Alexander Borovsky
Alexander Kosolapov and The Void

Time is working to Alexander Kosolapov’s advantage: we’ve barely had time to forget the scandal associated with his works at the Moscow exhibition Caution: Religion when now we find in the papers a new news-story with a typically Kosolapovian plot-line: Certain functionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church have demanded the removal of the names and images of saints and even sacred places from profane materials – advertisements, labels, and any kind of consumer goods in general! And there’s no doubt that more episodes of the same variety will follow soon. The appropriation of signs, the debunking of symbols, the battle for emblems – alas, in our society, the onomatodoxes still continue to seek hand to hand combat with their orthodox opponents and vice versa. So long as things continue to remain in such a state, the artists working with the strategy which almost forty years ago was dubbed Sots-Art will continue to have no problems earning their bread. I am, however, wary of the delight that some express when Kosolapov yet again hits bull’s eye. What is he, really, some kind of Chingachgook and Hawkeye all rolled into one? Or is it more the fact that someone, just as they did for Brezhnev in his late years, is tying all manner of game to trees, imitating a fair hunt? Alas, it seems to be the latter. And it’s not that he is not as good a shot now; I don’t know if that’s the case, and it’s not important to me. Such a thing as a fair hunt – i.e. the exposing of false idols – cannot happen today by definition. Life does not allow it. No matter what direction you shoot in, you’ll hit the mark. Which makes all the more urgent the need to examine the phenomenon of Kosolapov’s staying power. Because a terrible suspicion has long ago snuck into my consciousness - is he really that which he claims to be? Which is to say an iconoclast (an icon-clast) or, more broadly, a trope-clast. Which is to say someone who operates with forms of circumlocution – metaphors, symbols, emblems, and other conventions and modes of estrangement. Which is to say tropes of ideological content. Which is to say ideographic material. In the course, of course, of conducting mental procedures of a critical variety. If one were to collect at random some number of texts “about” Kosolapov, it would seem to be so. He “privatizes sacred symbols without sanction,” “dissects the entire corpus of cultural and historical relics,” diagnoses, cites, profanes, debunks, etc. Which would be a perfectly sufficient accomplishment for an agent of some specialized social science, or, even for a multidisciplinary agent. But it doesn’t seem like quite enough for an artist. This appropriation of art by a socio-philosophical discourse is characteristic of all ekphrasis of Sots-Art and its derivatives. What is still not given, though, is an answer to the very simple questions worrying me. If it all comes down to intellectual (and exclusively textual) procedures of debunking, reduction, and mystification, then why did a small group of artists, the leaders of Sots-Art, manage to get it right while a whole lot of others, who conducted the same procedures with the very same “symbols and emblems” (in the 1990s, only the lazy living anywhere between Moscow and the slums of San Francisco did not saw stars into parts, presume to get creative with Lenin’s bald spot, or conspire with Stalin’s mustache) were only able to create commercially available consumer goods?

And why is it that the same procedures, i.e. Sots-Art’s text-destroying  and text-mimicking techniques, did not work when applied to a different nation’s material? To wit, this happened with Chinese Sots-Art, which flawlessly copied all the “tools” of the older brother, substituting only portraits of Lenin with those of Mao, and failed gloriously (and this even given the strong rise of Chinese “contemporary” art). There you go, then. A mere description of the semiotic generality of Sots-Art’s intertextuality won’t do. Or, rather, it would suffice for illustrating one’s own theses, but not for understanding an artist.

What am I missing here? I’m missing corporeality. I’m missing mimesis and an anthropological gaze. The smell of the log from which Buratino (1) (or any other of Sots-Art’s characters) was whittled. The softness and malleability of clay – of dirt and all the other disgusting stuff of which his objects and installations are molded. Yes, yes, I am forced to quote Gogol, “What a foul town is this: just you go and put up some monument somewhere or even just a fence, and devil knows from where, they will come and bring with them all sorts of rubbish!” (2)

Kosolapov, as we all know, likes to utilize monuments. And it was already in Moscow that he taught himself to break taboos (i.e. fences). But what gives corporeality and naturalness to these procedures is precisely “rubbish” (rubbish as form; in this way the term “heap” for Gogol becomes form-bearing), a rootedness in low culture, an understanding from “what kind of rubbish” artistry grows. Without rubbish, all the procedures would be purely speculative.

Let us take the famous work Malevich-Marlboro. It has been described – quite justifiably – in all kinds of contexts. Globalist ambitions of the avant-garde and contemporary corporate globalism. Total consumerism, which has turned even on that which is most sacred. Russia’s turn to the once-forbidden Malevich in an attempt to find its new identity brand. The struggle of two eidoses. What else? It can be anything, but what comes to my mind is a memory of a very quotidian, “low” order: in the 80s, a pack of Marlboro was the best way you could pay a cab driver.  One remembers instantly the color and the weight in one’s palm of a pack, which turned out to be a compact container for associations not of an esoteric, but of a very lively every-day variety: will he or won’t he give me a ride, it’s a pity to give it away, perhaps better to keep it and smoke it myself.  And all of this “low” content – weight, color, smell, the connotations of ownership and desire – roots, I am sure, this particular work in the mind much more deeply than on the level of purely intellectual operations.

The favorite word of all those who write about Kosolapov is “desacralization.” What’s being referenced is a wide range of objects – from Soviet ideologems and mythologems to the exposing of that which is sacred today, be it in the religious sphere or the sphere of mass consumption. In the meantime, it would behoove us to look closer at sacralization Soviet-style. And consider in general whether Sots-Art’s ambitions in the sphere of the ideological (not as text, but as direct action, some kind of activism) were that significant.  Yes, it’s absolutely obvious that the culture of the 1930s developed under the sign of the sacral. Heck, why talk about signs – that culture was seriously rooted in the mystical: the sacrament of state love, state hatred, state fear… Official Soviet art existed, in general, parallel to Soviet life, on the other side of its realities. But this charge of the sacral was so strong that no one doubted its ability to break through the curtain of canvas or movie-screen and fire a live shot. An artistic embodiment or manifestation was a kind of trap from which the “deus ex machina” was always ready to strike with a bolt of lightning of inhuman strength. But in the late 40s, this Deus, the lightning-bearer, became senile and inactive (although, possibly, he was preparing for his last, crushing move, but ran out of time). And that’s not even speaking of the 1960’s and later; there remained a habit of sacralization, an inertia for it. But it was being snuffed out not by artists, but by the lowest of the low – the masses. There was an inertia of the sacral in demonstrations and meetings; but it was internally negated by the necessary ritual of the subsequent, almost sanctioned, debauch. There was an inertia of the sacral in the personalization of ideology and statehood in the images of leaders that were carried during demonstrations, but it too was travestied by the metanarrative of the late Soviet political joke. And as for the portraits and statues of Lenin… The latent sacrality of their ubiquitous ceremonial placement and the rituals surrounding them was neutralized by the very process of their creation… Kosolapov, like Leonid Sokov, is a sculptor, and both had to know the life of official large-scale sculpture workshops. Here was a treasure trove of visual and oral sources… Lenin, the great leader, even in the parlance of Exhibition Committees, which were quite official institutions, was not referred to as anything other than “Lukich.” The officially established categories of difficulty of execution of sculptures (and, correspondingly, of remuneration) were as if borrowed directly from jokes: a figure standing in a cap on a podium – first tier; sitting down – second tier, etc. But what, in my opinion, was the main factor that lowered the form- and meaning-creation capacity for official imagery was the production environment itself. It was the sight of that which fills up the “anatomy rooms” of sculpture workshops – opened-up torsos, scattered unattached arms and legs. Forms for casting and blocks for demoulding: suppositions, voids, forms without content… I think that it was here that the poetics of sculptural similarities and substitutions was born. Gogol again comes to mind: “In the corner one of these little shops, or, better to say, in the window, there was situated a mead-seller with a samovar of red copper and a face as red as the samovar, so that from afar, one might think that two samovars stood in the window were it not for one of the samovars having a pitch-black beard.” (3) The philosopher Valery Podoroga in reference to Gogol’s vision writes of the effect of dissimilarity in the similar, i.e. of transformation. And of the refusal to make references to a norm. Any norm. I am positive that for Kosolapov, it was here, in the anatomy rooms of sculpture workshops, that the poetics of sculptural substitutions and transformations, of the fluid extensions of one void into another, was born. (Both Sokov and Komar and Melamid probably had their own initiating professional environment – public décor and ornamentation studios). Here too can be found the original impulse of his future trademark work with the norm – with breaking the norm, with attacks on it (be it the norm of political correctness, religious tolerance, or sexual behavior). What norm can one speak of when here was dissected Soviet mythology in dismembered form strewn messily about under the feet of mould-casters, welders, and metal-beaters!

I think that this biographical brushstroke (I too in my youth had visited these studios) is not useless. Because it exemplifies that which Gaston Bachelard called “material intimacy,” i.e. the conditioning of an image through the mass of experiences of the material world. If one does not consider the question of genesis, of this material intimacy, then Sots-Art will turn out to be some sort of demonstration device for the reduction of ideologems, the absurdization of slogans, and for multidesacralization. A device that, it must be said, would admittedly be convenient for purposes of university lecture courses…

Speaking of desacralization… This term, as I see it, needs to be made more concrete, for too often it engulfs contexts that are too different. We’ve already recalled the latent, languid, unproductive (in the absence of the fear of God) practice of sacralization in the late Soviet period. But even this practice was taken as a challenge. And different people answered it differently. The proletariat by way of a ritual debauch; engineers by way also of a debauch combined with jokes. Artists answered in their own way. The generation that liberal critics would later dub “semidesyatniki” [people of the seventies] (they are, in fact, the same age as the Sots-Art artists) found their own answer, a somewhat bookish but organic one. Tatiana Nazarenko, Natalia Nesterova, Olga Bulgakova and others descended into the depths of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. They did not succeed in creating a true appeal to corporeal baseness, which is the classical Bakhtinian answer to the sacral; they were too refined and cultured for that. But they did sense the way in which rituals of sacralization consume time, enter into an irreconcilable conflict with it, and on this understanding these artists built their poetics of timelessness and the unlivability of the current and historical moment; this poetics can be unmistakably identified with the ’70s. Sots-Art followed a different route. As it turned out, a more radical one. And not because it had some kind of intellectual plan for corresponding reductive and deconstructive procedures. No, it became radical and effective as a consequence of finding with great precision its material of that which is most sacred and private. The entire social edifice was constructed of this material; its storeys and buildups were made up of the national sense of form, national stereotypes and traditions of vision, political metaphors, paths to the contexts of transnational contemporary art. The genesis of Kosolapov’s art is roughly of this kind. It developed, of course, without a plan and rather spontaneously. I imagine he had works that I would consider transitional or, more accurately, that went sideways from the main path. Thus, in The Museum of History, he completely adopts the mentality of the engineer’s joke, and the work ends up being flat, extra-material. The text doesn’t have enough meat, enough corporeality on its bones. (Apropos the visualization of text proper, “the gestures of letters,” that’s Kosolapov’s strong suit. He knows how to show the corporeality of a font, be it a basic stencil of ubiquitous Soviet design or the refined Westernized calligraphy of Coca-Cola. In later times, Dmitri Gutov specifically thematizes and savors this accretion by fonts of connotations from cultural memory). In the famous, pioneering Meat-grinder and Door Latch, though, he goes right to the heart of material intimacy. Wood, then plywood (Study Well, Son etc.) are taken directly from life. The aforementioned Valery Podoroga cites Sartre’s description of the phenomenon of stickiness, which is given through the variety of experiences belonging to this quality of being. The little pieces of wood and rope are given in Kosolapov with that same feel for the state of being – specifically Soviet being. Here one finds the dissatisfaction with reality in the face of eternity (that same Gogolian “pile,” “rubbish,” put next to the monument or fence), the habit of making do with this little (a crust will sate us, a match will warm us), and, of course, more “cultured” references – a citation of the highly popular topic of Buratino in the connotations of whittled-ness, woodenness, the quality of being carved from a blank. And here too is the particularly Soviet material aspect of functional falsity; the meat-grinder doesn’t grind, the door latch does not lock. And then, naturally, access to the problematic of High and Low, which has been thoroughly suffered through in Russia and then more easily, in a manipulative vein, continued in the West.  One should note that this disposition presupposes a synthesis of the reflexive and the tactile, which comes from the material with its ur-memory and the body’s memory. Normally, Kosolapov is taken to be a manipulator of meanings. This is not quite accurate. I think that already in these works, he manipulates meanings clad corporeally. Or, perhaps, he manipulates the conditions of corporeality fraught with meanings. In any case, the relationship to corporeality is extremely important to him.

Here, it is probably appropriate to remind the reader about the history of the question. Corporeality was not among the priorities of the Russian avant-garde; in Kasimir Malevich’s texts, for instance, “anticorporeal” motifs are repeated insistently: meat, corsets that bind women’s bodies, corpulent flirtatious Eroses, and , of course, “the shamelessness of Venuses.” The language of the decrees and directive articles of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolshevik) [TsK VKP (b)] is also paradoxically close to this rhetoric: the amorality of the plot, the slander on Moliere’s family life, crude naturalistic scenes of the sexual variety, bourgeois prurience, pathologically denuded erotics, etc. Though there is a unique example when a political body found corporeality. In the interests of the enterprise. In the memoirs of the old-timer of Soviet caricature drawing, Boris Efimov, there is an astounding anecdote: Stalin called him and commissioned a caricature of Eisenhower. Later, when the caricature was ready, Andrei Zhdanov conveyed to the artist the Politburo’s reaction, “Everything is all right with the drawing. Although, some members of the Politburo said that Eisenhower’s butt is accented too much, but Comrade Stalin didn’t think twice of it.” Which means he allowed it.

I think that Kosolapov keeps – whether this is self-reflexive or not is not all that important – to the Gogolian tradition of the corporeal that shapes its contexts by way of bringing down the tone, transferring meaning, by mimesis. (One can find synonyms for “corporeal” in “heap,” rubbish and other of Gogol’s words that have the connotation of form-creation and form-development). It turns out that by operating with the corporeal, Kosolapov a priori enters simultaneously into polemics with both the avant-garde and the Soviet mentality (this is not the place for the currently popular playful practice of bringing these terms together and then separating them back out). But this is only one of the possibilities. In this respect, of particular interest is the painting Genetics, one of the artist’s best relatively early works. The painting serves as a visualization of the famous formula of the late Stalin years: “Genetics is the whore of the bourgeoisie.” The suggestion is absurd in a Dadaist way; it requires no refutation. A visualization of it would be comically effective even if the artist had limited himself to a form of caricature-like approximation. But Kosolapov takes a different route. He depicts in a quite corporeal, mimetically convincing way a nude damsel in a complex ballet pose as she examines something in a microscope, with the building of the Moscow University in the background behind her. The whole image is built on the metamorphoses of the corporeal. In the depiction and form of the figure, there is a certain Gogolian “heaping” and dirtiness – she has sex appeal and, undoubtedly, does not belong to the world of ballet, despite the pose, but, more likely, to the sex industry. That’s how it ought to be – she’s a “whore.” But, according to Gogol, what goes with rubbish are the monument and the fence – phenomena that are pure and elevated. And so Kosolapov paints a monument – Moscow University. But in the very material dough of the paint we see again a hint of the “heap,” of rubbish – may be all is not right with the University? May be it’s really all rubbish (foul people, the adherents of the teaching of Weissmann and Morgan, have brought it there) – for all we know, there on the microscope’s glass is a drosophila fly, or however you call it? And that vileness, then, exists next to the real “monument” – the Soviet maiden-sportswoman-ballerina and the architectural masterpiece? In a word, everything is fluid, and this fluidity, agility, and animation, which refute the rhetoric of the figural imagination of an ideological construct, are that which forms the content of this painting. Or take, for instance, Kosolapov’s famous work Malevich Country. Its basis is the cult painting by Alexander Gerasimov, I.V. Stalin and K.E. Voroshilov in the Kremlin; in it, the great leader standing with his armor-bearer on the Kremlin wall are likened to mythical Russian bogatyrs [strongmen] keeping watch. And along with this, the dawn in the background is clearly the dawn of a new era. Which is to say that the great leader’s strolling stride covers the distance from the olden days to the bright future. Boris Pasternak, too, wrote back then about roughly the same thing: “…And in these same days at a distance / Behind an ancient stone wall / There lives not a man – a deed / An action as tall as the globe.” In a word, this is a serious work of art. When suddenly, over this painted field, Kosolapov writes in the recognizable Marlboro font: Malevich. This is hysterically funny even on the textual level. The kind of funny as when laughter is elicited by a coming together of distant things, a patent absurdity. So that the author might well have satisfied himself with a reproduction or even a sketch of the text-book painting (Ekaterina Dyogot has justly noted somewhere the Russian tradition of pathetically imperfect or verbal reproduction); the absurdist humor would have been just as legible. And then – also “just as well” – it would have been included in the apparatus of terms: who won in the end? The imperial language system or the globalist model? What did the artist wish to say? In order to elicit this kind of guessing, I repeat, it is not necessary to go to a lot of artistic fuss. It would also not have been worth it to labor so hard in order to visualize Boris Groys’ popular philosophical/speculative construct: avant-garde = totalitarianism. His approach especially demands a great amount of distrust in the particulars of the material, which gets in the way of globalizing generalizations, though this would have only made the detachment of a contour drawing or schema more appropriate.  What manner of perfectionism, then, moves Kosolapov, who quite earnestly, devotedly copies the painting – perhaps with even more enthusiasm than the Stalinist academician himself? I suspect that he requires the factor of freshness, liveliness, just-freshly-made-ness: painting is corporeal; it grows and even protrudes from out of the painting’s space like rising dough. This kind won’t be pushed down with a brick, especially one marked by a foreign font… Even less so with the name of the man who gave his life to the struggle with this kind of painting… And so that he might live behind this Kremlin wall and perform “actions as tall as the globe”… I think that Kosolapov is in general not very answer-oriented. He does not even really ask questions. He shoots out a semantic matrix, formula, or absurd slogan and then soaks and steams them in the salt and acid baths of the most unexpected and mutually contradictory contexts. The jive evaporates and disappears; some visual formulas become brands and are eagerly snapped up by quite serious books and articles which, are, however, dedicated to something else entirely – the sacral potential of the modern masses or to commodity fetishism. He has that kind of streak for victimization in him – the tendency to be used for purposes of illustration in professorial literature… But what is it that remains when the dust settles, after everything accessible has been divvied up, and everything inaccessible finds a plan of its own… And most importantly, what remains for the artist? By all appearances, the same thing as before. To create visual brands, which sell like hot-cakes. It would seem that it’s easier to make them these days: the lack of logic has long since become the truth of life, and it has gotten easier to mock the fools – they swallow it all right up. But the author… Yes, he still speaks in his own commentaries of Lenin as an ideological block and Mickey Mouse too, about mutually complementary and mutually exclusive semantic contexts. But I think that this is the inertia of style. It’s all clear with the contexts anyway; globalism has brought them all down to a common denominator. The Kosolapov of today, I think, begins where his own intellectual games and provocations end. The philosopher Merab Mamardashvili wrote, “If I am aiming for a non-human myth, an übermensch, then only along the path of my journey will there form the true appearance and essence of the man, who in and of himself, without this movement, does not exist.” Kosolapov for many years aimed to debunk various kinds of inhuman myths; he was keenly set on this. Now, he follows the reverse path – from myths and symbols to the human. And then even to the child-like human. I mean, of course he still works with symbols… And still calculates the instantly legible effects well. But there is in his latest things, in my opinion, a different, deferred effectiveness. First, they’ll eat up the external, the easily accessible, which, truth be told, is quite unsophisticated… An icon of some sort, Mickey Mouse, caviar – our familiar stuff. Obviously, someone will have to protest. And someone else protest against the protest. And Mickey on the shoulders of The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman is a gag: we should laugh. But I don’t believe that Kosolapov targets things in the fashion of the late Brezhnev years – with a clear purpose. That would all be too easy.

So let us feel about for the deferred. The philosopher Vasily Rozanov introduced a great word  once: prober-feeler [schupyvatel’]. And, indeed, one would like to look at this material directly, pre-interpretively, to sense it in a tactile way. And so I, when fathoming Kosolapov’s newest work, in a way bypass the layer of the conceptual and the scandalous and sense that caviar, for instance, which is so often used by the artist in his critical passages, is not at all a symbol of corruption, of behavioral standards, etc. I mean, of course it is a symbol as symbol, but beyond that… Besides, it is soft and viscous; you sink into it; it has a natural structure and thus defies chaos; it is not only a metaphor of life, but, in fact, a primary source of life. Nor is there anything shameful in it being linked with an icon. And even McDonalds… those Westerners, they may not have spiritual sustenance, but their food industry is top-notch. All is for the greatest good… And the deferred message is a kind one. It is sent by the artist in a state of being submerged in material intimacy, where no one debunks or provokes any more (or yet) …

Lenin and Mickey Mouse… They have already debunked Lenin every way they knew how… And Mickey, too, got his fair share when the brilliant cartoonist Art Spiegelman burdened him down with the problematic of the Holocaust.

Lenin – Mickey… Is Kosolapov really resurrecting the jive of the 80’s?

No, I think that the deferred message, which we will have to read after the laughter subsides, after the Pavlovian reflexes will be satisfied, is about something else. It has a very strong material and tactile aspect: the memory of the voids of the gutted sculpture in the anatomy rooms of workshops – the sheaths of torsos spread open, the shells of heads, hollow arms and legs… And the memory of the uselessness of Mickey, a thrown-away plastic toy… Openness, hollowness, vacuity, uselessness, loneliness…  This, it would seem, is the tactile and material feeling which lies at the basis of the object. Interpretations and the play of contexts will come later… The loneliness of a hollow Lenin. And a broken Mickey… Something coalesced precisely at this level; the artist, having combined them, achieved the quality of vitality. No matter what you say, a new being has come into the world… A freak, but a living one. The context will come later of its own accord. There is a whole slew of those who love to elaborate the context. They can do it without me…

Is it through reflexivity or spontaneity based on a lot of experience with sensing the texture of life that Kosolapov achieves the point where he gets to the resources of material intimacy?  It doesn’t matter. He gets there. This is why, before us, we see not “An old man who joked in an old-fashioned way / Exquisitely, subtly, and cleverly / So that nowadays, it is a little bit funny.” (4) Before us in an artist who has grasped something living. And his sculptural Mickey Mouses making love are not only and not so much a gag for oligarchs. Rather, they – in their reproducibility – are a sign of something living.  Kosolapov is in fighting shape again – before Gogol’s “monument and fence” and “rubbish,” which has been brought along by a foul people. And so this is the material he works with.

1 Buratino (from the Italian burattino) is the eponymous main character of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1936 fairy tale The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino, loosely based on Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. The character was a mainstay of Soviet children’s literature. – Translator’s note.

2 The quote is taken from Nikolai Gogol’s play The Inspector-General, Act I, Scene 5; the words are spoken by the Mayor.  For a different translation, see “What a vile, filthy town this is! A monument, or even only a fence, is erected, and instantly they bring a lot of dirt together, from the devil knows where, and dump it there.” Cf. The Inspector-General, translated by Thomas Seltzer, Teddington, England: The Echo Library, 2006.

3 Taken from Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume I, Chapter 1. For one of the alternate translation see Gogol, Dead Souls, translated by D. J. Hogarth, with an introduction by John Cournos, Teddington, England: The Echo Library, 2006.  “Within, on the ground floor, there stood a number of benches heaped with horse-collars, rope, and sheepskins; while the window-seat accommodated a sbitentshik, cheek by jowl with a samovar – the latter so closely resembling the former in appearance that, but for the fact of the samovar possessing a pitch-black lip, the samovar and the sbitentshik might have been two of a pair.” A “sbitenschik” is a seller of sbiten’, a hot, spiced, honey-based drink.

4 Taken from A.S. Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, chapter 8, stanza XXIV.

(Translation: Ksenya Gurshtein)