Sergei Anufriev, Vadim Zakharov
ZAKHAROV SZ’s activity took place in Moscow at the beginning
of the 1980s, which coincides with your arrival from Odessa.
You saw all of our work of that time, except the Brothers Karamazov project we made in Cologne, Germany in 1990. I am very interested in what you thought about SZ then and what you think about it now.
ANUFRIEV Well, back then, with my still fluid and phantom-like mind, I understood the art scene as a field of strategic importance. And in this field, the people closest to my age group were you and the Toadstools. There were, of course, the “old folks,” the Collective Actions group, for example. But for me the Toadstools were mainstream, too mirror-like, juggling recognizable paradigms and artifacts, brisk, talented, but not too deep. In a way, it was more Sots Art, more Kabakov, more New Wave. All of which seemed so fashionable and contemporary back then.
ZAKHAROV Well, it’s a bit strange to talk about fashion and the mainstream in the underground.
ANUFRIEV Yeah…among thirty people. But then, you know, everything is a hologram. Everything is scaleable. More than that: the smaller the model, the more faithfully it reflects basic principles. Let’s say there are three people who got washed up on a deserted island. You bet one of them will turn out to be a communist, the second a fascist, and the third a liberal, and they will start their own little war, each one claiming a stake. Same here. On the one hand, you were the alternative to the mainstream, while, on the other hand, you were more academic and more western oriented. And at the same time you were continuing along the lines of Komar & Melamid. Though I thought you were digging deeper. You articulated the state of the Soviet mind, which was not reflected before: just a dream-like, mechanical busy state of senseless work pro-cess. Really, the absurdity of the everyday chores of an average Soviet citizen was very thoroughly played out. You worked with elementary objects, surveying the disfigurement of the Soviet psyche….
ZAKHAROV It is interesting to me that you try to understand our line in parallel to the Toadstools and other groups. We just discussed this subject with Vitya. Our works: The Logistical Organization of Urinating Activities of Dogs in Accordance with the Distribution of Stars in the Constellation of the Great Hound or “Information Depositories,” which were made in the form of bird feeders cut out of milk cartons that we placed throughout Moscow, or Tank Parthenon, within the larger project Military Applications of Art, and Self Defence from Things Courses. All of them were very far from Moscow trends at the beginning of the 1980s. One of the works we did before Vitya left for the U.S. was also very important. You probably remember the repetition of the work Liblich. During the exhibition APTART on Plein Air, we, just like Collective Actions, guided participants through bushes, ravines, and a forest, and then when we reached an opening in the woods, an alarm clock in my pocket rang. At the same time, Vitya handed out little notes: “You have just participated in the performance of SZ – Lieblich” Andrei Monastyrsky, looking bewildered, said “Listen, but we already performed this piece,” while the now well-known photographer Volodia Kuprianov said, with obvious distaste, “It would be nice to smash your faces.” Later, however, Monastyrsky understood this as an act of repetition. It was the only repetition of someone else’s work in Russia. It was based on the idea of simulation within the concept of development in culture. Here we could include other works of ours that were radically different from the concepts of that time.
ANUFRIEV You took on the artifacts of art itself, the living, breathing art around you, and that was new. Andrei did not understand your action because you move in on his territory, which he considered untouchable since it itself was an assault on the territory of life, on the most sacred territory – the emptiness of Soviet quotidian existence. I also think that the tendencies of Moscow conceptualists of that time were too cerebral. There were no traditions of performance. When I came to your show and saw the lemon-colored wall paper, I started to salivate. In addition, you tied a large plywood circle to my leg, a thing that made me limp. It was then that, for the first time, I felt the unavoidable necessity of interactivity, be it in an installation or a performance. That interactivity that western artists seemed to use so well. I think this particular tradition started with you. Everything before that reminded me of the situation when a not very healthy fellow with a paper-white, awkward body suddenly decides to perform a belly dance. You, on the other hand, were well-trained and felt fit for performance. You had bodies you did not need to hide. I felt it was very obvious in your performance Brooklyn Bridge. The Toadstools played muscle-bound brutes, while really being Soviet office workers. You had something different, something German, western. Also, unexpectedly, you brought that commercial moment, very teasing, very western. There was a lot of bitterness in it, though. Remember you sold Head Butts (“bodalki”) for five kopecks a piece? It was such a strange moment. Nobody played it before because there was no commerce in art. And if there was commerce, it was something to be ashamed of.
ZAKHAROV Regarding our muscle-bound bodies and awkward Toadstools, it’s funny. I hadn’t thought about that. To the contrary, I always viewed them as big, self-righteous boys. It’s also interesting that I forgot about Head Butts. It was completely erased from my memory. I remember there was a series called SZ Production, with a number of things supposedly for sale, but that we actually sold them for five kopecks, I had forgotten.
ANUFRIEV Well, as a citizen of Odessa, I liked it. That idea of
a small profit I found funny and appealing. Nobody played with commerce. It’s later that Nikita (Alexeev) arranged auctions. Kostia (Zvezdochetov) tried some things too….
ZAKHAROV They were selling their works for kopecks, while we were selling the matrix of the Soviet system: matches, the most elemental object of Soviet times. Matches used to cost one kopeck a box at that time.
ANUFRIEV If it made any sense in the west, here it made none.
And later when it did, you were no longer working as a group. However, at that time, it was without parallel here, but it had parallels in world-wide processes. In other words, you did not have a drop of provinciality. You were not a product of the Soviet era in the way... Really everything you did was done as if you were
Danish, Japanese, or English.
ZAKHAROV Yeah, you correctly noted that we didn’t really care whether the roots were in Russia or in the west. We felt that the land of art is free. We really held the view that there are no borders, which was quite contrary to the notion that we are a pre-western group, that we lack the very traditions of the Russian and Moscow avant-garde. We were strange, not very tactful people, speaking with an accent. It is obvious now, but it is also obvious that everything we did has its deepest roots in Moscow conceptualism.
ANUFRIEV You guys existed in the partly imaginative world of art, but correctly understood its paradigms. In my view, it was a very British art with a well defined theme of trauma. And that was very important. Nobody even touched it at that time. The activity of Collective Actions is a metaphysical world with metaphysical heroes, actors, viewers. There is nothing concrete in there. But in your work, I felt a very pronounced physiology, which was not
articulated in the Russian consciousness of that time at all. Probably because the Russian consciousness works with conceived notions and categories. So everything of that time, from Kabakov
to Toadstools, was categorical. Meanwhile, in your art, there was real life with its miserable but so indispensable components, which do not exist in the categorical world: temperature, smell, the stupidity of everyday situations. There was that strange aggression, aggression from nowhere, aggression by itself.
ZAKHAROV Are you describing the phenomenon of Soviet trauma?
ANUFRIEV Just in general, the very aura of your works. Take, for example, your Parthenon. It looked to me almost traumatic, fragile, as if it were made of glass. There was something achingly tender in it, and yet healthy and elegant. Take, for example, your installation at Alexeev’s. It was built on very comprehensive physiological aberrations, connected with negative as well as positive feelings. The positive were alternatives to the negative ones that you built. You created that fork-like situation when a spectator is forced against the wall and insulted, while simultaneously being patted on the shoulder and encouraged to laugh. It was school-like. Some discomfort that we all lived through at school, yet at the same time that adolescent happiness, together with that all-encompassing, adolescent discomfort. In fact, everything you did was connected with physiology, the body, concreteness, all those things that came around in art much later. Really, you predicted a lot of stuff of the 1990s. And that includes the western art also. Only all of it was dumbed down in the west.
ZAKHAROV It is interesting that you bring it all back to physiology. To me, that’s an unusual view of our work. Yes, there were some works like Caresses and Kisses Make People Ugly, which the KGB confiscated during the search of Nikita Alexeev’s apartment in 1983. But really our bodies were no different from the bodies of the dead chickens we used for the performance at Misha Roshal’s. In any case, it was a “body art” that did not fit in the situation of that time. In this sense, there was physiology in many other works of SZ that few know now.
ANUFRIEV You had beautiful previews, though not exactly the discovery, of a theme. You had a number of touches, a number of starting points, many of which were not developed. What you were doing was charting new territories. You started and defined a lot that others developed later.
ZAKHAROV Yes, that’s right. For example, Simulations in Culture, Co-authorships, Filling the Voids, and so on. There was also such an unexpected notion as the interpretation of an exhibition as a process. You noted the exhibition with the yellow wallpaper that was the first personal exhibition of SZ. There were three more. Formally, they were based on the same works. However, in the first case, it was the show at Nikita’s that you saw. The second, at Roshal’s, took the form of a performance, a puppet show in which dead chickens played our works. The third was a carry-on show. We brought it to other artists. We would arrive at one’s studio wearing masks, hang a chair on his shoulders, and give a show using tiny models of our works. The fourth exhibition was a concert we played at the Evening of Amateur Music. It was a very important stage in our work. We understood our work as a continuous process. For example, the line of “hand-out ideas,” which we started just before Victor’s departure and later tried to develop with you. We have a number of lines to continue, but it’s not a mechanical extension of unfinished works. We charted a very big, active territory, which, as it turned out, today is still as
interesting as it was 25 years ago. What Vitya offered me were new and interesting ideas that came not from an old, forgotten territory, but rather from a well developed, still active dimension.
He just took off from some point that existed there in the past and started to move forward, very freely, with the sense that we are living, breathing artists.
ANUFRIEV Back then I understood your activity as a perpetuating activity rather than just the creation of artifacts which eventually have to be put in a portfolio. An important and unusual side of what you were doing was that you were saying things about yourself that you were not definitely sure of, and that’s because you were in the process of laboratory research. I felt good about the fact that you were getting into taboo areas and art that was not too deep, which was good. Even the photos of you, for which you could be accused of homosexuality… It was an awkward theme, but even there, you superimposed yourself with great tact. I would call your activity at the time actualization of latent states, such as latent homosexuality, latent sadomasochism, latent lunacy, the very states growing into pathology. There was a story I’ve heard from Dr. Samokhvalov: it was in the Crimea in the early 1990s. There was a guy who was walking around the town, going into different offices, offering his help. And to a point, it seemed all right, but then he would take a cardboard telephone with buttons drawn in with a ball-point pen, open a very crumbled folder, and it was obvious at that point who he was, but for some time, it was not obvious. That situation smacks of real pathology, but latently it is in every one of us. It’s like everybody pretends to be something while not fully understanding how inadequate he looks. In principle, everybody wants to scream at the toilet in some pathologic sense. In latent form, you did show it (as in the case when you incited a fight between a toilet and a chair). It was not that you opened the wounds and ills (that would be awful), but you opened those strange states in which there is nothing bad, really, but these states induce a state of awkwardness, since they are not associated with polite behavior. You worked with the actualization of latent neuroses.
ZAKHAROV That’s right, but these latent states cannot be extrapolated on all the activity of SZ. And it is MedHermeneutics who worked with them actively. We cannot ascribe everything to the theme of latency, though it is very important indeed. In fact, you are the first one to note it.
ANUFRIEV It is a psychoanalytic theme. You were curing it, just as Sorokin did, by the way. You were curing it by showing psychologically uncomfortable states and moments. Simultaneously, there was no schizophrenia. It was healthy. And there were no double meanings. You had that healthy autonomy. You did not work for the west; you were the west. Schizophrenia in Moscow was mainstream then. You did not have schizophrenia. You were doing concrete art and bore responsibility for your work in the Soviet social structure. You did not try to escape from it. These high standards of responsibility are very important at present, too, because too many artists behave themselves in art in too contra-dictory a fashion: on the one hand, it is contemporary art, yet, on the other, it could be hung on the wall in the country house of a new Russian. At least, it seems that way. Nobody is taking responsibility for what he is doing. This transforms art into design, which was unknown then, because both fields were separated by the official system.
ZAKHAROV However, at that time we were making a living by doing book design. But I understand what you are saying….It is interesting that there was an attempt on our part to escape personal responsibility, which was incarnated in the idea of “co-authorships.” We tried to form co-authorships with a number of Moscow artists. It was an attempt to create a layer of “intermediate,” “irresponsible” artworks. Naturally, everybody backed off. But I keep on working on this idea. I was involved in a number of co-authorships. To me, even now it is one of the most important and most fundamental methods of work. A co-author is a mask. You cover your back with it and therefore can move very freely in a different direction. A co-author is a wonderful cover. But I could not do everything we planned then by myself. In addition, the meaning of responsibility has changed since then.
ANUFRIEV Masks are such an interesting theme, so ubiquitous but little understood. It is a very important problem. I say that taking the mask off the face of the actor led to a revolution. This act demonized the theater. With the mask off, the actor cannot defend himself from someone else’s identity, which he happened to play. He, thus, becomes a changeling, while the person with a mask can defend himself. Therefore, art forms that retained the use of masks, I mean, the “commedia dell’ arte” and traditional Eastern arts, retained their positive nature, while all remaining theater was demonized. All actors are changelings. The fact that you were working with masks is very important because that way you entered the world of uncomfortable psychological states and psychosomatics in defense. The other identities with which you worked and to which you appeal could not really catch you. They slid right off.
ZAKHAROV The actor that took his mask off is destroyed by reality and the social structure. Is that what you mean? It would be interesting to clarify the differences between masks and roles since both of them are very important terms and categories for the Moscow situation. What is the difference between the mask and the role? In both cases, it is a form of exploration of other dimensions in a different identity in the armor of someone else’s skin, if I may say so. You used to use masks. You signed your works with different pseudonyms like “Schnur,” “Agent,” “Stuzer”… Do you think that the group SZ is more connected with masks?
ANUFRIEV Even constant removal of the mask and revelation of nudity is not connected with the changeling phenomenon. It’s a moment of truth. You had a work where you marked points on the skin of the viewer (something like acupuncture), as if giving him magic defenses. Or similar manipulations with objects constructed as archaic, magical rituals. In all archaic cultures, everything was all right because there were masks. There were enchantments, which fulfilled the very same role of defense against ghosts. Generally speaking, everywhere, even in art, there are ghosts. The only place where priorities still exist is art covered with masks.
ZAKHAROV Speaking of masks, you touched on yet another interesting theme, very important for SZ: usage of shamanist
attributes and mysticism as readymades. We manipulated pseudo-sacral objects and rituals without getting too deep in mysticism, as did Kolya Panitkov and Collective Actions. We tried to reduce the huge interest in mysticism of the time to emptiness. We tried to see a readymade in the sacred. For example, in our action Brooklyn Bridge, the very existence of rituals – eating bird feathers while we were hanging upside down from tree branches impersonating the Brooklyn Bridge – did not really mean much more than the fact that the Brooklyn Bridge itself is a shaman attribute made in a factory.
ANUFRIEV For you, everything was not much more than a consumer product, while Collective Actions was fond of a certain metaphysical pathos taken from the 1970s when everything was taken very seriously. The artists of the 90s got divided into perso-nalities. Only structures that use masks are interesting fields.
ZAKHAROV You offered that good example: the person who walked from office to office with a cardboard telephone. Here we have something very similar – a play in paranoia of pseudo-action, pseudo-text, pseudo-trauma. On the whole, it probably is possible to say that the activity of SZ was happening in a pseudo-dimension which could not be adequately commented upon. Our very text was running away, turning into an action. It is interes-ting that the text of MedHermeneutics was hidden in commenta-ry, while the text of the Toadstools was stuck in literature. These are three interesting points.
ANUFRIEV Or three types of Logos: Logos as action; Logos as performance; Logos as play. The “back text” was absent in your work. You concretely appealed to the megatext. You were developing your own technique.
ZAKHAROV Activity stretched in time and space. We were the very people who are called plumbers.
ANUFRIEV Work with the dull and dubious sides of humanity was your sphere of activity. Your work was inseparable from this state. You really got into stoves and toilets, trying to fix them up…. While others were decorating refrigerators, trying to turn them into works of art. There is something common between SZ and MedHermeneutics. First, there is the common theme of inspection. You, too, were inspectors, who pointed out some uncomfortable moments, which were nevertheless weight bearing constructs. On our level, we were trying to discover the weight bearing constructs of the general cultural space. Functioning in Culture was very important for us, especially in the beginning when we did just inspections and did not produce any artifacts in principle. It was similar at the beginning, but not so later. There is more parallel between your later work, Vadim, and SZ. Secondly, there was a very important orientation toward humor, which ultimately was the medicine for “neuroses.” The connection with a sense of humor was very important, especially because it betrayed everybody else. You had a very healthy sense of humor, but humor without a smile. Poker face. We had such a moment too. You were incorruptible plumbers, while we were incorruptible bureaucrats. But in reality it was the same: deeply covered, innermost business. One way or another, we were creeping toward non-symbolic means of expression, where nothing had a subtext. We were giving out communion wafers. And you had a similar point: we give only what we give, and it means nothing beyond itself. Whatever Collective Actions was doing was symbolic to the limit. And every directionality toward positivism was doomed from the beginning. No matter how Monastyrsky tried to escape, his symbolism continually caught up with him and bit him! I Ching and mandalas could be found later in everything he did. In your work, there was no second layer. We did not have it in the beginning either. It’s only later it started to develop in connection with psychodelia, but that’s a different story. However, you and we were unknowns. We were not important. It is the very absence of the author and the actor that was important. The activity itself, not who and why.
ZAKHAROV Collective Actions: action and practice. SZ: functioing and activity. MedHermeneutics: permanent commentaries on cultural neuroses.
ANUFRIEV It is having a process-like character. Freud pointed out that a patient cannot get completely well. However, he can be treated, thus becoming an ideal psychoanalytical subject.
ZAKHAROV A common theme in the work of all three groups is endlessness. Their problematics are stretched in time and space. However, because they existed in Soviet times, they worked with the present only. The absence of time as a category was common to all. The past was falsified, and the future was not important since it did not exist.
ANUFRIEV Because it was a system of inverted perspective: what is happening is happening here and now. That’s first. Second, it is happening with you, not with some symbolic figure. There was a concrete action toward a concrete person. Such a strange Soviet humanism, which found its reflection in the underground mind. And here, “our” practices allowed us to maintain a distance toward everything, including the present. This point was treated at length in the NOMA tradition. However, to follow that has proved much more difficult than to articulate it.