Vadim Zakharov (artist)

Vadim Zakharov ( Russian Вадим Захаров , transcribed Vadim Sakharov ; * 1959 in Stalinabad , USSR ) is a Russian action artist , painter , photographer , video artist and installation artist . He is referred to as the archivist of Moscow Conceptualism and counted among the Moscow Conceptualists. He lives and works in Berlin and Moscow .

Vadim Zakharov: Adorno monument in Frankfurt am Main

Life

Vadim Zakharov was born in Stalinabad in 1959. Since 1978 he has participated in exhibitions of the unofficial Moscow art scene and has worked with Igor Lutz, Victor Skersis and Sergey Anufriev , among others . In the years 1982–1984 he took part in the exhibitions of the AptArt gallery. In 1982 he graduated from the Faculty of Graphics and Art at the Moscow State Pedagogical University . In the following years he began collecting works by contemporary Moscow artists.

In the context of the opening of Russia in the years of perestroika , Zakharov, like many of his artist friends, left for the West in 1989. He settled in Cologne in 1990 and founded the publishing house Pastor Zond Edition , in which from 1992 to 2001 the most important publication was the art magazine Pastor, which he designed and edited in a hand-made edition. The thematic editions comment on current events in contemporary art, literature and philosophy and appear largely in Russian.

In 2003 Zakharov won the design competition for the Adorno monument in Frankfurt am Main . He decided to recreate a private workplace of a creative mind in an artistic form in public space. For this purpose Zakharov built a glass cube made of bulletproof glass with an edge length of 2.50 meters, which contains a parquet floor, a desk and a desk chair. Several items are placed on the desk. A desk lamp switches itself on automatically at dusk and off again at dawn and represents Theodor W. Adorno's nocturnal work. In addition, a metronome is constantly ticking , which is supposed to symbolize Adorno's compositional activities. There is also a book edition of Adorno's work Negative Dialectic , a typewritten manuscript with handwritten comments and a sheet of music on the desk.

Quotes from Adorno's work Minima Moralia and from his aesthetic theory are carved into a marble labyrinth outside the glass cube . The lines of the quotations change several times within the marble floor, thus forming a labyrinth.

The glass cube is a reference to the present, in which even the private space cannot escape transparency.

When it was unveiled, the installation was on Adorno-Platz in the Bockenheim district. Since April 2016 it has been on the central square of the Westend campus of Frankfurt's Goethe University , which was renamed Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz , but this change of location was not agreed with the artist himself.

The glass cube has been damaged several times since the monument was inaugurated.

In 2006 Vadim Zakharov received his first major retrospective in Russia at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Under the title 25 Years on One Page , Vadim Zakharov's 25 years of artistic activity was presented by the Stella Art Foundation and the Interros Book Publishing Program. The exhibition was divided into seven sections: actions, performances and adventures, editions, installations, photographs and videos, paintings, objects, collaborations.

In 2013 his installation Danaë was shown in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale , which was curated by Udo Kittelmann , director of the National Gallery , Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Danaë , in Greek mythology the lover of Zeus and with him the mother of Perseus, is a recurring topos in the fine arts from antiquity to modern times. Vadim Zakharov's contemporary interpretation of the myth is a commentary on greed and ruthlessness in modern times. In his installation, philosophical, sexual, psychological and cultural fragments merge into a theater-like composition that moves between installation and performance.

For the installation, Zakharov continuously rained 200,000 gold coins from the upper floor through a hole in the lower floor. The gold coins were specially designed by the artist. The value of the coin, a Danaë, was embossed on the front, and the four words trust, unity, freedom and love , which was encompassed by the slogan “The artist guarantees the value with his honor 2013” , on the reverse . In the basement, access was only allowed to visitors who were given an umbrella to protect themselves from the laburnum. They were asked to bring a handful of coins into an adjacent room and toss them into a bucket there. This was pulled up through a hole in the ceiling by a man who was on the upper floor in order to keep refilling the machine that let the gold rain down on the lower floor.

In another room, a man sat on a beam, who ate peanuts and dropped their shells on the floor - instead of gold it was raining garbage. On one wall was the sentence "Gentlemen, time has come to confess our Rudeness, Lust, Narcissism, Demagoguery, Falsehood, Banality and ...", which was continued in the next room "... and Greed, Cynicism, Robbery, Speculation, Wastefulness, Gluttony, Seduction, Envy and Stupidity. "(" Gentlemen, the time has come, our rudeness, lust, narcissism, demagoguery, falsehood, banality and ... ";" ... and greed, cynicism, robbery, speculation , Waste, seduction, envy and stupidity [to confess] ")

In 2017 Vadim Zakharov showed his performance "Tunguska Event, History Marches on a Table" at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The event was created in collaboration with the VAC Foundation, which is committed to the international presentation, production and development of contemporary art from Russia.

The performance was a humorous journey through time and history, in which the individual characters acted on a rectangular construction at which the visitors could sit down as if at a table. The title of the performance refers to the so-called Tunguska event , during which one or more explosions occurred in Siberia on June 30, 1908. The most likely cause today is the entry of an asteroid, but a volcanic eruption cannot be ruled out either. For Zakharov, this event symbolizes the irrevocable global changes in human consciousness.

plant

"(...) in order to become autonomous, an artist needs to become an institution himself, replacing all functions of contemporary art institutions with his own activities. (...) Zakharov did not change his strategy after he moved to the West, where there were plenty of contemporary art institutions to be found. Quite on the contrary, Zakharov has developed and even radicalized his artistic strategy of autonomy. (...) Zakharov takes up all of the vacancies that the system of contemporary art will offer: the artist, curator, critic, publisher, biographer, archivist, documentarian, historian, and interpreter. "

(“To become autonomous, an artist himself has to become an institution and replace all functions of the institutions of contemporary art with his own activities. (...) Zakharov has his strategy after moving to the West, where there are many institutions of contemporary art On the contrary: Zakharov has further developed and even radicalized his artistic strategy. (...) Zakharov fills all vacancies offered by the system of contemporary art: the artist, curator, critic, editor, biographer , Archivist, documentarist, historian and translator. ")

Vadim Zakharov is usually assigned to Moscow conceptualism. This circle arose in the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet Russia, where young artists examined and ironically questioned the ruling ideologies for their language rites and figures of thought. The artists of Moscow Conceptualism differed greatly from one another on the formal level, but their unity consisted in the “creative method as such as well as in the relationships to the contexts of art, i.e. to the historical, social and individual context.” The Soviet understanding of art became rejected and worked artistically and literarily with new methods such as intertextuality and intermediality. A constant change of perspective resulted from the fundamental doubt about the possibility of depicting reality through the artistic semiotic system . Ultimately, the artists of Moscow Conceptualism were convinced that reality cannot be depicted, only the failure to attempt it. Dealing with topics such as emptiness, metaphysics , garbage or the functioning of signs and symbols are an expression of this approach.

From the end of the 1970s one speaks of the second generation of Moscow Conceptualism, to which Vadim Zakharov is also assigned. This generation developed new questions and questioned the first generation around Ilya Kabakow , Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid , Viktor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatow and Andrei Monastyrski u. a.

In the absence of a position in the official Soviet art canon and due to state restrictions and censorship , Moscow conceptualism had to build its own structures and institutions. The artists created a "self-contained and independent world in which the production of art and its critical description, archiving and museumization were guaranteed." The art of archiving became an independent art form, for example in the "MANI folder" ( MANI = Moscow Archive for New Art), which were initiated by Andrej Monastyrski and prepared in the second version by Vadim Zakharov and Viktor Skersis. The “MANI folders” were the first important joint publications, regardless of their circulation of five copies. Each artist was given an envelope, which he filled with conceptual works, photographs or theoretical texts, which in turn was placed in a folder containing various envelopes from other artists. The publication was distributed by passing it on from one artist to the next.

From the 1980s, Vadim Zakharov continued the art of archiving , which is why he is often referred to as the archivist of Moscow Conceptualism. Since there were no other art institutions than the official ones in the Soviet Union, Zakharov was forced to collect material such as photos, videos, catalogs, brochures or invitations from the unofficial Moscow art scene on his own initiative. The first works in his archive were works by Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Nikita Alexeev, Yuri Albert and the group toadstool (Muchomor), among others. Between 1989 and 2014, Vadim Zakharov created a video archive on the activities of the artists of Moscow Conceptualism in the West, for which he filmed over 200 exhibitions, performances and readings.

Vadim Zakharov's archives not only function as a repository where materials are saved from disappearing. He actively works intertextually and intermedially with the materials and integrates them into his artistic activities and publications. This turns the rigid archive into a dynamic archive.

Vadim Zakharov acts as an artistic institution that unites collector, archivist, artist and publisher, and chooses a different approach than his artist colleagues, such as Ilya Kabakov or the Western conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers , in that his institutions and roles are not fictitious entities or Are additions to the actual artistic work, but can stand independently for themselves. The archive is an archive, the publisher is a publisher and its collection is a collection.

Vadim Zakharov works as a painter, photographer, video and installation artist as well as a performance artist. His work deals with the theme of memory and its destruction, preservation and erasure, and exploration of the Moscow conceptual community and its own strategies and methods.

Vadim Zakharov's works The Killing of the Madeleine Pastry (1997–1998), On One Page (1998–2001) and the work I Made Enemies (1980) are examples of this approach .

“The killing of the Madeleine pastry” is based on Marcel Proust's work In Search of Lost Time , in which the first-person narrator is reminded of his childhood while dipping a Madeleine pastry in tea. Vadim Zakharov also had his artist friends try a Madeleine pastry and immediately afterwards write down the sensations that this taste triggered. The texts were collected in a book and can be understood as the “collective subconscious of Moscow conceptualism”. The artist then brought the search for lost time to court, in which the Madeleine pastry was sentenced to death. On September 28, 1997 at 7:54 p.m. Vadim Zakharov had the Madeleine pastry shot by a sniper in Graz. In the last act in 1998 in the Kreuzkirche on Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin, the “Requiem for Madeleine Pastries”, composed by Ivan Sokolov, premiered and recorded by Natalia Pschenitschnikova. The long-term project The Killing of Madeleine Biscuits was documented in a multi-part edition consisting of a book, a video and a CD.

In the three editions of "On One Page", Zakharov printed the texts of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince , Dante's Inferno and 100 Russian Folk Tales on a single golden page, which ran through a laser printer over and over again until the entire text became so dense that the side received a relief structure. The resulting works address canonical texts that are inscribed in a cultural memory, but often lose their legibility as a result, but at the same time become like icons, since they function more as a picture than a text.

I made enemies from 1980 is a photo series in which Vadim Zakharov comments on Moscow conceptualists such as “Steinberg is a powdered Malevich”, “Bulatov, you are deceiving, and that is dangerous nowadays” or “It surrounds Yankilewsky and Kabakov something wolfish. Take a closer look. It is true ”wrote on the palm of the hand and held it head-on into the camera. These statements seemed like slaps in the face, which is why Vadim Zakharov wrote “I have made enemies” on his cheek in another photograph.

Today Vadim Zakharov lives and works in Berlin and Moscow. Together with his wife Maria Porudominskaja he continues the AptArt tradition in his private apartment in Berlin and regularly organizes exhibitions under the name FREEHOME with the maxim “Artist to artist” for a select group of visitors.

Awards and honors

• 1995: Griffelkunst Prize, Hamburg
• 2006: Best Work of Visual Art, Contemporary Visual Art Award “Innovation”, Moscow
• 2007: Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, American Academy, Rome
• 2009: Kandinsky Prize , Best Work of the Year, Moscow

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1979–84: Apartment exhibitions and APTART gallery, Moscow
• 1989: Vadim Zakharov, Kunstverein, Freiburg im Breisgau
• 1989: Vadim Zakharov, Galerie Peter Pakesch, Vienna
• 1989: Vadim Zakharov, Galerie Sophia Ungers, Cologne
• 1995: "The last walk through the Elysian fields", Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
• 1996: "Funny and sad adventuries of Foolish Pastor", Project for Atopic Site, Tokyo, Japan
• 2006: “Vadim Zakharov. 25 years on one page “, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2006: "Author - monument of Utopie", The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Museum of Privat Collections, Moscow
• 2009: "Collection and Archive by Vadim Zakharov", National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow
• 2013: "Danaë", Russian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale
• 2015: "Postscript after RIP: A Video Archive of Moscow Artists' Exhibitions 1989 - 2014", Garage, Moscow
• 2017–2018: "Tunguska Event, History Marches on a Table", Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna

Group exhibitions (selection)

• 1986: "APTART", The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
• 1988: "I live - I see", Kunstmuseum, Bern
• 1988: "Soviet Art Today", Museum Ludwig, Cologne
• 1990: "In the USSR and Beyond", Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• 1993: "Trade Routes", The New Museum, New York
• 1993: "The Language of Art", Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Art Association, Frankfurt
• 1998: “Preprint. Moscow Books from the Samizdat ”, Berlin State Library, New Museum Weserburg Bremen
• 2001: "Milano Europa 2000. The end of the century, the seeds of the future", PAC, Milan, Italy
• 2002: “Bangkok meets Cologne”, Art Center, Silpakorn University, Thailand
• 2002: “The small Word”, Art Center, Silpakorn University, Thailand
• 2002: “BABEL 2002” National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea
• 2003–2004: “Berlin-Moscow / Moscow-Berlin 1950–2000 - from today”, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; State Historical Museum, Moscow
• 2004: “Moscow Conceptualism: Oroschakoff Collection and Collection, Publishing House, Archive - Vadim Zakharov”, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin
• 2005: “What's new, pussycat?”, Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main
• 2005: “RUSSIA!”, Guggenheim Museum, New York City
• 2008: “Black Birds”, Municipal Museum of Contemporary Arts of Larissa; The Peristyle of the Athens Conservatory, Greece
• 2014: “A Space Odyssey”, The 2nd CAFAM Biennale, Beijing, China

literature

• Vadim Zakharov. Exh. cat. Kunstverein Freiburg eV Freiburg, 1989.
• Vadim Zakharov: The Last Walk through the Elysian Fields. Retrospective 1978–95 at the Koelnischer Kunstverein. Exh. cat. Koelnischer Kunstverein. Cologne and Ostfildern, 1995.
• Carsten Hoeller, Vadim Zakharov. Peter Mertes grant. Exh. cat. Bonner Kunstverein. Bonn, 1995.
• Vadim Zakharov: Adorno Square . Exh. cat. Office for Science and Art. Frankfurt am Main, 2004.
• Collection and Archive by Vadim Zakharov. National Center for Contemporary Arts. Moscow, 2009.
• Tupitsyn, Margarita. Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan, 1989.
• Groys, Boris. Contemporary Art from Moscow: From Neo-Avant-Garde to Post-Stalinism . Munich, 1991.
• Zakharov, Vadim and Degot, Ekaterina . Moscow. Conceptualism / Московский концептуализм . Moscow, 2005.
• Jackson, Matthew Jesse. The Experimental Group . Chicago, 2010.

Fonts

• Vadim Zakharov: The Last Walk through the Elysian Fields , Dt. / Russ., (On the occasion of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1995) Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1995 ISBN 978-3893-22775-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Vadim Zakharov in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.vadimzakharov.com

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Domus: Vadim Zakharov: Danaë. Retrieved February 1, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Paolo Ferrarini: Danaë by Vadim Zakharov. Retrieved January 25, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Axel Bojanowski : Historical event. Fire rockets from the ground exploded taiga. Retrieved February 4, 2018 . 
4. ^ Whitechapel Gallery: Tunguska Event, History Marches on a Table. Retrieved February 3, 2018 . 
5. ^ Boris Groys: The Promise of Autonomy. Retrieved January 10, 2018 . 
6. ↑ Ekaterina Bobrinskaya: The Moscow Conceptualism. Aesthetics and History. S. 36 .
7. ↑ Ekaterina Bobrinskaya: The Moscow Conceptualism. Aesthetics and History.
8. ↑ Ekaterina Bobrinskaya: The Moscow Conceptualism. Aesthetics and History. S. 39 .
9. ↑ Dorothea Zwirnet: Vadim Zakharov: Don Quixote against the internet. Retrieved January 20, 2018 .