Vadim Zakharov – Collection, Publishing House, Archive.
Between the Desire-to-Preserve and the Inevitability-of-Disappearance
Somewhere behind or in the work of the publisher, author, typographer and producer of Pastor Zond Editions is concealed not only the most important chronicler and documentalist of what is known as Moscow Conceptualism, but also the collector of many important works from this artistic trend. The various activities of collecting, archiving and documenting neither take precedence over, nor are sub-ordinate to, his own work, but go hand in hand with the business of producing, creating and inventing. Yet the loving design of texts and books, the laborious archiving and documenting on video of all exhibiting activities of the Moscow Conceptual school, the careful collection of items and their preservation in albums and folders, even his personal appearances in performances and installations, are balanced by a tendency to vanish. This modest attitude of understatement is not only rooted in Zakharov’s training as a typographer, who has to exercise discipline and restraint while nevertheless showing empathy for the work of others, but is also an essential leitmotiv of Moscow Conceptualism. Flight, Distance, Disappearance was the title of one of the first major comprehensive exhibitions of Moscow Conceptual art, whose catalogue was naturally designed by Pastor Zond Editions.1 The exhibition followed the motif of disappearance through its various stages of continuity and change from the beginnings of the Russian avantgarde through the first generation of Moscow Conceptualists grouped around Ilya Kabakov up to the younger generation of contemporary artists. From the paramount leitmotiv of emptiness via the yearning for freedom and transcendence, the motif of disappearance also implies the problem of identity against a background of emigration.
The Brief History of Modern Art or The Life and Death of the Black Square, written by Nikita Alexeev on a 36-metre-long scroll, may be seen as an illustration of this line of development. It not only forms the heart of the Zakharov collection and the visual link between the two exhibited collections of Oroschakoff and Zakharov, but is a piece of exile (pre)history as well. It is the last work Alexeev did before he went to Paris in 1986. A trained illustrator, Alexeev belonged to the Collective Actions group in the 1970s and maintained in his flat as the so-called Apt-Art Gallery in the early 1980s, which was an important venue for contemporary art in Moscow, where Zakharov and Viktor Skersis exhibited together in 1983. In order to finance his departure, Alexeev held an auction of his works in his studio in Furmanny Street, to which he invited artists and collectors. At this auction Zakharov bought the scroll for 50 roubles. It narrates its story in the style of a comic strip, begins with the birth of the black square from an egg, tells of its flights of fancy – the square acquires little wings – and leads, via various revivals, to its ultimate death on the gallows. This ironical reflection on the images of one’s own utopias and ideologies, which deny all possibility of an alternative utopia or ideology coming to anything, is typical of the Russian art of the past two decades.
Like most of his artist friends, Zakharov departed for the West in 1989. The world-historical dimension of this caesura is reflected not only in his personal curriculum vitae, but also in his work and the Zakharov collection. Whereas work and collection were originally separate areas, they began to merge with each other completely after his departure. The need for a link between the Desire-to-Preserve and the Inevitabili-ty-of-Disappearance was Vadim Zakharov’s justification for his Pastor Zond Editions, which have not only become a receptacle, but also an inspiration and initiator for numerous projects and works of the Moscow Conceptualists.
Pastor Zond Editions is no ordinary publishing house, but a family publishing house located at Gleulerstrasse 22 in Cologne, where Zakharov has lived and worked since 1990. Its most important organ is the periodical Pastor, eight issues of which have appeared to date in a small, hand-crafted edition, mostly, alas, in Russian. Each issue of Pastor is devoted to the discussion of a topical issue concerning contemporary art, art history, literature or philosophy. Text and illustrations are by Russian artists and poets of the Moscow Conceptual School. The authors are mainly contemporary Russian artists: Yuri Albert, Erik Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Ilya Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, Yuri Leiderman, Oleg Vasiliev, Victor Pivovarov, Andrei Filippov or the Medical Hermeneutics group, a few western artists, like Terry Atkinson or Rainer Ganahl, poets like Dimitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein or Mikhail Sukhotin, and philosophers like Boris Groys, Mikhail Ryklin, Victor Tupitsyn and others. Founded in 1992, im-mediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Pastor Zond Editions thus completes and addresses the ideological transition from East to West – when said aloud, “Pas-Tor” sounds like the German for “passing the gate”. Founder Zakharov considers himself a pas-tor in the sense of a shepherd who patiently seeks out (Russian: zond = to probe) his artist friends, disbanded like sheep, and corrals them together. Thus the periodical Pastor offers a discussion forum and a kind of substitute home for the artists scattered over all four corners of the world since perestroika, especially as Pastor’s image is in the familiar Russian tradition of “samizdat”, the manually duplicated publications of the unofficial Russian cultural scene. While the censorship of the totalitarian system was the original reason for the manual duplication of samizdat publications, Zakharov now cultivates this mode of production, whose dilemma lies no longer in political but in economic factors. This raises the question – which is not without an undertone of nostalgic irony – as to what distinguishes the relations of production in his former totalitarian homeland from those in a freedom-loving democracy? And what, in the computer age, distinguishes manual from machine production?
At Pastor Zond Editions Zakharov is developing an unusually complicated and elaborate network of Moscow Conceptualist artists, in which the group’s own mythology and history are themselves made the subject of art. In 1994, for example, Zakharov requested twenty artists to submit cover designs for his periodical, which he then published under the title of Pastors Umschlag (Pastor’s Cover). Each of these designs was printed on twenty red sheets of paper inserted in a hand-made folder, while the originals remained in the collection of the artist. The publication “Aus der Vita des durchnäßten Starez” (From the Life of a Drenched Old Man), 1993-94 is also constructed on a similar principle. It consists of two leporellos or zigzag folders, one black and one white. The black leporello contains 19 initials of Moscow artists, each framed by a computer file window. The white leporello contains 19 black-and-white photos of the same artists when they were children. The ironic cultivation of their own myths and groups shows a special esteem for the innocent creativity of childhood. Zakharov has been working since 1994 on a collection entitled Pastor Zond Children’s Library, for which he has published 25 volumes contained in three slipcases of texts and pictures contributed by his children and those of his friends, as well as by artists who have remained children at heart. As in the case of his Pastor periodical, Zakharov likes to assume the modest roles of typographer and publisher and leaves it to others to provide the words and the pictures, which he can then arrange and set out with a few cautious touches. Here we may discern a new nuance of disappearance, which Milena Slavická has paraphrased with the word “evasion”: “evasion, e.g. of any interpretation of the work or of the establishment of one’s own authorship.”2 In the case of the Moscow conceptualists this tendency is manifested in the recurrent phenomenon of forming groups or engaging in co-productions. Thus Zakharov’s collaboration with Sergei Anufriev was reflected in the publication Dead-end as a Genre (1997-98), a collection of conversations about the various kinds of dead ends. The publication entitled The Murder of the Madeleine Muffin (1997), is also a compilation of texts by various contemporary artists, philosophers and composers, which in accordance with an “experimental setup” of Zakharov’s were written immediately after the consumption of a muffin. The background is formed by a remarkable interweaving of episodes from the novels The Trial by Franz Kafka and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. What is involved here, according to Zakharov, “is memory and the collective subconscious, the symbol of which in Proust is the muffin”. The muffin trial ends with the death sentence, which was carried out in an action from the Steirischer Herbst in Graz at 7:56 p.m. on 28 September 1997. On this sad occasion the musician Ivan Sokolov composed a Requiem on the Death of the Madeleine Muffin, which was also included in the publication.
Another form of disappearance practised by Vadim Zakharov is his constant role-playing, which is not confined to his various functions, but embraces a whole repertoire of different personages or literary figures. Before his main role as the pastor, which Zakharov assumed in the Post-Soviet era, he has appeared in various projects as a “One-Eyed Man”, “Pirate” and “Gardner”. In the black cassock of the pastor, which Zakharov has occasionally worn on important occasions and appearances, he slips into other roles, thus donning one mask over another. Once, for example, he set off for Spain in quest of the Knight of the Melancholy Countenance and, while on the track of Don Quixote, recreated the latter’s adventures in photographic form, which have been brought together in the third book of the Funny and Sad Adventures of the Foolish Pastor. The fondness for personages shown by Zakharov in his work links him to a tradition of Moscow Conceptualism to which Ilya Kabakov is also committed. This is the sense in which Boris Groys describes the Russian artist “as a figure from a humorous novel”.3 The constant changes of perspective are due to a fundamental doubt that reality can be represented by means of artistic semiotic systems – whether it be the ideological semiotic systems of Socialist Realism or the idealistic semiotic systems of the modernist movement. It is plain to see that the structuralist and poststructuralist theories exerted just as great an influence in Russia of the 1960s-1980s as they did in the West. If reality cannot be mastered by any of the various visual languages of art, all that remains to be done is to make this permanent failure itself the subject of art. Zakharov does this by constantly switching roles on the stage of reality and using their various artistic languages as though they were various parts in a play. Strictly speaking, this is always the same role in all its conceivable variations: it is the figure of the unlucky fellowis chronically unlucky, in this case the Stupid Pastor who is doomed to failure without realizing it. The art of Moscow Conceptualism, which is seemingly “not done in its own name” but in that of an inveted figure, is, as Groys goes on to point out, profoundly literary.4 It is in the tradition of Russian humorous literature as exemplified by Gogol, Dostoyevski and Chekhov, to which Zakharov directly refers in various places in his work. At this point one would have to examine whether “the Russian artist as a figure from a humorous novel” really is a specifically Russian character, or whether the description does not equally fit artists like the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers or the Canadian Rodney Graham. Zakharov is linked to both artists by his love of appearing in different roles and functions, his running comments on his own work, his link to 19th century literary figures, a sense of humour that is always that of a victim with a note of melancholy in it – and his ever present love of typography.
The aesthetic quality of Zakharov’s works lies in the supreme refinement of typographical design which, despite a modest recognition of its ancillary function, stands in subtle relation to the content. Despite all their variations in formats and media, all publications of Pastor Zond Editions are distinguished by their severely aesthetic image that follows the timeless rules of a classical typography. With pain-staking care the individual works are organized into series, compiled in collections and, most recently, arranged by gentre in separate catalogues rasonnés. Zakharov’s method of a “self-evolving system” is always balanced by the tendency to make retrospective compilations of his output to date. Yet the severe organization of his own work and the voluntary submission to the basic rules of typography not only testify to modesty and understatement, but also serve as a self-imposed corset for the extravagant fantasies, absurd notions, lunatic ideas and spiritual flights of fancy of Vadim Zakharov.