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Boris Orlov The artist’s Moscow studio Boris Orlov in Wikipedia What kind of education did you get? I’d put it like this: I got lucky in my life. I got a very good education in the field of arts history because I was taught by some very serious people. Irina Danilova was one of those serious professors. I think the name should ring a bell to all the art historians. She was a respected expert in the Renaissance art. She published a lot of books on the subject. At some point she had tenure at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Once she organized a truly magnificent exhibition of European and Russian portrait of the 18th and 19th centuries at that venue. It was something grand. The exhibition helped Russian experts get rid of their complexes about the history of Russian art. We could see that our portrait painting was on a par with the West European painting of the period. It was a remarkable event. Danilova was teaching us not only fine arts, but poetry, literature, and philosophy of the Renaissance period as well. She was simply adored by her students; the auditoriums were always packed when she was giving lectures. Aside from the above, I also received an excellent education as far as the skills of an artist are concerned. Thanks to our art history professors I became well-acquainted with the subject, and those who were teaching me art techniques were the intelligent ones if compared to today’s professors. They were the intelligentsia. Take Motovilov, for example. He is a classic artist of our imperial, Soviet Monumentalism, though I wouldn’t say that he was the greatest artist on earth. However, everybody is familiar with his famous arch of the VDNKh main entrance, several stations of the Moscow Metro, and the Volga-Don Canal gates... In short, he did quite a bit in his time. He was a good specialist, though some of his works might have been done in a better way — that’s what I think when looking at his works today. Back then he was teaching us very important things. We would give us tough tasks to carry out, we wouldn’t just model from life by the contours like many others would do. Wearing that smirk on his face, he would say to us, «Stop modeling by the contours, will you? You should work deeper instead. Now look at a model full face and start modeling his head by going from his ears to the back of his head. Then turn him half face and go just the same way from his ear and towards the back of his head, and link it up at last. In other words, you should direct your thoughts deeper all the way. That’s the depth perceptions training for you. Doing these depth perceptions exercises in one’s brains is the most important thing for a sculptor.» It was an amazing experience; I mean the task that he would give to us. He was a wise man. He’d say, «There isn’t much I’m going to teach you.» In fact, that’s what he told me in person. He loved me very much. He used to tell me this: «You should visit the Pushkin Museum and take a long look at Donatello’s works. You should ask him for advice.» I’d go,"How come? He isn’t going to tell me anything...." And Motovilov would say,"You should learn how to ask him your questions and listen to his replies." Those were the sleepless nights for me. I was going to the Pushkin Museum every day to see Donatello. I still love visiting that Italian entrance hall of the museum. The noble equestrian statue of the condottiere Gattamelate is still my favorite artwork as to the history of arts. I can stare at it again and again. Gavriil Shultz is my second teacher. Shultz is one of Matveyev’s disciples. At the same time, in retrospect he is a follower of Aristide Maillol. Unlike Maillol who has always made various configurations and jugs out of his statues, Shultz was modeling in knots. In this respect his oeuvre is very much related to that of Wilhelm Lehmbruck. I was a student at that time. And I developed such a crush on Lehmbruck, I mean I was studying his art with the help of photographs. Then I was luck — Lehmbruck’s sculptures were part of some exhibition held in Moscow. I was about to pass out when I finally saw that sculpture. I was literally crawling around it, studying every bit of it. The way it was made is simply unbelievable. It didn’t resemble some of those Maillol’s jugs, no; it was made of knots which were tied up in a most astonishing, extremely cunning way. I still consider Lehmbruck my favorite sculptor, or, at least, my favorite one of the 20th century. It seems to me that there has been no one like him since Rodin’s time. Lots of people would tell me after seeing my earlier works, «Giacometty is definitely an influence.» And I would say, «No way», though I liked his sculptures very much. Anyway, speaking of influence, Lehmbruck’s oeuvre is the only one worth mentioning in this context. What was the first piece of modern art that you saw? Yet again, I lucked out in this respect since modern art came in pouring over me. All of a sudden tons of modern art works started landing onto my unprepared consciousness. The landing happened in 1959 and 1960 when two large-scale exhibitions arrived in Moscow. The exhibitions marked the lifting of the Iron Curtain. The first one was an exhibition of American art. However, the display didn’t feature any Pop artists because it was still the 1950s, and the Pop artists were canonized a bit later. At that point the prevailing style in American art looked pretty controversial and aggressive. We’re talking about Abstract Expressionists. I remember seeing several works by Pollock, Francis, Rothko. It was something completely new and very interesting too. You know, the time was right. Everybody seemed to be reading books by Freud at that time. Reading on the sly. Freud’s theories took root really deep in our heads, and then we saw those large-scale followers of Freud showing their works to the public of this country. The exhibition impressed us very much. Then we had the second one that was something more than an ordinary show of fine arts. In fact, it was one big workshop on modern arts. The French exhibition «From Roden’s time to the present». That’s the name of the exhibition. Some microfilms and other films on a larger screen were shown within the framework of the exhibition. Those films told us stories about the French artists of the 20th century. The exhibition was held in September. We didn’t attend our classes; we just didn’t show up at the university, we spent hours at the exhibition watching those films. Some of us, me inclusive, holed up in an audio hall listening to modern music. We were listening to Debussy, Messiaen, Honneger. In short, we were listening to all the music of the 20th century. And the quality of the recordings was very good. I was particularly overwhelmed while listening to Debussy. It was great. There were some French artists around. Bazaine was giving lectures. Many works by Picasso were on display, from his early works to his latest ones. A variety of sculptures was exhibited too, the works by Laurens, Archipenko. From that point onward, from 1961, my interest in modern art has started growing by leaps and bounds. Amerika magazine, which all of us would buy at the time, was a tremendous help to us as far as information on modern art was concerned. That’s the magazine where I set eyes on Jasper John’s works. I was really impressed by what I saw. There were new opportunities for making copies of some books at the Lenin Library. Access to those books was fairly easy for some time. Things changed under Brezhnev. You couldn’t get access to them any more. In fact, I was making two sculptures for getting my undergraduate degree’s certificate at the Stroganov School. One of them was for the examination board, and it was produced in a classical style. My Shultz was more than happy to see me doing my degree work. He didn’t even try to change my ways of doing it, though professors usually tend to involve in their students’ degree work so as to keep their students well-prepared for the degree day. So I earned my degree and got my certificate by myself. Afterwards I invited my classmates to my home to show them what I was doing as an alternative to the official degree work. I showed them how I was gaining knowledge on modern art, how I was trying my hand at it so that I could grasp the works by Giacometti, to comprehend what surrealism was all about. I used to create lots of surrealist artworks, which I eventually destroyed. I wish I hadn’t done that. I had a very strict attitude to my works at that point of my life because I had read a lot of artists’ memoirs so raised the bar pretty high. Roding once said that hehad been throwing his works into a pit until he reached 30. It means he didn’t cast his works; he’d simply throw them in the pit for a new steeping. So I was thinking, «That’s the right thing to do. I will follow his suit. I’m going to keep a low profile until I turn 30.» And I was really working hard. I was toiling day and night at my studio. I’d get back home about midnight or later only to do more modelling. I reckon the year was 1971, I had already turned 30 by that time, me and Igor Shelkovsky and Rostislav Lebedev rented a dacha in summer. We were lucky to rent a big house for the whole summer. I’d say that since the year of 1971 I have considered myself an artist. I was a crazy existentialist at that time. It was a time when every member of the Moscow art elite was literally addicted to European existentialism. The likes of Camus and Sartre, were posing as artists standing completely outside culture and everything else. They were searching for some sacred spheres. Our goal was even grander. We were trying to survive. Trying to find a niche of freedom within the limits of total non-freedom was an existential goal to fulfill. Back then the Soviet Union had the angriest readers of existential books. We were in luck to have found a hefty part of Russian-language existential philosophy in all that existential «reading.» Lev Shestov’s writings had quite an impact on me. I mean two of his books: Nietzsche and Tolstoy, which deals with not only Tolstoy but with Dostoevsky (the underground person problems are an existential subject). Shestov’s Kierkegaard hit me hardest. In fact, Shestov’s book was a superbly interesting retelling of Fear and Trembling in Russian. The Shestov version was so well-written that I kind of disliked the original when I came across it later in the 1990s. Lev Shestov is the writer who influenced me the most. It seems quite natural that the other book I point out is Berdyaev’s, Existential Dialectics of the Divine Man, which was my bible. If we take a look at «Sretensky Bulvar», a group of artists, all the members were full-fledged existentialists. Although Ilya Kabakov has been persistently denying his adherence to the trend. I can understand why he’s doing so. He’s got a different brand now, he is a conceptualist. Existentialism and conceptualism don’t agree with each other very much. Still, Kabakov shouldn’t be in denial as to his involvement in existentialism for his creative experience is so vast so the first part of it can neatly fall under existentialism. Kabakov was the first existentialist; moreover he was the one who belonged to the French, Beckett variety of existentialism. His early works with all those absurd dialogues were created in line with Beckett’s technique. The «Sretensky Bulvar» artists had been elaborating on this subject until the end of the 1970s. In the meantime, I and my circle of friends, including Prigov, and Lebedev were too obsessed with the idea. Following the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and later after the «Bulldozer Exhibition» and the «apartment displays» of our works we suddenly felt we had enough of it, we were exhausted and tired of the whole thing. We had to look for something new. So we changed the vector of movement by going vertically upwards. The existential discourse didn’t look attractive to us any longer because it had become an «academic thing» right before our eyes. The prospects for it were none or so it seemed to us. We, the disciples of Lev Shestov, were conscious that any discourse was bound to be «petrified»; it’s an inevitable development for every cycle. So we made up our mind to replace the monolanguage of existentialism with polylanguage, to rehabilitate a sphere of «profanity» held in contempt by existentialism, to work with «profane» languages. At one of the exhibitions Kabakov asked Prigov whether he was afraid of «turning into a dog» by using such «canine languages.» Well, it was a question asked by an existentialist. It seemed a fair reprimand at the time because we had to take a stand. So we took one. It was a metaposition, an elevated one that kept us from «turning into dogs» even when were speaking a variety of languages, including the «canine language.» We made good use of our experience gained in the theatre while doing set design jobs. An artist was already seen as a theatre director, a set designer, a puppeteer who was using those languages the way he found fit on stage. That’s how the author’s voice was shaping up though it had been put outside the brackets, somewhat off stage. The viewer couldn’t see the presence of an author but a vast scene was in the viewer’s range of vision. Managed thus, a circle of like-minded people began to take shape. Its formation was complete by 1974. It was a group of artists working with polylanguage. There were consequently referred to as Sots Art artists, though not every one of them was a follower of Sots Art. The group comprised Komar and Melamid and their disciples, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov (the following were my mates in the Stroganov Art School mates), Dmitry Prigov, Rostislav Lebedev, Ivan Chuikov, Rimma and Valera Gerlovin, and the young Igor Makarevich. As we can see, it was a wide circle of artists, allies. As for antagonists, they arrived a bit later. They climbed the stage at the beginning of the 1980s. It’s «Noga» as they were calling themselves. It was a art group formed around Andrei Monastyrsky, they would later call themselves conceptualists. It hadn’t yet existed in the 1970s. They were a bunch of Zen Buddhists who deliberately did some strange things without articulating their meanings or reasons. The meanings and reasons were attached in the 1980s. Those «Collective actions» kept on going even after the actions in question came to an end. However, a reflexion on those actions was still there. Later it evolved into what is now identified as the Moscow conceptualism. In short, they were going in a totally opposite direction as to the path we were threading. There wasn’t much of a choice for us so we took opposing views too. Their concept thinking completely excluded plastic thinking whereas our concept thinking was the plastic one i.e. our concept constructions were the plastic concept constructions as opposed to their literature-based concept constructions. What is Sots Art and do you consider yourself a follower of Sots Art? No, I don’t. Sots Art is a very narrow-gauge definition. To be honest, I’d recommend that today’s art historians use the term with extreme caution when describing art trends of the 1970s. Strictly speaking, it can only apply to the works of Komar-Melamid and those of Kosolapov. Even Leonid Sokow won’t call himself a Sots Art artist. Indeed, he doesn’t fall under the trend according to the Komar-Melamid doctrine. Sots Art of the Komar and Melamid variety appealed largely to Socialist Art, that’s where they too «Sots» from. They were appealing to Socialist Art; they were making art of a poor quality as they would put it at the time. Polylanguage and polystylistics were the only things we had in common at the time. But we were opposed to the language of existentialism while they were against the language of Socialist Art. That’s the difference between us and them. I’ve never called my oeuvre Sots Art, I still don’t use the term in respect of my works. On the other hand, I don’t put up too much resistance either because I do understand it’s inevitable. However, I believe that Ivan Chuikov was not a conceptualist; it’s out of the question, because the way he expressed himself in his works was purely plastic, and in terms of that polysystem he was closer to our group, though he had never been a Sots Art artist. And Rimma and Valera Gerlovin were part of Fluxus, which is also a polysystem, polylanguage and a very play language but it wasn’t Sots Art. Let me put it this way: I employ many languages. I don’t mind them calling it Sots Art, but I’m against any cut-and-dried doctrines. May Sots Art exist just like impressionism, though Degas wasn’t an impressionist in the very sense of the word. What are your political views? I’ve always been against the totalitarian system. Just like in the past, my today’s motto remains unchanged: «Down with the autocracy.» But I’ve never been affiliated to any political party. Being an artist, I don’t think I should be a member of any political organization. I won’t be able to keep my metaposition intact if I get into some sort of a political wrangling. I’ve got some predilections but I have no passion for politics. What is your attitude towards religion? I don’t think I’ve ever had an unwholesome attitude towards it. Art itself is a religion for an artist. People may belong to different religious denominations — it makes no difference to me. The parameters created by art itself are similar to the religious parameters. Same codes, same testaments e.g. thou shalt not do evil, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not steal, it goes without saying. What about «thou shalt not commit adultery»? I can hardly find any parallels to art for this one. An artist commits adultery with art anyway. What political events that occurred within your living memory do you consider significant? A: First and foremost, perestroika and the crumbling of the Soviet, Red totalitarianism. Needless to say, that political event quickly changed the course of my life. I’d been part of the Soviet underground art up to the mid 1980s. Besides, I was blacklisted from going abroad. Sure thing, I could have renounced my citizenship to light out. That’s what many people did. But I didn’t want to follow suit. All in all, my prospects in this country hit rock bottom back then. Then why didn’t you want to emigrate? Following my first trip to America, I realized that I didn’t want to move abroad. I understood that it had nothing for me in terms of my career because I grew up in an isolated system; I wasn’t part of the common world. Aside from this, I saw that everything out there had already become structuralized. American art had already become American. It was a different situation at the turn of the 19th century when there was an international school of artists in Paris. Americans were Americans, the German school was a German school, and the Italian school was an Italian school. Besides, my artistic views were built on evidence, so to speak. I’m an artist/witness, I’m an analytic who looks around and then builds his attitude using his reflexion as a basis. I’ve got no idea as to the world they live in. For example, I don’t know what fairytales they read when they were kids. It’s just pointless to go abroad in order to go on working with culture of your home country. Working for the sake of the market to make easy money is against my artistic ideals within the code I’ve been talking about. That’s why I got back to stay here. Which of the exhibitions you took part in do you consider important? The first most important exhibition in which I partake was held in Seoul in 1988. It was meant to commemorate the Olympics. The entire range of modern culture was on display. Artworks of nearly all modern artists of the era, including works of several artists from Russia, were part of the exhibition. I can mention the works by Kabakov, by Yankilevsky, and by Chuikov. That’s the exhibition that featured Nam June Paik building one of his famous installations.... The Russian artists were handpicked by a curator called Glebota. He was from France but a Croat by birth. He was dealing with not only Russia but entire Eastern Europe: the Balkans, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The second exhibition that seems to me a very important is «Moscow-Berlin. 1950-2000». It was held in Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin from 2003 to 2004. I liked it a lot, by and large. Things changed for worse after they brought it to Moscow. The range of works got shrunk in two, the same goes to quality. The Vienna exhibition was very important for me as an artist whose art rests on a classical foundation. Since I’m always calling myself an «Apolloist», the exhibition in the antiquity halls looked very enticing to me. I wanted to find out how my works would look like in the context of truly apologetic art. I reckon I passed the test. Good reviews from the Austrian critics and the museum staff support my opinion. As regards books that influenced me very much, I should mention the book that was one of the strongest influences: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music by Nietzsche. I acquainted myself with the book when I was 25-26 years old. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is the second book that I read at about the same time. It was another source that helped me find the necessary definitions, helped me to understand the reason why it took so long for me to climb the stage, why I spent so much time waiting just like Hans Castorp who’d got stuck on the «magic garden» until he turned 30. I must have spent all those years trying to gain knowledge in philosophy, science and all the rest available at the time. I just spent my days reading, making sculptures. I didn’t want any interference, any meddling in my studio. I believe it was a time well spent, very useful for me. So these are the two great books that used to sit on my table. Boris Orlov shows his works The works you can see in this studio date back to various periods, starting from the days of old or the mid 1960s. I graduated from the Stroganof School in 1966. I’ve begun showing my works to the outside world since 1971. It’s the year when people started to come by. The time before 1971 had been a stint I spent on the abovementioned magical mountain. The work sitting on that easel dates from 1967; I’m fresh from the Stroganov School. This one is by Sashka Kosolapov, my mate in the Stroganov School. I loved very much to compete against him at the time. He was a wonderful artist full of divine grace. Unfortunately, he renounced his own hands. And he had truly magical hands. This one dates back to the same year, 1971 when I started to consider myself an artist. This is a sort of metaphysics, existential metaphysics. The thing is about to go bursting at the seams, ready to be torn asunder, and takes great effort on the part of these hoops to keep it together. However, the energy inside keeps building up until it breaks though to the outside. It’s titled Khronos. Now, right on the wall if we turn around, there’s Parsuna (Russian for «painted portrait») dating from 1979. That’s the period called Sots Art. I remember Ira asking me about «periods of my art.» Well, there have been a few. The fist one refers to existential metaphysics. Here’s an example. Then we have the period of social heraldry, the polylanguage discourse of the 1970s, represented by Parsuna. Afterwards I kicked off a large imperial project, in the 1970s through 1980s. I’m talking about the reconstruction of the grand style, which kept me busy up to the early 1990s. After the break-up of the empire, political uncertainty and economic devastation followed by hard times, I entered the period of stump neuralgias. It’s the time when I produced this ornamental cycle and these works, which were displayed at the Vienna exhibition. The works seem to belong to some culture of the past yet they had some bits and pieces of their original paint removed, just like in a cleanup operation to remove cracked paint from the old icons. As you can see, there’s some complex color implied over here. But this color was overloaded with time to the point of disappearing. It’s gone. It transpired that the works had concealed something akin to a phantom limb, that’s why I call it stump neuralgia, a bout of suffering following surgery. We are the generation that had major surgery in which individual limbs of our body and parts of our consciousness were sawed off.... That’s the reason why the subject of traumatic experience is the most important one for my time as far as I’m concerned. Boris Orlov talks about artists of the 2000s They were keen to implement their plans using strictly plastic language; they were trying to find a point of rest by scrutinizing our art. We, the 1970s generation, seemed to be seen by them as next of kin. And that’s great, because the amount of historical experience grows on, and the future artists will no longer employ the Western art as a foundation. On the contrary, they will rely on their own historical experience. They may create their works by leaning on this, on that, or on some other trend, and the process will continue to move forward. That’s an encouragement to me. My retrospective exhibition took place in 2008. The same year I was awarded «Soratnik» (Russian for «comrade in arms») prize. It’s funny that all the artists of the 2000s and the1990s nominated me for that prize. All of them signed their names on a t-shirt. There’s a dozen of names on it e.g. Koshlyakov, Kulik, Shekhovtsev, Blue Noses, Dubosarsky and Vinogradov, Natasha Turnova. None of the conceptualists was among them. Anyway, it was a wonderful feeling: these guys are my relatives, my next of kin. Using me as their support was quite unintentional. Then came the time of recognition. They’d say, «You are the foundation we stand upon.» At this point I’d like to address again the subject of that culture chain, in which one link is perpendicular to another one. It’s only natural that the conceptual discourse was perpendicular to our polylanguage discourse for the conceptual discourse is going back again to sacred language, to an enclosed area. This is the language that is coded, the language of some cloistered group, of a knight order that is out of reach for those who haven’t been initiated. Their strategy of staying unreachable, focusing on some special initiation was completely perpendicular to ours. Boris Orlov talks about «culture 2» and globalism of socialist regime We can only make use of some simplest schemes, which won’t be absolutely right yet one of these simplest schemes was unveiled by Vladimir Paperny, who explained the rotation of two opposites i.e. «Culture 1» and «Culture 2» in Russian culture. He described them using only the Stalin era art and art of the pre-Stalin times as examples. No matter how strange it may appear, the scheme is still alive these days. Art in Stalin’s time wasn’t only remarkable because of its emphasis on total «meat», the exuberance of plastic arts. It was the first phenomenon of globalist art because Stalin’s «Red Empire», its ideas were similar to those of American global system of today. These days it’s a democratic empire, that’s the only difference. And please pay attention: all the varieties of globalist «red» art looked alike, be it Cuba or China. Boris Orlov talks about technologies invading evolution of art, about AES group and Eisenstein As regards the time we live in, the situation is as risky as it was at the end of the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century art hadn’t changed much over the course of two hundred years. And then new technologies came rushing in: a photo camera that in no time renders portrait painting redundant, cinema that cancels historical painting. The space of painting keeps on shrinking due to these technologies. Taking into account that the invasion of technologies is occurring increasingly quicker, and the impact of it is growing stronger, we might as well be unable to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. That’s why we’re going through the most difficult historical phase at the moment. At this point of time an artist should show extreme caution. We can see all these technologies turn obsolete by leaps and bounds. Just imagine that all I did in the 1990s was VHS video films. We’d simply have no technical means of watching them today.... All the same, the most resilient formations are archaic, and that’s what I chose. |
