A Transformation of Vision

Igor Makarevich’s exhibition emerged from the project A Transformation of Vision: Igor Makarevich — Jarosław Kozłowski, conceived as a joint initiative and a form of dialogue: a Russian curator proposes a Polish artist for presentation in Moscow, while a Polish curator selects a Russian artist to introduce to Polish audiences. It is worth noting that Igor Makarevich and Jarosław Kozłowski found common ground quite quickly.

Both artists are fascinated by transforming existing situations, original stories, forms and meanings. Although regarded as Conceptualists, neither rejects traditional techniques and genres; instead, they employ them within Conceptual practices. Both belong to the group of artists who radically altered how art is perceived.

In comparing the two, however, one must recognise the distinct character of Russian Conceptualism, which was concerned less with the international model than with creating a private intellectual space that made use of absurd situations, forms and words. The phrase “Moscow Conceptualism” first appeared in 1979 in the title of an article by Boris Groys published in the Paris journal “A-Ya”. Groys characterised it as a romantic, dreamlike and psychoanalytic variant of the international Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Western Conceptualist works undoubtedly provided a model for the creation of a parallel movement in Russia, but one distinguished by its own particular qualities and original set of instruments.

Within the intimate atmosphere of communal kitchens, typical of underground existence, Russian Conceptualism carried an enormous charge of artistic and ideological protest.

Igor Makarevich’s personal mythology is distinguished by the transformation of source archetypes connected to totalitarian realities, fairy-tale figures or discovered archives. Myth does not restrict the space of his imagination; it is a living tissue capable of development. In this context, an important aspect of the artist’s vision is his inclusion of the viewer’s perception within the very structure of the work. He plays with the viewer, breaking established patterns and leading the recipient astray. What is transformed here is not only the initial story and the subject itself, but also our ideas about it. Pinocchio-Buratino changes from a fairy-tale hero into the sombre Nikolai Ivanovich Borisov, a man who, in an inversion of the original story, wishes to become a tree.

A significant aspect of Makarevich’s work is his particular mode of vision: the artist sees himself, as it were, from within, perceiving the structure of his inner layers, a structure that yields to the mysteries of myth-making and abolishes the boundary between the visible and invisible worlds. Makarevich’s optics encompass an entire pantheon of images, from nineteenth-century Russian literature and its fondness for the life of the “little man” to the Surrealist tradition and its tendency towards mimicry. One is reminded of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, the protagonist of Gogol’s story The Overcoat, whom fate assigns the wretched role of copying official documents. Bashmachkin’s spiritual life is as limited as his external existence, but, like Makarevich’s protagonist, he is possessed by a dream. Bashmachkin’s dream is admittedly more prosaic — he longs “to have an overcoat made with quilted padding” — yet within the life he inhabits it is unattainable. The story contains two interpenetrating narrative threads: an external one reflecting all the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s life, and an internal, concealed and intensely personal one.

The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki presents works from the History of the Wardrobe and Borisov Museum series, which form part of the extensive project Homo lignum, initially entitled Homo lignum: Problems of Survival, Physiology and Burial.

The project is based on the story of a protagonist — the artist’s alter ego — whose desire is to turn into a tree. Over time, this fictional figure begins to acquire a biography of his own, assembled from diaries and personal belongings and drawing us into an astonishing vortex of metamorphoses intended to help him fulfil his desire.

History of the Wardrobe is a new part of the project, first presented at St Petersburg’s Navicula Artis Gallery as part of Manifesta 2014. It tells the story of the accountant Borisov, who brings home an old wardrobe found on a rubbish heap in the hope of restoring it. During the repair, a board strikes him on the neck, producing unexpected erotic gratification and radically changing the course of events. The wardrobe ceases to perform its conventional role. It becomes a “universal machine”, taking over social and personal functions. It is not a utopian wish-fulfilment machine, but a living construction that enables experiences belonging to an ideal world.

In one interview, Makarevich observed: “The guillotine as such is associated with the French Revolution and the philosophical discourse of the modern era, with the Marquis de Sade, with philosophical thought that exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century philosophy… and of course this entire story is connected to Georges Bataille’s early work Story of the Eye.”

The artist’s singular mode of reasoning, which combines elements of the real and imagined worlds into a unified mythic scenario, allows the viewer to make a dizzying leap into this inconceivable story, into the work’s spatial dramaturgy, which reveals the complexity of its bodily, theoretical, theological and literary conception.

The project Pagan, shown at Profile Foundation in Warsaw, belongs to the body of work Igor Makarevich has produced with Elena Elagina and refers to the principles of the Russian avant-garde. An enormous fly agaric bearing Tatlin’s Tower on its cap, a honey fungus growing on a Malevich architecton and a Red Square with mushrooms are further references to utopia and the modernist legacy. We find traces here of earlier projects by Makarevich and Elagina, including Life in the Snow, Mushrooms of the Avant-Garde and Source of Life. The artists enter into a dialogue with cultural history, discovering new meanings and recognising internal connections between avant-garde strategies and contemporary culture.

Their project appropriates and recodes Suprematist and Cubo-Futurist elements from the work of Malevich and Tatlin. We see not merely an ordinary incursion into someone else’s territory, but the application of a principle of duality and layering, in which the use of new elements activates the mechanism of post-history and enables us to perceive signs of new processes.

translated into Polish by Michał Jagiełło

Natalia Goncharova is an art historian, critic and curator in the Programme and Exhibitions Department of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in Moscow. She has devised and curated international projects including Life and Dream, Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2004; The Test of Freedom: Twenty Years Later, IKON Gallery, Birmingham; Reconstruction of the Beautiful, Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2011; and Formal Relations, University of Birmingham, 2014. She has also worked with Polish artists, including as co-curator of Mirosław Bałka’s 2013 exhibition at the NCCA.