March 2012
Artists’ studio in Moscow
Transcript by Vladimir Prokhorov
Initial editing by Oksana Voronina

Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich at the Moscow Conceptualism web-site.
Igor Makarevich at Wikipedia.
Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich at the Open Gallery web-site.

What was your first work of contemporary art?

Elagina: I think it was the Detskoye artwork. Previously I produced modernist artworks rather than works of contemporary art. The Detskoye artwork was the first work from the Neuter gender series. It was a large board with a child medicine sticker, zoomed in. In front of the board there was a bandaged bench with a hot-water bottle on it. It was at the end of the 1980s.

What about you, Igor?

Makarevich: First of all, what is the contemporary art? It is such a vague concept. Perhaps, it was related to photography. In 1975, I made my first deliberate photo artwork; it was titled the Choice of Target. I photographed a group of artists in the waste area. And it turned out that it was important how they responded to the environment. The fact was that when we came to that waste area, there appeared local residents. They started shouting and menacing us. My friends, among them there was Sokov, Shchelkovsky, Chuikov, the Gerlovins, reacted to the situation in some way. Thus, I spoiled my photographic film. I used a medium-format camera, with a roll film containing only 13 frames. Only one frame was good. Exposure time was long, and each time photos were spoiled. And I became interested in relationship of the inner and outer worlds. In 1976, I made a still-life with dice, titled the Choice of Target.

How did you get together in the waste area?

M: Leonid Sokov organized an exhibition in his apartment. All these people met in his studio. Of course, we decided to make a group photo. It resulted in my first photographic artwork.

What was the first work of contemporary art you had seen?

M: We are people of the past century. What could be called the contemporary art at that time? At that time Picasso’s paintings were, no doubt, works of contemporary art. In the late 1950s, there were the so-called Blue Period reproductions, which we secretly shared.

In 1957, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts hosted Picasso’s exhibition, didn’t it?

M: Yes. Because he was a communist. But before this, if such reproductions were found, you were subject to repressions.

E: In 1957, I was still very young. But in the late 1960s- the early 1970s, I saw many books. At that period, I became familiar with the Surrealism and the Pop-art, if it could be called the contemporary art. I worked in Ernst Neizvestny’s studio. There were many such books. I was much impressed with Duchamp’s art
M: As for me, I admired Masereel’s art. I found a 1957-58 booklet of his oeuvre, and his plots amazed me much.

What was your education?

E: I attended the Moscow secondary art school, and later I studied at Neizvestny’s studio. Of cause, I learnt much from the lessons at Neizvestny’s studio. Interesting people visited the studio. Among them there was Merab Mamardashvili, Alexander Zinoviev. I listened to their discussions. They were very interesting and educational.

Did you take lessons from Alisa Poret

E: Yes, before my preliminary exams... It was a very important period in my life. Later we were on friendly terms and communicated with each other until her death. She helped me to create classical still lifes. But these were just studies. Communication was a different story. She narrated much about her life. I was interested in the OBERIU group. Unfortunately, she was not familiar with their adult art. But she talked to them much and her tales were fascinating.

M: I attended the same art school, but I was a senior student. I was much influenced by my friends. We received information from other students, rather than from teachers. Many of our teachers were wrecked.

Who do you consider to be your teachers?

E: My teacher is my life.

M: I was much impressed with Yuly Perevezentsev. He was older than me. I was just charmed with his art. It was in 1965. If to talk about later impressions, it was Ilya Kabakov’s art. He had a huge impact on my generation and on me, particularly.

E: If to talk about teachers, I remembered my first teacher. He was Alexander Barshch, a brother of Mikhail Barshch, a celebrated constructivist architect. In the 1920s, he was also a Russian avant-garde member, but later became a teacher. He influenced upon me much in my childhood.

How do you think it is necessary to teach art?

E: I think that Bakshtein’s Institute of Contemporary Art is very useful. Because you can teach art just providing general education. Once we were giving a master class in the National Center for Contemporary Art. At the end of the master class, students from the Surikov Art Institute came to us. They were amazed and said that they had known nothing of the contemporary art at all. They asked to teach them more things.

M: Changes in the cultural environment are important. They are also a part of the education. If to talk about us, we belonged to a definite circle in the Soviet period. It was our growing medium.

E: The growing medium was not always an artistic circle.

M: Yes, but it was a very narrow circle. At present, I think education can fill in the gaps to some extent.

Who belonged to your circle?

M: The Gerlovins, the Collective Actions group.

E: I communicated with philologists from the Tartu—Moscow Semiotic School
M: Elena was luckier.

E: I had a wide circle of interesting communication.

Thus, the unofficial culture united artists, philosophers, didn’t it? Who else?

E: Musicians.

M: Writers, to some extent.

What about cinema, theater?

M: Cinema was a very special field, even the most progressive cinema of the Soviet period, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, for example. It was difficult for us to communicate with filmmakers. They were cute, smart and real people. But the matter is that cinema was always a special area. Filmmaking always demanded financing. And people related to the cinema were a privileged class, living a different way of life. I had three years of TV work experience. After three years I quitted. Then I was working at the Ekran TV film studio for a short period of time.

Did the TV work experience influence upon you as a contemporary artist?

M: No. But my education in the institute did. I could watch there the latest Western European films, which it was impossible to find anywhere else.
I watched all current movies of the time, such as Eclipse, The Adventure, The Night, The 8 1/2. Later I was impressed by the 1951 film adaptation A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando. I was just crazy about the movie, I watched it twenty times. I was overwhelmed.

Did your official monumental art experience influence upon you as a contemporary artist?

M: Surely. It influenced both from ideological and practical viewpoints. Monumental art has its own rules of composition. If an artist doesn’t understand them, he can create nothing. Even the Soviet monumental artists, who produced awful Lenin mosaics, to some extent, made them according to the rules of their favorite school of Vladimir Favorsky. It influenced upon me much. I consider that the triptych with portraits of Kabakov, Bulatov and Chuikov, to a certain extent, was inspired by my experience in monumental art, because it had the same spatial relationships. I am always attracted by making of such objects, and objects are spatial things. In this sense, lessons in monumental art exerted influence over me much.

E: First of all, you have never dealt with ideological images. There were mainly natural, animalistic and architectural compositions. It was only one time, when Igor was ordered to make an ideological artwork. It was a ceiling painting in Brezhnev’s office.

M: No less, no more. By the way, we worked together.

E: Yes. We worked together.

Should you decorate Brezhnev’s office?

E: Yes. The theme was the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. Awful! It turned out that the ceiling painting had its special laws of composition. For instance, feet of figures should not be towards the eye of a viewer, sitting at the desk. We had to change the composition radically. Then the architect advised us to make colors duller. When we did it, I told that something was nasty. And soon Brezhnev died.

Mythology and aesthetics of what Soviet period do you deal with?

M: The Stalin era. Its climax.

E: It was the very period, when the contemporary art was destroyed.

M: The Brezhnev period is a more delicate matter. It is a sphere of the Collective Actions group. We have more vivid images. Main projects are related to the archeology of ideology. They are connected with a heroic period of the Soviet authority rather than with the degenerative moment.

When did you start working together?

E: In 1991, I think.

M: No. Much earlier. In 1991, we made our first serious group project. Our collaboration started in the second half of the 1970s. Elena helped me with my first objects. They were 25 memories of a friend.

E: I was mainly occupied with technical work.

M: There was much technical work. I couldn’t cope with it alone, and Elena was glad to help me.

M: We produced many monumental works together.

E: Igor helped me with my projects, because it was easy for me to invent something rather than to put into practice.

M: Yes. The first project was the Fish Exhibition. We always help each other by sharing our experience. Elena is an optimist, and I am a pessimist.

E: I am an optimist, because I have always been designing gravestones.

M: It is her nature. She is very cheerful. I have a gloomy worldview.

Do you invent plots for your projects together or does each of you find your own characters and stories?

E: Sometimes characters appear by themselves.

M: Yes, sometimes. But it is connected with our parents.

E: My father was a writer and an editor. He was a founder of the Yuny Naturalist magazine. We adopted many plots and materials from him.

M: There is also Lepeshinskaya...

E: Lepeshinskaya was a character from my childhood.

M: A friend of Vladimir Elagin.

E: My father wrote a book according to her stories. This book was a source of my many projects.

M: There is a photo of Elena’s mother with Valery Chkalov and other Komsomol activists.

E: There is a photo of my father with Ivan Michurin. Igor’s parents were architects. His father constructed Stalin style buildings.

M: My parents were not intimately related to the ideology, but they matched samples. They were not proud to be people of the Stalin period, but they corresponded to the standards of the time.

E: My mother couldn’t love Stalin. When she was a schoolgirl, her favorite teacher was arrested during a lesson. When Stalin died, she was happy. But the epoch imprinted.

What political events, happened on your memory, do you consider the most important?

E: For instance, I was shocked by Brezhnev’s death. It was really a historic event. When I heard that Brezhnev died, it was a doomsday. We believed that he would live forever, and nothing would change.

M: The matter was that though we were young people at that time, our historical perception of reality dulled. It seemed to us that the Soviet power would last forever. It was hopelessness.

E: Brezhnev was a kind of the idol, which was inertly everywhere.

M: For us there was no way out of the situation. And we missed the moment when the perestroika period started. We didn’t realize what it was.

E: It was a turn.

What are your political views?

M: I think we are liberals. The fact is that when the perestroika period started, we honestly believed that radical changes were possible. But gradually we became disappointed.

E: Our political views are rather passive pessimistic. We are not involved in politics.

M: We are very skeptical about this. We are lack of any enthusiasm about politics.

E: We remember the Russian history very well. We have no special hopes.

What is your attitude towards religion?

E: I think it is a personal matter. Everyone shall decide for himself.

M: It is rather a difficult question. During the Soviet period, we were religious, because we considered the religion and the church leaders to be dissident.

E: But it has nothing to do with the religion. I think that events should not influence upon it. It is a personal matter.

What artists and what artworks are determinant for you?

M: I perceived art in the light of literature. My favorite writers always prevailed over favorite artists. When I was 9-10 years old, I read a novel by Edgar Poe. I worshiped this author. My favorite artists appeared later. First I was amazed by works of Bruegel and Rembrandt. Then I loved modernism, contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp is still one of the dearest artists for me

E: Perhaps, for me also. But I have no answer for this question.

What artist do you carry on a dialogue with?

E: I think they are artists from our circle.

M: Yes. It is a constant dialogue.

E: There are some international artists. Thus, when we exhibited in the Venice Arsenal last time, we met a Hong Kong-born, US-based artist Paul Chan. It turned out that we were in a dialogue with him.

Do you divide your art into any periods?

E: I think it is still early. When we are 80, we will define any periods. It is difficult to do it right now.

What art movement do you belong to? How do you identify the movement?

E: It has been decided for us. We have nothing to do with it.
M: Our oeuvre formally belongs to Conceptualism.
E: I think it is more sophisticated.

M: It seems to me that there are no separate territories, individual areas in art, whether it is modernism or conceptualism. I am just interested in one theme or another.

M: In visual arts, literature is very close to me. I am not interested in art without literature.

What is your prevailing theme? What is your art about?

E: It is rather something related to archeology.

M: It is the space of history, I think. It is the space of history in different degrees of development.

Do you have any followers?

M: No.

Do you collect artworks of other artists?

E: Only if they present their artworks to us.

What artworks do you want to have in your collection?

M: 20 or 30 years ago, we were gifted with several large artworks. They were good. But it was hard. I don’t like pictures hanging on the walls. It disturbs me. It is very difficult to preserve pictures. I am no collector.

E: I have favorite objects, which have been presented by my friends. By Monastyrsky, for example...

M: By the Gerlovins, perhaps...

E: I have an original copy of the Dykhalka object by Monastyrsky. I love such things. But we are no collectors.

M: No.

What exhibitions that you have participated in do you consider the most important?

M: For example, it is the In Situ exhibition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

E: It is a fantastic museum. There are amazing artworks there.

M: I have never been in that museum before. But it is related to the mythology of my life. During the WWII my father found a fascinating album of Bakst. But he had to cut out pictures from the album, because he couldn’t bring it in his military backpack. Later he bound the book again. The art of Bakst was my favorite when I was a schoolboy. When I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I was amazed. The museum interior reminded me of the picture from the Bakst’s album.

Secondly, one of my favorite artists was Bruegel, and there was a chance to place our Tatlin’s tower object next to the celebrated Tower of Babel. It was incredible!
Our museum simulacrum and the real exhibit became united. The naïve viewer could not define where the ancient artwork was and where our intrusion was. It was funny.