The Functioning Forms
Photographs
My field of specialization is engineering. After several years of work at the Aviation Institute of Scientific Research, I started to look for other fields of activity such as medicine and art. I didn’t become a doctor, but I was preparing to take up studies at the Department of Sculpture. I attended various art studios and private sculpture lessons. At that time (1987) an exhibition of Gunther Uecker was brought to Moscow. His work changed my whole idea of sculpture, objects and plastics, turning my mind towards the object. Till 1994 I was making art objects out of simple things, combining the ordinary with the culturally recognized and including in my work the ideas of Moscow conceptualists, Dada and Pop art.
In 1994, however, I took part in an international exhibition in Munich and first came into contact with the works of contemporary Western artists that made me realize how incomplete and unconvincing many of them – and mine as well – were.
Confusion and despair in search of a new approach incidentally brought me to a self-contained functioning object (not to be confused with Hand-Made and DYI or Do It Yourself objects). A self-contained functioning object is fundamentally necessary and significant to its author. In this case authorship is more important than any reason of production, but my principle of selection in its turn practically excludes massive significance: many objects that I have made could hardly even serve as a gift. They are not “intentionally” made that way; it is not an intentional will of the author – these objects are the way they are independently. These objects are the benumbed personal.
People are co-authors not only of their visual surroundings, but of their aesthetic environment as well – even without being aware of the authorial task. Even if there would suddenly be no more designers or sculptors in the world, the creation of new forms wouldn’t decrease.
Landscape is often associated with the word “God.” The forms that interest me bear the name of an author. Every professional artist is a creator of artistic forms. My own artistic forms have a natural source that you can talk to or interview and photograph as well. We are bound by the following chain: author => object/form => artist => audience. I do not misappropriate the authorship, but I do appropriate foreign discoveries of plastics, barely accessible to professional pride, delivering them to the audience in plain form. A loose collection can maybe catch one on the hooks of collectiveness. But what can be collective in the individual? Things are not included in my category of valuables for illustrative purposes and not due to some causality or because they have passed or will pass by, but because these things exist. After all, the main question concerning form is that of its justification. The technical completeness of a self- contained object, its size (materials, production and technique) and typicality can hardly be described as interesting. What’s interesting is the fantastic diversity of objects.
And what matters is the act of creation and its outcome – the pure and aesthetically unique form.