The Art of Placing Art Properly.
The Installations of Vadim Zakharov
“As a Child, I was a Mouse in a Zen Monastery” is one of those rare installations by Vadim Zakharov that does not include any of his older works whatsoever, which is why it can be considered a pure statement on the theme of installation itself. In the text that accompanies this piece, Zakharov recounts a story of his own invention: a monk teaches a mouse to guard a piece of cheese on the sand instead of eating it; as a result, the mouse becomes immortal. Clearly, the monk is asking the mouse to put the cheese in the place traditionally inhabited by the artwork. The mouse complies and by doing so, it becomes the artist Vadim Zakharov (cf., the installation’s title).
One could easily think that Zakharov is talking about the much-cited strategy of designating something as an artwork, that is, the strategy of the “ready-made,” but this simply is not the case. Cheese, in fact, is not a “ready-made.” It continues to live and to ripen. This is actually very important to Zakharov, who has often said that he does not create individual pieces, but that he is making an entire creative body of work, in which older pieces are used and reworked repeatedly, changing continuously, growing like children (or aging like cheese). In this sense, the main thing is not to “name” cheese as a work of art, but to “put it in place” as such.
Zakharov himself explains the story of the mouse as follows: the taboo on eating cheese prohibits any understanding of cheese itself, especially since the cheese is many times larger than the mouse, which is why the cheese cannot be eaten, in the monk’s opinion: if the mouse were to eat the cheese, it would blow up into an elephant and die. (It is telling that Zakharov was almost obsessed with elephants in the early to mid 1980s; now it finally becomes clear what the elephant actually is: a mouse who has understood everything.) But the most interesting point in Zakharov’s thinking is that cheese can be either understood (i.e., eaten) or put in place. While the former leads to the mouse’s demise, the latter gives it immortality. To put the cheese in place means to save it from both consumption and comprehension, and this is exactly what it means to be an artist.
In the context of the contemporary market, where everything is exhibited in order to be consumed or, at best, to be understood, this rather original point of view immediately reminds us of Andrei Monastyrsky’s Cap (1983), a piece that is legendary for the Moscow Conceptual Circle. A note that says “Pick Me Up!” is tagged to a cap lying on a table. When the spectator picks up the cap, he or she discovers another note that says “Placement is possible, understanding is not.” Monastyrsky was not talking about the cap’s deep mystery, but about the far from obvious fact that the demonstration of an object in the spectators’ field of view hardly leads to its consumption as an inevitability, that it (i.e. the object) can remain free. In Zakharov’s version, which no longer operates in the shelter of a private apartment, as Monastyrsky did in 1983, but in the unarguably market-driven space of the professional art gallery, this appears as follows: laid out on sand, the heads of cheese are completely inaccessible to the spectator. They are impossible to “understand” (eat), since no one even knows how it was possible to “put them in place” them there (without leaving any traces on the immaculate sand).
In this sense, Zakharov’s installation is a place in which objects are saved from consumption. The texts in his installations can be illegible (as in The Pastor’s Floodgates (1992), his first installation in the Gallery Sophie Ungers in Cologne); they can be crumpled up into paper balls and stuffed into nooks or crannies (another favorite device) or they can hang too high to be legible (as in Two Journals). His first installation (Children’s Library, 1987) consisted of paintings (the entire corpus of his work at the time), hammered together face-to-face, so that they could almost only be viewed by crawling into the construction. Or take, for example, the glass showcase, usually a symbol of consumerism: in Zakharov’s work, it is associated with the museum instead of the shop, and does not address the world of the masses, but the world of the unique, facing out toward the world of high culture. In a project in which Zakharov took on the role of the curator (Hell, Hermeneutics, and Floating Figures on Water), real prostitutes were supposed to sit in the gallery windows, and if they were not consum(mat)ed by the visitors, it was not because they were replaced at the last minute by students who were taking part in the project, but because the space of consumption was invaded by something that opposed it completely, namely through classical music by Chopin and Beethoven playing in the gallery (and here, one can already hear the grumbling approach of Zakharov’s later interest in Adorno).
Whatever is exhibited is inaccessible to consumption. If you think about it, this logic seems strange and subversive in relation to the paintings that hang in the gallery and even in the museum (because in the capitalist world, the logic of the gallery overrides that of the museum). However, in one case, the pieces exhibited in the showcase are unarguably inaccessible to consumption, namely in the case of open books, which only offer up one single page, no matter how strong the desires of their beholders might be. It might not be very original to say that it is the book that is the key medium of Zakharov’s art, but then again, maybe this is something it makes sense to insist upon again and again, if only to rob this statement of its romantic-metaphorical aureole.
In the West, one rather often talks about the incomprehensibility of Moscow Conceptualism at large and of Vadim Zakharov in particular, although no one is ever able to say what exactly remains so very unclear. The informed Russian spectator is irritated by this degree of incomprehension: in Russia, Moscow Conceptualism is usually not accused of its esoterism, but of utilizing banal aesthetic devices that are indistinguishable from everyday practices of thinking. This probably comes closer to the truth than all those ceaseless admonitions for being too mysterious. But in fact, Moscow Conceptualism is an open book. As is so often the case with phenomena of Russian culture, the West seems to think it is dealing with metaphors, when, in fact, these metaphors are actually realized in a completely literal, often radical way. Thus, what people like to call the “literary quality” of Russian art, either approvingly or disapprovingly - relating it to the “unique” Russian habit of re-reading the classics of Russian literature – actually represents an alternative set of roots for both the artwork and the artist.
When people say that “Vadim Zakharov is a poet among artists,” this is often little more than a trivial metaphorical compliment. But maybe it really does make sense to supply this expression with an altogether concrete meaning? Perhaps Zakharov does indeed belong to a small group of artists for whom the personality precedes the so-called “art work” much as it does for poets. Marcel Broodthaers is another one of these poets in contemporary art, in fact quite literally, since he really was exclusively a professional poet until he turned forty, which is when “the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed [his] mind.” It was only a gallery-owner acquaintance who told him that the resulting objects were art. And, in fact, Broodthaer’s first artistic objects were “illegible books,” anthologies of poetry set in plaster of Paris.
In the framework of the current market’s routine, the artist’s development from youth to maturity is usually a so-called process of “self-discovery,” in which one tries to extract the lowest common denominator (most often, a common medium) from a body of work, in order to save strength by concentrating on it and it alone. Zakharov and many other representatives of the Moscow Conceptual Circle have undergone this process (and are still undergoing it today) in reverse. They never set out “in search of themselves” but “searched for the artwork” in order to confirm a fact that was almost known in advance, namely that they were creators. (In the 1970s, the ineffective but still repressive apparatus of the Soviet state helped in supplying any young person from the circle of the capital city’s intelligentsia with the feeling that he or she was a personality, whose each and every gesture was unbelievably important, that he or she was a poet or an artist, in other words). Their search was not so much centered on what to do but what to present as art.
The form of this presentation is what we would call installation, though it does not entail the routinized arrangement of objects that millions of people all over the world practice today, but understands installation as a breathless departure from the artwork, which is self-sufficient and complete (potentially valuable for the market), up and away to the presentation of the notion “art as such.” For Zakharov and many other conceptualists, installation is precisely the form that allows them to point toward Art over the head of the Artwork.
Like Broodthaers, who quickly turned from singular objects to his famous project The Museum of Eagles, the Moscow Conceptual Circle and Zakharov in particular do not see the installation as a piece that the author will produce, comparable, for an instance, to painting, but as a technique of the spatial presentation of artifacts, a technique for “staging” art in the surrounding world. In this kind of installation, the status of singular objects can vary to the extreme; one says that Broodthaers left it up to his wife to decide which objects were artworks and which were no more than elements in his archive after his death. But, in a way, all of these object appear as words, words that compose poetic speech when they come together as a whole. The formidable power of a certain type of art market (the market that is still connected to the static, unique work of art) still prevents us from seeing a completely different history of the European avant-garde based on experiments on the field between visual art and text, a history that begins with Mallarme’s Et un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard, which presents the first hypostasis of a poetic text in the spatial whole. In short, the avant-garde and its conceptual line were born from literature, or, to be more precise, they emerged from poetry, but from the kind of poetry that was based upon its difference from prose as a form of organizing space with the help of rhythmic laws. It is no coincidence that there is a metronome on Adorno’s table, as rendered by Zakharov.
The staging (or production) of literary space is an art form that has no name. It can be found in architecture, but also in other spheres, in which Zakharov works directly, namely in typography, in the organization of different varieties of artificial paradise (board-games, theme parks, or gardens, one of which was laid out by Zakharov in the building of Cologne’s Kunstverein at the exhibition The Last Stroll through Elysian Fields), in the theater and especially the puppet theater, in the spatial construction of various abstract systems in principle (catalogues, libraries, classifications, or the analysis of space like those in Monastyrsky’s famous texts, dedicated to the VDNKh Exhibition of Economic Achievements), and more recently, to the creation of computer programs and computer games, as well as the installation, which brings us back to our theme. Practically all of Zakharov’s installations represent hierarchical sequencings of space (often involving ladders). In one of these the author has even written video into a purely spatial series by placing its projection onto the floor.
Maybe one day someone will write a history of Russian art that will not begin with the icon but with a form far more protracted in time and space, namely the literary and quasi-literary narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries. But on the whole, this is not only important to the tradition of art in Russia. To write poems and stories in the form of installation means to understand the book as something that one can enter, or, on the contrary, the artwork as something one can walk through, reading a little on the way, and winding up with the feeling of having read, more than of having seen, something, the feeling that everything non-literary is too flat, too momentary, and too commercial in the final analysis.
Incidentally, one could also describe this “literary” quality through the traditional term of “monumentalization.” The installation as understood by Zakharov is much like the monument in that it rests upon the sublimation of abstract notions from the world of the concrete. Unlike Kabakov’s installations, Zakharov’s installation never become “total;” instead of capturing the concrete space of a former school or a museum, the installation places itself in a far more abstract world: in history, in discourse, in literature, in the framework of any system. This is actually the origin of Zakharov’s many (albeit deconstructive) attempts to create monuments. Examples include the bed standing on end in the project Don Quixote against the Internet, the artist himself when he stood on stilts for the entire opening of the exhibition Two Journals, the History of Russian Art as a monument, or, last but not least, the Monument to Theodor Adorno.
So then why does Zakharov, this Don Quixote of the installation, do battle against the internet, especially if the internet is the most total system of dislocating various objects and symbols? Perhaps it is for the same reason that he threw himself into a heroically unequal struggle with a sumo wrestler. Like the mouse, he was attempting to understand something far bigger than himself, knowing full well that he was doomed to failure all along. And this is exactly what he calls installation.