Existential cold

In recent exhibitions Andrey Kuzkin’s little figures moulded out of bread have appeared in the context of the group installation “Bedesmen and Heroes”. In 2022 they are being made in the same small format, but individually. In “In the Ruins”, made of broken tiles and cement found by chance, these figures are the highest expression of sorrow and pain. When he began to work with bread as a material, Kuzkin evoked the tradition of modelling in bread in Russian prisons, and eucharistic associations. It is hard to say whether this symbolism plays a part in his most recent work. Bread undoubtedly makes the rough finish convincing, and the generalised nature of the ruins allows a breadth of possible interpretations: as the victims of bombing, or as the wrecked lives of refugees and emigrants. The bareness, the lack of any covering for these modest – and for that very reason very trustworthy – figures allows an immediate experience of the misfortune that has befallen them. The series ends with “Eternal Spring in Solitary Confinement” with an absolutely minimalist mise en scène. Kuzkin’s man does not appear to have been driven into a corner, he calmly occupies his space. His surroundings do not look much like prison walls, on the contrary, they are softened by natural elements: the bare twigs of a bush, a bird, and something that might be either the sun or the moon (a ping-pong ball coloured a warm yellow). The prison walls shut him off from society, separate him from the milieu of family or friends, and Kuzkin’s “solitary confinement” is indeed close to Brodsky’s existential abandonment.

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His words about existential cold end as follows: “The result of this must be enormous human suffering.” Today’s propaganda pushes the heroicisation of the “Great Victory” and its participants. As a counterbalance to this, Russian art has always lacked an interpretation of all the fallen, and all of the participants in war as victims, including the “victims of history”, as Brodsky called those who had mindlessly succumbed to propaganda in his Nobel acceptance speech. It is doubtful whether the present military aggressors may be pitied, and that certainly cannot be expected of people who live in Ukraine, but at the same time, art allows one to test one’s feelings. Thus Sergei Prokofiev has created a series of dead “invaders”. These figures show different phases of the history of a corpse, which has lost its human component and is going through an exclusively natural cycle.

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A stiffened body. A dog eating a soldier. A decomposed body. Something growing out of another body. Yet another body, no longer on the surface of the earth, we can only see its outline in the growing wheat if we look from above. Sergei Prokofiev’s technique – a 3D pen and black plastic – looks particularly effective when he photographs his work against a snow-white background. All these figures of soldiers – burnt, rotting, eaten by dogs and pigs, could be seen in documentary shots of 2022. We are trying to erase them from our memories; looking at this for any length of time is unbearable.

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Prokofiev’s images, though equally true to life, allow us to rest our gaze on them, they relieve the acuity of the moment. Translated into plastic, swallowed by the shining white background, they are perceived, as it were, from the distance of history. The dead man, even if he is an invader, is a human life stupidly destroyed, a failure of humanity. When the fanfares and propaganda speeches have faded away, there will just be bodies lying in the fields, and they will become fertiliser.

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The sunflower growing out of a soldier’s body is an immediate echo by Prokofiev of one of the main images of Anselm Kiefer. Born in 1945, he has spent all his life interpreting the German cultural tragedy of the twentieth century, on questions of history and war as a man-made catastrophe. At his exhibition in Venice in 2022, a coffin with two sunflowers inside it was placed at the centre of the key composition. It may be noticed that this is not only two modern artists echoing each other. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which opened the way to expressionism in European painting, are full of vitality, life and hope. Kiefer’s, and his Russian contemporary’s, look like a dried-up resinous sun, and there is no longer any hope that their seeds will be good for anything.

 

Like they year 2022 itself, the chosen works do not leave the viewer any cause for optimism.  But it is important that there are artists who raise these topics.  This may be a means of reassembling Russian culture, and of overcoming the existential cold.