The Brooklyn Rail

When an artistic tradition moves from one culture to another, it inevitably changes. And if that other culture is very different, it changes greatly. When El Greco moved from being an icon painter in Greece to Italy, and then on to Spain, inevitably his pictures changed. And when Western-style conceptual art is emulated by the Russian artists presented in Distortions, the result is radically unexpected. In Ten Appearances (1981), a board with ten bobbins of white rope was placed in the middle of a snowy field. Ten participants grabbed the ropes and, moving in different directions, unwound them. Then some of them came back and were presented with photographs of a figure coming from the forest into the snowy field. In Yuri Albert’s “Household Help” (1979–81), presented in a digital print made in 2023, the Soviet concern of art serving the people was explored and parodied. Albert offers to help with tasks like grocery shopping, cleaning, or babysitting free of charge to any of his friends who filled in the application. And in Andrei Monastyrski’s Pile (1975), recreated by Dr. Olga Zaikina in 2018, visitors to his apartment were asked to deposit unwanted items on a black shelf.

For the old masters, there was an enormous gap between the governing concept, “represent a landscape,” and the realization of that concept. But by the 1960s, it seemed to many artists that once a concept had been presented, the activity of art making was essentially completed. In its translation by Russian artists, in this contemporary recreation, the basic concepts are Sovietized. An American audience can perhaps understand the photograph created in Ten Appearances. And when in Sabine Hänsgen and Andrei Monastyrski’s Conversation with the Lamp (1985) Hänsgen recorded Monastyrski seated in front of the camera, illuminated brightly with a lamp, engaging in a philosophical monologue about art, all the while drawing scribbles on his body, we may find some analogies with familiar Western conceptual art. But since the concept of art serving the people is alien to most Americans, “Household Help” and Pile need to be explained; their distortions of familiar Western ways of thinking are considerable.

Ironically, given the roots of the Moscow Conceptualists in Soviet Marxist culture, the best way to understand the importance of their art was developed by American analytic philosophers. Consider accounts of banal everyday life: when we watch someone act, we understand what they are doing by appealing to their intentions. The woman turns on the light because she wants to read; the man raises his hand after the lecture to ask a question. If philosophical analysis thus begins with banalities, it encounters the complex concerns of multiculturalism in this show, for understanding action is more complex when the beliefs of someone are exotic to us. If we’re not believers, then we may not understand why they cross themselves upon entering the church. If we’re not familiar with Orthodox practice, we won’t understand why they cross themself right to left. And to understand Soviet Conceptual art, we need—as we have seen—to know about everyday life in that now vanished culture. The work of the Moscow Conceptualists, produced by a Hunter graduate seminar curated by Daniel Bozhkov, Joachim Pissarro, and Dr. Olga Zaikina, with assistance from Victoria Borisova, thus provides documentation, as valid and perhaps as valuable as literature or music. And in showing how, as they say, “existing artworks can be activated to create new living situations,” they enlarge our concept of art. A real record of life in the former USSR survives in this downtown Hunter College art gallery.

My favorite work in the show is Victor Skersis’s The Understanding Machine (1979). You place your face onto a wooden plank, and pull the string that releases a hammer which slams down close to your face. According to the artist, the emotional tension that accumulates at the drop of the hammer is transformed into a feeling of “joy and wonder” of intellectual discovery or even “enlightenment.” This was emphatically not my experience—I felt a tremor of terror even while knowing that I was safe. A couple of years ago I devoted my leisure time to reading Stephen Kotkin’s massive recent Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941. Little did I know that I was preparing to get ready for The Understanding Machine.

Endnotes

1. This account draws upon the classic philosophical analysis of Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (1960).