PRIGOV Introduction: Theatre of Revolutionary Action by Elizaveta Butakova Kilgarriff D mitri Prigov afforded no particular special status to only works on paper, installation and sculpture but also his Curator: Elizaveta Butakova Kilgarriff the events of 1917 within his oeuvre. He may seem media works, made in collaboration with other artists and Curatorial advice: Ekaterina Eloshvili, Dmitri a less than obvious choice, then, for an exhibition musicians. Ozerkov, Andrey Prigov that marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, and yet, through his work, we are able to look back lucidly at The title of the exhibition, Theatre of Revolutionary 1 - See Ekaterina Degot’s ‘Meat of Space’ in the hundred years that followed 1917. Not only did his Action, serves to highlight the way that performance and Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, Ad Marginem, art deconstruct the Soviet culture that was born of the performativity is at the heart of Prigov’s project as D.A.P. , Moscow, 2014 for more on Prigov’s use of Revolution, but it also revealed its mystical and mythical or Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov. The theme is already theatrical space in his works. underpinnings. It allows us to partake of some of its present within his earlier poems from the late 1970s, as the aesthetic flavours – party slogans, “revolutionary red” – Stikhogramms (concrete poems) included in the exhibition 2 - On the roots of Prigov’s glossallalia and live whilst connecting its mythology with other social orders can be interpreted as scripts ready for performance or lines performances, see Sabine Haensgen, ‘Poetic and paradigms of oppression. It is this dual ability to to be read aloud, as much as visual texts. Similarly, Prigov’s Performance: The Script and the Voice’, lecture communicate the fundamentals of what now is a long-gone Addresses to Citizens coax their projected interlocutor delivered at the Centre Georges Pompidou on Soviet totality, but without ever allowing us to succumb to to act, or at least take notice. The space of the installation 20th November 2017. (n)ostalgia for the period, that makes Prigov’s work so vital can also become a stage for action, ripe with possibilities. in 2017, this year of Revolution commemorations. The title is a play on the Russian military term for “theatre 3 - Prigov’s relationship with Malevich was of operations”, and of course the theatre itself was an addressed in the exhibition marking the 75th Conceived to accompany the exhibition Dmitri important part of Prigov’s writing.¹ anniversary of his birth, Prigov in Dialogue Prigov: Theatre of Revolutionary Action at Calvert 22 with the Avant-Garde at the Russian Museum, Space, this publication brings together a number of The “revolutionary actions” that Prigov undertakes are St Petersburg (October-November 2015). translations of key texts by Prigov about his own work sometimes startling, as his voice was protean and could alongside writing by young scholars on the subject: travel from a shout to a whisper to a scream; but just as “Prigov on Prigov”, “Verbovisuality”, “On the Life of often he appears as a figure that is absent and inscrutable Installations”, “Conceptualism”. As a prolific maker, writer (Evangelist), or quite the opposite – familiar and fallible and commentator, Prigov’s own texts illuminate the (Russia, Sisyphus).² In the same way, Prigov’s relationship philosophical position behind his life-long artistic project. with the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century Indeed, they can be considered an integral part of it, and can be superficially read as one of bathetic and humorous they also reveal the context of his work in the 1990s and homage. In his “phantom installations”, Malevich’s Black 2000s. Sam Goff’s text, first published online as part of Square is transformed into myriad forms, including teddy The Calvert Journal’s Special Project dedicated to the bears and vaginas.³ work of Prigov, gives an overview and introduction to the artist’s work as a whole. Ksenya Gurshtein’s text “Spaces But just as Prigov’s amorphous black shapes at once of Silence in D.A. Prigov's Visual Art” delves deeper into undercut Malevich’s sincerity and zeal, and are a truly the development of his visual art in particular, and Daniil foreboding presence (see Ksenya Gurshtein’s essay), Leiderman explores the uniquely Moscow Conceptualist Prigov’s red – ostensibly the colour of revolution – is term of “shimmering”. equally impossible to pin down. It is a mark of vitality – VITA, according to Prigov, but it is never celebratory. It Theatre of Revolutionary Action focuses primarily on trickles and pools like blood; it sits in goblets like wine, works produced after 1989, when Prigov, along with other but it is neither blood nor wine. The overlaying of mystical artists of his generation, was forced to reformulate his symbolism with Soviet iconography again reveals their work to accommodate entirely new systems of display and common source: the phrases “God is Dead” and “Lenin” are distribution. The photographs from Natasha Nikitin’s work of the same order. Hommage to Dmitri Prigov give a taste of this exciting period. The reason for this focus is that, looking back to Prigov has finally received significant institutional 1917, Prigov’s work only makes sense if we simultaneously attention in Russia in the past decade, with large-scale keep in mind 1991– the Revolution’s less than glorious end solo exhibitions at the New Tretyakov in Moscow (2014) point. 1989/91 is pertinent not only as a point of closure, and the addition of the Prigov Rooms in the new wing of but a point of comparison, for Prigov’s generation of neo- the Hermitage, the General Staff building (2012). The State avant-garde artists lived through their own experience of Hermitage, partners for this exhibition, have the most the world turned upside down. Prigov successfully made the important museum collection of works by Prigov and led the transition from the Soviet context that fed his earlier work way in exhibiting his work internationally with the collateral into an international one, and retained his interest in never exhibition Dmitri Prigov: Dmitri Prigov at the Venice “getting stuck” in any one discourse. Biennale in 2011. It is intriguing to consider how the artist himself would have reacted to this increasingly “museified” The exhibition is built around the installation Heavens version of his works. (Series with Brooms) (2000s), the first ever realisation of this particular work. From the late 80s, exhibitions such as that Prigov was always interested in the future. The “new at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam (1989) and the Kunstverein in anthropology” he often discussed and referred to in Mülheim (1995) afforded Prigov the opportunity to realise interviews leading up to his untimely death in 2007 foresaw installations that previously had existed only in “phantom” humanity exceeding its own boundaries. The exhibition forms. Yet, if these aspects of his work fitted seamlessly into opens with “God is Dead” and closes with an image of Prigov a museum context, his emphasis was always, as ever, on the as a fallen angel, wrapped in gaudy gold cloth. His influence contradictory ephemerality of the installation format, even on the work of young artists today is significant, his final, in its institutionally sanctioned and financed form. Having unrealised work being a collaborative performance with the achieved this level of superficial artistic success, far from group Voina. The revolutionary potential of his approach to capitalising on the formula, Prigov continued to expand his all discourses and styles, as an artist “making raids” on all means of expression. The show therefore encompasses not spheres of creativity, lives on. Dmitri Prigov, Lenin, 1995 Performance by Dmitri Prigov. Tanzquartier Vienna, 2002 NATALIA NIKITIN HOMMAGE TO DMITIRI PRIGOV. 1989-2003. COURTESY OF NATALIA NIKITIN AND KRINGS-ERNST GALLERY Prigov on Prigov F or every artist, the number of simultaneously exhibited In his visual works of art, Prigov does not repeat works, or works that have long been known to the public, the results of his activity as a poet, but develops the idea is very important. In other words, the context of creativity, of the word in visual art as the “Name of that Space”. Using its evolution and artistic surroundings are important for the any particular style, Prigov is not trying to stylise, but is understanding of each separate work. replicating the structure of that style. Hence his meticulous For the understanding of Prigov’s work, this is all pages from the Bestiary series, executed with the use of all the more relevant because he, strictly speaking, works and the methods of academic and classical drawing, drawn in consciously correlates with the cultural and social context; detail, do not carry the features of stylisation. Beyond the with the image of the artist and the poet; with the constituted exterior, almost kitsch expressiveness of their monstrous forms of behaviour of the viewer, artist and writer in the characters, a deeper dramaturgy of geometry and tone sphere of culture. And he works in such a variety of genres emerges, of the symbol and the living form, of the word- and manners, that only through knowing their totality, uniting idea and its embodiment (all the characters of the series are them or, at least, through studying one, taking into account absolutely real individuals, existing in this reduced form in all the others, can we isolate the meta-level at which they the metaphysical space of the graphic page). And the last come together, or rather at which the artist and poet emerges and most global, dramaturgical conflict plays out between as an integral, single figure of an author-creator. Otherwise, this series, with its stylistic particularity, and the context of knowing Prigov through individual manifestations, taking the rest of Prigov’s work; indeed, that main dramaturgical them, according to the usual model, as the only manifestation conflict, reveals the meta-level of the existence of the author of an artist or writer, we might erroneously identify him as already no longer as an artist, but rather a demiurge, creating a sociological poet, or satirist, or an author of avant-garde not individual works, but whole dimensions, worlds. texts, or an artist in the tradition of Bosch or Breughel, or a Many of Prigov’s works are connected with the use participant in the rock movement, or a traditional writer, and of direct textual material – newspapers, paper production, (1993) so on. Prigov does not work with paintings, with styles, with his own typewritten texts. They, these works, are located on polystylistics, but with images, forms of artists and poets. It the border between literature and visual art. They sometimes is exactly for this reason, therefore, that the social theme, take on the forms of three-dimensional or manipulative that dominates in, for example, the Newspapers cycle or the textual objects (Cans, Windows, Telegrams), where the poems of a certain period, might sit alongside the topic of metaphorical spaces of language take on the spatial reality of traditional art in the Bestiary series, without being reflected a three-dimensional object. or appearing there at all. In the series Newspapers, the words, written with Prigov belongs to a generation of artists who entered the help of fine graphic hatching, i.e. words, drawn on the the arena of Soviet culture at a time when, after the Thaw background of the standard newspaper text, look like words of 1956, Soviet visual art concertedly (over a period of ten that are alive, imbued with vital energy, swimming out from years) covered the development of global culture from the within the conventional text, like “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” on beginning of the century to the present day. It was at the end the wall of a Babylonian temple. of the 60s/beginning of the 70s in the USSR that unofficial art In this sense, Prigov’s fixed focus is remarkable; he definitively established itself, with its rules of how to live and constantly emphasises it himself in his articles and essays, behave, within the sphere of culture. It was unofficial art that, in the pre-poetic, pre-painterly stage of creation, when the for the first time in many years, at that moment coincided penetration into the logos of language or style takes place, with the cultural mentality and style of international art. This and it is only later that its deployment begins, a concrete moment came about during the period when conceptual ideas materialisation into concrete works or series. proliferated within culture. Two main tendencies defined the new generation of artists: the understanding of all styles and directions in the sphere of culture as descriptive languages, and the turn towards contemporary Soviet language in all its This is probably why, in the works of Prigov, we can trace so clearly, almost visibly, how the ancient culture of myths, incantations and conspiracies germinates in contemporary slogans, verbal and visual clichés, exhortations by D.A.P. manifestations as a material for fine art. and appellations and so on, and how the age-old heroes of It was in this way, understanding each language myths and poems are present in contemporary pop favourites. as being a true language within the confines of its axiom, In the series of ecstatic cantatas, designed to be becoming untrue at the moment it puts forward a claim to a performed by the author – quite apart from the fact that total description of the world (of course, understanding every the image of the storyteller-cum-rhapsode of those times language, its layers and hierarchical steps as representatives is invoked, from before the division of syncretic action into of ideas, cultural traditions and social groups within the poetry, prose, singing and theatre – the characteristics of the sphere of art), Prigov brings together in his literary works contemporary pop and rock movement appear in their links the languages of the everyday, official documents, culture, to ancient shamanism. religious and spiritual writings not as textural layers, but as Despite all of this, however, of course Prigov the heroes of an ideological drama, working out reciprocal nevertheless never completely “gets stuck”*, never relationships and ambitions. Thanks to the considerably disappears into any one of the styles or forms, languages larger movement and mobility, of literature, it is in Prigov’s or images used by him, but somehow soars above them, poems that these ideas first became apparent and in a purer flickers*, is fully identifiable as the author only on a meta- form than in the works of visual art, both in his own and those level, from which it is as if he undertakes raids into all of the of other artists. above mentioned spheres. Ilya Kabakov, Boris Groys and Dmitri Prigov in Kabakov's installation Noma, Kunsthalle Hamburg, 1993 Boris Groys and Dmitri Prigov in Kabakov's installation Noma, Kunsthalle Hamburg, 1993  Dmitri Prigov: F rom 13 October, Calvert 22 Foundation will play host to Dmitri Prigov: Theatre of Revolutionary Action, the first posthumous solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to one of Russia’s most prolific, playful and profound artists. Ten years after his death, the time is certainly ripe to revisit Prigov, perhaps more than anyone else, took the verbal tics of official “Soviet-ese” and ran with them, creating in the process something unnerving and invigorating. This Conceptualist context is crucial, because a figure whose seemingly endless creativity when it came to the central concerns of Prigov’s career derive from his the narratives and iconography of power seems as relevant ideological and artistic education in 1970s and 80s Moscow. as ever in the age of fake news and other public mendacities. Like its “Western” counterpart, Russian Conceptualism Prigov’s career stretched almost equally across the wanted to break with and break down grand historical late and post-Soviet periods, and Theatre of Revolutionary narratives — whether these were political or artistic. But in Action is primarily focused on his work after the collapse the late Soviet Union, artists were confronted with a very of the USSR had opened him up to the world at large: particular set of circumstances. There was a real, monolithic the Cleaning Woman and Angels installation (2000s), the state discourse that impinged on everyday life and could, photography of 1907 (2002), the video series Evangelist if needed, be violently enforced; at the same time, many (2007). But where did Prigov the artist/performer come people knew this to be an illusion, hollow and lacking in from? How did his Soviet upbringing and artistic education meaning. Mikhail Epstein, one of the great theorists of late influence his work? Soviet culture, once wrote that, “in the West, conceptualism Born in 1940, Prigov was a member of the first substitutes ‘one thing for another’ — a real object for its generation to come of age after the war — one that verbal description. But in Russia the object that should be would go on to define Soviet culture for an international replaced is simply absent.” audience (think of poet Joseph Brodsky (b. 1944), director This is why, when we look at Prigov’s works Kira Muratova (b. 1934) or songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky themselves, they strike us as simultaneously detached and (b. 1938)). It’s perhaps no coincidence that Prigov later warm, ironic and sincere, fun and austere. Playing with the claimed to have started writing poetry in 1956, the year of emptiness at the heart of the Soviet “message” allows for an Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing the personality endlessly varied range of expressions. As Kabakov himself cult of Stalin and kick-starting the period of relative cultural said, “this contiguity, closeness, contact with nothing […] is licentiousness known as the Thaw. The sense of an artistic like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like generation coming of age is reflected in the fact that a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots Prigov’s classmates at the Stroganov Industrial Art School in nothing.” included several other key figures in what would become Prigov worked in poetry, graphic art, sculpture, Moscow or Russian Conceptualism: Boris Orlov, Komar and installation and performance art, cultural theory, film, TV Melamid, Leonid Sokov. and music. He adopted a similarly broad range of characters The Thaw was a contradictory period, one of or “personages” and rejected the label of “poet”, insisting simultaneous possibility and disillusionment. Western and on the importance of the figure performing the words rather by Sam Goff Russian avant-garde art was (re)discovered and punishments than the content of the words themselves. He once said of for creative heterodoxy were softened, but artists also his method: “I take a certain image of writing and collide it began losing faith that the state might eventually support with another image.” As befits a trained sculptor, he cited their work, especially when Khrushchev savaged “modern” Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti among his formative art after a visit to an exhibition at the Moscow Manege in influences (along with Warhol, Beuys and Fluxus), and he 1962. Rather than simply acquiescing to or opposing official was concerned throughout his life with the question of demands, so-called “non-conformist” artists began to ironise monumentalisation: how the artist and their work become and reappropriate the rhetoric and imagery of the state. Four set in stone through public appreciation. years after Khrushchev’s outburst, Prigov graduated as a The “collision” between image and writing is there sculptor. For a few years he worked as a building inspector in Prigov’s “stikhograms” or picture-poems, reminiscent and sculptor for public parks. of earlier 20th-century typographical experiments by the Prigov was at the centre of Conceptualism from likes of Guillaume Apollinaire. Prigov takes fragments of its emergence in the early 70s, alongside Ilya Kabakov, Erik recognisably “Soviet” speech (one example: “Comrade, Bulatov, Komar and Melamid, Ivan Chuikov and others. More I cannot abandon my squadron!”), replicating and a loose grouping than a strict school, Conceptualism was manipulating them on the page. In this way, Prigov divests multifaceted: in the 70s, Kabakov was constructing elaborate the weighty pronouncements of official culture of their installations while Bulatov and Komar and Melamid were power — he is a fundamentally democratic artist, less subverting Socialist Realist tropes in their classically interested in creative genius than in personal response. He trained painting. At its heart, Russian Conceptualism was once described postmodernism as “an exploration of the self-reflexive, ironic, fixated on verbal and visual “codes” possibility of individual expression”; his installation at the and their subversion. It would take Soviet orthodoxies Hermitage in St Petersburg invites the viewer to take a seat and reconfigure them, exposing rather than denying them; alongside empty frames labelled “Malevich”, “Rembrandt”, official slogans and imagery would be repeated and twisted “Leonardo” and so on, suggesting that these lofty names until they lost all meaning, recreating for the audience their are simply convenient labels onto which we project our own experience of living with rules and received wisdom own interpretations. which they knew to be hollow. Bulatov would recreate In common with many of the Conceptualists, scenes of fresh-faced young things in idyllic settings, and Prigov focused with particular intensity on the mundane, then insert thick, disruptive blocks of colour or text; Komar seemingly trivial aspects of Soviet life — another aspect of and Melamid painted Stalin next to Hitler and E.T. . And his democratic approach. Many of the “heroes” of art are everyday workers, and he described himself as a labourer, more concerned with the quantity of words he produced than their quality (late in his life he claimed to have a quota to fill of 2,000 poems a year). But this focus on the quotidian was also another part of his spoofing of Soviet power: his everyday heroes become mystical figures, inhabiting a phantasmagorical version of the Soviet world. One recurring character in his Soviet-era poems is the Policeman, who becomes, in the words of Yelena Fedetova, “a kind of ideal how the Soviet Union embodiment or avatar of the Soviet power structure”. The policeman looks to the West, to the East — And the empty space beyond lies open And the centre where stands the policeman — He can be seen from every side Look from anywhere, and there is the policeman Look from the East and there is the policeman And from the South, there is the policeman And from the sea, there is the policeman And from the heavens, there is the policeman And from the bowels of the earth… Uncovering the uncanny nature of Soviet life also produced a meant exposing its ritualistic, quasi-religious underpinnings, and Prigov has often been described as a kind of holy fool or shaman. When performing his poetry he would often adopt a growling, hooting, almost musical tone, like an unhinged monk — as in his famous Alphabet series, an extended deconstruction of the Russian alphabet into something nonsensical and unsettling. Of course, Prigov was never officially exhibited in the Soviet Union. His reputation, fostered in émigré journals before perestroika, went from strength to strength once he was able to travel and perform for foreign and domestic audiences in the 90s. But the formative experiences of coming up in the stagnating late USSR cannot be forgotten. The philosopher and art theorist Boris Groys wrote earlier genre-defying this year that for Prigov, the “Soviet Cosmos was a well- defined space with a high visibility and recognisability of all the social roles possible within it. Perestroika […] opened this Cosmos to Chaos.” For Groys, Prigov’s work post- 1991 — the work at the heart of Theatre of Revolutionary Action — is an attempt to deal with the chaos not just of dysfunctional Soviet society, but of the world as a whole: a much more terrifying prospect: “For Prigov, the best way to protect himself was not self- isolation but communication. He wanted to be able to address Chaos, to name it, to let it speak — to involve Chaos in a dialogue, to begin to communicate with it. […] Prigov’s images are haunted by Chaos — but do not manifest it. Chaos conceals itself in dark corners, in abandoned, empty artistic mystic spaces — but then suddenly erupts inside the image, leaving a black stain on it.” In the works on display at Calvert 22 Space, then, we see an artist coming to terms with the death of the system against which he had set himself, and abandoning the idea of identity altogether. Peter Metres once asked Prigov whether his art was a “mask” behind which he hid. “An image is a kind of existence,” Prigov replied. “I must, first, understand it, then enter into it and live. A mask, generally speaking, implies that another person exists behind it. But I, as a person, cannot exist.”  Dmitri Prigov, Imaginary series, 1994 From the life of installations (2004) I n accordance with and in relation to its English root – of this could be the many installations by Kabakov and instal, install – an installation is a kind of structure. In visual some by Komar and Melamid. The second type we might art, unlike an environment (a structure within an open call objective and presentational. For example, all kinds of space) and land-art objects in a landscape, an installation imitations of scientific laboratories, real and pseudo-real is something that is constructed within an enclosed space. domestic and museum interiors. And the third is visual and The size of the latter varies from the extremely small, so visionary, placing an accent on the contemplation of a certain that you can only look into it with one eye, to a number of image or structure. As an example, I can point to those of my rooms within a substantial museum. Installations, unlike own installations that are for the most part related to the use flat paintings and individual objects, place an accent on the of newspapers and drawn images. organisation of interior space. by D.A.P. With an installation, its meaning before content lies in its One might consider the most ancient forerunners of fragility, its temporariness, its short-livedness. In other words installation to be altar-like structures within religious today, for a week, for a month (or rather the designated time of buildings. There were many installation-like trends exhibition) it exists, and then tomorrow – not a trace. In short, throughout history and particularly in the Baroque and as they say about people: you lived, lived, then were gone. In Rococo periods. However, installation as a genre took on spite of the whole extensive and developed infrastructure of meaning and became a recurring theme only in very recent museums and collections, only a handful of installations end times, when the generic and specific borders between art up on permanent display. And, in fact, having ended up there, forms began to collapse. Alongside objects, performances, they lose this vivifying aura of theirs, turning out to be like happenings, actions and the aforementioned land-art and eternally-living dried-up butterflies. It is their ephemerality environments, installation, in both its plastic and generic that is the primary function of installation, as with aspects, is something of a floating kind of activity, where the performative genres, which become definitively fixed only in dominant factors are the wider context of projection and the some form of posthumous reconstruction-documentation. appointing gesture of the artist. Hence their pathos is not in being a masterpiece, which survives through the centuries and conquers time, but in Installations can be divided into three main types, their almost ritual suggestiveness. That’s how it is. Generally notwithstanding the conventional nature of these and the any parts, details or documentations of vanished installations existence of many in-between and hybrid forms. The first that are accessioned into museums and collections have the type is characterised by the dominance of a scenic and form and essence of holy relics of art, or material traces of narrative (or quasi-, or pseudo-scenic) premise. An example the miracle-artefact that took place.  Dmitri Prigov, Heavens (Se Courtesy of the State Hermit eries with Brooms), 2000s. tage Museum, St Petersburg Она склонила голову и не видит, что вокруг творится, She has bowed her head and does not see what is happening хотя, конечно, знает все заранее а то что бы она стояла и around her, although, of course, she already knows it all, бормотала нет! Нет! Нет! otherwise why would she stand and mutter no! no! no! И это она знает, но все стоит колено-прикланненая и And she knows this, but still stands bowed down on her смотрит перед собой, а вокруг уже ветра шумят и голоса knees, and looks ahead of herself, but all around the winds детские где-то вдали поют: A-aaa-aaaa! are already blowing and children’s voices are singing somewhere in the distance: A-aaa-aaaa! И куда она смотрит – ей одной известно, а вокруг уже бегают, кричат, And where she is looking, only she knows, and all around they are already гром где-то там гремит, кто то рядом, в соседней комнате куда-то running, shouting, thunder is thundering somewhere, someone nearby in пробивается… the room next-door is breaking through somewhere… Dmitri Prigov, Cleaning Woman and Angels, 2000s. Courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg  C onceptualism is a movement, defined in any of a true not only of conceptualism and of past names, but also all number of different ways, but, at the same time and current, and indeed perhaps future names and movements. even maybe to a greater degree, it is names. Especially Of course, that is unless the situation changes. Otherwise in Russia, where under this title we encounter a relatively there exists another, more problematic exit for Russian large and varied group of artists and writers, many of whom, artists – a direct one, bypassing the existing and non-existing strictly speaking, in places with more correct definitions and cultural institution, and becoming part of global art history. terminological strictness, could not be identified in such a Some have managed it. But not many. way. Well, whatever. What we have is what we have, and that’s That’s how it is. But even very recently, the more what we’re discussing. radical Russian conceptualists were fully understood and their practices and names were even very influential within Of course, as with any other artistic direction, the confines of Russian visual art (although, considering the conceptualism had a period of birth and vague self- aforementioned radically reduced timeframes within the limits nonidentification that is now hidden from researchers (if of culture and art, this everyday “not long ago” might well be such people might now be found), followed by a period of understood as a complete and concluded aeon). It’s not my heroic flight and then, subsequently, a period of retreat role to remind you of this and remind you of these names. into the cold, almost coal-like layers of cultural and artistic And now, there is what there now is. history. In other words, it is already an object or rather should Without further returning to the problem of the be an object of cultural and artistic history. In other words, natural process of the blooming and conclusion of styles it is no longer recruiting new forces into its ranks, although and the natural reaction to it by those who inherited and its heroes and founders are still full of energy and function followed, let us try and understand the broader local socio- within the limits of their own elaborate individual myths. cultural context, which is reflected in this narrow internecine Obviously, these individual syndromatics, ironed out in a battle and to some extent generates it. First of all, we should period of group existence and functioning by the pressure note that as a result of everything that has taken place in of their near surroundings and divisionist ardour, with time this country over the past 15 years (and, in a broader sense, take on more obvious characteristics and distort individual over hundreds of years), we have been left with no other myths, moving away from the general line of any tendency. zones of prestige, apart from money and power, which, in the It all depends on the power of that same myth, which end, are one and the same thing. For our discussion about is the thing that determines its relevance or irrelevance conceptualism (especially in its Muscovite expression) with within culture. Moreover, within the limits of cultural ages, its characteristic critical tendencies, it is significant that in which have become reduced to a 5-7 year period (almost this country the spheres of academic prestige, civil society tragically departing from biological ages and the incredible and any more or less influential left opposition movement lengthening of life expectancy), it is an almost unavoidable are not present, as these things also form the main breeding situation for relatively young artists to outlive their styles ground for consumers of critical tendencies in culture and art. and tendencies and to exist within the limits of those of Of course, with the absence of the aforementioned others, or moving between them. I repeat, it is all in the power positions or niches of critical reflective thought, the pressure of the individual myth. Moreover, the specifics of a local from the market and mass-media is very significant, with their cultural situation and the ways of being of the underground overbearing colourful, almost hallucinatory visuality, appealing provided conceptualism with the opportunity of passing to sensuality and anaesthetising any reflexive impulse. almost undamaged through three real (and not only cultural!) (It is interesting to note that, again, the claimed experience of generations of its representation. certain sots-artists* is interpreted only through its decorative Now let us look at the present situation here, and entertaining show-like brightness. If the self-same Lenin naturally bearing in mind the abovementioned universal with the Mickey Mouse head by Kosolapov in this context rapid and short-lived cultural processes (which to a certain produces some kind of horrifying effect, then it is more likely degree corresponds with Warhol’s statement that in the in the form of Hollywood horrors.) future everyone will be famous for five minutes). Judging As a result of all kinds of perturbations that took by the results of the Art Moscow* that has just finished, place in Russia, in general we can see the growth of anti- by D.A.P. and in general, from just scanning the situation, in Moscow, intellectualism, which corresponds completely to the in any case, one can sketch a certain picture of the local traditional cultural situation in Russia, where the influence artistic life, in which one notices the obvious disappearance of the reflexive and intellectual coincides with moments of from exhibitions and the current horizon of discussions radical breaks within political and social life and the turn around practices and names the more pure and subsequent towards Western social and cultural models. And, accordingly, representatives of our Russian conceptualism. the rollback on all fronts is accompanied by an ardent and In principle, of course, within the global context in ideologised anti-intellectualism. general we can also observe radical conceptualist practices naturally retreating into the shadows, in view of the And in the end, if one imagines certain prospects, impossibility of recruiting new proponents into its camp. where conceptual and any post-post-post-conceptual (However, we should note the legacy and interpretations of experience could be in demand, then, perhaps, one could all manner of conceptualist practices and aesthetics seen imagine two fundamental social projects. The first is the today). However, the developed and powerful system of development of a civil society, the formation of a zone cultural institutions and museums in the West has long since of academic prestige and the emergence of serious left consolidated and approved both the practices themselves, opposition. The second is a radical strengthening of and many names. They are valorised, established, have a the regime (with the appropriation of the main cultural price on the market and are absolutely current on the wide institutions and cultural space in general that naturally horizon of contemporary culture and art. In Russia, however, accompanies it), pushing the majority of the cultural elite the picture is more or less the exact opposite, both with the into opposition, which will become the breeding ground for institutions and the names and with cultural memory. This is and consumer of the critical movement in art. Conceptualism. (2003) Lecture delivered at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 8 May 2003 Spaces of Silence in D.A. Prigov's Visual Art by Ksenya Gurshtein  1 - Prigov articulated the idea of his life as THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE, VOL an all-encompassing project numerous times. Its most clear definition can be found 76, ISSUE 3, 2014, PP. 309-338. KSENYA GURSHTEIN, “THE in Andrei Monastyrski (Ed.), Slovar’ terminov moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, Moscow, ELOQUENT SPACES OF SILENCE: D. A. PRIGOV’S VISUAL ART”. 1999, p. 193, where Prigov notes that the idea became relevant for him in the mid-1990s. In COPYRIGHT ELSEVIER (2014). the 1990s, however, Prigov also post-dated the beginnings of his “project” to the late 1960s. 2 - D.A. Prigov and Sergey Shapoval, Portretnaya galereya D.A.P., Moscow, 2003, p. 107. The text of this interview between Shapoval and Prigov can also be found online at <http:// www.intelros.org/drevo/prigov2.htm> 3 - D.A. Prigov, Raznoobrazie vsego, Moscow, 2007, p. 77. anything he chooses while asserting his separateness from Introduction: Free to Not Be Me his texts was essential. It wrested away from the State — the ultimate arbiter of both aesthetics and ethics in the USSR – the prerogative to name what could be art, i.e. protected 4 - Andrei Monastyrski (Ed.), Slovar’ terminov moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, Moscow, 1999, pp. 192, 59. speech, while simultaneously expanding the realm of Poet; novelist; playwright; social and cultural commentator; unofficial discourse.¹¹ 5 - Ibid., 192. draftsman; sculptor; installation, video, and performance In theorising Project D.A.P., Prigov simply extended artist; musician – Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was all these these ideas logically beyond strictly literary boundaries: 6 - D.A. Prigov, ‘Gde ty, gde ty, matushka- things, and he was more than the sum of his parts. Like “text” for Prigov would be understood broadly as any cultural sovremennost’!’, in Khudozhestvenny zhurnal, Walt Whitman, another larger-than-life poet, he contained artifact. And instead of being a creator who “dies in the 64, February 2007, p. 13 and on-line at multitudes and consequently defined the goals of the life- text”, i.e. identifies totally with its ideological position, he <http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/ 64/prigov/> and long artistic “Project D.A.P.”¹ broadly enough to encompass would let any and every “text” “die” in himself by holding, Monastyrski Slovar’ terminov moskovskoi every aspect of his activities. “I am put here,” he said, “so as at least temporarily, every ideological position possible.¹² kontseptualnoi shkoly, p. 193. to present freedom in its ultimate meaning in this particular This approach to cultural production would, paradoxically, moment,”² adding that the ability to represent “absolute accomplish a similar result to the one Barthes sought in “The 7 - The full definition of “mertsatel’nost’” can Freedom” is what separates being an artist from other kinds Death of the Author”, while still keeping the author very be found in Monastyrski Slovar’ terminov of activity.³ much alive as the centre of discussion and interpretation. moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, pp. 58- But what did freedom mean to Prigov? Two key If the interpretive framework described above can 59. The term was sometimes used by other terms that the artist had articulated by the early 1980s help make sense of Prigov to his readers, what about his members of the Moscow Conceptual circle, define the philosophical underpinnings of “Project D.A.P.”.⁴ viewers? Straddling the underground worlds of literature but was of greatest importance to Prigov. It The first is the Duchampian “naznachayushchii zhest” and the visual arts, Prigov moved in the overlapping can alternately be translated as “shimmering”. (appointing gesture), which denotes “the appointment of Moscow Conceptualist and sots-art circles, some of phenomena or objects in the surrounding environment whose best-known members, including Ilya Kabakov 8 - D.A. Prigov and M. Epstein, “An Attempt Not to as works of art by transferring them into the exhibition, and Komar and Melamid, relied heavily in their work on Be Identified: A Conversation between Dmitri magazine, or book space”.⁵ Prigov took this idea to its “personazhnost’” (characterhood), an approach in which Alexandrovich Prigov and Mikhail Naumovich logical conclusion when he conjectured that “recognition the artists channelled borrowed voices and visual idioms Epstein”, Nekanonicheskii klassik, Moscow, and nomination” would eventually become the primary in paintings and sculptures in the same way Prigov’s poetry 2010, p. 55. functions of an artist, as opposed to the creation of objects did. Yet, paradoxically, Prigov’s visual art did not follow the in any particular style, which Prigov dismissively called same logic and defied the expectations one might have of 9 - Mark Lipovetsky, a foremost authority on “аrtisanal craft”.⁶ it. He did not, for instance, invoke the appointing gesture to Prigov’s literary work, has argued that despite The second concept crucial to understanding the justify using unassisted readymades in his art — even when the apparent variety of voices that Prigov freedom Prigov found in Project D.A.P. is “mertsatel’nost’” he integrated found objects into his drawings, sculptures channels in his poetry, all of them ultimately (flickering).⁷ This behavioral strategy vis-à-vis one’s work and installations, they were always extensively reworked. enact two foundational but diametrically existed for Prigov as an alternative to “vlipanie” (getting Nor did he seek the freedom of renouncing traditional opposed archetypes of Russian literature: the stuck), a condition wherein an artist is embedded in one skilled artistic labour. He spent hours drawing painstakingly “little man” with his banal, everyday struggles discourse to the point of full identification with it. A with ballpoint pens to achieve remarkable verisimilitude and the “Great Russian Poet”, perceived to “flickering” artist, by contrast, allows himself to temporarily in the representation of volume, perspective and the play have God-like powers. (Mark Lipovetsky, “Kak “get stuck” in a certain type of text, gesture, or behaviour, of light and shadow. He even reached the apogee of skill chestny chelovek”, Znamja, issue 3, Moscow: “but his task is not to get stuck in it for so long that he can’t in rendering in ink diaphanous cloths and objects behind 1999), retrieved from <http://magazines. russ. jump away. Jumping away to a certain distance, however, he them. Most significantly, the visual world Prigov created was ru/znamia/1999/3/lipoveck.html>. also shouldn’t stay there for long so as not to be completely no analogue of the “heteroglossia” of his literary universe separate from the text, [gesture, or behavior]. Thus his — if the latter had an ever expanding cast of characters 10 - Vladimir Sorokin, “Prigov and His strategy is a constant ‘flickering’ [. . .] [and] neither the text, and forms, the former remained remarkably stable in its Universe”, unpublished. nor the author independent of the text is the object of close iconography and style from the early 1980s until the artist’s observation, but this dynamics of movement.”⁸ death in 2007. 11 - The degree to which the Soviet state These two terms set up certain expectations of What I want to explore in this essay, therefore, is demanded to be the arbiter of aesthetic Prigov’s body of work, and in the thousands of poetry and the way in which the sphere of visual art – the least verbal matters was made most evident in the post- prose texts for which he was best known in his lifetime, realm of Prigov’s work – held a special place in Project Stalinist period by two infamous cases of Prigov fulfilled them brilliantly. As Vladimir Sorokin has D.A.P. and played a different role in his oeuvre to the literary writers being put on trial in the 1960s: Joseph observed, Prigov’s readers recognised early on his talent for output with which it is often conflated. This goes to some Brodsky in 1964 and Andrei Siniavski in 1966. moving mundane speech into the realm of art, channelling extent against the artist’s intentions, since Prigov himself voices (such as those of Soviet everymen, among many wanted every manifestation of his creativity to be seen as an 12 – Andrei Monastyrski (Ed.), Slovar’ terminov others),⁹ and being in character, starting with the character equal contribution to Project D.A.P. and rarely discussed the moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, Moscow, of Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, the eccentric poet who disparities between works made in different media. Yet he 1999, p. 192. addressed others and himself by his full name.¹⁰ Prigov did describe himself as a worker in both “the literary realm shared these artistic strategies, moreover, with other and that of visual art, on the border between them,” adding 13 - Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders, “Dmitri A. Moscow writers – most notably, his friends Lev Rubinstein once that, “My work consists in increasing the permeability Prigov – manipuliator tekstami”, in: Ekaterina and Sorokin – whose works form the core of Russian of this border, but simultaneously I have to take care that it Degot (Ed.), Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov. literary post- modernism. For all three, the philosophical is not wholly eroded since then the tension of my activity Grazhdane! Ne zabyvaites’, pozhaluista!, exh. position that insisted on the writer’s right to write about would dissipate.”¹³ cat., Moscow, 2008, p. 142.  FIGURE 1. DMITRI PRIGOV, APERTURE, 1974. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST'S ESTATE Prigov, I would argue, was more successful than 14 - Prigov quoted in Mark Lipovetsky, “Kak he would acknowledge in retaining this tension. Recent exhibitions have brought together large groups of his work and have made it possible to see that, at a certain crucial Prigov’s Early Visual World chestny chelovek”, Znamja, issue 3, Moscow: 1999), retrieved from <http://magazines. russ. ru/znamia/1999/3/lipoveck.html>. moment, his work in visual media started down a parallel but separate track from his literary work. Over time, the A few biographical facts about Prigov’s early life can help 15 - Mark Lipovetsky offers a reading along visual became a means to render visible that which lay shed light on the evolution of his visual art. Prigov received these lines of Prigov’s enormous poetic beyond articulation even for a man of his formidable his earliest artistic education as a teenager at the sculpture corpus, arguing that Prigov’s writing of his powers of speech. This was accomplished through the classes at the House of Pioneers and subsequently innumerable texts “[paradoxically] [...] affirms repeated depiction of black space – readable as both became a professional sculptor, graduating in 1967 from the impossibility of an intellectual or spiritual absolutely flat and infinitely deep – that I will discuss as the the Stroganov School of Art and Industry.¹⁶ Upon finishing ordering of reality and the futility of all the artist’s “eloquent abyss”. his studies, however, he, by his own account, moved away various attempts to overcome the chaos of life Precisely because the visual allowed Prigov to from visual art, returning to it only around 1973.¹⁷ It was also through the creation of ideal constructs within figure – i.e. , make visible – a realm beyond articulation, it around that time that he both started working as an official one’s conscience, within language, or within is hard to guess its exact meaning. The only thing that the sculptor decorating children’s playgrounds and began to culture.” (ibid.) eloquent abyss announces certainly and insistently is its participate actively in the life of the artistic underground existence. The iconographic signs of mystical knowledge by reading his poetry. He had started writing poetry in his 16 - The most helpful chronology of Prigov’s surrounding it might suggest that it is an ecumenical realm teens, but for a long time treated it as just a pastime.¹⁸ life currently available can be found in Degot, of spiritual transcendence – something that numerous world What changed his literary practice was a job Grazhdani! Ne zabyvaites’, pozhalusta!, pp. 9-12. religions have imagined through spatial metaphors. An overseeing the painting of Moscow facades that he took All biographical information in this article is existentialist reading might see the realm Prigov conjured after leaving the Stroganov School, which gave him ample drawn from this source. in his visual art as a void of non-being that continuously has free time and reading privileges at the otherwise restricted to be given meaning. Indeed, the artist himself described his Humanities Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 17 - According to the account of Prigov’s close artistic motivation as rooted in part in the fear of a person This led to several years of intense self-guided study of friend Boris Orlov, Prigov continued to draw who is standing in front of an abyss that he has to fill up with topics ranging from social and literary theory to the history throughout the period between 1967 and 1973. something. “So long as you are throwing something into it of philosophy and religion, both Western and Eastern. Based on the 2008 retrospective curated [. . .] you are staying afloat over the abyss. As soon as you The education Prigov thus obtained profoundly reshaped by Ekaterina Degot, one can conclude that stop trying to fill it up, you fall in.”¹⁴ Finally, the relationship his literary ambitions, and by the mid-1970s he began at least some of his works from that period in Prigov’s images between the black space and everything to emerge as a major voice on the unofficial scene. Even were colourful abstract (half geometric, half else in, on or near it can also support a post-structuralist though his writings, of course, appeared only as samizdat, biomorphic) gouache and ink drawings (1967- reading, as would befit a conceptualist. The void might be his reputation as a writer from that point on tended to 1974) (ibid.) the realm of non-signification, the pre-verbal darkness overshadow his many other creative projects. It was only which reminds Prigov, the consummate theoriser, of the as a writer, for instance, that Prigov was described by Boris 18 - The earliest poems that Prigov included in ultimate hollowness at the heart of all of his constructs. Groys in 1988 in The Total Art of Stalinism. Groys called D.A. Prigov, Sobranie stikhov, Vol. 1-5, Vienna: (The seriality of Prigov’s images as variations on a given Prigov a poet with a “radically postutopian position” who Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1996-2009 theme would then suggest the arbitrariness and slippage of “openly maintains and thematises the kinship between date to 1963, but according to the chronology meaning in any given picture.)¹⁵ Knowing Prigov, it was likely poetic and political ideology and between the poetic and cited above, Prigov first began writing poetry all three and more. the political will to power”.¹⁹ in 1956. What matters more for my argument is Prigov’s What Groys did not note is the way in which some obsessive need to visualise a realm that conjures such of Prigov’s best-known early iconic poems offer their 19 - Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, readings. The existence of this realm sheds light on the insights not only through a pastiche of borrowed voices London, 2011, pp. 95, 98. meaning of freedom within Project D.A.P. The visual offered and cultural icons that suggest the poet’s overidentification Prigov a way to account for – without verbally acknowledging with them. They also rely on tropes that are vividly visual them – the unknowable things that lay outside all the and spatial, and it is often the descriptions of space that discourses that his “flickering” hypostases inhabited. More allow the poems’ “author”, characters, and readers to inhabit importantly, the visual – with its images that recur over metaphor or discourse in a literal way. Thus rendered and over through the years – allowed Prigov to hint at the visible, they do not, in Prigov’s mind, require further possibility of a single, authentic vision within his oeuvre, explanation. a vision which promises (though never fully delivers) Clearly present in Prigov’s poetry, the idea that access to intense personal feelings (such as fear, hope, and complex cultural constructs and deeply held beliefs can yearning for both transcendence and escape). Prigov thus be silently explained by simply being made visible is incorporated into his post-modern persona one activity – absolutely central to Prigov’s visual art. And in thinking visual art making – that returns his viewers to the sphere of about Prigov’s recurring visual tropes, it is worth noting sombre spiritual sincerity. This, I believe, became Prigov’s that even the earliest examples of his mature work – a ultimate conceptual move. series of drawings titled Apertures and dating to 1973-1974 (Fig. 1) – already announced the artist’s interest in images Already in the 1970s, moreover, when Prigov 20 - The description is drawn from a video of of openings onto an unknown and invisible place that lies borrowed texts to visualise and literalise in his objects, a personal interview recorded by the then beyond the picture plane. The strange spaces with a highly the sources could include The Book of Genesis or the curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Andrei ambiguous sense of scale depicted in Apertures appear to Gospel of John as easily as the icons of Soviet culture, such Erofeev, during thе 2005 group exhibition Co- be tunnels formed by holes drilled into a hard surface and as the writings of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov or conspirators (Soobschniki). opening onto another side that remains incomprehensible the announcements in the Moscow metro. One sees this but enticing. This series, however, remained a singular one especially in Prigov’s Stikhogrammy (i.e., “poetry-grams”) – 21 - Deconstruction of the ways language in Prigov’s oeuvre. His work during the 1970s was marked by pieces of paper with the same words or phrases typed out organises knowledge and thus creates culture an intertwining of the visual and the verbal that produced a over and over again so that the words make visual shapes, or remained a staple of Prigov’s literary practice remarkable body of concrete poetry unparalleled in Moscow turn into jumbles of conflicting, indistinguishable characters, throughout his career. Conceptualism. These works also became his first forays into or both. While some show specifically Soviet rhetoric multimediality – as manipulable objects, they bore some collapsing in on itself and being rendered meaningless 22 - Andrei Erofeev and Dmitri Prigov, personal relationship to sculpture and existed, according to Prigov, on through reiteration, others question the capacity of language interview during the Co-conspirators the boundary between text as immaterial ideas and text as as such to hold meaning securely, to say exactly what it (Soobschniki) exhibition, 2005. material object.²⁰ means, and to be as exhaustive as it claims. Several of these Prigov made several different groups of these works contain the Russian words for “no”, “nothing”, and 23 - D.A. Prigov, “O bestiarii”, published objects, but the use of words, combined with an irreducible “never” typewritten dozens of times until they turn into originally in Cologne, Pastor #1 (January visual component, united them all. Many of those words, splotchy messes, rendering visible through “mistakes” in 1992), reprinted in Pastor: sbornik izbrannykh like the words of his changing poetic practice, were reiteration the material supports that language normally materialov opublikovannykh v zhurnale borrowed from other contexts and rearranged on the page renders invisible. Even more poignantly, the works show “Pastor” 1992-2001, Vologda, 2009, p. 27. and in space. The resultant objects thus give literal physical that the claims of language to describe abstract nothingness form to the assumptions that language in general and Soviet inescapably require a physical (and for Prigov, visual) form in 24 - Mark Lipovetsky notes that images of language in particular otherwise kept invisible. The form order to be comprehended. “metaphysical chaos [...] form the space-time of the objects – which referenced conventional ways of coordinates of the world which [Prigov’s] organising information – could include a seating chart, a ‘authors’ inhabit”. (Lipovetsky, ‘Kak chestny table of ranks or a desk calendar, a series of which Prigov started to make around 1980.²¹ A series of empty cans whose “contents” were announced by small plaques sticking Into the Abyss chelovek’). 25 – Prigov described the assignment of “the out of them also belong to this period. name” using “the appointing gesture” as: “The In its use of space, the most interesting series of In the late 1970s, Prigov’s visual idiom began dynamic of the interrelationship of essence works was one called Little Windows, which Prigov used to shift again and seemed to bifurcate as he both drew and name accessible to comprehension to literalise such metaphors as an inner essence uncovered remarkably naturalistic and sensitive still-lives of everyday within our limitations or, in any particular by lifting a “veil” or a deep underlying meaning revealed objects and started to make drawings that consisted of case, some word, which is connected to by opening a window onto a new layer of reality. Thus, one individual words (carrying over from the earlier word- its referent in a congenially essential way. work from the series makes visible a transcendent ontology based series) enveloped by meticulously rendered abstract The dramaturgy of these relationships is hidden underneath a schematic representation of an official textured space. Prigov himself analysed this moment in his seemingly personified in the zone of visual Soviet meeting room. Three words are layered on top of artistic development in the following way: art. [...] [I]n my own visual art [...] I was always each other beneath flaps that one opens consecutively, interested in the transposition of any (any!) uncovering such sequences as: Portrait / Law History In 1977-78 I started to draw various objects (cans, Keds, word [...] extracted from any arbitrary context Language / Breath; Chairperson / Accomplishments shells, flowers, etc.), then the problem arose of organizing (with no possibility of reconstructing it) into Circumstances / Mystery; and Window / Enemy / Non- space around these objects not as a real surrounding, but an abstract-visual space in such a way that it, Being. This schematisation is neutral in its appearance (one as an environment, a force field. [...] Gradually, the space the word, is perceived only as the name of that hardly expects to receive great revelations upon first seeing began to consume the objects from the depiction of which space and not only as the name of that space, this piece of paper), and Prigov-the-maker leaves few traces everything had originally started, which at one time got but as some creature-inhabitant of this space, of himself here. Yet it is notable that the work offers the compressed down to a ball in my drawings and then simply which it itself engendered. (“O bestiarii”, pp. ability to see beneath the surfaces of reality and intimates a to a word-name. For a couple of years I worked with this 25-26) world laden with metaphysical meaning, where the simplest magma-like space until it gave birth to the creatures which objects stand for something else. Importantly for his future I’m currently discussing.²³ 26 - Curiously, with these works Prigov work, Prigov also conflates here discursive space with remained unique in Moscow Conceptualism, literal space, as if to draw an analogy between the ways that I will return to these creatures shortly, but it is but not entirely alone. The art he made borrowed ideological language visibly takes material shape worth first pausing to consider the space Prigov describes from the 1980s onwards moved away from on the page or pages and the way it shapes the material here, since it would become increasingly central to his visual the interests he shared with sots-art, but reality of the society that lives with it. work.²⁴ It is with the appearance of this dark, dense space of developed a greater affinity for the space Here it is important to note, once again, that Prigov indeterminate depth, largely by itself in his drawings, that the of the empty white fields – the physical was not alone in his interests. These works belong to the visual and the verbal start separating in his art, though in a embodiment of the “polosa nerazlichenia” heyday of Moscow Conceptualism’s exploration of Soviet subtle way. Words remain a recurring motif in many (though (zone of indistinguishability) – that was patterns of engrained ideological thought, and they are certainly not all) of Prigov’s drawings, installations, and explored for years by the Collective Actions related to the uses of speech, ideology, and imagery that even videos, but it is the black space that becomes the most group. artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Ėrik Bulatov, and Komar and consistent protagonist of Prigov’s visual work. In one of his Melamid were also borrowing from the world around them. interviews, the artist seemed, in a deliberately convoluted 27 - Hirt and Wonders, “Dmitri A. Prigov – What is distinctive about Prigov’s work, however, aside way, to say as much, contending that the power of the manipuliator tekstami”, pp. 141, 142. from the elegance of its minimal means, is how explicitly appointing gesture made it possible for him to make any word and insistently his objects – the Telegrams, Calendars, Little have a deep, essential connection with the dark space.²⁵ Thus, Windows and Stikhogrammy which dominated his visual when words appeared in this space, they acquired, regardless output in the mid-1970s – were already pointing to an of their apparent meanings, new metaphysical ones, as if existential or metaphysical Beyond. Consider, for instance, they all belonged at the bottom layer in one of the Little another “Little Window”, which entices the viewer to open Windows, and that layer was now the only one on view.²⁶ a flap that addresses him with “Attention, citizen!” only to The tension created by black space enveloping tell him, “Do not lift the veil over the mystery – for you will words was central for one of Prigov’s best-known series know horror.” Indeed, Prigov added a metaphysical note even – the works on newspapers, some of them large in scale, in a piece like “In Our.../In Their...”, a work from the Little produced in the late 1980s (Fig. 2). “In these works,” write Windows series which satirises the rhetoric used in the USSR Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders, “Prigov materialises virtual during the Cold War to describe the glories of “our” (Soviet) ‘super-images’ or ‘super-words’: covering [newspaper] pages life and the horrors of “their” (capitalist) one. Surrounded by in black paint, he leaves a portion of the surface untouched, all the other flaps that reveal what happens in socialist and thus forming words that seem illuminated from within.” In capitalist countries, there lies at the centre a black space that this way, the authors argue, Prigov explores how in Russia, Prigov describes as “the point of absolute non-being, the “Relics of a sacral understanding of writing continued to metaphysical starting point from which life begins”.²² survive in secularised form.”²⁷  FIGURE 2. DMITRI PRIGOV, AGROPROM, 1989. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST'S ESTATE Prigov’s choice of actual newspapers to bear his in Moscow and the only way in which he could intervene 28 - The discrepancy between Pravda’s drawn words atop them suggests that Prigov’s growing in the newspaper was manually. Rather than being a name and its contents was also thematised interest in the metaphysical did not immediately take him transparent support, the newspaper was so layered with earlier, in 1975, by Komar and Melamid in their away from the social. In this series, he created on a larger meanings that focusing on any given word would result in performance and resulting installation titled scale than before a metanarrative commentary on the plumbing great cultural depths. The Essence of Truth. workings of Soviet ideology. For Soviet citizens of Prigov’s Given these differences in their circumstances, it generation, newspapers represented sites of propaganda at is unsurprising that an artist like Kosuth and an artist like 29 - This defamiliarisation is something that its densest, and Prigov’s interventions revealed them as such. Prigov would respond differently to the common goal that Prigov also practiced in his oral performances, The works suggested a deep level on which the newspapers Kosuth articulated when he proclaimed that “the only role where his readings of his poetry and prose presented not secular facts, but sacred truths – something for an artist in 1969 was to investigate critically the nature often morphed into glossolalia, which that, like the Scripture of yore, demanded to be taken of art itself.” For Kosuth, this led to the next conclusion that similarly offers both a semiotic insight about on faith. To intensify the effect, Prigov frequently set his “One cannot do this through painting and sculpture [. . .] the instability of meaning in language and an drawings atop Pravda – the official daily of the Communist because as particular forms of art they assume the validity allusion to older spiritual practices. Party with its name meaning “truth”– and occasionally wrote of a general conception of art.”³¹ Yet for Prigov, free from the the floating words using titla – ­the over-text abbreviation demands of an art market for paintings and sculptures, what 30 - Bruce Altschuler, The Avant-Garde in marks reserved in Old Church Slavonic for writing sacred made equal sense was not an ascetic disavowal of traditional Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, names and concepts.²⁸ Occasionally, Prigov also took media (even though he created no paintings and relatively Berkeley, 1994, pp. 241-242. letters (usually vowels) out of words altogether, without few sculptures), but a maximalist gesture of embracing re- inserting them using the titla. Thus, he not only alluded as many media as possible and working across them in a 31 - Ibid. to older Russian forms of orthography, but also, as with the way that dramatically amplified the latent metaphysical Stikhogrammy, defamiliarised language as such, pointing dimensions of terms like “existence”, “time”, “order”, and 32 - In a 2004 radio interview with Pavel to the arbitrary and tenuous connection between written “space”. Indeed, in the spirit of his life-long expansion Lembersky, Prigov articulated his oft- repeat- signifier and its usually multivalent signified.²⁹ into ever new media, over time Prigov also started to use ed position on truth: “There is no Heavenly The degree to which Prigov’s canonical newspapers to make installations. He began these projects Truth, only limited, conditional truths, each of works emerge out of his embeddedness in his cultural in the late 1980s, often while working abroad, notably in which is the truth within the boundaries of its environment can be highlighted through telling comparison Germany. While many of the newspapers used in these own axioms.” Available online at http://www. with another well-known series involving newspapers, often room-sized works were merely arranged in large metpo.com/articles/detail.asp?iData=123&i- namely Joseph Kosuth’s germinal Art as Idea as Idea (1966- mounds on the floor, the installations inevitably centred on Cat=852&iChannel=2&nChannel=Articles. 1970). Created in an effort “to avoid the reification of the the depiction (in some form) of Prigov’s black space, as well art object as a thing, even if an immaterial one”, the works as the other evolving elements of his personal iconography, 33 - Prigov was very aware of the importance consisted of text published in advertising space that Kosuth which I discuss below. Some of the most elaborate of these of periodisation to historical metanarratives, purchased in newspapers and periodicals. In that space, “he installations include Russian Snow (1990), Snow Space and he also addressed in interviews the [. . .] printed without explanation a list of synonyms for an (1991), and Winter Russian Journey (1994). issue of multiple temporalities existing abstract term.” Three of the earliest terms for which Kosuth The newspaper works were novel in the way they simultaneously. reproduced the thesaurus entries were “existence, time, and brought together in Prigov’s work the metanarrative with the order”. Later, when Kosuth was asked to participate in an metaphysical, giving a new prominence to the latter. On the exhibition in Bern in 1969, he also published synonyms for one hand, they were undeniably of their time and showed “space” in the city’s newspapers.³⁰ the artist’s specifically Soviet path to the post-modern I mention this particular series of works because, insight that any discourse is self-serving, self-enclosed, as Kosuth’s choice of terms suggests, he and Prigov clearly self-sustaining, and historically contingent, its axioms not had shared interests, both in the use of the Duchampian tied to any essential, universal, eternal Truth.³² On the “appointing gesture” to decide what could become art other hand, they also transcended the present as Prigov’s and in the concepts they wanted to explore. Against this black dense space signified and invoked a timeless realm of background of shared interests, the contrast between inchoate forces that took the viewer to a pre-Enlightenment Kosuth’s purist preoccupation with the maximally world where simply naming things still held the promise of dematerialised and demystified idea and Prigov’s much revealing their true essences and defeating chaos.³³ messier artifacts reveals the degree to which cultural Looking across the whole series, one can also context could inflect equally conceptual practices. For easily see that this visual component was primary to the Kosuth, who could freely publish his entries in The New works’ meaning. As Prigov made scores of drawings on York Times, Artforum, and London Times, the newspaper newspapers, the words and objects in them changed, but page was a welcome alternative to the gallery. It served the dark space remained the signature element. It was the as a transparent support for a mechanically produced abyss that Vladimir Sorokin describes when he writes: public announcement of his refusal to materialise abstract ideas. None of this was true for Prigov – disrupting the art The abyss, the abyss [. . .]. Every poet has his own special market or the ideology of the white cube was a non-issue relationship to it. Prigov used to say that he always felt  himself falling into the abyss and would try to stem the balls and spheres of various sizes, which seem to represent 34 - Vladimir Sorokin, "Prigov and His free fall by pelting it with art. Everything he dashed down self-enclosed, opaque individual entities; and black and Universe", in: Alla Rosenfeld and Kirill into it would cause a reactive jet stream to shoot back up, white squares as “symbols of the structural and intelligible Svetlyakov (Eds.), Dmitry Prigov. From buoying its creator in the air.³⁴ force of a cosmos that is material and spiritual”.³⁹ Renaissance to Conceptualism and Beyond, Aside from the chimeras that populated the Bestiary exh. cat., Moscow, 2014. Paradoxically, though, the more Prigov filled his abyss with series, the subjects of Prigov’s other series of installations work, the more the abyss also showed up in them like an and drawings frequently included the plumber and the 35 - The Russian name for the series – ever-expanding black hole. This happened throughout cleaning lady – humble people who devote themselves Tablichki – can also be translated as “signs” or the 1990s: in his Plaques series³⁵, Prigov plunged to service and unsung struggle against entropy in the “little tablets”. found phrases, random concepts, and the names of his name of a divinely sanctioned order. Just as frequently, contemporaries into/out of the darkness. In the Untitled hagiographic inscriptions of names, particularly those of 36 - D.A. Prigov, Sovetskie teksty 1979-84, with (Chairs) series (1996), chairs holding Prigov’s symbolic Wagner and Malevich, became protagonists in their own an Introduction by A. Zorin, St Petersburg, 1997, objects float atop circular abysses while smaller black right, mythologising the heroic period of Western artistic p. 12. openings appear above them. The same can be seen in modernity.⁴⁰ In later years, a teddy bear often showed up, the Stylites series, where spheres of various sizes become seemingly as a stand-in for childhood and youth. Prigov’s 37 - For more on this, see Dmitrij Golynko- strange “pillar saints” hovering above and below the abyss. symbols, moreover, also made frequent references to Volfson, “Chitaia Prigova: neodno- In the 1990s and 2000s, he yet again contrasted timely non-Western cultures. Some of the creatures of Bestiary znachnoe i neochevidnoe”, in: E. Dobrenko, found images with the timeless abyss by appropriating with have chakras marked on their bodies; in the 2000s, Prigov I. Kukulin, M. Lipovetsky and M.Majofis his drawings the pages of glossy magazine ads, as well as occasionally used Chinese characters to write words in (Eds.), Nekanonicheskii klassik: Dmitri reproductions of Old Master and historic Russian paintings. his drawings and made a video that depicts a pair of hands Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940-2007), Moscow, Not only words and objects, but also fantastical opening up, one after another, a series of transparent sheets 2010, pp. 145-180. beings inhabited Prigov’s abyss. These are found in the of plastic until a drawing of the word “Tao” (transcribed in Bestiary series, which depicts the “creatures” Prigov Russian as “dао”) floating on a black background comes into 38 - Vitaly Patsyukov [Ed.], Posredine referenced in the quote above when describing their view, is revealed and then covered up again.⁴¹ Mirozdaniya, exh. cat., Moscow, 2008, p. 46. emergence out of the dark space. Painstakingly rendered, usually with nothing more than a pen; fleshly yet 39 - For an extensive explanation of his ethereal, floating in dark space and holding mysterious objects; surrounded by cryptic initials and partial, usually incomprehensible utterances, the creatures of Bestiary Metanarratives and Metaphysics heraldic system, see Prigov, “O bestiarii”, pp. 29-31. were said by Prigov to be “spirit-portraits” of his friends in 40 - “Hagiography, new hagiography – that is the literary and artistic underground, as well as of important It is important to clarify at this point that in the what I have a fuzzy vision of as the true answer figures from cultural history. The emergence of the series context of his work inside the Moscow Conceptualist circle, to the call of history,” Prigov wrote in a 1984 in the early 1980s marked the point at which Prigov further Prigov’s visual art made from the 1980s onwards could text (Patsyukov, Posredine Mirozdaniya, p. 11. ). turned away from exploring the forms of thought particular – and to some did – easily appear to be in questionable to the Soviet “aeon” – away from what Andrej Zorin saw in taste. Prigov was no stranger to aesthetic animosity – his 41 - The scope of this essay does not allow Prigov’s poetic Soviet Texts as “the pleasure [. . .] found in introduction of the Militiaman (i.e., policeman) and other me to discuss Prigov’s performance works in the game of domesticating a monstrous system”.³⁶ Instead, profane Soviet topics into poetry in the 1970s scandalised addition to his work in the more traditional the interest in taming systems by seeing to their inner older members of the cultural underground to whom all visual arts, but it is worth noting that parallel essences remained, but turned now to deeper historic time. things Soviet were anathema and the spiritual in art was to developing his elaborate visual language, Hence, Bestiary is full of new “monsters” whose chimerical sacrosanct. Yet with his visual work – with its suggestions of Prigov also moved beyond performing appearance and surrounding world seems cobbled together transcendence and a codified visual language that replaced readings of his own poetic texts and started from conventionalised symbolism traditionally associated Soviet mystification with a global pastiche of older symbols staging more elaborate performance art with depictions of a metaphysical “reality”.³⁷ – Prigov stood to be misunderstood not by those with whom events. Even though Prigov’s performances he disagreed, but by his own cultural milieu. were clearly related to his visual art (in their From around the mid-1980s, Prigov’s dark, The poet Lev Rubinstein, one of Prigov’s closest interest in ritual as an older form of knowledge, otherworldly space began to be supplemented by a personal friends, has described how within the Moscow Conceptualist for instance), they were also notably different. iconography, heraldic notation, and colour symbolism circle, talk of the spiritual was seen as painfully embarrassing They were more aligned with Prigov’s with a strange feel to them: they are almost “medieval” and was referred to only as “dukhovka” – the Russian “flickering” literary persona, which also in the rigidity, elaborateness, and the obscurity of their word for “oven”, which reduced the lofty “dukhovnost’” explored the possibilities of order and chaos codification of meaning. The colour scheme consists of (spirituality) to a domestic appliance.⁴² Prigov too could be in language through the extremes of both black, white and red, with the occasional later addition flippant on the subject, acknowledging, for example, that, highly convoluted and very elemental speech. of green and blue. “Black is the colour of concealment, “[O]f course, [the works in Bestiary] do have a certain hint More importantly, the performances were metaphysical mystery, and magical impenetrability,” Prigov of kitsch (which I aim for, having a reasonably broad array of fundamentally inflected by the assumption explained. “White is the colour of energy and streaming. means of mystifying not only the viewer, but also myself).”⁴³ that the performer was temporarily embodying Red colour [is] life, vita,” and Prigov usually depicted it as In interviews, he also downplayed the iconographic a character – a quality that, as I have been a red liquid filling up a wine glass.³⁸ Black, white, and red, significance and aesthetic qualities of his works by focusing arguing, is not true of Prigov’s visual art. of course, were, as Prigov noted in the same text, also the attention on the time-consuming, meditative process by colours typical of both Russian icons and the early 20th which he made them.⁴⁴ The process of creation mattered 42 - For Prigov’s own explanation of his circle’s century Russian avant-garde (particularly Suprematism more than the product. People who knew Prigov do note dismissal of “dukhovka”, see Shapoval and and Constructivism). In his late works, Prigov explored that he drew obsessively and constantly – for hours – when Prigov, Portretnaia galereia D.A.P., p. 80. this connection to the Russian avant-garde even further, watching television and even when carrying on conversations, invoking Malevich’s name as a mantra. He also mythologised so that the movement of the hand was, indeed, an incessant 43 - Prigov, “O bestiarii”, p. 28. Malevich’s Vagina, in numerous drawings and installations part of his life. The works thus could be seen simply as traces proposing an affinity between Malevich’s Black Square of the artist’s need for activity that became art thanks to his 44 - In the same interview as the one cited in (which “birthed” both pure abstraction and “modern” art appointing gesture within Project D.A.P. ⁴⁵ the previous note, Prigov reflected, “Making in Russia) and his own black abyss. Indeed, Malevich, This, though, is what one might call a conceptualist’s art for me is a kind of meditation. When I draw who wanted to distill the essence of the Russian spiritual way of having his cake and eating it too. It allowed Prigov to for five or so hours in a row, after an hour, I tradition into pure form to make a utopian modern art, hold on to the dense metaphysical meanings he insistently simply disappear, and then, after coming out was the perfect forefather for Prigov’s own mixed artistic conjured up in his visual art and disavow these meanings of this state, I look at the drawing and cannot temporalities. at the same time, citing as justification, paradoxically, the remember how some parts of it were drawn.” Other iconographic tropes that Prigov used to intense, obsessive labour he put into materialising them. Yet (Ibid., pp. 107-108) describe the relationship between this world and the this explanation does not answer the pressing question of otherworldly included an egg – “a symbol of the primary what drove the artist to make this particular kind of work, 45 - The obsessiveness expressed in the cosmological substance” when unbroken and of “personal not to mention make it consistently over decades in media drawings through evidence of extended, shelter and the privatisation of the cosmos” when empty; a where the artist – despite his attempts – could not insert ceaseless motion can also be found in many drawn back or transparent curtain as a cipher for a revealed and foreground the metatext that would alert viewers to his of Prigov’s prose texts, such as, for example, or concealed mystery; the ever-watchful eye, standing in for desired interpretation of Project D.A.P. This, perhaps more “Open Letter” (1984), republished in Posredine “superhuman vision [and] the presence of a higher power”; than anything, differentiates Prigov’s art from his poetry, mirozdanija (pp. 8-15). which was always prefaced by his signature Forewords, now on chairs; piles of papers covering the room, much as 46 - D.A. Prigov, Sbornik preduvedomlenii k anthologised in their own right.⁴⁶ newspapers in Prigov’s earlier installations did; plumbers raznoobraznym vescham, Moscow, 1996. Instead, Prigov’s visual work was left to its own and cleaning ladies having visions; and the names of devices when facing the public eye, vulnerable and Malevich and Wagner slithering across the walls in black 47 - Quoted in Dmitri Ozerkov, “Where is exposed to the interpretation it so readily invites that its areoles. There are also new motifs, like the square beams Prigov?”, in: Dmitri Prigov, exh. cat. for the maker is sincerely making metaphysical claims and asking that prop up the ceiling in one sub-series but also collapse, exhibition Dmitri Prigov: Dmitri Prigov, metaphysical questions. And it is in this way that it made taking the room down with them. Rope also features organised as part of the parallel programme of visible, without having to articulate verbally, the full extent frequently in these drawings, often disappearing into the 54th Venice Biennale, co-produced by the of the tension in Prigov’s work between the metanarrative unknown spaces above the ceiling or below the floor. Yet State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the and the metaphysical. It was in Prigov’s visual art that the the one common element that defines the series consists Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, the Dmitri Prigov power of the two interpretive forces was acknowledged as of gaping black holes that rend one or more of the pristine Foundation, and the Barbarian Art Gallery, that of equals. Rather than treating the metaphysical as yet white surfaces. Collectively, the rooms are “an entirely Zürich, 2011, p. 211. another kind of metanarrative, another story Prigov dredged Platonic model of the world, the white dream of existence up and channelled from different layers of Culture, his art rent by a black abyss” as Vladimir Sorokin has put it.⁵⁰ They 48 - Shapoval and Prigov, “Portretnaia galereia pushed to the limit his own and his circle’s ability to accept are thus the perfect visual distillations of the metanarrative D.A.P”, p. 108 and available online at <http:// the metaphysical as an alternative mode of knowledge – or, – the endless elegant mental constructs about the inner www.intelros.org/drevo/prigov2.htm>. perhaps more accurately, not-knowing, which, as Prigov workings of culture, which Prigov so often proposed showed, escaped his abilities to describe it. “Culture,” himself – being mercilessly intruded upon by the black void 49 - The earliest of these were made in the said Prigov, “unlike religion, understands exactly what it is of the metaphysical.⁵¹ 1990s, but it was in the 2000s that Prigov really concerned with: it is concerned with penultimate truths. Its meaning remains as obscure as ever, but delved into their creation on a massive scale. The ultimate ones are dealt with by religious teachers, its presence is at its most insistent. It is also so clearly founders of schools and esoteric systems. Art is a school rendered in Phantom Installations that they take us, 50 - Sorokin, “Prigov and His Universe”. of appointment and preparation, opening eyes and raising surprisingly, right back to the beginnings of Prigov’s artistic awareness. Any further steps are to be taken on one’s own career, suggesting that this tension in his art was a life- 51 - In relation to Prigov’s installations, account.”⁴⁷ In his own art, Prigov seemed to want to take long one. Now that the void becomes defined as part of Ekaterina Degot has argued that what Prigov steps – temporarily but frequently – into the territory of three-dimensional space, these works echo the Apertures so often reveals in them is the “meat of space” ultimate truths, but did so, given his self-proclaimed title as series from the early 1970s, intimating that Prigov’s – the kind of other- worldly magma which “culture worker”, in conspicuous silence. interest in passages to the “other side” predated or arose I have also described that oozes out of the This idea is also supported by Prigov’s complicated simultaneously with his conceptual practice, though the hatches that the artist opens up for it. (Degot, views on aforementioned “self-mystification”, which he at other side seems to have become much darker over the Grazhdane! Ne zabyvajtes, pozhalusta!, pp. 53, once avowed and disavowed by disparaging it in others but years.⁵² Even more interestingly, the Phantom Installations 59). recuperating it for himself as part of a self-conscious practice. drawings bear an uncanny resemblance to the description of Prigov the rational thinker claimed not to object to mystification the stage that appears in an unpublished play Prigov wrote c. 52 - Dmitri Ozerkov makes a similar suggestion so long as it was done with self-awareness and in a controlled 1977.⁵³ In the play, Prigov-as-director describes the actor he in Ozerkov, ‘Where is Prigov’, p. 87. way in the realm of art and culture. To this he added: needs for his play: 53 - The play was first published in the Rationality is easy for me precisely because I know the I need a quite particular kind of actor for all this [. . .] I need catalogue of Prigov’s first posthumous sphere [i.e. , art] where I disappear completely. This him to jingle, clown around, and joke, listening all the retrospective, curated by Ekaterina Degot problem is very relevant for Russia. Here, there is a while to something inside himself, something not quite in 2008. It is Degot who tentatively dated passion for mystifying everything that should be clear. understandable and light, or, I would say, light-sounding. the manuscript, titled A Play on Stage, to There does, indeed, exist a level of mystery, but one So that, rapt by this something, he might freeze in the 1977. (Degot, “Grazhdane! Ne zabyvajtes, has to have the honesty to figure out everything that middle of a trick, and only one finger on, let’s say, his left pozhalusta!”, p. 52). should be figured out. We constantly observe attempts hand, not having yet heard this emanation, soft as bells in to move to the level of mystery things that are as simple a blizzard, would alone continue performing the trick by 54 - Ibid., p. 16. as hammering a nail [. . .] The mystical fog, which gets inertia. This is the actor I always need.⁵⁴ sprayed onto even the simplest of actions, gives man the 55 - Monastyrski, Slovar terminov moskovskoi right to become spiritually and intellectually lazy. And this When we consider that Prigov was not only the director kontseptualnoi shkoly, p. 194. constitutes the great dishonesty and fatal flaw of [Russian] of the life-long Project D.A.P. , but also its only actor, this culture.⁴⁸ description seems to be an intimate glimpse into the inner workings of Prigov’s “flickering” and suggests that he always What seems to remain unspoken, undescribed, and passed had a need for a silent space in which he could listen to an over in silence here is the nature of the mystery Prigov inner voice even while performing the “tricks” of channelling mentions; crucially, though, he does aver its existence the voices of others. Within his oeuvre, it is Prigov’s visual and seems to suggest that exploring it in a private sphere art that provided that silent space and allowed for the where one “disappears completely” – the phrase evokes “listening [. . .] to something inside himself”, in contrast to a meditative or spiritual experience and clearly describes his poetic and performance-based heteroglossia. One sees the role that visual art played for Prigov – is an act of great this, finally, in the video art works made late in his career, in personal honesty. the 2000s, most if not all of which are silent save for music The seriality of Prigov’s work further complicates and include such meditative pieces focused on repetitive matters; numerous reiterations of the same motif can point action as Triptych, Evangelist, and Sisyphus. to the arbitrariness of each individual image. Yet it seems By way of conclusion, I would like to introduce significant that in the group of works where Prigov’s seriality the reader to what is probably Prigov’s most peculiar went into overdrive – whole rooms can be filled with these contribution to the lexicon of Moscow Conceptualism – the particular drawings – there is one element that unites phrase “proiti bokovym gitlerom” (“to sneak in through a almost all the works: it is still the gaping black abyss, now sideways Hitler”), which Prigov coined in the late 1980s and more prominent and clearly defined than ever. I am speaking which denotes bringing an idea into culture obliquely and in of the vast corpus of Prigov’s Phantom Installations – “low doses” because it would never be able to get through sketches for possible installations of which Prigov made if presented in its full force.⁵⁵ That Prigov needed a term for seemingly hundreds before his death, even though only a such an operation strikes me as incredibly revealing about handful were ever realised as actual installations.⁴⁹ his artistic project, since he himself had for decades been All of the works share the same starting point – sneaking a belief in the possibility of an unfathomable, they depict a room with blank white walls, three of which metaphysical Beyond into a heavily theorised conceptual the viewer can see (while the absence of the fourth invites practice. This, in fact, was Prigov’s ultimate conceptual one to imagine standing in the room or, at least, to witness move – to include in his body of work images that one what is happening there the way one does in the theatre). would not expect from a conceptualist and that give the The rooms contain arrangements of structures and objects, “flickering” artist a way to speak to the private and the many of which are familiar from Prigov’s earlier works: incomprehensible, which lay beyond description, through there are balls, teddy bears and glasses of liquid sitting visions of the silent yet eloquent abyss. Verbo- visuality (c.2007) T he binding together of the verbal and the visual came course, the use of any material cannot happen without a about, it would appear, with the very first ritual practices certain (and sometimes very meaningful) admiration and love of humankind, when they served a single goal — to for it. So, in fact, the works were always located on the border transport a person into a transformed state of consciousness of ambiguous interpretations. Moreover, it is impossible not (akin to other hallucinatory, performance-based, meditative to mention that undoubtedly the magical aura of the written practices). Later, their connection changed its form according and, in fact, the spoken word, endured within the very same to concrete cultural and historical traditions, with this performances, actions and installations. connection almost completely interrupted when book printing came about. Here verbality gained almost complete I must note that it was visual art, rather than literature, priority, as it was within the confines of the verbal that key that became the active testing ground for various kinds of ideas, utopias, ambitions for power, philosophical systems, languages and ideologies. This was perhaps because it was along with legal and civil institutions were formed. It must precisely the writer’s word that had been the carrier of heroic be noted that the archaic connection between the verbal and ideologised statements par excellence. I won’t discuss and the visual, which for an incredibly long time existed in the problem of the domination of visual art within the the form of hieroglyphic calligraphy, is undergoing a serious sphere of the radical, and its particularly successful market crisis within the limits of informational culture. integration via such radical practices. The new spark of interest in the interrelation and Basically, the ways of using the verbal within visual spaces interpenetration of the verbal and the visual was notable at are well known. These are titles, commentaries or quasi- the beginning of the 20th century, when within the limits commentaries, sometimes completely replacing the visual of a precipitously urbanising culture, city space became unbelievably populated and clogged with billboards, announcements, slogans and so on, which became an essential part of the city environment. Accordingly, there object and occupying its place and status. In other cases, words are placed on the painting, entering into complex relationships with its space and image. Words could also appear in their seperateness, severed from the context and by D.A.P. was a turn towards the old traditional examples of similar the possibility of narrative deployment as self-existing symbioses – luboks*, pub signs, inscriptions on walls and on beings, names, logoi. They might have imitated certain fences. But, on the whole, these were of either a decorative slogans, mottoes and advertisements. or propagandistic and agitational character. The latter, aimed at stirring the vast uneducated masses to social action, Following this, with the general mixing of genres and even amounted to the visualisation of a verbal space. forms of art, the practice of using works within visual objects became self-evident. But, in general, it took on a decorative It wasn’t until the 1960s, in the wake of the criticism of social character. This is particularly true of our time, given the utopias and ideologies, that this problem returned, , this time weakening critical tone and desire for experiments and in the highly segmented and thematised conceptualism, radicalism. In its appearance, this form of symbiosis of the which subsequently proliferated and definitively established verbal and the visual is read as an appellation to the so-called itself in all its various postmodernist dialects*. It was the phenomenon of the “gesamtkunstwerk”, from which we can critique of language that became the overarching reason for read the Wagnerian meaning of the anthropological unity testing visual languages by introducing verbal elements into of the cultural gesture, the particular components of which the visual space. Actually, the verbal, as the principal carrier are allocated into different areas only because of specific of narratives and utopias, was also tested and critiqued. Of cultural and historical traditions.  Dmitri Prigov, Addresses to Citizens, 1985-87 SISYPHUS (2004) It is common knowledge that a perpetual motion machine is possible only in a space that is unaffected by any force and that exerts no force of its own. I don’t know whether such a thing is possible. Other than in heaven. But there, it is common knowledge who the Perpetual Machine Machine is. Any considered and unconsidered action, in the end, takes place under the influence of multiformed backgrounds, fields, particles and noises. And in our case, it is enough to take the pointless and endless pouring back and forth of water into and out of a cup, for in the end, a meaning is found, which lies in the discovery of the meaninglessness of any ambitions and hopes of eternity. by D.A.P. Dmitri Prigov’s “Shimmering”: Daniil Leiderman Within the Image and Without it D mitri’s Prigov’s concept of “shimmering” is one venues or gazes out of the image explicitly offers them up as 1 Ilya Kabakov “Not-Getting-Stuckedness,” of the many terms developed in the course of signifiers of the sacred, and Prigov’s obvious investment of in Dictionary of the Terms of the Moscow his collaboration with the Moscow Conceptual time and labour in making them bolsters this interpretation. Conceptualist School, 62-3. circle during the 1970s and 80s. The circle sought and The works thus make a two-fold claim: that they clearly created many such terms to describe their activities with hold some metaphysical meaning, and that this meaning 2 Dmitrii Prigov, “Shimmering,” in Словарь specificity. “Shimmering” was used fairly widely, occasionally is somehow within the dark forms. It is these claims that терминов московской концептуальной appearing in different formulations, such as Kabakov’s create the red herring upon which the shimmering relies. школы [Dictionary of the Terms of the Mos- “Not-Getting-Stuckedness”, but with a consistent meaning.¹ Inevitably, it becomes clear to the spectator that cow Conceptual School], ed. Andrei Monas- It describes a strategic counter-ideology for evading and the mystery is fundamentally closed to them, that no image tyrsky (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999), 58-59. preempting authoritative discourse. It is a strategy of in the series reveals anything final about any other image. Hereafter, if not indicated, all translations principled tergiversation between irreconcilable artistic and Inevitably, too, the black form shifts from the ultimate from the Russian are mine. ideological discourses, such as the Russian avant-garde and signifier of the hidden, revelatory truth, and becomes a Soviet Socialist Realism. Shimmering moves from profound literal representation of murk, of the absence of clarity, 3 Groys, Boris. “Dmitrii Prigov: prizraki khao- investment in an artwork, or thorough identification with of a splatter of ink blocking meaning. But then it becomes sa,” 2016, no. 97, Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, a given political position, to utter detachment, critical obvious that it is not a splatter at all, but the slow and http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/19/ distance, and merciless analysis; from an earnest investment methodical work of Prigov’s pen, and again the blackness article/279 in a given position’s binary opposite, and then back necessitates a graspable but eliding meaning. Boris Groys again. It is a trajectory intended to prevent or preempt directly described this process in his article “Dmitry Prigov: the consolidation of an authoritative voice or artwork.² Ghosts of Chaos”, where he interpreted the images as In his artworks of the 1990s, Prigov frequently effected representing a negotiation with an essential existential shimmering between political, artistic and especially, as an chaos.³ I fully follow Groys’ interpretation, but for me what added twist, metaphysical discourses. is crucial is not the content of the negotiation itself, but Prigov’s 1990s series of untitled works often called rather the shimmering structure of the works: the effort “drafts of installations” and identified by a significant detail to mislead the audience into meaningful revelation, which (“with a cleaning lady”, “with an eye”, etc.) offers an example sabotages itself for obfuscating nonsense, which sabotages of this metaphysical shimmering. These works represent a itself for meaningful revelation, and so on in perpetuity. ritualistic space which is occasionally attended by a cleaning Similar formal structures hedge Prigov’s numerous portraits lady, who seems to participate in the rituals. This space from the series Bestiaries, by simultaneously prompting the sometimes contains glasses of wine, curtains, altar-like spectator to try to find reasons for recognising the portrait forms, floating eyes and other paraphernalia associated with as a given individual (facial features, meaningful objects), religious imagery in Western art. One consistent factor is only to inevitably conclude that the strange, long-snouted the presence of a solid black form, which takes on different creatures don’t depict the people they represent at all, shapes, most of them openings of some sort, allowing egress before inevitably again trying to find the thread of meaning or ingress into the space. In several works, this black form which is obviously there or must be, given the unity and shapes the pupil of the floating eyes; in others it is a literal consistency of the images and Prigov’s project as a whole. opening, such as a hatch or hole. In others yet it is a floating It is this effort to trick the audience in finding formless shape or a blackboard, both containing a word. and losing meaning, into convincing them that the author Numerous critics have noted that Prigov created these black holds the truth, betraying this conviction, and betraying shapes with individual strokes of the pen, representing an the betrayal, that constitutes shimmering. And, in all cases, enormous investment of time and energy. shimmering serves both to disarm the discourse it both It is with these black forms that Prigov introduces produces and evades, and to disarm the author of any claim shimmering into a transcendental discourse. The surrealistic to ultimate authority and power. It is only here that the or metaphysical imagery within these works prompts discourse is that of contact with the sacred as a whole, and ambitious interpretations, which the various signifiers of here the ultimate authorial authority is disarmed through Western religious imagery prime into overt anticipation of an insistent and willfully impotent quest to represent it as the sacred. The role of the black forms within the images as divinely omnipotent. Colophon This publication accompanies the exhibition Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action at Calvert 22 Space in London, on view from 13 October to 17 December 2017. Curated by Elizaveta Butakova-Kilgarriff, the show culminates Calvert 22 Foundation’s year-long season dedicated to marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution and is the first posthumous solo exhibition of Dmitri Prigov’s work in the UK. Presented in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the Hermitage Foundation UK and the Dmitri Prigov Foundation. Supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Curator: Elizaveta Butakova Kilgarriff Curatorial advice: Ekaterina Eloshvili, Dmitri Ozerkov, Andrey Prigov Programme Manager: Will Strong Authors: Elizaveta Butakova Kilgarriff, D.A.P. , Sam Goff, Ksenya Gurshtein and Daniil Leiderman Copy editor: Elise Morton Graphic Designer: Lauranne Cox Printer: Trinity Mirror Printing, London, England © 2017 by Calvert22 Foundation 22 Calvert Avenue, E2 7JP London. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission. All images are © the artists, reproduced with the kind permission of the artists and/or their representatives. Credits: p. 4 — 5: Courtesy of the Artist's Estate; p. 12 — 13: Courtesy of the Artist’s Estate and the Prigov Foundation; p. 15: Installation shot of Heavens (Series with Brooms), 2000s/2017. Mixed-media installation built on site. Courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo credit: Nat Urazmetova; p. 16 — 17: Dmitri Prigov, Cleaning Woman and Angels, 2000s/2017. Triptych. Hand coloured etching, E.A. Courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the Prigov Foundation; p. 18 — 19: Heavens (Series with Brooms), 2000s/2017. Hand coloured etching, E.A. Courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the Prigov Foundation; p.30 — 31, 33: Dmitri Prigov. Addresses to Citizens, 1985-1987. English translation by Elizaveta Butakova-Kilgarriff. Courtesy of the Artist’s Estate and the Prigov Foundation; p. 32: Installation photos. Photo credit: Stephen White; p.34 — 35: Dmitri Prigov, Iraida Yusupova, Alexander Dolgin. Sisyphus, 2004. Media-opera, 13’4’’; p. 38: Private view photos. Photo credit: Nat Urazmetova Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to ensure that all the information presented is correct. 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