Goodbye Gelsomino!

Preface by Nadya Plungyan to the collection of Alexandra Novozhenova

The V–A–C Foundation is preparing for publication a collection by Alexandra Novozhenova (1982–2019), which will include texts, design and graphic works by the artist and art historian. Gorky publishes one of the prefaces to the upcoming book, written by Nadya Plungyan.

Failure, betrayal, mistake, ridicule, destruction. In one of the realities, telling about Marxist art criticism in the USSR, this would be the way to describe the relationship between art and criticism. A deadly game in a collective farm landscape. A model of the artists' union in the form of a huge piñata filled with bayonets of directives and sledgehammers of elaborations. Paper fireplace of the Stalin Prize, glued to a brick. Then this fear froze in the cold capsules of the “creative environments” of the seventies. The nineties caught him in their shattered mirror. The noughties hatched with poisoned flowers with the whistling name of “ contemporary art institutions .”

In Russia there is not enough space for irony, sarcasm, an independent and arrogant look at the relationship between art and power. The dramatic breakup has been forgotten, after which some experts went into hiding, while others dressed in civilian clothes, called themselves curators, and began to compose (and sometimes simply sign with their name) policy articles and brochures. And the big purge of satirical drawing in the first quarter of the century left us no chance. There is no Charivari or Private Eye to accurately and caustically describe both the Komsomol members of the late post-neo-Soviet art world and its academy on the feet of clay of socialist realism.

It cannot be said that Novozhenova proposed precisely such satirical optics. We never agreed on this, she told me that drawing is a matter of personal practice, like dangling a leg, and there is nothing political in it. And yet, the more unsteady and vague her attitude towards her own place in academic structures became, the clearer the drawings turned out to be. The artistic form, perhaps, has crossed the boundaries of analytics and opened a way out of the regulated field. I want these graphic theses to linger in our discussions for a long time. They have weight.

When I first saw her sketches (Sasha was scribbling something with a pen on a round table), I was struck by the peculiarly cast, finished form of the figures, similar to cast-iron blockheads. In some places it was simplified to a beater, to a column, in many drawings it was fleshed out, even emerging from the sheet in complex and still sculptural baroque angles. This amazing plasticity and eerie invention, the combination of the menacing and the comic, still reminds me most of all of the works of Alexander Arefyev. His crowds in bathhouses and on cramped staircases, scenes of fights and reproaches, hanging carcasses of “citizens” require no explanation and do not contain any linear narrative. But this is precisely what made them illegal in their era: convention freed a whole orchestra of emotions, tension of form, real sharpness of color. Novozhenova has a lot of such compositions: conventional figures, firmly outlined with colored pencil, try to overtake each other, strangle, or stick a knife. Thin and thick, big and small, they double, triple, merge into a single being.

A cruel macabre game without beginning or end, replete with repetitions. In the series “Repetition” (2010), the stamping of an image mechanically multiplied by four by six creates a comic imitation of the rhythms of deco and pop art. A film strip where nothing happens; “find the differences” picture where there are no differences. There are, however, quite plot-driven cycles of drawings, for example, “Moscow” (2011) with laconic titles: “Caps”. "Frame". "Branch". “Detention”, also built on the contrast of monolithic groups (police - protesters).

The common theme of all the drawings is violence, collision, damage. There are no winners in this skirmish; only masks appear, close to the commedia dell'arte, which can flow into each other and change places. Plastically, Jean Effel or the most vulgar Disney comes in here every now and then, the flexible form of Ivanov-Vano stretches out, a newspaper strip from the turn of the century peeps through, starting with Yellow Kid. By the way, Novozhenova’s permanent character, Baby , a plump giant baby, often growing into a leaf, is quite transparently correlated with him : plastically, he resembles the famous bronze of Sarah Lebedeva. Sometimes the Baby changes his age and gender, but he has an emotional constant - confusion: the protagonist, he can drive a tank, but at the same time he always seems to be floating with the flow, remains a victim of circumstances, awaiting his fate along with the rest of the Babies .

The next phase of the Baby is Pinocchio , an elongated soldier-puppet, a children's hero in a pointed cap. If the Baby is static, then Pinocchio is mobile or in free fall, and it is no coincidence that in some sheets he turns into Alice . In this character, another cross-cutting theme is gradually emerging, related to an artificial or extra-long nose. The nose is both a sign of a toy, separating the living from the inanimate, and a metaphor for deception. An ominous artifact, it is attached to the face like a gun barrel, a finger, a revolver or a phallus, and somewhere reads as an identity marker, if we mean the Soviet Pinocchios of the 1960s–1980s, always played by women. The rows of guns pointed at the hero can also be read as a semi-reference to the book “Gelsomino in the Land of Liars” with illustrations by Tokmakov, Sasha loved it.

The baby is on the same side as Pinocchio: they are pursued by a cunning and evil double with an already priapic nose, sometimes wearing the characteristic mask of Punch or Pulcinella . As in the commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella's theme is violence, ridicule and shame. On many sheets, he keeps poking at the Pinocchio girl’s doll’s womb, but it seems he can’t get inside, resting against a piece of wood. In addition to the Gogolian context, the connection of the grotesque false nose with public stigma goes back to Novozhenov’s theme of the plague doctor, and to the form of the medieval iron mask of shame, intended to punish women who violated public order.

The conflict of the three figures is inseparable and insoluble; it moves in a circle, like three phases of one personality, three states of one society. Hence another motif - the Curtain, Le Rideau - the delimiting frame of the narrative, the beating of stage actions. The distance between the masks of aggression and innocence makes us recall the Soviet adaptations of the square theater, where the hero henceforth performed only good deeds. Funny antics of Petrushka the Foreigner, who just doesn’t want to go to school; pioneer Vvedensky, who grabbed the wolf by the tail and threw it into the river, jumped over the Volga and clutched the bullet intended for him in his fist. Punch, for comparison, here and there gets into a fight with anyone, throws a screaming child out of the window, kills his wife and beats a policeman with a club. In Sasha’s drawings, the policeman with the revolver-nose in a black holster is Pulcinella: it is he who leads a crowd of confused pinocchios in caps into the police station.

It is interesting that the theme of Punch and his wife Judy, acting in the labyrinth of a blood-red curtain, that is, precisely outside the modernist grid, literally crystallized at the same time as these drawings in David Lynch. In his new version of Twin Peaks, Punch is shown as the doppelganger of the main character, Agent Cooper, and Judy is shown as a chthonic grin of the otherworldly, the root cause of evil, a pit of nuclear war, gaping where a face should be, but in fact - as an unspoken and key element of the picture world of the 20th century, mysticism that overturns the Marxist scheme. I see a partly close approach to the development of the superreal (I am sure that Sasha would have developed it further) in the general movement of her graphics towards the non-objective, in the free transition from abstraction to figure and back. In some of the drawings, letters and numbers come to life: quotation marks swell, filling with a menacing chiaroscuro, the sharp tails of triplets unexpectedly predatorily dig into the backs of overturned figures. The abstract sound of the series was also preserved in Sasha’s online nicknames: “deadpants”, “deadly rattle”, “toy repair”.

In the drawings of the last year, which Sasha showed on Instagram, the figures retain their elasticity, but are constantly modified in a psychedelic dance. Punch's conflict with the Baby , the Baby's alliance with Pinocchio turned into a tense, obsessive dialogue between a ball and a pillar, long and round in shape, sometimes stretched, sometimes collected. Losing individual parts, the form floated into space like sound: a half-arm or phalanx appeared on a pedestal, peas rolled out of the gears of an armored vehicle of unknown purpose: balls filled coffins or carts, a curtain opened and closed. A parallel solution was her literary performative passages, such as the famous interview with Borey Klyushnikov. I have heard that this text is pathological and has nothing to do with art, but I still take the position that art, especially experimental art, will always cause outrage and remain misunderstood. Phantom and eccentric images of semi-abstractions are connected by a clear logic. They contain not only a multi-layered metaphor of suffering through ridicule and skepticism, but also an amazing vitality at the forefront of the struggle, an unwillingness to give up - and simply personal courage.