Conversations with Ilya

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Diana Vinkovetsky graduated from Leningrad St. Petersburg Univesity, Russia, with M. She was working in geological expedition in Kazakhstan and teaching at St. Together with her husband Yakov Vinkovetsky she was involved in struggle for political freedom between intelligentsia and KGB, involving arrests and house searches. After Yakov tragically died she remarried to Leonid Perlovsky. Diana published five books in Russian, which received two literary prizes and highest acclaims from Nobel prize laureates and common people.

In Conversation with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

The book is interesting to read unexpected awaits at every page and at the same time you are taking part in the development of personality. A childs thinking opens a veil Conversations with Ilya are written from unique material: A childs thinking opens a veil over the deepest aspects of human psyche: How the act of judgment emerges? How the mind begins functioning? What disturbs a human being coming to the world. How does a child relate to parents, teachers, other kids, brother? Conversations reveal the nature of childs worries: But to somehow survive in Soviet society, adaptability was assumed as obvious.

There were no warriors, no revolutionaries except for five or six dissidents. Life consisted of two layers, each person was a schizophrenic. Any person—a factory worker, farm worker, intellectual, artist—had a split personality. From childhood, everyone knew what was necessary in order to survive in this country—how you had to lie, how to adapt, what to draw, what to sing, how to dance.

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This was so monstrously false, that underneath this bark emerged an autonomous layer of a different kind of human existence. For stealing from the factory, a worker could be very honored inside his own family. He would teach his child decency, but each day he would bring home a stolen sausage or milk.

This was the norm in Soviet life. For the external world there was one structure—mostly verbal, chatter, all those meetings, the battle for peace. After the death of the Cannibal 2 this dual life became firmly established, it was recognized by absolutely everyone, including the official organs of the secret police.

There was a very strict distinction between public and domestic, kitchen life. A group of about five students would get together after their classes and each had his or her own role. There were no teachers at all. This was the natural desire to inhale oxygen, like frogs living at the bottom of the swamp.

One student was occupied only with poetry—he would get collections of Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, 3 and Western poets. Another, named Daniltsev, was in charge of music education—he collected records. Each had his own house, except for me, I lived at the boarding school dormitory. Khavin—who later became a well-known architect—was in charge of the literary part, and yet another was responsible for theater. Someone else was in charge of philosophy.

We were very proud that we did not belong to the Soviet world, but rather after school we breathed a different oxygen. This way of living outside of Soviet reality was preserved once we had finished school and transitioned into the institute. We would regularly go to the conservatories, libraries, and theaters. It was a kind of self-emerging, almost intellectual medium. It represented an instinctive attraction toward culture, knowledge, and the desire to find out just what was on the other side, beyond the fence, of the Soviet livestock yard.

This naturally turned into a meeting point of the unofficial art world. We were terribly fortunate that in , in Moscow, a circle of poets, artists, and musicians took shape. The main question now asked is: Each person had his own biography of dual existence. In the internal world, no one talked about it, no one complained about how hard it was to live in the Soviet world.

We were personages who existed autonomously, poets would read their verses each day in studios. The same kind of characters would come from Leningrad where the same kind of world existed in parallel. Life was unbelievably intensive, although, of course, there were no exhibitions, no galleries, no collectors. We had our own philosophers, such as Boris Groys, and religious thinkers, Zhenya Shiffers being the most well known. And there was an entire group of musicians, modernists who were also protesting in their own way.

There were an enormous number of poets, mostly from Leningrad.

I was told that this unofficial sphere was very big, that it had its own commerce. Some things would be purchased on occasion, and it was possible to subsist this way. But this subsistence was oriented toward the West, and the uniqueness of your position, and the position of Moscow conceptualists, was that yours was an opposition within an opposition.

It was like prison, like a camp. Inside of that camp there were lots and lots of barracks that had autonomous and ideologically non-intersecting positions. This was silently recognized by everyone, but there was mutual respect, like among inmates in a prison camp. Each barrack had its own ideology. A few of the barracks were not oriented toward the West. I wrote an entire book about that, where these groups are identified: But the conceptual group was not very oriented toward that. The fear of selling to a foreigner, for me, for example, was insane.

You were immediately put in jail as a black-market currency speculator. The only thing that there could be was an exchange; you could ask for a camera in exchange. Any currency operations with foreigners were criminally punishable. Moreover, this entire circle was under the close scrutiny of the KGB. In the eyes of the officials, it was very important that this was not of an anti-Soviet nature.

The concept of art in the West had the quality of a dream about a young man meeting a woman. It was impossible to leave the country; one could only emigrate. The West was perceived as a flourishing cultural civilization. There was a very strong desire in the conceptual circle to orient oneself toward that culture, not to compare oneself with the Soviet tradition. I dreamed about doing what would please the West. I was one of those who during the Soviet period was called a groveler of the West. I created my works, thinking about what a Western curator would say about them.

For many, the criterion was the artist himself and his ideas—if they were realized, that was enough. I had an inflamed reaction to what an authoritative Western person, an expert, would say about me. For me, the Western history of the arts was the beginning and end of my horizon.

I would fantasize that somewhere there was some sort of world where I would feel at home, like one of them. I was rather indifferent to the opinions of my colleagues. Such an apologetic attitude toward foreigners existed amidst my friends and me over the course of probably thirty years of existence in our unofficial artistic life—from the s through the s. The life that had been established in the s monotonously melded into the s and s. The generations of unofficial artists changed, but the lifestyle remained the same.

Everyone had agreed to such an extent about how, how much, and where to steal, what to say and where to speak. My generation is situated between a generation of fear and a generation of relative calm. The next generation in the conceptual circle was no longer constrained by fear, it was freer, and had fewer phobias and frustrations. Perhaps there was not such a big difference in age, but the content of their psyche was already different.

And the next that we still managed to catch—the Kindergarten home gallery, the Mukhomory group—lived a kind of upbeat, prankish life that did not take Soviet reality into consideration, and they existed in a relatively free world. It is a scale that goes from fear and torsion to the movement of paws and certain kinds of dance. I am talking only about the generations of the s, s, and s. It is believed that the most active work of conceptual artists was in the s, but I am now making a gradation of the psyche from the frightened to the non-frightened. My generation, and that of Bulatov and Vasiliev, had a certain relationship with Soviet rules, signs.

We, like Komar and Melamid, were always reflecting on the presence of Soviet ideological signs. Sots-art emerged as a humorous reaction to the presence of Soviet symbols. Where did you first see the works of Lissitzky or Malevich? How did that take place? Our education in the art school and institute was constructed in such a way that Western art history was presented up until the Barbizons.

There were no Impressionists, Picasso, or Matisse. Our self-education in terms of the visual was sporadic, it was not methodical or thorough. Books on Malevich were not sold, his works were not exhibited, there was only one painting by Kandinsky in the Pushkin Museum and it was presented as the work of a French artist at that, and Antonova 5 hung it up only at the end of the s. A feeling of sensitivity of the nostrils developed, such that given three, four molecules you could catch something in the air that could be Malevich or Kandinsky.

You are probably referring to Sitting-in-the-Closet Primakov. There was no such Black Square in my consciousness at that time. There was a consciousness of the blackness of a closed closet.

Some sort of cultural genetics kicked in and started working. They react to any external irritant—Putin, Shmutin, their hand twitches because something is bothering it. Our generation is more introverted.

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It is that which lies in consciousness, in the capacity to develop cultural fantasies, signs. The manipulation of these signs is the fate of the introvert. These images arise at that point when, finding yourself in total isolation, you orient yourself toward the entire cultural field as a whole. This gigantic field of images is the country and homeland of the introvert. The extrovert operates differently—everyone is running somewhere, so I am running there, too.

It is always in your imagination. It continually functions and produces. This is the fate of people who are detached from actual cultural phenomena, they are involved only with their own imagination. For the introvert, three components are important: Nothing material was ever discussed in our circle—who is living with whom, who bought what, how much it costs, and so on. Only topics of cultural reflection were discussed. When you arrived in Austria, for example, were you disillusioned by the West?

I had arrived in the real art world. It was a happy time after the end of the Cold War. The Soviet wave had arrived. The same happened later with Thailand, China, and so on. There was huge interest from curators and museum people. I was included in this process as some sort of exotic character. This is a very important point—I was not a patriot. I was not a Russian artist who wanted to show Russian art to the West. This was the position of an observer. My installations were well received, because this was a projection of Western consciousness onto a world unfamiliar to the West.

Included in my task was to show the ordinary, banal Soviet world, with its communality, language, wretchedness, sentimentality. This is not the heroic Soviet person, nor the Western superman. This is interest in the simple and banal. In Western art I was astounded by the unbelievable individualistic isolation, loneliness, and exclusivity, from Pollock to whomever. This was very unpleasant for me. I saw in this the deformation of Western ideology, because the image of the little man comes from the tradition of the Enlightenment. The intellectual in this sense is understood not as a class attribute, but as a certain kind of norm of the individual.

He cares, sacrifices, and is compassionate. The Russian intellectual in the image of the nineteenth century is a complete person. Not a noble, but an intellectual, namely a commoner. This tradition entered into the bloody twentieth century and has only vanished entirely just recently. It is the end of the epoch of the intelligentsia. I think that the only function of art is to support this tradition. I repeat, I am talking in relation to the superman-artist, whose image now exists in the West, a champion in his own area.

But when I moved to Austria in , the image of the Western world and modernism was very strong. Now I have major reflections concerning modernism. But twenty-five years ago, I accepted absolutely everything. There was a complete idealization of Western artistic life. Did it ever occur to you that these foreign curators who would visit did not fully understand what you were doing?

After all, it is very difficult for a Western person to understand Soviet dematerialization. I perceived a certain interest of the West in this world, but I understood that the context and content of Soviet life was inaccessible to them. But they had heard something. It was important for me that they had an interest in it.

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For me, this was enough. It was enough for me that they allowed me onstage, but as for what my dance meant there, I was fully aware that they virtually did not understand any of my body movements. In fact, the West right up to today, in principle, rejects that which was carried out of Soviet Russia. This has a reason. There is an enormous tradition of adaptation of the Western world to distant civilizations. There was a Japanese wave, an African, and a Chinese wave. But not a Russian one. After all, you could say that it is the same as ours, only repulsive.

Our child too, only lousy. To this day there exists a repulsion and rejection of everything that has come from Soviet Russia. No, of course that is an exception. It is understood as a Russian version of the Western avant-garde. We are getting close to our topic, to Lissitzky. The Russian avant-garde accepted the paradigm of Western artistic evolution, understanding it not as a critical attitude toward the past, but as a normal evolutionary movement.

They perceived formal changes in the Western artistic process. By —7, the perception had emerged that the old world had ended. Despite the fact that everything has changed, there is no such perception of the end of the old world. The new world was supposed to carry the perception of the cosmic. All ideas come from the cosmos, and not from social life.

The Russian avant-garde believed that a new cosmic era had begun. Technology, steamships, airplanes, steam engines were all perceived to be signs of the cosmos. There was no such cosmism in the West. Italian Futurists come the closest to this, but they are too technological. All the Russian avant-gardists were accomplished visionaries, mystics, from Filonov 6 to Malevich. You have to remember that we were talking about a radical repudiation of the past, of existence, as if it had died.

It had rotted, had turned into the Black Square. For Malevich it was white, for example. And for Lissitzky it was white too. This, of course, represents an unbelievable enthusiasm for the approach of the future. It was seen to take various forms: The degree of cosmism of that epoch is not understood fully. Everyone understood what was happening in the new Russia as a social utopia.

Cosmism does not manifest its nature, only in rocket flights. Tsiolkovsky 7 perceived rockets to be a means to deliver things to space cities. To a great degree they bore world-building, cosmic experiences. They attempted to illustrate this with their art. You can view Malevich as an illustrator of his mystical ideas. All it takes is to read the texts that he wrote. It is clear that he was in a state of agitation, exaltation from cosmic fantasies. The West poorly perceived this aspect.

Western materialism, pragmatism, and rationalism does not want to adapt this artistic thinking. Even though there was an enormous quantity of mystics, such as Klee, for example, in the West. Not cosmic, but other pilgrims: The recognition of modernism as an unwavering artistic doctrine came very late. Essentially it came after the war, when museums of modern art started to appear. At that time, canonized figures took the place of prophets.

In the end, a narrow group of formalists was victorious, thanks primarily to Matisse and Picasso. Modernism rejected the ideology of imparting content and transitioned to the realm of pure signs, blotches, scrolls, and commas. This formalization turned out to be the main line of modernist thinking that was in its own way also religious. Modernism lost its content-based meaning. In the end, formalistic emptiness prepared the soil for the appearance of Pop art, which is already the area not of aesthetics, but of ethics and the ethics of cynicism.

Diana Vinkovetsky's Conversations with Ilya PDF

Irony is always filled with content. It is always the view of some sort of tradition of something alien. This is the tradition of Romanticism, German Romantics. A romantic was always laughing at something low, something not corresponding to his ideals. But Pop art is cynical in relation to the consumer and modernism ignored it. Since the appearance of Impressionist artists, the artist was liberated from the consumer. The artist is the pure producer. It is production for no one. The consumer remained for the realists. Pop art again appeals to the consumer, but this consumer is not someone the artist respects.

Warhol made an important shift—the collector is such a stupid beast who will purchase anything on the level of his own understanding. This is kitsch, comics. He will eat what he is used to eating. But he is not only a beast, but also a snob. Cynical derision toward the buyer forms the basis of this production, and each of the artists of Pop art, beginning with smirks and giggles, ends with factory production.

He himself becomes a bourgeois animal. Warhol was very smart at this. His art comments on non-existence, death in life that is ongoing. Beuys is also such a figure, a kind of medium of death. Of course, Warhol is complete despair, he cannot be described merely as cynicism and commercial production, like others, such as Lichtenstein, Rosenquist.

Diana Vinkovetsky's Conversations with Ilya PDF - OrangeHRM Book Archive

Barnett Newman very precisely formulates the concept of the lofty. Art is the realm of the elevated. The first is the realm of the lofty. Subjects of the lofty dominated in old art. Without it, there was no motivation to draw—the lofty was embedded in the very commission for art, in the plot. The second thread is that of artistry. It is like a certain form of a congenital feeling of harmony and balance. It can have refined and multilayered forms or it can be simple. The sign of artistry is when an artist sees not the details on the painting, but the paining in its entirety, as a whole, consisting of details.

So, for example, from this perspective, Ingres is unartistic.

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