V.V.Bychkov

The Art of the 20^th century

(Texts from the Book of POST-adaequations
«The ARTISTIC APOCALYPSE of CULTURE» )

(Published in: KornewiSHCHe. A Book of Non-Classical Aesthetics. Moscow. Institute of Philosophy. 1998. P. 49-164)

Translated from the Russian
by
Oleg Bychkov and Alexandr Perevay

.

- POST-ADAEQWATIONS.
An almost traditional introduction
into the non-traditional aesthetics.

The 20th century is a notable and tragic century in the history of Culture. It is its last century. Of Culture with a capital C in its Mediterranean and European version; of Culture as the spiritualized civilization. Of Culture that is a carrier of the Spirit. It is the century of encounter and confrontation between Culture and POST- culture that comes to replace it: the super-technologized, computerized civilization that has driven away the Spirit and was abandoned by the Spirit. The 20th century is the last century of spiritualized Art and the first century of the artefacts devoid of the Spirit: the fruits of the nuclear and computer civilization that has deified the THING and matter, the BODY and corporeity and has cast away the Spiritual, the moral, the aesthetic, in fact, the human as well in its traditional humanistic sense. The artistic- and-outside-of-art culture (= anti-Culture) of this century is a conglomerate, a whimsical mixture, a mosaic made out of the bright pieces of Culture and both the innumerable products and junk of the most recent civilization; the products that are not, however, deprived of signification and meaning of a certain kind, albeit mostly unintelligible to the carriers of Culture: to those who are still in Culture.
For POST is something OTHER in principle! It is not just 'after' in its temporal or causal sense. POST is a completion outside meaning, the non-logical end of logical development; it is a fruit that has imbibed everything but that is something that denies all that nurtured it. POST is negation and affirmation at the same time. The negation of the Spirit and Culture, the affirmation of something OTHER, unfathomable, almost unaccessible to the representatives of traditional Culture. Perhaps, the beginning of the triumph of the global deprivation of the Spirit or, on the contrary, a PRE-sentiment of some forms of cosmic spirituality that are OTHER in principle?
The artistic-outside-of-art culture-anti-culture of this century is the 'stromata' (from the Greek 'patchwork') made up out of a multitude of the avant-garde faces of Culture: on the one hand, the arte-phenomena that crown the multi-century history of the development of European and Mediterranean culture whose beginnings are lost in the historic depths of Sumer, Babylon, ancient Egypt, on the other hand, the artefacts-hieroglyphs of POST-culture, already numerous, although often ephemeral, unstable, instantly emerging and disappearing.
The arte-phenomena of our time, especially such pillars of the avant-garde as Kandinsky, Picasso, Chagall, Klee, Miro, Matisse, Malevich, Moore, Dali, are the last bearers of the Spirit and, in part, the forerunners (one of the paradoxes of this century!) of the new epoch of POST-culture devoid of the Spirit, the prophets of the Apocalypse of Culture.
The artefacts of out time are the works and products of POST-culture that have radically abandoned the spirit and all spirituality (although in reality far from being always devoid of the latter). The 20th century is the most interesting power field of meaning for a historian of culture, a philospher, an aesthetician. However, it is a special field, and it requires not so much the traditional forms of research but rather something other in principle.
POST-adaequations are one of the versions of such 'other' type of research. They are an attempt to create contemporary aesthetic analysis, a philosophical and poetic penetration into the essence of the arte-phenomena and artefacts of the 20th century, of which many do not yield to standard discursive aesthetic analysis or art-criticism. They necessarily require other forms and methods of research and comprehension that are commensurate with the degree of their arte-being. For the 'stromata' of the arte-phenomena and artefacts of this century are a whimsical mixture of a plethora of discrepant, often mutually exclusive phenomena that address the most diverse levels of the psyche of the recipient: ranging from primitive and physiological to supra-conscious and mystical. And as a rule it is not formal logical descriptions, but the verbal structures of higher levels -- in particular, poetic (free verse or even classical verse),
the rows of associations of different degrees, the flow of consciousness, conceptual constructs etc. -- that happen to be adequate to such mixture, as well as to the arte-phenomena that are created on its basis.
POST-adaequations, as well as POST-philosophical aesthetics, are an attempt to arrive at the present-day level of aesthetic analysis. They are a system of specific imagery that is condensed to the limit, that emerged in the process of meditative immersion in the arte-phenomena and of a concentrated contemplation of artefacts. They are a verbal fixation of an attempt at aesthetic penetration that is integral -- just as any other aesthetic process -- in the unity of its extravert-ness and introvert-ness, of its deep, almost religious faith and its childish and playful frankness, of its almost scholastic seriousness and its all- loosening irony, of its intellectual striving towards the essence and its bucolic naivete and primitivism, of its admiration for absolute truthfulness and its sceptical negation of everything, of its strict logic of an analytical mind and its radical parodoxicality (?) and absurdity of a strong feeling.
POST-adaequations are
the aesthetics of aesthetically-non-aesthetic,
a new science-non-science, art-non-art,
the poetics of poetically-anti-poetic.
Here all is lost and all is gained.
POST-adaequations are POST-aesthetics!
If POST-culture is a PRE-culture of the future
that will already be not Culture
but something radically OTHER,
then POST-adaequations are PRE-aesthetics,
or something other than aesthetics,
of the POST-culture of the future.
And it is only possible on the basis
of the shoots of this PRE- in the modern POST-.
Today, POST-adaequations are
poetic questions rather than answers,
problems rather than their solutions,
hypotheses and intuitive insights
rather than conceptions.
However, without the former the latter also cannot be.
An OTHER object requires an OTHER description. The ancient Greeks already knew that the like is known by the like. Hence -- POST-adaequations. It is almost evident that adequations are an attempt to discover the adequate forms of verbal expression for the experience and comprehension of the present-day arte-phenomena and artefacts. POST- is not so much evident as it is common nowadays; it seems to belong to the same series as post-industrial society, post-non-classical scholarship, postmodernism etc. In my understanding, it derives from POST-culture (see CROSS-SECTION a - a. Materials for the Lexicon). POST-culture is a fruit of the progress of science and technology in this century; it is a leap of consciousness and matter somewhere; it is a headlong process, a becoming of something OTHER: of a new unknown mentality, of a different plasticity of thought, of a different structured-ness, of different forms of expression; of a different spatiality and a different corporeity that forms the latter. POST-culture replaces Culture and bears with and within itself all the POST-. Including also its own POST-methodology of integral philosophical-poetic-meditative penetration into the phenomena of POST-culture and their verbal and visual representation in a form of sui generis simulacra upon the plane of a paper sheet by means of letter characters. It is evident already now: POST-objects, or artefacts, are irrational in their essence -- even when they are created by means of, it seems, strictly devised, logically proved and mathematically calculated rational concepts (for example, as in conceptualism). Irrationality here is achieved through the mediation of reason, and the discourse acts as an analogue of absurdity. It is here that the paradox and law of the new POST-mentality is hidden! It is from this that the efficient method of penetration into POST-objects derives, i.e., extra-conscious experience, deep immersion, meditation, contemplation. For a scholar, however, it means an attempt (almost certainly doomed in case if he employs traditional methods) of subsequent verbal fixation of the acquired experience, that almost does not yield to verbalization or in general any other formalization. I call the result of such verbalization POST-adaequations, or non-adequate adequations of that which, due to its nature, can have no adequations. What are they? Philosophy? Both yes and no. Aesthetics? Both yes and no. Art criticism? Both yes and no. Poetry? Both yes and no. Irony? Both yes and no. Ecphrasis? Both yes and no. Impressions? Both yes and no. Associations? Both yes and no. A play of aestheticizing mind? Both yes and no. They are all that has or has not yet been enumerated at the same time -- and nothing of it. In any case, they are more serious than it might seem to an inexperienced reader. These POST-adaequations are a glance cast from the snow-covered Orthodox Russia upon the artistic culture of the 20th century: the century that is TRANSITIONAL according to the zodiac (from Pisces to Aquarius), as well as in all other respects. However, transitional to what? -- an idle philosophizer would like to know...

- SKETCHES OF PICASSO

Dedicated to his 110th birthday
October 1991

1.
Bass penetrates through the figure six,
And on the plane of the table lies
Not a die,
But playing the guitar
That curves between.
Red and black
In the green tonality
Of angular turn.
The surfaces of brown foundations
With a black breakthrough into PURGACIONES
Against the blue background
Of golden patterns.
The residues of oncoming modalities,
And no cutting of striped ovals
Of fish on the sand banks
Of the white silence
Of canvas.

2.
A flourish is not a face but
backbone of that which,
based on the shape of the frontal bone,
may become a design for
a charming little face.

3.
Energy is accumulated in the line,
and following a sharp bend
is the rupture of tissue
and the deformation of substance,
in order to reveal
the face of beauty
upon the face of time.

A breakdown and a fall
into asymmetric symmetry
at the limit of the harmonic
of a new tonality.
Dodecaphony of plastic
pictoriality
and the pictorial plasticity
of sound in a lush stroke-
throw
from the darkness of non-being
into the colourful feast
of the chopped angles
of living energy
that generously yields
an eye, a nose, lips, a breast
as they are splashed out
by the force field of necessity
of the supreme demiurgical principle.

4.
When our relaxed and softened flesh
is pierced by unearthly call,
all will turn round in us, to us
the world will look minutely small.

A ball will roll out of a ball,
All shining with its languid white,
and slide along the curve of hips
Like a hyperbola of light.

A cone, all silverish and blue,
Will hide the orange gap from sight;
Its point will rip right through our chest:
A voice that flies into the night.

A yellow spotted cylinder,
That forms the backbone of a red,
Will pirce right through a bean-shaped disk
To its white-coloured middle-shed.

Not thought -- a pearl-like flow of rays
Will silver-clothe our conscious soul;
The nectar of the supra-mind
At once will fill the lifted bowl.

Someone will ravish us with might
up to the boundaries of the sky,
and we will praise above the stars
the Demiurge who lifts us high.

(transl. O.Bychkov)

5.
Late Picasso, in all his might and beauty,
revealed himself to me in his museum in Paris,
although I had seen not a little of him before.
He was all in Culture, and Culture was he -
A powerful elemental beginning at its very end.
The most ancient archetypes found their ultimate embodiment here.
The elements of beauty, eros, and energy
Acquired their artistic tissue
in the tri-unity
of spiritualized flesh with superb easiness.
The form is in his hands as in a workshop of the Demiurge --
He moulds it as he pleases,
He always produces the living
and organically-existing;
and it is always esthetic and
appropriate.
Final without end,
that is beautiful...
Colour always enlivens the form;
it is not self-dominating.
The line is superb, especially in drawings.
One can spend hours in front of many of his works.
They are meditative and hence spiritual,
even those in which the erotic impulse is strong.
Eros is understood in them as a cosmic principle
in which sensual and spiritual pleasures
are moulded in one.
Picasso is delightful, but not sweet.
His voluptuousness is unworldly.
He is beautiful with primordial beauty
discerned in any form,
beautiful in revealing the essence
of any form and any line -
both apart and in their intricate
mergings, juxtapositions, and countermovements.

He is antinomical,
for he has understood the strength and beauty of opposition,
its vital foundation
And threw antinomy carelessly onto the canvas.
His form is deeply symbolic,
However, not with meagre intellectual
semantics,
but with artistic and sacred symbolism
of ancient idols.
Picasso's forms live
with their magic and energy
and press upon the psyche
of the wimpy intellectuals of our century.
You feel something similar
in the Oceania and Southern Seas department
of the Dahlem Museum
looking at old African sculpture.
Perhaps, if you could find
a true icon of the 20th century,
it would be among the works of Picasso.

6.
The world's palm is unable to hold him;
he tips any scales,
even if they are electronic
and the power is off long ago.
He is all earthly: of earth and from earth.
the chthonic principle in its soaring spirituality
Is his element.
He is all substance and flesh
in an incorporeal wrapping
of dreams, reveries, and fantasies -
evaporations of ancient Hellas
and the nuclear monster of our civilization.
Earth groans
to his magic flute.
And he laughs as ever:
when he sheds his blue tears,
when he saws a Stradivari violin
with a rusty saw,
and when he performs vivisection
on his beloved.

He forecasts
not the day of wrath,
but the eternity of bliss
to the doleful humankind,
horrified
at its own deeds, but far from rejecting them.

(transl. O.Bychkov)

7.
The centaur now of war and peace stepped out
Unto the path that to the garden leads,
Where nymphs in careless dancing revelries
Praised spring to Satyr's flute...
Then Minotaur's wild roar abruptly shook
The sleeping Europe, and the foliage fell
From Poet's laurel wreath...

No one has power nowadays already,
The million pieces back again to fit
That made up Aphrodite once before
.
The Master thus is doomed since then to spend
His sleepless nights before his model...

(transl. O.Bychkov)

* * *

- SALVADOR DALI

1
The island is left in the desert let loose
to seek in the sky
the ancestral gold. A female shape --
a meaningful flood.
A fine subtle impulse; a red-hot, proped-up
cupboard of being.
A boat of nuclear-gentle gall moves
in our direction.
It's time for us to suck up madness through ribs,
to stick out your eye,
to spread out the stem of a worm along
the perimeter
into yellow ecstacy.
A dazzling cup filled with dark liquid --
a female brest;
blue horror slides down in a smooth line along
the inside of the thighs.
The eight openings of a curve-like profile
shine in the dark.
Gala as Leda embraced by the swan
sleeps on the ground.
The nuclear age smoothly comes out
in green perspiration.
Man has become a fire-fly stung
right in the crest

(transl. O.Bychkov)

3.

pure thinking
without the control of reason

The day remains in man's oblivion.
The stubborn Aquarius fails to recognize it.
It seems that the dog,
that emerged out of a browless maiden, bites.
She streems into prolonged sonority
upon the trunk of a spider-elephant
that carries the melting burden
of a window flung open by eros,
not of eternity, but of sweet languor
that has covered a fluffy little mound
of the clock that has long forgotten its time
and praises vice with its arm.
There is no limit to sleep, now and forever.
Fantasies could not pull together the edges of love,
and the phallus that has soared into the sky
is to play not with Aphrodite, but the piano.
Such is the law of desintegrated knowledge
that has pierced the mollified breast
with the purple dripping of dazzle
that has discerned the senseless essence.

(transl. O.Bychkov)

5.

The day is beautiful in its weariness.
Someone forgot to turn off the water tap,
and all strength went to sewage;
and thus life potencies
boil and bubble there.
And we have become flabby on our folding beds,
watching with paranoid joy
the thoughtless play of bodily atoms
broken free from the dictatorship
of the force that bound them together.
You may say what you like,
but the ability to release intramolecular forces
is the way to Truth.

6.
When you will sense the taste of sunset
desintegrating by the Cross,
the rusty spade will see the sunshine,
a mouth will open in the wall;

a feeble voice will cry out loudly
right through the melting armour steel;
the scales that covered up the tombstones
will peel off just like falling hair.

He who left not the cosmic lap, will
float into it as if anew.
All will return to Law and order,
as if He never did exist,

who drank the red-hot melted magma
of sin that had absorbed the world,
who burned into the sun the dark spots
and roasted roosters in a shrine;

who entered lecherous assemblies
with lighted candles, like a church;
who felt affinity with atoms,
to whom a hagman was a friend.

The Entrance folds will come together,
the Law will soar high up above
that shuns all nature as a relic
of Evangelic ancient times.

But, thanks to God, the taste of sunset
yet nobody has understood;
and so the spade in peaceful calmness
still rusts upon Old Testament rocks.
(transl. O.Bychkov)

* * *

- JOAN MIRO

1. For me, MIRO is a refined and colourful mystic and visionary;
all his painting is reveries and visions;
he is an eternal wanderer through OTHER worlds,
OTHER dimensions, OTHER spaces and times;
supra-
he is a poet of and consciousness,
sub-
sur-
a singer of and reality
un-
a creator of innumerable worlds,
of art symbols,
that manifest to us in actuality
the ancient archetypes of being.
For me, MIRO is the TONE.

2. A refined sound and a pure TONE
in the artistic dimension
of resounding lines;
a refined run
through invisible TONalities
and along the edges of subtleties
that incite the sounding of TUNing forks
hung up in a row
on the sublest threads that are invisible to us,
in those worlds where hardly audible overTONES
steer the movements of exquisite forms
and the construction
of a-TONal harmonies;
the TONE is his mysterious sign.

3. against the grey mirror of space
the sign emerges
of balanced forces that give
a signal to the endless motion
along the trajectories of the pendulum
of consciousness and the phenomena of life
in the form
of speci-formed creatures
and flexible foundations
that flutter in non-gravitational fields
and know the price of the world and their own.

6. the tone D
fainted
in the blue spaces
like an air baloon.
only a trace of the thread
is left.

7. Painting. 1933.

Painting opens up endless levels
of the states of space and time
of Consciousness immersed in the contemplation
of the nebulae of light and colour
that smoothly flow into one another
and with this generate whimsical,
alive, living, feeling,thinking
formations, beings, entities:
innumerable species of ideal forms
of stable materialized being
that possesses a probability
of real becoming.
Painting is the visualization of the consciousness
of the Demiurge at the moments of creative excitement.

8. A child's drawing mastered
to the level of the perfection of a genius:
this is the essence of Miro.

10. Cinnabar dazzled the mystical blue,
and black shouts
ran across the space in all directions.

11. Regular metamorphoses of shapes are
the fluid symbols of the century that constantly changes
its colour and has forgotten about all static states,
let alone stability, permanency, and eternity.
The endless search for optimal forms
for the ex-pression, re-velation, and manifestation
of some imperceptible spiritual realities.
The intense concentration of understanding
of the black infinity of meaning
upon the red field of blind potentialities;
of blatant ultramarine -- upon the venomous yellowness
of despair.
And all this -- to the music of the night and
the bright shooting-stars of stuffy August
in a suburb of Madrid.

12. Miro is not myrrh,
and it is not tranquillity that appears in his paintings
but an excruciating question about the fates
and the Fate of all that has come into the world,
or is likely to come: for
all colourful, joyful, and singing,
and bearing light and life across spaces
always has a black edge --
the heavy vestige, sign, and symbol
of annihilation and transition
to NOTHING
that scares a European with its incomprehensibility --
as well as the mind partial to the certainty
of mental constructs,
and the sense of a living creature
accustomed to regard itself as a complex
of quite concrete and real
sensations.

13. Adult Fears.
I am afraid of painted little men
that every night jump out of the fireplace
and dance upon my chest
with repulsive grimaces
and squeaky jeers at
my marks of masculinity;
I cannot shake them off, for
they have already trampled over all of my chest.

I am afraid of birds, for each of them,
even the smallest and the most beautiful,
conceals the ugly crow of my
secret desires
that haunt me every hour and
give me no chance to think,
to work, to sleep, or to live calmly.

I am afraid of all rustling, creeping
running, and flying insects, for
they are the embodiment of the Wasp of my terrors
and nightmares.

I am afraid of the woman, for she is
the big black Wasp of cosmic vengeance
for the fact that I, having entered the world and
caused pain to her womb,
could not expiate my guilt
with the infinite diversity
of libidinous accomplishments
that are so welcome to her entire nature.

Behold, I, surrounded by a dense cloud
of the shrinking dancing circle of raging
painted little men,
fearful cephalopod insects,
scarely croaking crows, and
other similar beings
above whom trembles
the enormous bloodthirsty sting of the black Wasp --
the desired deliverer
from all this nightmare
of human life.

* * *

- HENRY MOORE

Dedicated to his exhibition.

Fine Arts Museum, Moscow,

September 1991.

1.
The parabolic shadow around
that which was once the sky,
of the escape into the melody of things
that flow into the bending time
that has rolled up into a scroll of days,
apart from that night that does not wait,
that removes the veils of forms
and reveals the foundations
of fleeing eternity
into the oval of fossilized void
that cries out the essence
of the worlds
that are contained not in the womb
but in a secret
line of the thigh
that pierces through the whole body
of her who reigns
over eternity and entices us
to elevate the captivating breast
with the sigh of the sea
and the fluttering of that which
rustles with mysteries
in the silence of the unfading day
that grows dark:
the day that has forgotten to leave
its light at the threshold
of the second being
of newly created forms
in defiance of the Creator,
yet also to His glory,
as to the First Sculptor
of all
that can come into being
millions of years after,
from the inner depths

2. The Helmet or the External in the Internal

The Lord has carved two worlds:
one -- the inner sphere that shelters
the subtlest matter of spiritual insights
of the elements of shapeless flows of vanity
that surrounds us tightly;
the other -- the steel protective shell,
the impenetrable screen for the pernicious rays
of spiritual beauty
that attempts, from the outside, to pierce that which is inside
and, stung by the terror of supersolid void,
to break through to the outside, confusing the External
with the bitter sweetness of secret reveries.

* * *

- Art- OTHERness of POST- Culture

A classical definition of POST-culture I found in the 'Exact Interpretation of the Ecclesiastes of Solomon' by the great Church Father of the 4th century Gregory of Nyssa. Only, he calls it vanity (mataiovth"), according to the spirit of his time and proceeding from ancient Hebrew practicality and utilitarianism: "... vanity is a thoughtless word, a useless thought, a design that cannot be perpetrated, an effort that does not aim at anything, or in general anything that serves to no use".

(In Eccl. Hom. I - PG, t.44, col. 621A)

A vitreous motion is equivalent. We do not bring understanding into the world when we stay. A thing breaks up and elevates. It is posited as a foundation of THAT which has no foundation. For desintegration and positing out are synonyms, and Culture is shut by a curtain.
A new sound is a new sign. A number with a meaning that is not for us. For them. But they are in a prism, and their shine is not our abiding in reason.
Super-abiding, Supra-abiding, Sur-abiding, Sur-step.
Yet outside the step and motion.
Anti-language. Of a new old civilization. Of action.
The alphabet of a new supra-sur-super-religion ?
The foundation. The abiding.

* * *

Only thus ! For without this, there is nothing.
We spirally move out into the cosmos
of the lack of spirituality,
that is the chaos of abandonment !
Terror antiquus !The ancient terror of abandonment !

* * *

The He-Goat of RAUSCHENBERG

(A monogram)

The goat, that takes the heavy burden
Of age, is freed. Behold! His horns
Will shake not to the canon's roaring
Or from a kick af a knee-boot.
His burden is absurd and fearful,
It stuns with gaping emptiness.
The lamp of reason is extinguished
And painted over with thick black.
And, moody, he will bear the strokes
Of vicious and ironic Fate.
As if it were his lot, he takes up
The punishment ordained for us.
But shall we yet escape the anger,
Who weighed the goat with our disgrace,
Of him who promptly promised heaven
To us for good and honest deeds?

(transl. O.Bychkov)

* * *

The junk-yard is a battery of POST-culture.
The energy of the junk-yard nurtures, and will still nurture for a long time,
the creative genius of the POST-artists --
who express the essence of the 20th century.
* * *

ASSEMBLAGE

Unto the surface of a maple leaf
I glue the day of unfulfilled hopes,
having supplied it with a glassholder,
lest I burn the eye that hangs nearby
and that was lost by some sloven
at the fair of autumn cranes.
Just above it, I fix a scrap of the sky
caught among birches,
sparing not a nail for this purpose --
for it can fly away any moment.
Down below, to the secure stalk of the leaf
I attached --
thank goodness, there is a plenty of wire --
the flow of my doubts
that carried me turbulently through life
for forty nine years
and, stepping back two or three metres,
in order to appraise the finished assemblage,
I felt the lack of finishing strokes
necessary for the completion of the face;
But I could not find them,
And I still stand pondering.
* * *

POST-culture, POST-art are a mosaic or, more exactly,
the STROMATA out of the fragments of our departing Culture
and today's anti-cultural civilization.
(POST- is IT, of a neuter, indefinite gender.)
POST- accepts all and negates all.
All in all and nothing in anything !
POST- negates the image, the symbol, and the sign !
POST- negates art, science, and culture !
POST- negates sanctity, religion, and God !
POST- substitutes itself for all that!
POST- is a thing and thingness in their
sacredness, symbolism,and artistry !
POST- is culture-anti-culture made out of the fragments
of the progress of science and technology !

* * *

The sharp rang with blue steel.
The pierced-ness jetted out.
And behold!
Motion into the wall of oblivion.
The shill of desintegration. A split in metal.
Leaves ring silvered-ly.
The rust of swelling creeps in.
No salvation to those.
No Saviour!
The metallic. By halts. Concrete.

* * *

APPARITION

The salty bast was squashed and splintered,
Azaleas in the green.
What did you lack, my good friend Pushkin,
in 1917?

Whom will the Greek embrace with softened
and fluffy legs,
when this our age will tumble down:
a mound of eggs?

The surf will whimper, sick and languid,
in constant lack,
when Saturn will embrace the Moonlight
behind the back.

And not a single evil wonder
will shake the earth
where Judas, guilded in the ages,
is plunged in mirth.

Among the stars the clouded reason
forever lost:
and ther's no mercy or salvation
in culture - POST-.

(transl. O.Bychkov)

* * *

ACTION, or INSTALLATION in the act (Concept 389)

Enter an empty room, carrying a white toilet-bowl on your head.
Slowly walk with your burden diagonally.
Stand facing a corner and concentrate.
Recite two or three verses whichever you remember.
When you feel a slight prickling sensation in the back of your head,
slowly turn around, facing the center of the room.
Make two and a half steps
and crash the toilet-bowl against the floor
with all your might.
A few options are possible.
for situational orientation:
a) low probability: the toilet remains intact.
There come your neighbors living below, the police,
some characters in white smocks, witnesses.
They contemplate. Your are taken away. To be continued in
a different interior.
b) high probability: the toilet breaks into pieces.
See Option A.
c) medium probability: the toilet-bowl breaks into a multitude of
pieces.
No one comes.
Carefully stepping over the snow-white splinters
of intricate and rare shapes,
you slowly come into the hallway
without looking back.
The door is shut
and sealed forever.
Nobody sees anything. For there is nobody around.
A certain number of unique forms
originating from the former toilet-bowl
under the influence of your energy concentration
that is linked up with Earth's gravitational field,
lead their intense life
on the surface of the parquet floor.

* * *

The essence and the main principle of POST-culture is its mosaic character. This is a mosaic composed of everything which has ever existed among the planet's cultures and civilizations throughout its history. The results achieved by all sciences, arts, religions, technology, etc. provide a rich material for this mosaic of probable, disorderly (in a common sense) combinations of pieces of everything with everything and in everything. POST-culture is a colorful kaleidoscope of fragments of values, meanings, and senses that at a certain time somewhere constituted something meaningful or inwardly integral, harmonious and self-sufficient. Now this infinite jumble of objects and information tumbles down upon the fragile mind of a philistine, creating in him the illusion of omniscience and omnipossession.
What is this ? A dead end, a finish, a desintegration? Or a well-manured soil for the shoots of a new superculture ?
POST- is a fertilizer for the future !
But will there be a place for man in that future ?
* * *

POP Art

1. KdW* , or schizoid postmodernism.

The whole world is a KdW, or a SUPERMARKET
On whose endless floors and levels and counters
and in its salesrooms and storehouses and depositories
live the objects
of different nations and generations and ages and
languages materials and forms and colors and prices and packages
which are things themselves
not to mention labels and price tags and checks and
billboards catalogues video and audio advertisements
and all similar trade signs and other things
leading a full life

in all of them there is
a particle of my disintegrated Self
living only inside a video cassette
on the third shelf from the right
seventh row eighth line
fourth floor among
five James Bonds vampires and Caligulas
(parts One and Three only)

and here acquire the basic meaning
the routes
followed meaninglessly (to our consciousness)
and spontaneously
by goods things packages sellers
in the maze
of dead end ways and passages of the SUPERMARKET
from the Outer depth of depositories
to the Inner surfaces and walls and
windows and ceilings and roofs
at last
where the super-dense centre of the things
that has housed and replaced me completely with themselves
and the THING as the supreme symbol of being
soars above the illusory throne
that crowns the boundless world of things and the paradise
of the SUPERMARKET...

but behold the routes...
they conceal the options of innumerable opportunities
as well as the potential for unknown discoveries
of the MAGIC UNIVERSE of things
which are nothing but
the OTHER fugitive I's
of the nonexistent big and major I...
one simple example:
an I-refrigerator took the escalator
from the eighth floor
to an I-vacuum cleaner on the seventh floor and
passing by two departments in the right wing
cast a tender look at a graceful I-bookshelf
and sat comfortably in a soft I-armchair
watching a cool I-video with some
naked I-girl...
and these routes are countless and endless
and they are much richer
than the entirety of space galaxies
and spiritual values...

What else could you dream of !

2. Advertisement

I am a girl from a Pepsi-Cola advertisement
and the gold of my hair
and the passionate glitter of my big eyes
and the lipstick of my half-open mouth
and the even row of my teeth
and my languid standard smile
and that which your immodest glance
has discerned in the cut of my fashionable jean miniskirt
belong to you, my friend
the lover of Pepsi !

3. POP Art in Madrid.

1992. A large retrospective exhibition
of pop art travelled across Europe.
I managed to catch up with it in September
at the Centro de Arte REINA SOFIA in Madrid.

The TWENTIETH CENTURY's expanded profile --
it is flat and smooth like a concave sphere.
And, all in nice wrappings,
rolls by a billow of odds and ends dear to us and sticky
and sweet and bitter and often fearful
as a bogeyman from the childhood
as the echoes of wars
as an atomic mushroom
as drunkenness...

and the world freezes as Hamilton's Fun House
full of the shadows of those who grieve
and those who laugh and those who are sad
and those engaged in drudgery...
here are those who lightheartedly danced boogie-woogie
and those who were in love with Marilyn Monroe's smile
and those who devised formulas of new murders
at a glass of intoxicating drink...

and the finish is sad:
an ugly robot, a product of the evil technological revolution,
carries to the century's threshold
the lifeless body of a beauty
who carelessly gave herself up to the luxury of the world
and the rage of advertisements and the streams of neon lights
and the crazy rhythms of painted days...

the world of bright plastic
is stretched out into strings
the axonometric appearance of parts is clear
its Art-O-Matic1
just as its eroso-matic
is aimed at the female body -
and a car and a beauty have intertwined in sex -
a dreadful interlace,
a requiem to the century..
many strange phantoms
and wild illusions and hallucinative dreams are born -
and a robot with a huge hacksaw will cut up through the walls
a lyrical image for packaging
and mould a beautiful motif into junk...

here is Tom Wesselmann
with an excellent collage
of immodest female bathers in the comfort of apartments
and next to it...

a dreadful monster with a morbid delirium
about the nightmares of wars and horrors of life -
E. Kienholz pushes across the planet a baby carriage
with the stumps of that which once
laughed and thought and enjoyed itself but now -
through the blood and rags of desintegrated flesh
the devil's mask
laughs from the top of the century's rusty penis...

everything here is just as in Cronique's Paris-dorado
some crowds of some soldiers
trample down and thrust through and vitrify
through across in and on
fragments deeds immortal works
of Chagall Matisse van Gogh Leger
Manet Picasso and Cezanne and Braque and many
others dear to all for a long time
who have now become the classics
among the masters of the never-aging brush...

here are Cola and Dollar
and warm bedrooms
and the standard languid whims of women...
and all this bright and boiling hive
is crowned by the Everest-high
doubled or tripled or increased tenfold
with the aid of the miracle reproductive machine
of Leonardo-Warhol
having stuck on the way from The Last Supper
in things and bodies and labels
and hundreds of other unintelligible but necessary objects
and still unable by any means to arrive to heaven
sad and strict
colossal Jesus !

* * *
The meaning of abandonment is the abandonment of meaning.
The estrangement from being.
* * *

Motion into the void of space --
the POST-motion.
A unidirectionality of way
from the center of being into nothing.
Some time ago
the Architect
erected all from nothing.
* * *

JANNIS KOUNELLIS

An exhibition in Moscow.
July 1991.

"I gotta look at all this hanging
on the walls for the whole day.
Neither beauty, nor shape...
I wish I were given milk for this hazardous job..."
- A watchwoman in the exhibition hall.

Steel rattle upon parquet.
Wagons' rumble. Darkness erupted.
The grey world and the black artist -
Steel and coal.
Morphine. Slag.
Installation. Cosummation. Move-aside.
From what ?
The re-mission of everything!
Out of nothing.

The grey dark is like urulak!
Ur is the foundation, the base, the ground for it.
Ur - urbana - urbis - urs.
Coal - corner - collapsed.
Coal' black - city's black.
The city's like a vampire.
Desintegrating into a nothing.
Chtonos. Chtonos. Chtonos. Dark!

The world cracked. The dirty atom.
Canvas without a sack - the longing of ancient Greece.
There is no Hellas, there are no men.
All have been made into strumpets.

Dirty rags on a rack...
Steel is preserved from decay for the ages to come!
Out of an ancient amphora --
the ugliness of a sack:
for the ages to come!
The lamination of steel - red-hot.
The concentration of fire.
The world is cut up into lumberwood.
It smells of smoke: the spirit of the earth.
Coal is black.
All are black!
The oval gapes: steel and coal --
outright! Right!

* * *

Does a fish need a bicycle ?

An unposted letter to Rudi Fuchs,
who wrote much about Kounellis.
See "Tvorchestvo" N 7, 1991,
The Russian Catalogue of Kounellis etc.

Moscow, August 16, 1991.

Dear Rudi,
You are, of course, a brilliant guy and right about everything. For the 46 metal shelves with cinder spots on the wall are a romantic alloy of neo-Pythagoreanism with a mystical meditation of a steelworker fried in a self-made pan in the 9th circle of hell. OLIO !
You might already be close to the truth about fire invented by Hephaestus and extinguished in Kounellis' fireplace, the "lonely altar" of an unrestrained dreamer. Bravo ! Bravissimo !
And the steel plates with the mystical number 30 are naturally a new revelation of Andrei Rublev's Trinity at the supercomputer level of the 20th century's exquisite romanticists. This is a new symbolism which neither the French nor Russian classical symbolists
could even dream about. "Art is homeless", and art criticism is shameless !
This is the "bliss, magic, mystery, sorrow, past, purity, greatness, future, spirituality, and order(wow!) of a dirty sack stretched on a rusty rack. He who does not feel this mysticism of Kounellis is a plebeian !
Hope to meet you, dear Rudi, in the Zagorsk (now and forever the Sergiyev Posad) cafeteria that you visited on Easter Sunday and liked so much.
I think there would be no Yannis without you. So, long live the 42 trains around the Gothic pillars !
Truly yours,
Victor Bychkov

P.S. It is pleasant to read you. It's just like music, a music of POST- ! (It is hard to explain in a nutshell the meaning of POST-. Read my POST-Adaequations with attention... Anyway, it is not that current of modern culture and the way of thinking known as postmodernism in the West or, more precisely, not only postmodernism but also something much broader. So neither you nor Kounellis should feel hurt by my including you in this POST-category. In my view, it is not negative at all). Frankly speaking, all this sweet talk only hampers the grasping of such a serious phenomenon of modern POST-culture as Kounellis. It is clear that your job is to create an image, attract more people to his exhibitions, enlist sponsors' support, etc. Alas, this is well-known, clear, and normal in the realm of quasi-artistic business. But here, too, one should know when to stop and proceed from artefacts themselves at least onewhere, and not to cling to the biographic peculiarities of the artist. Kounellis' works are as close to antiquity, Byzantine tradition, or Orthodox Christian spirituality as a TV to an Egyptian pyramid. The key to understanding this phenomenon is not in Western and Eastern national traditional spiritual cultures but in the POST-aesthetics of POST-culture. For it is originally and in principle extra-national, extra-traditional, extra-spiritual, and extra-symbolic (in any case, in the traditional interpretation of all those notions). It is OTHER and requires a radically OTHER approach and OTHER description ! And if you do need ancient archetypes, look for them in neolithic times, not in Andrei Rublev. Read our poet of the early 20th century Sasha Cherny ! Excuse my Russian harshness and straightforwardness. Bye !

V. B.

* * *

POST-art is struggling in an excruciating quest. It has broken free (completely) from art in its classical sense. It is a product of OTHER realities, perhaps, a belch of technological civilization or a signal of other worlds and other levels of life. It is, indeed, something radically OTHER than the art of human Culture over the last two or three thousand years, in any case, of the Mediterranean-European region. Its self-awareness is old-fashioned; and it thinks in traditional categories - nostalgia for the traditional Spirit and spirituality. They are non-existent in POST-art, but the self-consciousness of POST- does not want to acknowledge this and imposes on it what it does not and cannot have. Hence follows the attachment to Eastern religions (as the ones that are least clear to us), ancient cults, etc. The key to POST-, however, is not in them but in our nuclear-space-computer epoch.

YIN and YANG - that's not the point !
POST- is a requiem for Culture !
It was foreseen by Spengler and other clairvoyants
of the recent past.
POST- is a tragedy of Culture, a tragedy of mankind,
a tragedy of humanism, a tragedy of Personality.
POST- is extrapersonal but, alas,
not supra-personal !
It is pre-personal. Collectivist.
It is gregarious rather than conciliarist.
POST- is archprimitive;
POST- is superintellectual.
POST- knows no love
knows no faith,
knows no hope.
POST- is alien to conscience.
It is extra-ethical and
extra-aesthetic.
It is an extra-cultural formation as yet
disguised as Culture.
POST- is PRE- !
Pre-decessor of that which is now unknown to us, sinners.
Foreshadowing of the NEW,
that is alien, unintelligible, fearsome
for us, the people of departing Culture.
Pre-commencement
of a new level of consciousness.
God knows what kind of consciousness. Radically OTHER.
Of consciousness-action-activity-mystery.
Mystery?
The avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century
drew the line under Culture.
POST- is a new page,
the beginning of a new chapter
in the book of the FUTURE
that is not accessible to us,
that is unread by us.
POST- is the aesthetics, philosophy, and religion
of the budetliane* who were already discerned
at the beginning of this century.

POST- !

* * *

NARCISSIST POSTMODERNISM

1. Performance.
We stood still on the Thames embankment near the ancient Tower walls.
I was in an immaculate evening jacket of fine English fabric; he,
in all his beauty of a strong
sun-tanned and no longer
young body.
And then
the famous Tower Bridge
faded and dissolved in the mist.
Who can now be surprised at, and attracted by its once powerful
towers with the flying tracery of arrowlike walkways?
The once dismal and awe-inspiring Tower
has finally sunk into the ground to its roofs,overgrown with weeds,
its toy-like royal guards have just withered and drooped,
ashamed of their clownish masquerade,
before the greatness and beauty of our modest
but majestic figures standing nonchalantly
in the rays of the rising sun.
We are the pride and beauty of ancient Britannia!
We are the quintessence of nation!
We are the crown and foundation of civilization!
We are the center of the universe!
Undivided attention of all human beings who can see
is riveted to us.
And we deserve all this!
We know we are
the best of humankind,
culture, and civilization!
And we accumulate all being in ourselves with dignity!
Contemplate our standing together on the Thames embankment
by the walls of the once great Tower now ashamed of its paltriness,
and you will be happy!
As we are happy in our self-contemplation.
For there is nothing more beautiful than contemplating oneself's
standing proudly on the bank of the dirty
but still powerful Thames!

2. Gilbert & George.

WE, Gilbert & George, are the whole world.
WE are almost like twins,
the glasses making the only difference.
WE are in unity.
Here WE stand in yellow
under the red-and-yellow cross
on which the face of the world -
our youth - is crucified.
It is no more, only WE are
in the entire Universe.
Here WE sit in red next
to OURSELVES standing in yellow.
WE are the only reality of being
WE are strict and concentrated.
WE look at you who are not.
WE are everywhere. See! You who cannot see!
Here WE are in dark-blue, lying at ease before
the eyes of eternity,
for only it deserves to enjoy
the contemplation of that which it has become
having embodied itself in US.
Gilbert & George,
WE are beautiful, and our red faces
with green lips are engraved forever
into the foliage of being that is not.

Only WE are,
and WE are never tired of admiring ourselves,
extolled and perpetuated in all forms
with our own hands, for there are no others.
WE, Gilbert & George!

* * *

A CHAMBER ASSEMBLAGE

999 various objects forming a complex relief are attached to a 50x100-cm plastic board. In the centre is the head of a big celluloid doll hairless but with a moustache. Around it are intricate designs made of clock cogwheels, paper clips, bones of small animals and fish, dried mushrooms, plants, insects; then parts of toys - remnants of the child's world: nails, screws, bolts, four bras of differenr colors and sizes, a minislip, a few pornographic photos from latest magazines for children, knives, forks, a pair of scissors, one mummified Indian, a rusty water tap, a glass and a beer mug, small parts of no one knows what, an almost full deck of cards less one ace, buttons from military uniforms and trenchcoats of all times and peoples, a worn-down left shoe without a lace, an audio cassette, a 'Fanta' bottle with a label, a scrap of a Pravda issue with labels of 'Stolichnaya' vodka, a packet of 'Troika' cigarettes. Volumes from collected works of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao - one of each - are nailed to the board. A hammer, a sickle, and a star hang down on a wire under the board. In the top left corner is a photo of a famous poster from the Kuban power plant: "The Kuban waters flow where the Bolsheviks go!" On the right, a white diagonal inscription on red calico: "Communism is inevitable!"

An art critic's explanatory summary on the wall next to the board:
"The artist worked on the assemblage for three years. One can feel the profoundly thought-out semantic ties between the objects, i.e., the semantics of the assemblage, not to mention its supercomplex syntax. It is immaculate, its finesse striking. Infinite is the polysemy of each element, for it is determined by the infinite number of semantic ties with other elements, separate groups of elements, and composition as a whole. The artist deeply feels the inner essence of every object and harmonizes all of them in a powerful polyphonic fresco glorifying the past, the present, and the future of our people and humankind as a whole".

* * *

While Cezanne saw the painting essence of a teacup with his artist's vision and sought to express it by purely pictorial means on canvas, a contemporary POST-artist does not trouble himself with this. He shifts the job on to the spectator, invites him to cooperate by offering him the cup in the original without even bothering to grow it with hair as once Meret Oppenheim.
He who hath eyes to see, let him see!

* * *

A HAPPENING

Seven Plus One with fire extinguishers
walk along the Seine embankment
toward a group of girls in white cloaks,
half-naked, with lilies in their hands;
a golden transparent vellum
rising over them.
Seven Plus One measure out their pace,
and even the rank;
they are in red.
The girls laugh joyfully,
throwing flowers at the red.
Plus One falls down,
his head splitting like a watermelon;
champagne splashes
reach the first girl,
and she strips down in ecstasy,
picks up Plus One's fire extinguisher,
and, laughing cheerfully,
aims it at her friends.
Black foam is swirling
all over the white cloaks.
All the girls strip down,
exposing their golden bodies
to the jet with squeal and laughter.
Two of the audience come out with newspapers
and begin to wipe the laughing girls
that try to beat them off.
Another naked spectator appears
and,encouraged by the cheering crowd,
attempts to take possession of the first girl.
She beats down the erection of his penis
with the jet of black foam,
and he disappears in the crowd,
accompanied by cheerful laughter,
whistling, and whooping.
The Seven come up, measuring out their pace,
lifting their fire extinguishers.
Sparkling golden jets
gush at the crowd
many people's clothes catch fire,
panic spreads.
The spectators run to the girls,
trying to hide among them,
the latter brush off the burning
with mischievous grimaces
and point them to the Seine.
The spectators jump into the salutory water of the river
and for some reason drown.
The Seven lift Plus One
and walk away, measuring out their pace.
The girls leave their cloaks behind
and run to a city bus
with cheerful jokes.
The embankment becomes deserted.
The golden vellum
slowly comes down on the dirty asphalt.

* * *

If you think I have been mocking you,
you are completely wrong.
The innermost meaning of POST-culture is
that it is very serious. It is not a game but a performance!
All things that are nonsensical, funny, absurd, and even
simply ridiculous from a philistine's point of view,
are performed here in the earnest
with full concentration of all physical
and psychic powers.
A participant in any POST-art action
feels almost like a mystagogue.
Concentration and mysterious nature are
POST-culture's spiritual and psychic foundation.
Believe it or check it out.

* * *

A FEW PARTLY FINAL STROKES

The boomerang has not come back, and the string burst sharply
of a harp tuned to go out of itself at the moment alpha.
When the stealthy archer will release the bowstring on the clock
of suffering,
a lilac lightning will pierce the city's quiet,
and stone hearts will abandon their niches
and merge with the united orchestra of the Universe,
adding to it their muffled moans.

The black tulip of astral joy will grow
Through pain and despair and its red heart
will awaken in us a thirst for intelligible life
as a gift of divine grace.

The golden shine of glory
will descend upon the shapeless souls
that stir in ugly bodies
unconscious of the inner eidos
of primordial being
and devoid of the light of God's name.
There will be no time and no space -
only an ocean of bliss
in an impregnable shine of eternity.

* * *

P. S. Here we have raised some questions and outlined some issues, sometimes in an ironic form, but have given no direct answers, because even the very reality of culture-civilization of this transitional (I only wish I knew to what) century neither gives nor even implies them. POST-adaequations record associative moves, semantic or image-based symbolic fields emerging in connection with, around, or in contact with the phenomena of modern artistic-quasi-and-anti-artistic culture-POST-culture (or simply POST-) and what immediately precedes it.

* * *

- THE LUDWIG MUSEUM IN COLOGNE

The waves of the 20th century have frozen
in amazement before the Cologne Cathedral
having thrown on its steps all
that has been created
by this great and tragic
(perhaps the greatest and the most tragic)
CENTURY of human Culture,
its last century
and the first century of POST- !

1. We cannot manage here without an alphabetic list
of artists, because
certificates and catalogues
are the foundation of ALL in the 20th century:

de Andrea John
Arman
Arp Hans
Bacon Francis
Barlach Ernst
Baselitz Georg
Baumeister Willi
Beckmann Max
Beuys Joseph
Blake Peter
Braque Georges
Chagall Marc
Chamberlain John
de Chirico Giorgio
Collvill Alex
Cornell Joseph
Dali Salvador
Delvaux Paul
Dine Jim
Dix Otto
Dubuffet Jean
Duchamp Marcel
Duchamp-Villon Raymond
Ernst Max
Estes Richard
Exter Alexandra
Feininger Lyonel
Fontano Lucio
Freundlich Otto
Gertsch Franz
Giacometti Alberto
Gontscharowa Natalia
Gris Juan
Guttuso Renato
Hamilton Richard
Hanson Duane
Hartung Hans
Heckel Erich
Höckelmann Antonius
Hoerle Heinrich
Hofer Carl
Immendorf Jörg
Indiana Robert
Jawlensky von Alexej
Johns Jasper
Jones Allan
Judd Donald
Kandinsky Wassily
Kiefer Anselm
Kienholz Edward
Kirchner Ernst
Klee Paul
Klein Yves
Kokoschka Oskar
Kupka Frantischek
de Kooning Willem
Larionow Michail
Laurens Henri
Leger Fernand
Lehmbruck Wilhelm
Le Witt Sol
Lichtenstein Roy
Lindner Richard
Louis Morris
Lüpertz Markus
Macke August
Magritte Rene
Malewitsch Kasimir
Marc Franc
Marcs Gerhard
Mataré Ewald
Matisse Henri
Mense Carlo
Miro Joan
Modernsohn-Becker Paula
Mogoly-Nagy Laszlo
Mondrian Piet
Morley Malcolm
Motherwell Robert
Müller Otto
Nay Ernst Wilhelm
Nevelson Louise
Newman Barnett
Nolde Emil
Oldenburg Claes
Palermo Blinky
Pechstein Max
Penck A.R.
Pevsner Antoine
Picabia Fransis
Picasso Pablo
Polke Sigmar
Pollock Jackson
Popowa Ljubow
Reiner Arnulf
Rauschenberg Robert
Richter Gerhard
Riopelle Jean-Paul
Rodtschenko Alexander
Rosenquist James
Rotella Mimmo
Rothko Mark
Savinio Alberto
Scherer Herrmann
Schlemmer Oskar
Schmidt-Rottluff Karl
Schultze Bernard
Schwitters Kurt
Segal George
Seiwert Franz-Wilhelm
Serra Richard
Severeni Gino
Sironi Mario
Soulages Pierre
Spoerri Daniel
Stella Frank
Suetin Nikolai
Tapies Antoni
Tinguely Jean
Warhol Andy
Wesselmann Tom
Wols

2. The soldiers are tired of fighting (i.e., writing)...
Oh, what a galaxy of worthies!
It looks as if I have missed out a few.
Let the management of the Museum correct and
amend the list in the notes sometime in the future.

3. ... once
on the banks of the great Rhine
a mossy stone from an ancient legend
blossomed forth with a wonderful garland of bright flowers
and the gold of old Rhine

faded
and all turned
into grey and hardly visible ashes
and waves broke up and froze at the spot
where a mad architect later
flung up into the sky the bulk
of Gothic foam and lacework
of the sparkling unworldly splashes
of ungraspable and strange harmonies...

4. ... and now...
skateboards
ran into a Cathedral wall, squealing and gnashing -
the ancient Roman scowled
at a sweaty Motor-cyclist:
"How are you doing
in your electronic box with an empty beer can
at the spot where once the mighty Phallus
served as a token of carefree life?

Have not your crops dried out
in hundreds and thousands of years,
oh, the lancer of the 20th century?"

Scornfully
Rosenquist looked at him from under the brows
and with a swing of his arm projected onto the wall
an apparition of supra-cosmic life...
all in electronic patterns
and synthetic colours that scare the soul
and cry out in sorrow...

5. A few concrete things

MARK ROTHKO

infinitely
diverse vibrations
of color planes
lead into the depths
of supra-sensory sounds...
the longer the contemplation,
the harder the return
to the realities of this world...

TOM WESSELMANN

... one cannot say that they are
unpleasant to the eye
that has penetrated immodestly
into the bathrooms of the maidens
who have slipped off the covers
of blatant magazines that trade
sex for eyes...
but in the bathrooms they wash off
sticky and bawdy glances
from their young bodies
and souls as well, that are, perhaps, comfortable
only here,
among clean and well-made objects
and water jets
that clean the beauty of young bodies off
the makeup of their hard diurnal vigils...

the water jets run gently
and the maiden's body is sunk in pleasure...

A ROLL

Öyvid Fahlström. Roulette. 1966.

this century's culture is
a palimpsest,
or a roll,
or a puff-pastry pie...

a bright layer of traffic has opened
against the dark background of being
a Chinese boat is sliding
along the highways of bad luck

it's not a boat but a junk
and in it above the yellow water
a colourless face of either a poet
or a young Gipsy woman

the ravishing breasts
fly like cannonballs sowing fear
through the boudoirs of modest ladies
with the brand of vice on their lips


their brain relishes one revery
one but colourful motif
as a yellow or black phallus
pierces their parlour verse

and a stallion of a beautiful colour
covered with a cloth of piety
and tearing its reins
is led up to the back steps

the apparition of a supple young maiden
rushes off upon him
and neither Cola nor spring water
will cool off her passion

she will put out many a candle
in the dark of a tropical night
her mustang gallops fearlessly
and neighs in wild joy

the orangutan has left the tree
where he ate bananas
and pondered over the meaninglessness of life
amongst the wilderness of the jungle

scorning the useless world of creation
he rushes into the depths of cosmos
in order to obtain upon his return
a medal on to his skin

a kiss from the immortal Marilyn
duplicated millions of times
and a can of beer and of course
Oldenburg's toilet-bowl
(inflatable)

PENK A. R.

it is strange and, of course, somewhat unusual
for us to read about the 20th century's dramas in a ciphertext
in Mesolithic and Neolithic petroglyphs...
as though the Standards, the Models, the Pictures, and the Images of the world
of THAT man
regain their being in flesh and body,
in the signs and symbols of this difficult century
through the depth of ages and consciousnesses and dreams
and reveries and long wanderings about the jungle
of disintegrated truths...

or ? ... oh, Lord !
again a Stone Age (the 21st ? in our chronology)
is on the threshold again
and boils our blood again
and frazzles our nerves again
and shoots a pictogram like a stone arrow
into a benighted soul
and a funny little man
joyfully dances again
in his ritual magic dance

before reviving to racket and screams and shouts
his cannibalistic aesthetic taste again
on the remnantsof the deceased Culture and starting to the jolly crunch
of the cracking bones
of the 20th century's intellectual
a new cycle of the samsara
of reviving of Culture, great
but extremely long in its coming-to-be ?
Ars longa !

6. The Ludwig Museum is a strange but logical flow of Cuture into POST-... As though the classics of the last century of Culture gathered there (in fact the classics of Culture since ancient times, because the same building also hosts the Wallraff-Richartz Museum of classical art from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century, and the Romano-Germanic Museum is only 50 yards away in the same square) wish bon voyage to those who succeed them in time but along OTHERpaths and in unknown directions...

Points of contact are still clearly visible here:
local, formal, lexical sources, influences, and effects...
The newcomers still look back at their forerunners - the new frightens
but also attracts inexorably -
not backwards but forwards, in all aspirations, all thoughts,
all intentions...
Farewell ! Remember us kindly
if we vanish without a trace into the OTHER...
For someone must fill the Abysses...
to block embrasures with their bodies...
make passages through mine fields and swamps...

7. At the Brandenburg Gate
endless and eternal questions of BEING are asked
and they have to be answered
by shouting and mumbling and inarticulate wailing
and hitting the head against the mighty stone pillars...

the stone is indifferent to your sufferings
and groanings and desperate consciousness,
oh, miserable and sinful man that has gone astray!

and the steel surfaces are covered with perspiration,
for the imploring cry burns through the centuries,
yet no one can hear them on newspaper streets
and robots in tuxedos hurry to a blue bistro...

what was once called ether condenses
and someone forces his way through putty to the Light,
but his efforts are vain...

everything gets stuck and vitrifies...

8. the never-ending ringing!

9. A simulacrum and a plaster cast
see me out and meet me
at the entrance
and I can no longer recognize
who is who...
in this strange
and joyous world...

* * *

10. The Ludwig Museum - 94.

The museum's exhibitions constantly change, and Ludwig's collection is huge. There is much to show and to substitute. Here are some new things and new impressions of this year.

Nam June Paik. Brandenburger Tor. 1992.

Right at the entrance there is a large three-dimensional video installation
composed of a multitude of TV sets (of a multiscreen type). When I wrote paragraph #7 of these adaequations, I, naturally, did not know that a Korean Nam had already made something close to my associations. Close but not quite...
It is a real colourful and multicolour kaleidoscope of life that in a multitude of changing frames - rushes, glimmers, flashes, smiles, jumps, runs, dances, competes, cries, and rages, jumping out of itself and out of the screens and laughs at the stupid viewer who tries to follow all the windings of its intricate patterns...
The moment does not stop, and nobody knows how many and what kind of frames (large, small, colour, black-and-white, bright, pale, faded, etc.) will flash before us to the last still...
All life is frames, frames, frames...
A singer. A violinist. A soccer player. A bunch of lilies. Strontium. The sharp.
Inserted. In violet. An addition to the background. A girl on a beach...
The endless flashing of colour spots.
At the Brandenburg Gate...
This year Russian vendors of Soviet military insignia and matryoshka dolls still flok there... Here go the double-deckers... And the limes on Unter den Linden blossomed for the whole summer... But in Cologne they knew nothing about this...

Anselm Kiefer's paints have wings,
and wings are like mountains,
for the mountains of paints are on the surface
of shuddering consciousness when
the subterranean water currents exert themselves,
raging as though in veins
in the superpastose canyons
of black-and-brown-and-grey ignorance
of something very important and clear
to all but us, humans...
yet something takes shape and appears dimly
and gleams through somehow
when you grope your way around
the canvas in an unknown dimension,
and meanings are squeezed out
of the tubes...
of course, I do not object... but the tubes
are too big
though the smell of oil has always
brought me joy...

... but Il'ja Kabakow drives me out of my wits with his total installation entitled
An Unhanged Painting. A primitively painted poster depicting the Abramtsevo Museum stands on the floor, around it on the walls are pseudoreviews and judgements (conceptual !) explaining why the "painting" does not hang on the wall and wondering whether it is worth hanging its creator or that can wait a little... Profanation and global provocation, says V.Bychkov, puncturing it with his finger, because today we have only paper nails. How can great people like Kabakow be hanged on such nails on metal walls in poorly heated German museums of the totalitarian epoch of Stalinism that was especially deeply rooted in Cologne between 1982 and 1992, though no one has ever noticed that...
No, gentlemen of the jury, the referendum confirms that only straw nails befit great paintings. But where can we get them ?... The last ones were eaten by Chagall's green cow as far back as last century... So Ilja Kabakow will remain in Cologne forever standing up...

11. Steel threads reach out to the Cathedral,
but not of thoughts or spiritual currents
but simply binding ropes -
the ancient masterpiece is under restoration;
and Oldenburg attached to them big cardboard
figures of men, and the wind dangles them
above the street; they are pedestrians
hurrying along their life path -
a Maestro unknown to us lures them towards the Pit
by pulling the ropes -
it is jolly to jump: from the Museum to the Cathedral
and further into an unknown land...

the crowded square is noisy
with its unconcerned and joyous hubbub and
multilingual humming...

* * *

- MMK: MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST.
Frankfurt / Main.

(Deutsche Übersetzung: Eugen Kollessow)

Die Eröffnungszeremonie des Museums für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main erlebte ich nach einer vierwöchigen Pilgerfahrt in die Klöster von Serbien und Makedonien mit ihren Meisterwerken des byzantinisch-slawischen Mittelalters, in die Kunstgalerien und Museen von Budapest, Wien und München mit ihren reichen Sammlungen alter und nicht nur alter Meister. Ich hatte Glück: in Wien konnte ich eine grosse Segantini-Retrospektive und in München eine wunderschöne Chagall-Ausstellung sehen, das Lenbach-haus mit "Dem Blauen Reiter" und die Staatsgalerie der Modernen Kunst besuchen; auch Skopje und Budapest eröffneten mir die Türen ihrer schönen Museen der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Und zum Schluss, als letzter Akkord sozusagen, begab ich mich nach Frankfurt und entdeckte dort das MMK.

Ich will mich hier nicht anstellen, als wäre mir die moderne Kunst neu, obwohl ich als Forscher ganz anderer Kulturgebiete gelte. Trotz der einst gewählten Fachrichtung habe ich mich schon seit den 60er Jahren, das heisst, seit der Zeit meines Studiums für die moderne Kunst interessiert. Im Dezember 1966 habe ich im Jugendklub "Rodina" einen Vortrag über Wassily Kandinsky gehalten, dem 100. Geburstag dieses grossen Malers und Kunsttheoretikers gewidmet.

Damals war aber die moderne Kunst als solche für uns in Russland kaum zugänglich (und blieb es auch bis zum Ende der 80er Jahre). Auslandsreisen waren selten und dauerten nicht lange, für die moderne Kunst hatte man kaum Zeit und freute sich schon, wenn man Klassik zu sehen bekam. Zu Hause, in Sowjetrussland, galten alle Formen und Richtungen der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts - außer dem "Realismus" - als "dekadent", ideologisch gefährlich und wurden allseitig verpöhnt, wie seinerzeit in Hitlerdeutschland.

Sogar Fachleute - die Kunsthistoriker und die Künstler - konnten sich mit der modernen Kunst meistens nur mit Hilfe der wenigen Büchern, Alben und Dias bekanntmachen, die jemand aus dem Ausland mitbrachte. Von systematischen Forschungen über diese Kunst, geschweige im Original, war gar keine Rede, was die Wahrnehmung der modernen Kunst (wie jeder Kunst überhaupt), ihr Miterleben natürlich nicht erleichterte. Hierin bestand die größte Schwäche des damaligen rußischen Subjektes der modernen Kunst, sei es ein Künstler oder ein Theoretiker, - und seine Besonderheit, die, aus seiner besonderen sozialen Daseinsbedingungen resultierend, sich objektiv immer mehr zu einer besonderen Position entwickelte. Daher ist der Blick aus Rußland auf die moderne westliche Kunst ein besonderer Blick.

Fast 70 Jahre lang entwickelten wir uns (wenn überhaupt - eher versuchten wir, geistig und kulturell nicht zu vergammeln) unter dem schweren Druck der totalitären Ideologie, fast isoliert von dem Hauptstrom der industriellen und postindustriellen Kultur, irgendwo abseits von den sich rasch entwickelnden Formen, Mitteln, Grundsätzen und der Logik des modernen künstlerischen und ästhetischen Denkens. Deswegen betrachten wir die Artefakte der heutigen westlichen Zivilisation in mancher Hinsicht (in ihrer Gesamtheit) als Außenseiter, das heißt, anders als die Angehörigen des Milieus, die kulturhistorische Herkunft und die logische Entwicklung dieser Artefakte konsequent nachverfolgen konnten.

Daraus ergibt sich erstens unser "Minderwertigkeitskomplex" gegenüber der modernen Art-Bewegung: wir wollen uns ultramodern oder wenigstens moderner als westliche Vertreter dieser Bewegung zeigen. Zweitens aber behalten wir stets unser besonderes Auge, wir beobachten diese Bewegung als Fremde, als "verfremdete Rußen" aus einer Entfernung also, die innerhalb dieses Phänomens lebenden westlichen Forscher nicht kennen: nur selten können sie sich von den ein mehr oder weniger stabiles konventionelles Feld der modernen Artproduktion bildenden Artefakten wirklich distanzieren. Ohne diese Distanzierung aber ist eine objektive Einschätzung dieser Artefakte kaum möglich. Den meisten von uns, in Rußland lebenden, ist diese Konvention noch nicht eigen geworden; auf der Ebene der "Ratio" können wir sie erkennen und anerkennen, aber sie muß noch auf anderen, viel tieferen Bewußtseinsebenen (Unterbewußtsein, Außer-Bewußtsein, Über-Bewußtsein usw.) an-ge-eignet werden, und man braucht viel Mühe und Zeit, um sich in diese Phänomene einzuleben...

Manche unserer Künstler, besonders die jüngsten und die heißblütigsten, würden mich hier sicher heftig angreifen: Wieso denn? Wieso sind wir hier fremd? Wir haben doch dies alles schon hinter uns! Wir hatten auch unsere Avantgarde, unseren Modernismus, unser Underground usw. usw. Ja, ja, natürlich. Wir haben dies und jenes schon hinter uns, wir haben auch viel erlebt. Aber das war eben u n s e r e Avantgarde, u n s e r Modernismus und u n s e r eigener Underground, die sehr (wenn nicht ganz) anders waren als die jeweiligen Art-Bewegungen der postindustriellen Gesellschaft. Daher ist auch der Blick aus Rußland anders, wir sehen uns diese Entwicklungen aus u n s e r e r, einer besonderen Sicht, an - in mancher Hinsicht jedenfalls.

Kommen wir jedoch zum MMK zurück. Sogar einem alten Hasen aus Rußland, der in den letzten Jahren endlich viel von der modernen Kunst auch im Original zu sehen bekam - im Pompidou-Centre zum Beispiel, oder im Kölner Ludwig-Museum, oder in anderen Museen und Ausstellungen in Deutschland, Frankreich, England, Belgien und - Gott sei Dank! - sogar in Moskau, unserem alten Zuhause, - sogar ihm kommt das MMK als ein ausserordentliches Phänomen, ein einmaliger semantischer Kern in der Welt der modernen Kultur, als ein essentieller Mittelpunkt dieser Kultur vor. Kein Wunder, daß mich dieses MMK-Erlebnis, dieser Eindruck von ihm als eine unnachahmliche Ganzheit (da seine Architektonik absichtlich im Geiste der ausgestellten Werke und in organischer Einheit mit ihnen gedacht, geplant und stofflich gestaltet wurde) nach meiner konzentrierten Pilgerfahrt in die europäische Klassik von dem antiken Heraklea in Makedonien bis Chagall, Kandinsky und Klee in München 1991 noch tiefer beeindruckte. Aber auch im Sommer 1992, als ich endlich ruhig und bedacht, ohne Führungshektik im Frankfurter Museum arbeiten konnte, wurde dieser Eindruck nur noch tiefer und stärker.

Anfangs ahnte ich nur, jetzt aber bin ich überzeugt, daß das MMK als ein konzentriertes, lebendes und sich entwickelndes Phänomen der heutigen (oder eher der zukünftigen) Kultur, als ihr lebendiges Ursymbol prinzipiell, essentiell und notwendig ANDERS ist als die gesamte vorherige Kunst der Welt oder wenigstens des Nahost-, Mittelmeer- und Europaraumes seit den Zeiten Sumers, Babylons und Altägyptens.

Ungefähr seit der Mitte useres Jahrhunderts erlebt die Kunst, die Art-Kultur (und die KULTUR im allgemeinen, wenn wir etwas weiter ausholen) einen grundsätzlich neuen Durchbruch oder Wandel, und dieser Wandel ist bedeutender als alles, was der Kunstkultur in den letzten drei bis fünf Jahrtausenden zugestoßen ist.

Dieses ANDERSsein ist schon (jedenfalls seit der Pop-Art-Zeit) deutlich erkennbar, wird aber immer noch kaum verstanden und läßt sich nur schwer in Kategorien der traditionellen Wissenschaft beschreiben. Denn es besteht eigentlich nicht in der Form, die zwar auch anders geworden, trotzdem aber begreiflich und beschreibbar geblieben ist, sondern vielmehr in dem grundsätzlich ANDEREN Geist, Sinn oder Inhalt (wenn sich diese Begriffe der traditionellen Ästhetik an dieses wirklich ANDERSartiges Phänomen überhaupt noch anwenden laßen) dieser Kunst-Unkunst-Kultur-Unkultur, kurz, dieses Art-Seins oder Art-ANDERSseins. Das Letztere ist übrigens wohl das Treffendste: Art-ANDERSsein.

* * *

Providencia. Der Dom.

MMK
SELBST
DIE FORM
DIESES MUSEUMS
IST EINZIGARTIG
- EIN BOOT? EIN
RAUMSCHIFF? EIN BÜGEL -
EISEN? - SIE VERLEIHT DER ALTEN
STADT FRANKFURT MIT IHREN FACHWERKBAUTEN
AM RÖMERPLATZ, IHREN ZEITLOSEN DENKMÄLERN AUS
GRÜNPATINIERTER BRONZE UND IHREN TADELLOS FRISIERTEN
ALTEN DAMEN, DIE SO ANSTÄNDIG UND RUHIG AUF DEN BÄNKEN VOR DEM
ALTEN RATHAUS SITZEN, EINE NEUE, EINE ANDERE DIMENSION, EINEN ANDEREN
PULS, ANDERE DASEINSMUSTER, DIE KEINEN NAMEN HABEN, KEINE ADÄQUATE
BESCHREIBUNG FINDEN UND KEIN VERSTÄNDNIS SUCHEN: DIE ALTE KULTUR WEISS
DAFÜR KEINE SYMBOLE MEHR, DAS ALTE WERT- (ODER WELT- ?) SYSTEM VERSAGT,
UND DER ALTE MENSCH, SEIN IMMER NOCH ALTES GEMÜT, SEIN GEIST
FÜHLEN SICH DADURCH ANGEZOGEN UND ERSCHRECKT.

E n d e wir stehen wir gehen macht Ruhe marmorne Splitter sind Frass für das Fest Freunde sind weiß aus dem Gipsmehl sind sie entstanden aber noch ungeformt ohne Wasser und das Wasser i s t a l l e

N u r ein Oval wo der Mund hingehört L u f t Luft mehr Luft lieber Gott gib mir Freiheit G i b u n s nach uns die Sintflut vielleicht irgendwann wenn nicht heute u n d h e u t e g i b u n s etwas Ruhe und Stille und Kräfte zu warten

Bill Viola.
Eine Video-Klang-Installation

Ein Ahornblatt klebt am nassen Asphalt; ein Wassertropfen
schimmert darauf, zitternd wie eine Träne
// Zuck - Zack - Raschel
- Ruschel - Tumba - Tumba - Tumba - Peng! //

Eine goldene Ähre, mit allen Säften der Sonne und Erde
durchtränkt, hebt ihren Kopf immer höher und wartet auf die Sonne
// Klick - Klack - Wumm - Brumm - Ding - Dang - Kreisch - Kreisch - Kreisch - Uhuhuhu - Sssssst! //

Auf der Wiese ruhende Schafe lassen sich nicht vom Zeitalter
der Raumforschungen stören. Nur Video-Clips leuchten auf und ab
in ihren Augen: sie bleiben hier, in ihrem Bergparadies
// Doing -Spoing - Schmatz - Quietsch - Plopp - Siiiing - Siiiing - Siiiing -Grrrrrr - Bang! //

Lautlos gleiten über die Meeresfläche weisse Schatten der
schönen Sternbilder: sie fürchten sich nict
// Bimm - Bamm - Wamm! -Peng! - Peng! - Ratatatatt - Ah! - Ui! - Qual - Qual - Bsssbs -Bummms! //

- ein spoldrig zugespitztes Gesepp!

Das kam nicht gleich. Das musste reifen.
Das fing im Garten an, im leichten, seichten Schlaf:
Rhades Rhades Rhades Ath Des Par Dieu!
Das ist die Hülle des Enthüllten.
Die Ousia (oujsiva) des Dinges.
Das Ding i s t Ousia.
Denn die Reihenfolge der Grundsätze ist in Wirklichkeit
keine. Man sitzt in der Finsternis. Und die Stille
bedingt ihr Wesen, ihren Durchbruch und ihre Entdeckung.

Das ist der Satz. Und der Gegen-Satz ist: man sitzt
sich gegenüber. Und nennt das Ent-Setzung.
Browsening!
Spannung, Schwere und Fall.
Der Ab-Satz als Grundsatz.
Alles andere ging verloren, verloren, verloren!
Nur ein Stück ist geblieben -
Ousia!
Ein einziges Stück ist aber auch kein Stück, nur Ousia.
Rhades Rhades Rhades Ath Des Par Dieu!

Oh, sieh ja! Der Geist hat verloren - es geht
zentripetal, und im Zentrum ist Finsternis - sieh ja!
Dice me, peto, wo geht es jetzt hin? Finster
und trocken ist heute die Autobahn, nur Ge-
sichte
ziehen sich sichtbar und hörbar
dem Zentrum entgegen - heavy metal!
Zentri-petal geht es, in den finsteren Ginster
abgenutzter Zeitungsklischees und Formen hinein,
und der Flug dieser starren Spirale hinab
ist einem Fall gleich - oder eben ungleich
oder gleich einem Unfall -
Rhades Rhades Rhades Ath Des Par Dieu!

Das ist hart. Ausgestrichen. Herausgenommen
aus dem Da-Sein
dem Da-Schein ausgeliefert
als eine Ausstellung,
Als Mahnung für Enkel
und als Strafe für unsere Ahnen.
Eine sorgfältige Auswahl aus allem,
was sein oder nicht sein soll.
Es ist schon alles enthüllt. Und die Hülle
der Dinge, die Reste
der Hülle, die Sätze
sind frei, denn alles hier ist Ousia. Oh sieh ja! Das ist
der Satz. Alles übrige - Leben, Erdbeben, Bewegung -
ist keine Kunst. Und die Kunst
ist nur ein Impuls, ein Korpuskel, also eine Schwäche.
Rhades Rhades Rhades Ath Des Par Dieu!

Nur das Schweigen schreiet zum Himmel um Hilfe
in der Finsternis, wo man nicht weiss,
was Das war -
dieser ins Ziegelgestein der wahnsinnigsten Mauer der Epoche
eingemeisselte Ruf der Verlierer -
was war Das?

Das war es grade: ein Anruf, ein Mahnruf.
Man hat kein Gesicht gehabt und damit auch kein Antlitz,
Donner und Blitz weichen einem schon lange aus dem Wege
- man ist weit fern von hiesiger Welt, man ist niemand!
Oder
war das wirklich ein Merkmal der NEUEN EPOCHE ? -
Klein ist der Schatten im Garten.
Niemand ist da. Man ist da. Träume lügen. Und niemand mehr
kann heute sagen, ob das ein Alptraum oder eine
Erleuchtung gewesen sei: "Rhades, Rhades, Rhades!
Ath! Des Par Dieu!"

* * *

REINHARD MUCHA:

MUTTERSEELENALLEIN

doch das gleichgewicht bleibt understört -
salz rieselt weiter herab auf offene wunden -
die elektronische zeit fordert haut für die trommeln
fleisch für die werbung von waren -

die produktion hört nicht auf
das gesetz der erhaltung bleibt gültig
dir wird nichts fehlen
du meisterwerk dieses lebens du erdenmensch...

füttert die würmer nicht - gebt ihnen lieber
zu trinken - in den computer - gebt den funken des lebens
in den digitalspeicher ein - bite by bite - zerreibt
lieber alles was sich geist und seele nennt
ruhig und lagsam zu einem guten zahnpulver -
lässt sich wirklich so alles - unwiderruflich -
zu einem zahnpulver zerreiben?
bleibt wirklich nichts vom Gottes funken erhalten? es hat
doch geheissen: das gleichgewicht wäre perfekt -
bleibt es so weiter? braucht die KULTUR wirklich
ein nuklearbad
um sich zu läutern?

7. TRANSAUTOMATISMUS

I was rising into the depths of that which exceeded the boundaries of the everlasting exactitude of things and the clarity of concealed truths through an opening in which something has remained in a tetragonal aperture as a line upon red
just as I penetrated through the limits into the exactitudes of unclear things and all was covered with frost in the blue and red

cold due to the heat descending into the twilight of Tachism when suddenly the "Hommage au Tachisme"(460;1960) gleamed through the genius somewhere and the cryptograms exhaled the might of ancient archetypes and my mind that had been asleep outside for hundreds of thousands
of years to the sequences of precise clear incantations under the vaults of the structurally eminent labyrinths of consciousness wondered at the depth
and through the green of stable apertures I did not start to count
in order to pass into the being-OTHER -- there were too many of them
upon the convex and menacing emptiness.

The French and German title, or epigraph, of the exhibition
clearly expresses the content of POST- as a whole: jumping into emptiness!
(a re-make of a well-known work by Yves Klein, 1960, in which he attempted to express man's striving for space in a particularly direct manner in a jump from the height of five meters)
This is a precise self-portrait of POST-!
It is made of patchwork and mosaic but is also integral in its general orientation toward emptiness.
What emptiness? In what sense?
It is one of the first self-portraits. An early one. Though it appeared late. POST- in its youth, just hatching from Culture.
In general, it is a photo-video-portrait as though consisting of separate FRAMES,
at the level of both the individual artist (pop-post-artist)
and the whole exhibition.

The exhibition begins with great Man Ray's "Dust-Breeding"
and Yves Klein's violet globe...

- THE TRIUMPH OF POST-
AT THE END OF THE CENTURY.

Axis Paris-Kassel. 1997.
(live sketches)

(translated by O.Bychkov)

made in france 1947-1997 Exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou

documenta X Kassel

The two main exhibitions of the year provide a clear idea of the pattern of art-culture in our century and the tendencies of virtual movement;
and logically succeed each other;

While made in france is a mosaic Art-portrait of the artistic situation in the second half of this century and in some way
a quintessence of Art-movements of the whole century, documenta X is exclusively a POST- of the end of the century,
a today's self-portrait,

"Transit ins naechste Jahrtausend" (art 6/97, S. 12);
it is not an accident that the organizers of both project are French (although also speaking English):

In fact, already the subject headings of various sections speak for themselves and for the organizers: their essentially fortuitous character and no need for a single interpretation; their profound polysemy and supple vibrations of spaces-"stromata" organized under their sign:

In fact, even this list itself already sounds like a POST-poem or
a condensed exposition of a concept, and, to help a contemporary Art-lover, very little needs to be added to it. He is already in ecstacy and experiences an orgasm from a direct contact with such an impressive gig of erotic verbal visuality.
Indeed, sharpened erotic sensations and bodily intuitions dominate almost every chronological and thematic section out of the above list.
Although, of course, even the pure classics of the avant-garde which still remains within Culture would suffice, as well as the traditional aesthetics of the beautiful and spiritual -- the exhibition is a retrospect of all "made in France" over the last half of the century, after all.

There is Matisse (his works open the exposition: La Tristesse du Roi, 1952 <what the King is sad about -- a great secret!>), Chagall, Rouault (an excellent collection of late Biblical landscapes), Ernst, Calder, Picasso, Matta, Poliakoff, and many other avant-garde artists of the first half of this century (both the French and their followers).
BUT it is not them who create the main tune and determine the visual landscapes of exhibition spaces.

POST- dominates even here: especially on the third floor.

Annete Messager. Les Piques. 1992-93. ("Art vierge").
Niki de Saint-Phalle. Crucifixion. 1963. ("l'imperfection").

Both ladies in many aspects are the symbols of the whole exhibition and especially of the first section of the third floor.

Annete lifts up on metal spears innumerable toy-symbols of sexuality manufactured by her from old panty-hoses and stockings. Niki creates enormous marasmatic dolls (female), covering their massive busts with piles of fragments from childrens' dolls and other toys. And all this is being pissed upon by La Pisseuse (1965) of Pablo Picasso.

Inside the "Cave" of Jean Dubuffet lurk the beginnings of the world and its strangeness (the name of the section is "Origines et singularité") -- there is no exit -
spontaneous descent into the depths -- into the womb of days --
a gaping lap of a maiden who plays the phallos-flute
and steel spears pierce breasts hips and among them
risking to turn the house of child play into a den of a sadist
and to crown a masochist where some time ago
Love reigned wrapping himself in Platonic rags
nobody
told us that this is not permitted
into the theater of cruelty not Antonin Artaud
but a maiden clad in a snow-white gown
introduced us today -- silently
coloured drops pour down into the sand

POST -- is aggressive towards the human being and nature
POST -- professes the cult of the body
of sexuality
of cruelty
in the sharpest and the most perverted forms
POST -- is a quintessence of the anti-human
POST -- is anti-ecological
POST -- does not exist outside of humanity and nature
- - -

the Paris exposition ends with a symbolic video-installation by Pierrick Sorin (born 1960!) "Réveils" (1988), where for ten minutes on six screens poor Pierrick, who had come to his kitchen to have supper, sustains the downpour of hundreds of books falling from above upon his head, face, chest; he hardly manages to beat off this Cultural downpour of books which reminds one through pain about its still-being-here.
(being-for-how-long? I wanted to ask but couldn't be bothered;
it's all clear anyway!)

The ending Culture of the Book and the Spirit thus surrenders his positions to POST- !

and POST- takes over already in Kassel!

In the Neue Galerie an installation (or sculpture) of someone Hubertus Gojowczyk (born 1943) from documenta 6 called "Door for the Library" (1977) is forever on display. This door is constructed of books tightly glued together with cement. Books in POST- are used solely as bricks for the purpose of walling up Culture.

A performance by the Swiss Christian Philipp Müller "A Balancing Act" which was enacted at the opening of the documenta's 10th anniversary has become the symbol -- although POST- denies symbolism -- of documenta 10.

Impersonating the tight-rope walker Philippe Petit who walked the rope between the towers of the World Trade Center in New York on August 8, 1974 -- for which he was later forwarded to jail -- Müller, with a balancing pole made half of brass and half
of oak, several times walked the rope extended on the ground on Friedrichsplatz (in front of the main pavilion of documenta exhibition called Fridericianum) between the "sculpture" "The Vertical Earth Kilometer" by Walter de Maria (before the opening of documenta 6 in 1977 Walter de Maria inserted into the ground in the middle of the square a brass rod 1,000 meters long) and the two oaks (the first and the last) from Joseph Beuys' action "7000 Oaks" (1982; 1986).

The simulacrum of balance where no balance is needed, where it makes no sense to balance, connected that which, according to the original plan, was not supposed to be connected. One pierced the sacred womb of the Planet with a brass spear, the other bequeathed to heal its wounds with forests.

In a separate room of Fridericianum Müller's pole is exhibited and a non-stop video is shown featuring his performance and preparation for it.
This is POST- !

The art director of documenta 10 -- the French Catherine David -- is a courageous woman! (men did not dare to organize this documenta, for the era of matriarchate is approaching, and they are not fit for such an important task as the last documenta of this century, especially since it's the anniversary).
And she managed to show POST- in all its glamour!

documenta 10 is the domination of photo-, slide-, cinema-, video- and computer (especially on the World Wide Web) visual ranks together with verbally expressed concepts. Technical or ultimately technicized Art-practices prevail over traditional plastic visuality, although even the latter has not been forgotten -- in its latest (POST-) modifications.

The (conscious) alogical; absurdism; the simulacra of documentaries; strong socio-political accents (POLITICS and POETICS are almost synonymous here: the fact stated on the cover of the catalogue -- das Buch "documenta X"); complicated concepts which demand ample verbal explanations; strict, sharply de-humanized spaces and images; Freudian-post-post-Freudian implications dominate today's Kassel.

Already at the Hauptbahnhof Kassel the recipient who has come to see the documenta is immersed into the alternative atmosphere of POST- :
he is welcomed by the installations of Tunga and Lois Weinberger.

Right on the platform is located a large installation by a Brazilian artist Tunga "Inside out, upside down (Ponta Cabeca)," which consists of the materials used in his performance which is enacted once in a while. The contents of the latter according to the "Short guide" d X is as follows:

The installation consists of these two giant hats suspended above the platform in a picturesque way, a suitcase, and bags with numerous plaster-cast limbs of human bodies (arms, legs, heads, skulls, etc.). Music continuously sounds from the loudspeaker. The butchers of all countries -- unite under one hat (where it's hot -- under the one of straw, where it's cold -- under the one of felt)!

The installations by the Austrian Weinberg are of an eco--socio-political orientation:

One of them "Das über die Pflanzen / ist eins mit ihnen" is as follows: a piece of old railway is fenced off, and between the ties grow weeds -- both native German and from overseas, quickly growing and stiffling all -- the struggle between nature and technology, between the foreign and native; another one of the same kind: before the Kulturbahnhof building the asphalt is broken open, and some vegetation breaks through its fragments.

In the main exhibition hall of the documenta -- in the Museum Fridericianum -- the prominent place is given to the installation by the American Andrea Zittel "A-Z Escape Vehicle Owned and Customized by Bob Shiffler" which consists of six simulacra of living spaces: in hermetically sealed automobile trailers made of stainless steel in the volume of approximately one cubic metre she reproduces a study, a bedroom, a children's room, a private swimming pool, etc., with a plethora of objects of contemporary consumer civilization.

The ready and absolutely enclosed little worlds for every member of the contemporary consumer society. An individual shell for everyone! "I wanna live in my own cell, I wanna rot in my own shell, slowly palpitating in my own skin alone!" -- a popular song by the famous Russian bard Gary Slinkov flows from the loadspeaker...

The symbol of POST- and one of the main installation of documenta 10: Hans-Jürgen Syberg, "Cave of Memory"(1997) in six stations: Schleef Kleist Goethe Raimund Mozart Beckett".
On ten cinema screens and innumerable video-monitors in a large dimly lighted room, through which recipients move and where they sit and stand, an endlessly-dimentional space of live-POST-culture of the 20th century is being created, which includes in itself all culture, art, and human life -- from Antiquity till our days.
The visual chao-genic process of human existence is also supplemented by muffled audio effects which can be chosen by means of putting on different headphones with various records featuring music and other audio products.
I came into this world in order to see (and hear) the chaos of culture-day.
Nor do Beckett, Plato, Gaugin, or Mozart decide.
For everything is being arranged into strict concepts bypassing the wretched human reason, and no one yet managed to overcome the laws of Lobachevsky-Riman geometry which are clear and comprehensible to all.

And leave all these political tricks to yourselves when I exit a video-clip and head over to the reading room No.5 on the second floor of Fridericianum with a plaster-cast volume of Goethe in my hands.

The installation "The typosophic pavilion" (1996-1997) by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk is the quintessence of POST- of this century:
the motto of this installation is a palindrome on a mirror:
AIDE MOI - O MEDIA
and the media really help to create a unique POST-space in which Dürer's prints co-exist peacefully with nowaday's bottles of wine; ancient volumes -- with computer presentations of Marsel Duchamp; texts by Joyce -- with super-new technologies of manufacturing photo-images of the seven rooms by Hamilton; slide-projectors -- with computers taken apart; L'academie des sciences et des beaux arts (1695) of Sebastian Le Clerc -- with the most recent model of the process of fog formation (Wilson Cloud Chamber - 1997)
one can hardly disagree with the authors of the project in that "the typosophi pavilion is a poetic rendering of neighbouring disciplines: science, technology, rhetoric (especially -- V.B. ), viniculture (NB! -- V.B.) and the arts"

Finally, "The Poetics Project" (1997) of Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler in the space No. 13 of the documenta-Halle.
This space is filled with objects to the limit, so that the recipients are only allowed there five persons at a time. And you find yourself in an ultimate hell. Some enormous marasmatically painted dummies of human organs, on which films and videos are projected (as well as on many other surfaces) of a violent contents (the history of rock-music, according to the authors' plan);
an enormous human heart with an accompanying phonogram of heartbeat; a whole lot of other sounds, noises, roars, music; piles of objects, paintings, drawings: in general, an audio-visual chaos of great concentration and of anti-human contents (an unwritten history of humanity which is being written by the authors of the project with all available means) -- of course, if chaos can have concentration and contents. In Poetics Project it can!

So!

Balance! -- this is the main thing with which we approach the end of the century and the millenium! To be more precise, a simulacrum of balance, for it can only be achieved where one cannot fall: on the rope extended on the ground (which is still rather stable). One could hardly walk accross a real rope extended over an abyss with a balancing pole of POST- . Anyway, nobody is trying just now. There are few real nutters! Only their simulacra!
A transition to the unknown along the rope of abandonment over the abyss of embarrasment and lack of understanding with a balancing pole of POST- !

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