Doing Battle with Windmills
Or How the Pastor Became an Adventurer
Pastor Zond is like a mystical substance preordained to take on a large variety of aggregate states. Effortlessly, the portrait of the one-eyed pastor becomes a real person who throws himself into funny and sad adventures, only to take on a bibliophile form, becoming a synonym for Zakharov’s editorial activities. Journal, archive, editions, actions, and publications blend together in a stroll through an endless landscape of real and fictitious constructs, the Elysian fields of the pastor from Cologne.
The story of Pastor Zond Editions – and with it, the genealogy of the pastor as a character – begins in the early 1990s, when Vadim Zakharov first decides to relocate to a studio in Cologne and to commute between Moscow and the West. This decision comes at a time in which the Moscow Conceptual Circle is being scattered to the four winds, so that the cathedral city on the banks of the Rhein appears as an ideal hub, somewhere midway between Paris, New York, and Moscow. Zakharov’s apartment on Cologne’s Gleueler Strasse inevitably becomes a meeting place for the Moscow Circle, both as a way station on journeys through Europe or as a destination in and of itself.
As the Moscow Circle wanders apart and changes, Zakharov begins to develop the artistic metaphor of a shepherd who tends to his flock. The figure of the pastor seems to draw a symbiotic connection between the “Holy City of Cologne,” Germany’s largest Catholic diocese, and the world of Moscow’s myths. Initially, Zakharov chooses the mouthpiece of a periodical journal, which is how he describes Pastor in somewhat self-deprecating terms. Artist book or multiple seems more appropriate, especially if one wants to do justice to the unique quality of every copy, which is designed on the computer and made by hand, as well as to the richly illustrated contributions themselves.
The title page of Pastor’s first issue – entitled Names, it appeared in May 1992 in an edition of no more than 30 copies – recapitulates this situation in a scene that seems nearly romantic: in the shadow of the twin spires of Cologne’s cathedral and the steeple of the Great St. Martin’s church, two of the city’s trademarks, a herd of sheep grazes peacefully on the banks of the Rhein. Correspondingly, Zakharov’s first issue takes stock of the artistic situation in Moscow, much like a shepherd counting his sheep, in order to keep a steady eye on them in the future.
In retrospect, the figure of the Pastor can be identified as the spiritus rector of all ensuing editions and actions. Since 1992, Pastor Zond Editions has published over sixty portfolios, which vary both in terms of extent and medium. However, all of them are connected with the Pastor’s real adventures in different ways.
For example, there are editions that were already planned as the Pastor’s actions from their very inception, such as The Flight of Zechariah (1993) or the series The Funny and Sad Adventures of the Foolish Pastor (1996–97). These adventures were preceded by real journeys in which the Pastor – a.k.a, Vadim Zakharov – reenacts scenes from Cervantes’ Don Quixote or augments them through invented episodes (In Search of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance). These scenes play out in the Spanish town of La Mancha, in a U-boat submarine on the German coast of the Baltic Sea (How the Little Boy Dima Made Fun of the Pastor in the Submarine U955), in a Russian dacha (How the Pastor Died, or How the Chickens Picked Out His Brains in Moscow) as well as in various locations in Japan (Japanese Notebooks I–IV). Zakharov sets his actions into scene on location, documents these photographically, then editing them as illustrated narratives.
A completely different, yet equally central branch of Pastor’s activities can be found in the video-archive. Here, Zakharov engages in an almost seamless documentation of exhibitions held by members of the Moscow circle in the West. Between 1989 and 2001, he has captured more than 100 exhibitions in total. The quality of documentation diverges and vacillates between camera work executed with documentary precision and sequences in the style of amateur video. The resulting form – a comprehensive albeit subjective inventory – is congenial to the Pastor journal, although it also differs from this project on a number of points. While the material of the video-archive declines commentary or editing, thus taking on a quality that is almost completely documentary, the Pastor journal bears the hallmarks of a far more open, artistic handwriting.
This short outline of the various operative and productive strategies involved allows us to surmise that the activities of the Russian-born adventurer from Cologne circumscribe a field that has become so vast after fifteen years of unceasing, intensive work that it is almost impossible to gain any complete overview. Each piece – including portfolios, slipcases, videos, objects, as well as the issues of the Pastor journal – are part and parcel of a larger hard-to-define whole whose only constant is a continual process of transformation. In the introduction to the first issue of Pastor, Zakharov describes the Moscow Conceptual Circle as a self-evolving system. In terms of form, he argues, the Moscow body may be distrophic, but has a formidable energetic mass at its disposal, which, in turn, effects self-duplication and self-expansion.1 There is hardly any more appropriate way to describe Zakharov’s own artistic activities.
The fine bifurcations and branches of Pastor Zond’s geneology – swollen into a mystical coagulation – should not hold us back from venturing to glance into its past. The origins of the journal Pastor and the character of the same name reach back to the 1960s, when artists in both the West and in Moscow began to make artistic objects in multiple editions, distributing them more widely than ever before. In the West, this strategy found its justification in the hermetic system of the museums, which were only beginning to open up to contemporary art and its new forms, while in Moscow, it was the political situation and the tradition of samizdat that led to a new art form that was easy to produce and – most importantly – developed through collective creativity.
The multiples made by Fluxus or by contemporaries like Daniel Spoerri in the edition MAT focused on broadening the distribution of new ideas that proclaimed a radical fusion of art and life, spreading like wildfire thanks to the low cost and small format of the objects themselves. As an example, it is enough to remember Robert Filliou’s Suspense Poems – small objects with one line of poetry each – which one could subscribe to per mail over a period of several months in order to put them together to a serial poem.
Around the same time, the circle of unofficial artists in the former Soviet Union saw itself imperiled by an overpowering apparatus of repression that only allowed communication and free production in hiding. Without legitimation or recognition from the outside – not to mention the lack of any art-market whatsoever – artists were forced to rely upon mutual assistance, spontaneously inventing their own forms of exchange, organizing the APT-ART apartment exhibitions, which are legendary today, or archiving documents, art-works, and pieces of writing. The MANI-files, initiated by Andrei Monastyrsky in 1981, were the first systematic form of such communal undertakings.2 For purely pragmatic reasons, its contributions largely consisted of works on paper that could easily be collected in portfolios. These were distributed hand-to-hand, so that every artist would add a contribution to the bundle. One can already recognize the close connection between actions and editorial activities on the unofficial Moscow art scene, a connection that Zakharov would later continue to develop as an aesthetic system in its own right.
Hence, the surprising derivation of filmscenes or performative pieces from the Pastor journal: in The Pastor’s Conversations – round-table discussions on themes addressed in the journal – Zakharov continued the Moscow tradition of “the listening-method of communication in private, communal forms”3 as practiced through the MANI-files, self-publishing or “conversations at the kitchen table.” In June 1993, for example, a conversation between Boris Groys and Pavel Pepperstein on the theme Our Future (Pastor No.4) was held in the Shedhalle in Zürich. A year later, the theme Emigration and Wayfarers become the subject of a public discussion at the Kröller-Müller-Museum in the Netherlands. This principle of expanding the print medium into the reality of artistic and political discussion can also be found in Zakharov’s editions, which are frequently linked to actions, exhibitions, or journeys.
No more than a few months after Pastor Zond Editions was founded, the metaphor of the shepherd from Cologne developed a dynamic life of its own. In an initiation ritual of sorts, Zakharov slipped into the guise of a black cassock with a white stand-up collar, which would become his most important prop for years to come, constantly accompanying him on his journeys.
Zakharov’s first public appearance in the vestments of the Pastor takes place during the Austrian art festival Styrian Autumn in 1992. Having chosen an old estate near Graz as the backdrop for his action The Flight of Zechariah, Zakharov sits in a small two-seat airplane and slowly flies off into the distance after performing several banks over the castle-grounds. Diskettes with text-fragments from the Biblical Book of Zechariah – which narrates the return to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon – are buried at over 101 points in the castle grounds. When the airplane with the pastor from Cologne turns away, leaving behind the people in the park, each of whom marks one of the disks buried in the ground, this gesture reminds us of the “undisguised wish for the other side in the desire to leave behind all conventions, be they social, spiritual or emotional”4. In its gaze back toward the people on the ground, receding into the distance, becoming smaller and smaller until they are little more than meaningless points that mark the terrain, The Flight of Zechariah is one of those so-called “games of departure, flight, mimicry, and transparence”5 of the Moscow Conceptual Circle’s younger generation, as Zakharov calls it himself. However, the action also symbolizes the transition to the West, which makes it possible to “note the changing nature of one’s own inner dispositions, as well as the external changes that have been recorded by the senses and are only recognizable in certain moments, in certain moments of stopping and taking stock.”^ (6)
The desire for new vantage points and altered axes of perspective can be understood as the central motor for Zakharov’s artistic endeavors. This desire makes itself manifest in numerous actions and journeys. Taking place under a variety of auspices, their common object is the exploration of the unconscious and of metaphysical experience. Zakharov’s probes never apply any scientific methodology; instead, he pursues a logic of intellectual dodges that often take on absurd forms; the execution of the Madeleine pastry – which serves as a symbol for the unconscious in the edition of the same name – through a police sniper can only be understood as an artistic metaphor that has retained a kind of childish fantasy. Instead of yielding to reality, Zakharov continues to confront the fantastic, producing new ideas over and over again.
Armed with changing props and masks, the Pastor a.k.a, Vadim Zakharov places himself into the most varied states of mind: sometimes, he explores the worlds of childhood fantasy, but just as often, he is fascinated with obsessive or spiritual-religious worlds of imagination. For instance, Pastor No.7 pursues strange phenomena – such as ghosts – under the title Pathology and Norm. In the edition The Japanese Alphabet for Shamans, monsters prove to be useful familiars: with their help, one can playfully learn Japanese.
Zakharov is especially fascinated by Japanese culture and the landscape of Japan. A number of his editions take place in the land of the rising sun, where the artist finds the miraculous meeting point of East and West. In the course of one of his journeys, Zakharov discovers a strange pilgrimage site in the Aomori province, which is being visited by a Japanese biker: if one is to believe the legend, this holy place is the Japanese grave of Jesus Christ, at which the remains of the saviour found their last place of rest.
The edition Theological Conversations centers on the pastor’s struggle with traditional sumo wrestlers, whom he has no chance of defeating. On the island Komaemidgima, the pastor uses wondrous masks to slip into a variety of roles: disguised as Buddha, an old woman, and an evil Chinaman, he wanders through the dense vegetation of the secluded isle, returning to the solitude of his childhood.
These peculiar encounters – some of them real, others staged or fictitious – find their continuation in the edition Missions, one of whose central themes is a Chinese folding screen, decorated with illustrations of the Christian gospel in a traditional Chinese style of painting. Eventually, this sequence of strange coincidences led Zakharov to dedicate the eighth edition of the journal Pastor to the subject The Eastern Tradition in the Moscow Conceptual School.
However, Zakharov’s reenactments and explorations are not limited to the history of occidental or oriental religious thinking. In the long-term project Cults – Prophets – Image (2001), Zakharov collects information on cults, sects, and self-proclaimed prophets from all over the world. The corresponding video material shows examples of rituals and ceremonies whose states of trance occasionally even seem grotesque in the context of contemporary societies.
An interest in manipulative alterations of consciousness, be it through external influences or through auto-suggestion, have played a central role in Zakharov’s oeuvre from its earliest stages onward. For example, in the early 1980s, in the Eye Patch project, he wears a black eye patch for two years, subjecting his sensual-optical perception to a material influence in order to forge ahead into surreal worlds of experience.
In retrospect, the actions and editions of the pastor connect to form a mythical, closed world of their own. The experiences of escape, of the evasive, or fleeing dominate his search for the interrelations between the subconscious and processes in reality. Their leitmotif is the coincidence of multiple identities in one person7. From the very outset of his work as an artist, Zakharov has been using fictitious heroes to develop his own personal mythology: the One-Eyed Man (1983) is followed by the Dwarf (1986), then the Gardener (1989) as well as Madame Shlyuz (1990), until he slips into the role of the adventurer by becoming the Pastor (1992). Even the early protagonists develop a life of their own through which Zakharov attempts to evade the dead end of reality. By devising all of these characters, he creates a secret point of calm in hiding. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Zakharov’s figures and themes from the 1980s already produce an atmosphere of the dreamlike, the grotesque and the fantastic.
The current fields of the pastor’s activities are linked to these earlier characters. However, they are oriented toward experiences of being that thematize the possibilities of dissolving conventional boundaries in the most general terms. Zakharov succeeds in doing so in a great variety of ways: through ‘religious’ experience (in the action “The Flight of Zechariah”, 1992, in Jös/Graz), in his own imagination (in the edition “A Supplement to the Second Volume of Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’s Dead Souls, Found at Gleueler Strasse 22”, 1993/94), through literary quotes (in the puppet-play Reading Borges’ Story Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1995), and by probing the collective unconscious (in the project “The Execution of the Madeleine Pastry”, 1997).
All of the pastor’s actions seem to be connected by a single moment: they all thematize the experience of futility. Zakharov has even dedicated an entire edition, namely “The Dead End as a Genre”, to the experience of the cul-de-sac from a sociological, cultural, philosophical, historical, or artistic perspective. Pastor Zond transforms the dead end into a principle: instead of leading to capitulation, it forms the impetus for a productive strategy. In this way, Zakharov does not evade the dead end through its “empty center,” which always played a central, quasi-mystical role in the discourse of the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Instead, he continues to spin new Ariadne’s threads that lead us to fictitious places that take on real forms, and to real places that seem totally fictitious. The pastor from Cologne with the eye patch leads us to the Grave of Christ in the Japanese village of Shingo or to the hidden corners of a submarine in Laboe, inviting us to join him in doing battle with the windmills in La Mancha. In the end, we find ourselves in the bathroom of Gleueler Strasse 22, where faces from Gogol’s “Dead Souls” emerge from the floortiles. A vicious circle from which Pastor Zond will only release us unwillingly, whose adventures we will follow in innocence.