.ru/critics/mazoh/ 2/6 to a certain cultural area… What attracted the guys to Masoch was his tendency to provocations, to acts in the field of art that maximally offend society. The founders of the Masoch Foundation prefer to work, like their idol himself, on the margin (marginalis – located on the edge). The Igors believe that culture in general can only develop through the adaptation of margins: what, for example, 20 years ago was defined as perversion is now a cultural norm. From Sacher-Masoch, when creating the foundation, Dyurich and Podolchak used only one trait – the courage in their works to be themselves. Cool, of course, the Masoch Foundation members treated their spiritual father, but the evaluators are also people not the last in the art world. It is obviously unnecessary to explain to our contemporary who Roman Viktyuk is. Igor Dyurich is so far better known in a narrow professional environment as an organizer of creative and politicized actions. Igor Podolchak’s name in the visual arts market has serious promotion: laureate of 30 international exhibitions (“Grand Prix,” Seoul, Korea, 1988; 1st prize, Marietta, USA, 1990; bronze medal in the “Best Book in the World” contest, Frankfurt am Main, FRG, 1994…), about 30 museums worldwide (Pushkin Museum, National Library in Paris…) have acquired his paintings, more than 20 solo exhibitions in Europe, Asia, Australia, America… But all these are quantitative indicators that do not give a complete picture of the artist. But qualitative ones… Well, what can I say… If you use elementary definitions, funny for the artists themselves, Podolchak’s works cannot be attributed to either realism or abstractionism. All elements in each work are quite “readable,” quite recognizable as some specific objects, behind each figure and each object hides deep academic training. But the interpretation of elements, their presentation can be understood only after good art historical training or… half a liter. The main visual means of Podolchak, like any self-respecting painter, are human bodies, female and male, separately and together and “completely together” (the painting “The Great Hermaphrodite”). The main place on the depicted human bodies for Igor, naturally, is the “center of composition” – those organs that in normal condition ensure the continuation of the human race. Of clothing, Podolchak’s characters prefer graphic tan, intimate prostheses, and a decadent mood… My memory is not loaded with a large archive of iconographic materials, so I will not compare Podolchak with either Dali or any other recognized master of brush and pencil. But with Gogol, perhaps, I dare. The great Ukrainian Russian-speaking writer in one of his stories described an incident where a certain part of the body – the nose (a symbol of one of the facets of human character – pride) – separated from the face of a specific Petersburg resident and began to make an independent career. Podolchak went even further, or rather lower. On the canvas “Cochitiada” he completely deprived the naked male body of a head. And that very organ, which is “in the middle of the composition,” which in pre-Christian beliefs served as a symbol of fertilization and became the prototype for the sculptural-architectural element “obelisk,” the artist alienated (in the sense of “carried through alienation”), developed to the size of a small head… The artistically mutated organ acquired its own face, with eyebrows, forehead, and obviously thoughts, probably about the same thing. To what extent Podolchak’s canvases are autobiographical and self-portrait, remembering the artists’ reluctance to verbalize their works, I did not dare to find out. Usually, artists nervously throw: “This is another art,” “We see the world this way”… Perhaps Podolchak put a completely different meaning into his works. But I saw them exactly like this. And if the artist does not agree 09.06.2016 ART ALPHABET GiF.Ru | With Masoch – through life http://azbuka.gif.ru/critics/mazoh/ 3/6 with my interpretation of his canvases, then all his symbols are with him! As the author of this text, I also have the right to my own artistic fiction! This is how I see the world of his arts! Unlike Igor Podolchak’s “pure art,” the actions carried out by the Masoch Foundation are much easier to translate into ordinary language… Having recorded the word “margin” in their manifesto, the founders of the Masoch Foundation could not help but look for those marginal (extreme) places where they could hold their marginal (extreme in spirit) creative events. In their searches, they reached the “edge,” beyond which only the Creator himself had previously exhibited: the Masoch Foundation was the first among earthlings to hold an exhibition in space – on the orbital station “Mir.” Having established themselves at such an unattainable height, the “masochists” turned their eyes to the sinful earth. For example, the guys decided to rid the Ukrainian nation of the inferiority complex, of infantilism. Ukrainians, the teacher’s thought continued, cannot realize themselves because of the “authority of the father.” All normal nations have long ago killed their symbolic fathers, kings, presidents… Said and done. In 1994, Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk fell under the hot hand. It was decided to symbolically kill him… by creating a mausoleum for him. The action was called “Mausoleum for the President.” Podolchak and Dyurich did not pity Kravchuk: they found him complexed, uninitiative, making decisions only under great pressure. The place for the cult object was an ordinary three-liter jar, into which a small portrait of Leonid Makarovich was placed and filled with lard, a Ukrainian national preservative. The mini-monument was supposed to be exhibited in the Kyiv Museum of Fine Arts. Faithful to the symbol of state power, the police immediately after the opening helped the organizers to “dismantle” the “dubious exposition”… However, the “spiritual liberators” managed to rid the children of the Ukrainian nation of the Oedipus complex. The body of Kim Il Sung in the same 1994 was not entrusted by the North Korean people’s democrats to our “conservatives”-avant-gardists, so the artists had to limit themselves to a simple expression of condolences to the people of the DPRK on the death of their leader. The guys took the matter very seriously: they kept the text of condolences in the best stylistic traditions of this genre, and even more… If condolences on the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko consisted of a maximum of 60-70 words, then for Comrade Kim the “masochists” did not spare more than 200 selected lexemes. The next year, greetings on Victory Day from the Masoch Foundation were awarded to all residents of Berlin with the surname Mueller. Why Mueller? Because it is the most common German surname. The greeting, measuring 10.5×15 cm, introduced some confusion into the established stereotypes-assessments of pedantic Germans. Not every Berlin Mueller could make an unambiguous conclusion from contemplating the postcard, whose victory it was if both Germanys after unification live better than the collapsed Soviet Union? And how should one understand the fact that the Reichstag, once set on fire by the Bulgarian Dimitrov, and relatively recently wrapped like a banal product in a supermarket by an American of Bulgarian origin Christo, was chosen for the content of the picture? And what the red cloth measuring 7.5×15 m is doing over the wrapped Reichstag remained an unsolvable riddle for the bourgeois. Having dealt with the “winners” in the Second World War, the “masochists” took on the “victims.” More suitable material for artistic reflections on this topic than “Jewish pogroms,” the “masochists,” of course, could not find. And the topic of pogroms attracted them not by its real horrors, but by the mythology developed around this phenomenon. (And we already know that for art, myth is more important than reality itself.) According to the Igors, the status of a persecuted people could quite claim the Gypsies, North American Indians, Armenians, 0 9.0 6.2 0 1 6 ART ALPHABET GiF.Ru | With Masoch – through life http://azbuka.gif.ru/critics/mazoh/ 4/6 who lived in the territory occupied by Turkey, and few others; and a mass of ethnic groups (Etruscans, Pechenegs, Prussians, and others) have generally lost the right to be called peoples. However, for some reason, only the descendants of Abraham are accepted as them. This “for some reason” is a product of myth-making, it just so happens – the conclusion suggests itself – when a chart becomes terrible because it is painted. To rid the Jews and the rest of humanity of this myth, the Masoch Foundation in 1997, with the assistance of the Moscow Helman Gallery (!), held “The Last Jewish Pogrom.” They “beat” at a high organizational level. Four stages of “horror” were developed: “expectation of the pogrom,” “the pogrom itself,” “immortalization of the memory of the pogrom,” and “desecration of the memory of the pogrom.” Everyone who decided to participate in the event personally chose whether to be a “pogromist” or a “victim.” The “pogromists” received 100 grams of vodka, beer was given to everyone, the “victims” signed papers with which they relieved the “pogromists” of all responsibility… …Having familiarized myself with the incomplete description of the creativity and social activities of the members of the Masoch Foundation, an uninitiated person could say: “They were terribly far from the people!” And he would be wrong. In “The Last Jewish Pogrom,” a certain citizen participated who, as it later turned out, was a representative of a firm engaged in political consulting. He was recruited by the Igors. I liked my new acquaintances among political consultants for their ability to create myths (myth is an indispensable attribute of politics) and the talent to hit painful social points. Image makers gladly discovered for themselves that love between the nation and the elite is often built according to the scheme “masochism of submission and sadism of domination.” Which, in fact, explains the popularity of such political figures as Stalin or Lebed, and the unpopularity of such as Masaryk or Yavlinsky. The founders of the Masoch Foundation probably could not avoid politics. Structures engaged in democratic elections in the post-Soviet space are in acute need of developing new technologies. Fully transferring Western experience to our soil does not work. In the West, the electoral field is completely different: there everyone has long known who votes for which party. This allows Western political consultants to use, from the point of view of their interlocutors, quite primitive means – long-established images, as a rule, perceived from the sphere of commercial advertising… In Russia, in Ukraine, such methodology causes an inadequate reaction. Political consultants resort to artists’ services also purely for mercantile reasons. It is believed that the use of art saves other resources, primarily financial ones. The results of such creative-political searches can be the most unexpected. An example of this can be the participation of the Masoch Foundation in 1997 in the federal government’s offensive against the head of the Far Eastern region. The guys caught some presence of necrophilia in the atmosphere of Vladivostok. The city has a “007 service” that advertises its readiness to provide ritual services around the clock, the firm “Quiet Abode” prospers, again with a ritual bias – among all possible businesses in Vladivostok, the funeral one turned out to be the most developed. The Masoch Foundation relied on this feeling and held a “charitable” action “Lawlessness of Humanism.” Finding charity a hypocritical phenomenon, the organizers decided to “have fun.” Among other “pranks,” they held a lottery, and the winners were given… coffins as prizes. The “Primorgans,” as the Far Easterners call themselves with an extremely healthy sense of humor, were given the right to exchange their “prizes” for drinks and snacks, but the “Primorgans” did not exchange. The people took the event very seriously. The Igors do not feel any complexes characteristic of conformists about their participation in political life. On the contrary, they consider their near-political artistry as a reason for 09.06.2016 ART ALPHABET GiF.Ru | With Masoch – through life http://azbuka.gif.ru/critics/mazoh/ 5/6 the realization of absolutely creative ambitions, which are only somehow tied to a not quite traditional material. Every artist in working on any work has certain boundaries of freedom determined by the material and means of implementation. Politics turned out to be creativity on a new level, in a new dimension – in the borderline area (on the margin), and it is there that all noticeable achievements usually occur. The ease with which our artists settled in the political environment, according to their own definition, can be explained by the blurring of boundaries between art and politics in the modern world. The Igors think that a modern political figure in real life can no longer perform any special political acts. Because life in general and political life in particular, they say, has shifted to virtual reality. Working in political consulting gives the artist the opportunity to use expressive means unavailable in a traditional workshop: street television, radio, mass media, agitators, billboards… And, of course, the most interesting material for the artist is the human one, from which politicians must be molded. And it is usually harder to deal with a living person than with paints or marble. And incredible skill is needed to pull a person used to staying in the shadows into the public eye and at the same time teach him the skills characteristic of a public figure. In Russia, this usually succeeds. Because there the client loses the right to vote – he turns into material. Examples from the foundation’s activities indicate that the “masochists” are clearly not indifferent to the personality of the Marquis de Sade… It only dawned on me when the guys shared with me their plans to open the Sade Foundation in Paris… What kind of artistry will there be! 10.06.1997 Author of the article: Evgeny GUTSUL – all materials
[Gutsul E. With Masoch – through life [Electronic resource] / Evgeny Gutsul // Art – Alphabet. – 1997. – Access mode to the resource: http://azbuka.gif.ru/critics/mazoh/]Type of comment: Published comment
Author: Evgeny Gutsul
