Waste Lands in the East

By scratching the surface, you are taking away a little part of it. You exchange the loan for the remainder. You keep your mark. This ancient technique is tamed by the artist Vadim Mikhailov. The primer and black oil paint are covering the foundation: canvas or more often obsolete clothes, coats, pants, a shirt, or unnecessary things such as a stand, a shelf, a rug. Scratched drawings are applied with an awl, a blade, and coalesced with surfaces. The objects that appeared in this process resemble archaeological finds, paleontological imprints.

According to the author's legend, the practice of scratched images is associated with youthful experiments of harmless vandalism. The favored walls of the entrances became a space for joint creative activities, covered with many drawn pictures, probably, reminiscent of the graffiti that Brassaï shot on the streets of Paris. In the collection of objects by Vadim Mikhailov, the imprinting of collective memory also comes into play - many things reworked by the author were transferred to him by the participants of the St. Petersburg art scene: Nestor Engelke, Anna Andrzhievska, Petr Shvetsov, Tatiana Chernomordova, Alexander Tsikarishvili and others. The artist also decided to keep the brutal practice of «unskillful» drawing to himself. On its basis, he develops a plastic language, ponderously significant, physiologically convincing, documentary-dried.

The objective world, which the artist enthusiastically recycles, captures, mummifies, seems to resist systematization. There are bodily remains here: a skeleton, a skull, legs with garters; semi-organic structures: intestines with a crutch, fins with claws; there is just a string bag, a half of a fish, the corpse of a birdie, a couple of mythical birds, a plantain, a ring with a sparkling stone. Sometimes images enter into dialogue with the things on the surface of which they appeared. Clothing with embedded body parts or naked torso demonstrates its past function of covering; a shelf with a pair of legs and decorated, by the will of the author, with flowers, turns into a reliquary. Sometimes things cease to be recognizable, absorbed by their new black skin with drawings - tattoos.

In a separate exhibition space, there is a large-scale composition assembled from several sheets, which the author called «Expulsion from the Garden of Eden». The drawing appeared in the process of the artist's work with Old Believer popular prints (a lubok or lubki prints), the various characters of which he re-assembled in his own manner. The well-known plot is hardly guessed here, instead of two they drive a whole host of heroes, there are also demons, a dragon, and other evil spirits, so it seems as if everyone went straight from heaven to the Last Judgment. This work, referring to Christian texts, seems to be an unexpected element in the general fabric of the exhibition, however, it is the artist who singles it out as the title. The mysterious name “Waste Lands in the East”, chosen by the author for the entire project, indicates the place where those who no longer have a place in Eden, who have gone through irreversible events, reside.

Empty clothes, canned, turned into objects by Mikhailov, in the exhibition hall turns into a double of the former owner, a substitute for a part of the body, an indication of the loss. Coupled with images of bones and internal organs that have gained independence, these images contain a reminder of the works of Rona Pondick, Sarah Lucas, Robert Gober. In the 1990s, they, like many other artists, created objects and installations related to the problematics of taboo corporeality, freeing up obscenities and searching for a place in art to symbolize traumatic experience. Their practices, including those associated with the re-actualization of surrealism, were actively discussed by curators and theorists, who saw in this art another turn in the artistic process that appeared after «the art of simulation» of the 1980s. The works of Vadim Mikhailov in the current difficult epidemiological situation are alarming with a reminder of the instability of the body, but they are much less physiological and hardly claim to have a shock or frightening effect. However, invoking heterology by Georges Bataille, which is important for the tradition of analyzing the art of the nineties, can be productive for thinking about his artistic practice. The French thinker defines heterogeneous as opposed to the social order and rejected by it, such as waste, garbage, body parts, erotic experiences, but also the experience associated with the sacred, "knowledge of heterogeneous reality as it is can be found in the mystical thinking of primitives and dreams."

It seems that Mikhailov's artistic intuition is close to this trajectory of thinking, and, perhaps not by chance, from working with all sorts of trivial waste, he easily turns to quasi-religious subjects. What is worth to be soldered into art is what is pushed out of the daily routine at the moment of working. His works, as if baked in advance by time, together form a space of memory, which appears to be the kingdom of heterology devoid of hierarchies. In Mikhailov's artistic world, the heterogeneous is what, for inexplicable reasons, is best preserved at turning points in history. What will you remember when you are expelled from paradise, traveling on waste lands, or if you are called to the Last Judgment? About fins with claws, about antlers, about a comet and a molar tooth.

By scratching the surface, you are taking away a little part of it. You exchange the loan for the remainder. You keep your mark. This ancient technique is tamed by the artist Vadim Mikhailov. The primer and black oil paint are covering the foundation: canvas or more often obsolete clothes, coats, pants, a shirt, or unnecessary things such as a stand, a shelf, a rug. Scratched drawings are applied with an awl, a blade, and coalesced with surfaces. The objects that appeared in this process resemble archaeological finds, paleontological imprints.

According to the author's legend, the practice of scratched images is associated with youthful experiments of harmless vandalism. The favored walls of the entrances became a space for joint creative activities, covered with many drawn pictures, probably, reminiscent of the graffiti that Brassaï shot on the streets of Paris. In the collection of objects by Vadim Mikhailov, the imprinting of collective memory also comes into play - many things reworked by the author were transferred to him by the participants of the St. Petersburg art scene: Nestor Engelke, Anna Andrzhievska, Petr Shvetsov, Tatiana Chernomordova, Alexander Tsikarishvili and others. The artist also decided to keep the brutal practice of «unskillful» drawing to himself. On its basis, he develops a plastic language, ponderously significant, physiologically convincing, documentary-dried.

The objective world, which the artist enthusiastically recycles, captures, mummifies, seems to resist systematization. There are bodily remains here: a skeleton, a skull, legs with garters; semi-organic structures: intestines with a crutch, fins with claws; there is just a string bag, a half of a fish, the corpse of a birdie, a couple of mythical birds, a plantain, a ring with a sparkling stone. Sometimes images enter into dialogue with the things on the surface of which they appeared. Clothing with embedded body parts or naked torso demonstrates its past function of covering; a shelf with a pair of legs and decorated, by the will of the author, with flowers, turns into a reliquary. Sometimes things cease to be recognizable, absorbed by their new black skin with drawings - tattoos.

In a separate exhibition space, there is a large-scale composition assembled from several sheets, which the author called «Expulsion from the Garden of Eden». The drawing appeared in the process of the artist's work with Old Believer popular prints (a lubok or lubki prints), the various characters of which he re-assembled in his own manner. The well-known plot is hardly guessed here, instead of two they drive a whole host of heroes, there are also demons, a dragon, and other evil spirits, so it seems as if everyone went straight from heaven to the Last Judgment. This work, referring to Christian texts, seems to be an unexpected element in the general fabric of the exhibition, however, it is the artist who singles it out as the title. The mysterious name “Waste Lands in the East”, chosen by the author for the entire project, indicates the place where those who no longer have a place in Eden, who have gone through irreversible events, reside.

Empty clothes, canned, turned into objects by Mikhailov, in the exhibition hall turns into a double of the former owner, a substitute for a part of the body, an indication of the loss. Coupled with images of bones and internal organs that have gained independence, these images contain a reminder of the works of Rona Pondick, Sarah Lucas, Robert Gober. In the 1990s, they, like many other artists, created objects and installations related to the problematics of taboo corporeality, freeing up obscenities and searching for a place in art to symbolize traumatic experience. Their practices, including those associated with the re-actualization of surrealism, were actively discussed by curators and theorists, who saw in this art another turn in the artistic process that appeared after «the art of simulation» of the 1980s. The works of Vadim Mikhailov in the current difficult epidemiological situation are alarming with a reminder of the instability of the body, but they are much less physiological and hardly claim to have a shock or frightening effect. However, invoking heterology by Georges Bataille, which is important for the tradition of analyzing the art of the nineties, can be productive for thinking about his artistic practice. The French thinker defines heterogeneous as opposed to the social order and rejected by it, such as waste, garbage, body parts, erotic experiences, but also the experience associated with the sacred, "knowledge of heterogeneous reality as it is can be found in the mystical thinking of primitives and dreams."

It seems that Mikhailov's artistic intuition is close to this trajectory of thinking, and, perhaps not by chance, from working with all sorts of trivial waste, he easily turns to quasi-religious subjects. What is worth to be soldered into art is what is pushed out of the daily routine at the moment of working. His works, as if baked in advance by time, together form a space of memory, which appears to be the kingdom of heterology devoid of hierarchies. In Mikhailov's artistic world, the heterogeneous is what, for inexplicable reasons, is best preserved at turning points in history. What will you remember when you are expelled from paradise, traveling on waste lands, or if you are called to the Last Judgment? About fins with claws, about antlers, about a comet and a molar tooth.

Anastasia Kotyleva