The Stella Art Foundation at 7 Skaryatinsky Lane is opening an art and poetry exhibition called “Wayward War” incorporating paintings by Yuri Pavlov-Rusyaev and poetry by Mark Shatunovsky. For the official opening Misha Rachlevsky’s Kremlin Chamber Orchestra will perform pieces by Sergei Prokofiev, Tom Schnauber, Rodion Shchedrin and Dmitri Shostakovich.
This experimental project is Stella Art Foundation’s first to combine visual art, poetry and music. Paintings, a cycle of poems, and Misha Rachlevsky’s vivid musical performances for a short time will all come together in a single space. Within that space the capricious trajectory of wayward war will emerge from the barely discernible outlines of odd connections between the inhabitants of landscapes lost to history and the Soviet soldiers who have arrived among them from no one knows where. The soldiers in Pavlov-Rusyaev’s paintings and Mark Shatunovsky’s poems have ceased to be the bearers of aggression but enter instead into a calm dialogue with the past. Blood had already drained into the soil of those ancient expanses, but the soldiers have turned into archaeologists and prophets, builders, madmen and traders. Even the biblical Snake does not disconcert the Soviet fighters: they unceremoniously seize it from Tree of Knowledge along with a harvest of apples from some unknown year.
Boris Manner, professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, curator and friend of the Stella Art Foundation, has this to say: “Yuri Pavlov-Rusyaev has long explored artistic worlds which contemporary viewers may see as anachronistic. His canvases resonate, explicitly or implicitly, with painting of the 16th through 18th centuries, as if they belong to some alternate history of art in which the modern era never existed. His pictures again and again recall the art of Alessandro Magnasco, whose restless brush and unrestrained fantasy brought the most haunting landscapes and ruins to life. Albrecht Dürer’s achievements are another focus of the artist’s creative impulse. Dürer’s well-known diptych “Adam and Eve”, housed in the Museo del Prado, becomes a screen on which a stream of our painter’s imagery plays. This could easily tempt the viewer into interpreting the polemic between the contemporary artist and the classics as a type of artistic appropriation. But the question remains, “Does Pavlov-Rusyaev work with those ‘Ur-images’ as an artistic successor and acolyte, or does he bring to them a form of critical reflection?”
The typical exponents of artistic appropriation — Elaine Sturtevant, for one — mostly resort to the works of their contemporaries or immediate predecessors, whereas Pavlov-Rusyaev has been dealing in aesthetic ideas locked in the depths of art history. However, at certain points the rightful inhabitants of his classical worlds become soldiers. In the “Adam and Eve” modelled after Dürer, one can spot Russian soldiers in 20th century uniform plucking apples from the Tree of Knowledge. One of them is even holding the Snake in his hands, and it is not clear whether the soldier is carefully lifting it up into the Tree or, on the contrary, confiscating it as a legitimate trophy.
In these historical worlds penetrated by forms and images alien to them, we see the mechanics of artistic adaptation operating at full strength. Indeed, the simple use of artistic resources from history constitutes an assault on the creative property of one previous master or another. And as is evident from the experience of the practitioners of artistic appropriation, questions about ownership of intellectual property will certainly come to the fore. Yuri Pavlov-Rusyaev places his soldiers in landscapes created by a completely different artist’s force of imagination, and this immediately makes clear the role played by such a seemingly innocuous practice as copying. The soldiers depicted in quite contemplative poses are not a threat of any kind to those around them, but they nevertheless remain personifications of militaristic behaviour.
When Clausewitz In his famous treatise On War considered whether war is an art or a science, he proposed a third alternative. He thought that war is a social instrument, a form of interaction that absolutely demands courage as one of its prerequisites. This vision of courage stems from the pursuit of the unknowable by our spirits. “The human spirit almost never travels beside reason along the narrow path of philosophical inquiries and logical conclusions; indeed, traveling this path it almost unconsciously arrives at domains in which all things native and close to it fall away and are left far behind. Thus, the human spirit and its imagination favour dwelling in the realm of happenstance and fortune. Instead of wretched necessity, it revels in the bounties of possibility. From that stimulus bravery takes wing; risk, daring and danger thus become the element into which courage plunges like a confident swimmer diving into a seething current.” (Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Chapter 1 [22])
The intrusion of modernism, which is imperceptible with Pavlov-Rusyaev at the formal level, is clearly seen in the depiction of the act of intrusion as such. It employs the theme of war embodied in the figures of soldiers. This “trick” can transform both the artist and the viewer into the object depicted. It personifies the daring required to conquer aesthetic fields in which everything has seemingly been put into place, if not entirely forgotten. Yuri Pavlov-Rusyaev’s works exemplify this daring by reviving the possibility of dialogue with what had seemed hopelessly familiar.
“Wayward War”, Mark Shatunovsky’s cycle of poems from which the exhibition derives its name, exists within that same context. These poems, hovering within the hyper-real, transpose it into their own key in order to pierce the binding of sacred history, poking holes in it through which unmediated reality becomes visible. Aryan Valhalla, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Modernity all these are nothing other than spaces for life, for occupation by imperfect, limited and heavily burdened human beings. Imperfection and limitation are precisely what makes anyone alive equivalent to a soldier. All of us are mobilized for, recruited by and compelled to serve in the arduous mission that is called life. This is a war that has strayed into each of us. Not the war of all against all, nor the dreary Darwinian struggle for survival, nor romantic feats of daring, nor the gaping of hell. This war is really everyday perseverance, a hard soldierly effort that is not utterly devoid of a few moments of joy and transcendence, of irony and self-irony. And victory in this war means gradually and painfully ridding the collective unconscious of psychoses and phobias.
The basic tenet of Shatunovsky’s worldview is certainly not a modernistic de-canonization that erects in place of certain idols others no less despotic. His poetics is constructed upon a deliberate rejection of any contradiction between the traditional and the avant-garde and of any pretension to willingly canonize anything. His poetics consists of giving in to a propulsive force that it would be inconceivable to control. Instead of a fine move in a paltry game or a mask with a weary smile, it upholds the right to the constantly changing expression of a human face.
