How Vadim Zakharov Smashed Duchamp with Kosuth
For about 20 years in the 1970s and 1980s ? which is when Moscow Conceptualism actually existed ? there was a unique system, excellent in a way, an “entire world,” a self-contained cosmos, insular in the sense that society lived in utter self-sufficiency on all horizons of its existence. This system was completely hermetic. No “feelers” whatsoever reached into the outside world from this spherical formation, from this life in a bubble. Moscow Conceptualism also took shape according to this “spherical” principle: it was not integrated into international contemporary art at all. In any case, unlike international Fluxus, for example, it did not exert any influence onto the international artistic process whatsoever. On the other hand, within this “sphere,” life was full and complete, copied from the template of Western international contemporary art. This rather populous and complex outlier of contemporary art was almost like a state in its own right, somewhere in the remotest part of Africa with its own governmental and bureaucratic structures, but without subjects.
In this “sphere-state,” it was very important to guarantee the further development of the hierarchies, structures, and relationships among its “inhabitants.” Vadim Zakharov was the person who was busy with this task. From the very beginning of his activity (in the early 1980s), he began to develop a system of “feelers” or “probes,” different forms of “co-authorship,” which served to establish connections between the manifold individual worlds of unofficial creative Moscow.
Moreover, during this period in the early 1980s one could say that two principal lines, two branches of Moscow Concep-tualism were emerging. One of them was headed by Kabakov, the other by Komar and Melamid. Zakharov (much like Yuri Albert and the Gnezdo Group) belonged to the line of Komar and Melamid. One could call this line the “Southern” branch in analogy to Zen Buddhism, where there were two branches, the “Northern” branch and the “Southern” branch. Curiously enough, Komar and Melamid lived in the south of Moscow in relation to Kabakov; Zakharov and Albert also lived in the south, while Panitkov and I ? both belonging to the Kabakov branch ? lived even more to the North than Kabakov himself. Leiderman, the last in the line of Kabakov, finally set up house in the extreme north of the city, in Sviblobo. Alexeev’s apartment, where APTART took place and where Zakharov, Skersis, Lutz, Roshal ’, and Albert ? all the “Souther-ners,” that is ? held their exhibitions, was near Melamid’s former apartment in the South. In fact, Alexeev switched from our “Northern” branch to the “Southern” branch in the early 1980s and left the “Collective Actions” group.
The “Southerners” were oriented toward the West and far more politicized than the Northerners. But most importantly, they were anthropocentrists, unlike the logocentric “Northerners.” Zakharov was a pronounced Western-style anthropocentrist from the very beginning of his artistic career. The event character of his aesthetics are always centered on his own persona (more often than not, in the corporeal sense of self-portraiture). In most of Zakharov’s works (or on photographs thereof), we see the author himself. This is true both in his early series and in newer works. On the whole, it would be interesting to examine the works of Moscow Conceptualism from the perspective of self-portraiture. For example, you probably will not be able to find one single piece by the “Northerner” Kabakov in which Kabakov appears as a figure, while the “Southerner” Albert’s exclusively textual works (written on white) are always about him, about Albert himself. This can be understood as a clear-cut expression of the Western line of contemporary art that includes Josef Beuys, Vito Aconcci, Chris Burden, Urs Lüthi, etc.
There was always a certain degree of polemic controversy or even struggle between the “Northerners” and the “Southerners” of Moscow Conceptualism. For the more metaphysical “Northerners,” the key importance lay in the object (as eidos) and on space and time, abstracted to greater or lesser degrees. To the “Southerners,” the most important aspect was personality. Zakharov had a series of works ? in collaboration with Skersis, I think ? on the struggle with things. He carried out one of the actions in this series at my apartment, where he smashed my toilet bowl with a chair. In this struggle with things, one can easily discern the battle with all those Kabakovian stools, “sofa-paintings” etc. So the incident with the toilet bowl was like an assault on me as one of Kabakov’s followers. It is a shame that I was not able to keep this toilet bowl, which was an important piece of Zakharov’s work from the early 1980s, especially if you consider the context of Duchamp’s urinal of 1917 as probably the first piece of contemporary art.
Putting this context aside, the gesture of smashing the toilet bowl with a chair had yet another implication. After all, the “chair” can be understood as Kosuth’s chair in his famous “One and Three Chairs,” an art work that is fundamental to conceptualism. The installation presents a real chair next to a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word chair. Kosuth was very important to all of us. Albert even turned Kosuth’s text “Art after Philosophy” into a rhyming narrative poem. In this sense, Zakharov’s gesture could be understood as its own kind of “victory” of Kosuth the copy man over Duchamp’s ready made. But Kosuth and the dominance of text in his work (logocentrism) was important to both “Northerners” and “Southerners.” It follows that a certain reconciliation takes place between the Northern and Southern branches on the level of text development as the dominant tendency in Moscow Conceptualism. On the other hand, any “reconciliation” in any ideological or philosophical (or our case, aesthetic) school leads to stagnation and decay, since it is struggle and polemic controversy that imparts it with its vitality. Which is what happened: by the late 1980s, the Moscow Conceptual School essentially ended its heroic existence as a group process of becoming.
In the 1990s, Vadim Zakharov was very active in publishing the journal Pastor, but it contained either works from the 1980s or material on the “individual peregrinations” of the members of the Noma , which is what the MANI had become by then. And if MANI was a kind of “spherical agglomeration,” caught up in a process of becoming and in an ideological sense an example of group-production, then Noma already consisted of separate little “glo-bules” or “beads,” each of them with its own trajectory of motion and its own goal. Throughout the 1990s, Zakharov’s journal Pastor created the impression of some kind of unified field, maintaining this field as a space for the process of individuation for the members of the Moscow Conceptual School, whose history Zakharov prolonged. In a sense, “Pastor” could be called a duty log of “course and distance,” fixing the direction of all of Noma’s “beads.” This has been an exceptionally important and interesting publication, which has given depth and volume to the longstanding phenomenon of Moscow Conceptualism.
To my mind, the objects of depiction and artistic interest in Zakharov’s work were always entire systems and infrastructures and not phenomena taken in and of themselves. His work operates with “broad frameworks” and big projects, a macro-aesthetic of sorts. And even on its micro-levels, photographing inside an orange or taking picture of my armpit, for example, the result is a boundless black cosmos with mysterious flaming auroras in between.