Several years ago, I found myself in a small provincial German town and went to visit its museum. The place contained a decent collection of art, traditional and contemporary, as well as a design exhibition and several historical objects. Of these objects, one immediately caught my attention: a small wooden structure used for punishing children. Shaped like a chair, it had a wooden bar for fastening to children's legs. I spent a long time walking around this “instrument of torture” and naturally took a photograph. A few years later, on the occasion of an exhibition, this child's chair of punishment came to my mind again. It appeared in a strange poetic form, as a “chair of execution by love.” The expression had not occurred to me immediately but arose only after the work was complete. Strictly speaking, all I did was enlarge the chair in size, to a height of two meters 20 centimeters, and place a large, scented, potted rose in the appropriate place (below the hole in the seat). The flower was arranged so that its delicate rose-colored petals protruded slightly out of the hole. Naturally, this evoked a (purely mental) image of someone sitting down on the chair to relieve himself; they would feel the tender touch of the delicate petals. You may think that this is depravity. Not at all. This is punishment. A painful form of execution was once employed in far-away China using bamboo shoots. A person (for some reason, it seems to me that it could have only been a man) was made to sit (with his buttocks bared) on a small bamboo shoot. He was fastened in this position and left there for several days. The bamboo quickly grew through the person’s innards until he died in agony. A terrible procedure invented by an artful mind, wouldn't you agree? Now imagine two things. First of all, that you will never die. Secondly, that, instead of bamboo, love will grow through you, whether you like it or not. At the same time, imagine that you were born a complete idiot, an emotionless block of wood that suddenly feels (to its horror) that something awful is happening to it: the rose of love is growing in your innards, rising higher and higher and approaching (oh no!) your heart. You shout, “Don’t do this! I've done nothing wrong! I want bamboo! I'd prefer to die as a block of wood…,” yet no one pays you any attention. The process has begun, and you are fated to love.
I look with surprise at this combination of toilet, punishment and rose, and cannot find any logic in it. Yet I feel the logic exists. I walk around this strange contraption, hoping to pierce the secrets of its being. I run my finger across its wooden wall, touch the rose petals, prick my finger on a thorn, lick off the blood and walk away along the black path; yet the path ends, and I come back. I ask the visitors walking past, “Where's the toilet here?” They look at me with astonishment. “This is a museum!” they irritably reply. Museum!? How did I find myself here? I want to take a pee. I’ve already become a small whining boy who runs back and forth along the black path. People gather around me, stop and take pleasure in seeing how my short pants become wetter and wetter. “You're depraved!” I shout to them, pulling my pants down and climbing onto the chair. Blushing, I pee onto the rose petals. I close my eyes and hear the growing sound of applause. People shout, “Bravo! Bravo! It's the best work of the season!” V. Zakharov