by Alexander Borovsky (Director of the Department for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum St. Petersburg.)

Igor Sacharow-Ross’ studio in Cologne is located in the district of Ostheim, which translates into
English as “eastern home”. Showing one round this enormous former industrial building designed in the early Secession style, surrounded by greenery, the artist does not fail to note that he was born in the Far East. He hails from Khabarovsk, where his parents lived not by choice, but in exile, huddled together in abarrack. Igor spent his childhood in the countryside. Besides Russians, this countryside was also home to Chinese people and members of small indigenous races, who managed to cling on to the vestiges of their own national way of life. There were other exiles from different social classes – kulaks (the name given in early Soviet times to prosperous peasants), white-collar workers and intellectuals… A harsh place and environment to say the least… Yet it was home, his eastern homeland… Life itself throws up its own subjects…

An artist becomes an artist in order to discern the higher meaning in all of this and Sacharow-Ross constantly addresses childhood impressions. The circumstances of life change, artistic thinking undergoes cardinal changes, one’s understanding of media evolves, yet, in the depths of the mind, childhood images continue to inspire the creative process. In the artist’s studio, my attention was immediately caught by Girl with Flowers. A photograph greatly magnified, to the point of raster dots evoking associations with skin pores. A form on the verge of disappearing and optic collapse, but – at the limits of the possibilities of the eye – a self-focusing form, drawing one into itself, making the viewer somnolently change his position with regard to the work – move away or approach or feel about for the point of contact. Photo-based art? Of course, only the medium does not per se explain anything; it works when the optical is governed by the existential.
I was not surprised when Sacharow-Ross told me that this work was based on a photograph made back in his youth, when he was only a teenager. The model was the daughter of the local witch doctor, virtually a shaman (a member of those aforementioned indigenous peoples who had not lost touch with their own peculiar lifestyles). On the plane of the work, Sacharow-Ross had arranged a vertical strip of micro-photographs of politicians of the past forty years – Khruschevs, Kennedys, Castros and so forth.
This is a form of chronological prospect-hole. Politics change, its heroes depart, vital decisions sink into oblivion … and what remains is a girl with flowers coming out of a forest – a sharp, youthful sensation of the enigma of existence …
Even in the 1980s, Sacharow-Ross was naturally integrated into the artistic process of Western Europe. This integration had its own specifics, which are worth exploring in more detail. Above all – independence. He appears to have regarded all these roles as being purely temporary and tactical.
Yet Sacharow-Ross was not indifferent to matters of national-cultural identity. These were not, owever, understood in the sense of an articulation of the Soviet experience. For the artist, the concept of “Russian burn” – regarded today as a purely technical term for the catalogue designation of Russian artists and active participants of the transnational process – has an informal meaning. For him, it is full of profound significance. Childhood experience appears to be much more important to the artist than the Soviet experience.
For Sacharow-Ross, this experience implied not only his own personal development, but a unique situation of contact with the remnants of archaic cultures, which he experienced in the Far East and which he constantly, creatively reinterprets.
The individuality of Sacharow-Ross’ entrance into the Western artistic process bears one unexpected, albeit completely explicable, factor. Although not lacking the attention of Western curators, he remains an unfamiliar figure to the new wave of Russian critics and historians. He is not a team player – and professional critics of the new Russian art prefer “collective actions”. This is understandable; they are concerned with the transnational contextualization of the Russian art practice as a collective body (also bearing in mind their propagandistic and organizational activities). A lonely runner, even one with his own individual achievements and records, does, in their minds, not quite meet the grade.
The long-distance runner can never get accustomed to loneliness. The collective “book of records” can wait. In the historical-artistic sense, however, it is high time we partially restored some justice in connection with the case of Sacharow-Ross.

The first histories of unofficial Soviet art are now being written – albeit somewhat hurriedly and opportunistically.
The absence in them of references to Sacharow-Ross looks like an annoying oversight. This young man from the far end of Russia was at the forefront of the artistic quests of the 1970s. This is linked, above all, to two circumstances. He was one of the first – virtually in parallel to Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid (Pravda Cutlets performance) and Andrei Monastyrsky’s Collective Actions group (1976), all from Moscow – to engage in performances in I Want to Go to America (1975). I do not know whether the artist had heard of Joseph Beuys’ I Love America and America Loves Me action, held in New York a year earlier, but he was clearly at the cutting thrust of the attack.
The same applies to the creation of objects. Shown at the legendary exhibition in the Ordzhonikidze Palace of Culture in Leningrad in 1976, System of Coordinates was, undoubtedly, the first object in the history of the Leningrad underground, reflected in the media aspect. In its scale and consistency of strategy, it was without equal in the Moscow context.
This division between Leningrad and Moscow – artificial in the majority of cases – has important meaning here. Moscow already had the active second generation of artists of the Conceptual school. Leningrad, perhaps on account of its subconscious historical orientation toward retrospection, remained an “easel” town, where traditional genres also dominated unofficial art. Sacharow-Ross began as an easel artist.

Moving to Leningrad in the early 1970s, the young artist plunged into a refined cultural environment, opposed to the regime less in political and more in cultural terms – interested in the aristocratic World of Art tradition of form creation and life creativity. Interest in the classical avant-garde also looked “frondishly” aristocratic, in the sense of the banal servility planted in official art by the state (the irony of history is that the avant-garde originally opposed St. Petersburg’s retrospection, positioning itself as a cardinally democratic phenomenon oriented toward the masses). Sacharow-Ross was lucky: he received the avant-garde impulse first hand. He made the acquaintance of Anna Leporskaya, a remarkable porcelain artist and faithful student of Kazimir Malevich, and Filonov’s student Pavel Kondratiev. He also associated with the architects I. Chashnik and Nina Suetina. Through them, the children of artists and followers of Suprematism, he gained access to such primary sources as family archives and collections.
At this time, Sacharow-Ross displayed energetic, refined and sometimes stylized draftsmanship, fully corresponding to the specific visionary natural element of St. Petersburg. He did not stop at this stage, where many talented underground artists come a cropper, unable to overcome stylization. In those years, the artist seemed to try out the possibilities of different directions (World of Art stylization, Pointillism, Surrealism – an original attempt to visualize musical structures – and even Letterism) and, most importantly, various systems of visualization. There was a short period of creating a Sots Art kind of ideologem, followed by an interest in the magic of montage: comparing different visual sources, from photo clichés to shreds of posters, i.e. any visual litter. More important for the future was his interest in the devices of auxiliary, functional graphic art of a “scientific” type – different ways of generalizing and mediating; schematic or “blueprint” presentation of the material.
All this led to a work that seemed to sum up the experience of the differentiation of the mimetic and the concrete. This was an amateur photograph spread out in scale, “slammed” by a fully materialized, weighty and tactilely felt red bar, cut out of cardboard or textile. Curiously, despite the concrete nature of this color bar, one can discern diverse cultural associations in it – a hint at Malevich’s Red Square or something Sots Art or, perhaps, a reference to the art practice of the Zero group, with its attempts to objectify color.
Notwithstanding all its primordial, visual mimesis, the photograph is also transformed and includes various cultural codes – both visual (the manner of printing; the haziness of sepia as a sign of nostalgic dreaminess) and thematic (rural cemetery, i.e. soil, roots, etc.). So what we have here is not competition between art and reality, but competition between different ways of representing reality. This work turned out to be of cardinal importance for Sacharow-Ross and he returned to it throughout his life.

Sacharow-Ross proved capable of thematicizing his own émigré experience – the experience of saving and finding himself in a new life. He created the Flight into Egypt series and Jewish Daughter – very profound and symptomatic for the inner development of the artist. He possibly never achieved such a rich-incontent dialogue with time; an almost physical, tactile sensation of the passage and movement of time. In the 1920s, there was a term called “surface sound.” Sacharow-Ross made the textural polyphony in this work (this is mixed media – photograph, wood, metal) become the sound of the time … The photograph of a female face, sunk in milk acrylic, is outside material, weight or season. Or, to be more exact, it is for all seasons … The texture of wood effaced by the wind, drenched by the rain and dried by the sun … Metal with patches of rust – the tone of sand, the patina of time … Finally, a compass and a blueprint or plan – a hint at an exit or the possibility of exodus from the Old Testament wilderness …
If Jewish Daughter captures the fate of a whole nation, the object of meditation of a large, long-lasting group of objects is different cycles – life, death and rebirth of matter in its various hypostases. This led to Sacharow-Ross’ trademark theme of the leaf – mostly Anthurium salviniae – specially prepared, served up with all possible reverence and piety, as a perfect ready-made of nature. The leaf exists in different hypostases in the artist’s objects. It soars solemnly in a space playing the role of a display, representing itself; it is a raking light cannon. It is enclosed in a metal cage; it is implanted into an icon board; it is investigated under the microscope in macro-magnification. Its flesh – cellular structure – is correlated with structures of artificial origin, for example, the plans of medieval cities.

Notwithstanding all these manipulations, the leaf remains perfect, a standard form of the manifestation of organic life. Sacharow-Ross confirms a thought that Damien Hirst attempted to express much later in “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) – only without the corroding irony and in a more humanist regime, without such shock therapy as pickled sharks. The leaf in Sacharow- Ross’ oeuvre is not only a standard of organic form, but also a form of the standard of time. All experiences which, by the will of the artist, fall on the lot of His Majesty the Leaf deal with time regimes and the ceremonials of the passage of time – flashes of spiritual illuminations (icon), not giving themselves up to direct human, sensual experience and conveyed in speculations and measurements of geological, light, and biological time …

It is characteristic that reflections on death, which permeate all levels of that picture of the world created by the artist – from the cellular and histological (he works much with micro-photographs of cells, including sick ones) to the cosmogonist – are not of an eschatological character. The talk here is about the natural cycles of vital functions. Specially interrupted, selected life is another matter entirely. In the Bloody Customs installation, using an openly emotional style, not typical of the master as a whole, Sacharow-Ross invades the political context. In a massive metal plate, three oval embrasures are covered by thick tank glass.
The famous photograph of a student crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square is thrice repeated in these observation slits. The youth’s face seems to fall back, collapse and vanish. Alongside the slab is a construction made of three glass volumes – tubes with yellow, red and brown sand – a piercingly beautiful, orientally refined color scheme, accompanied by sound (the artist himself created an aleatoric musical composition).
Removed life, the unrequired perfection of tonal relationships, interrupted sound – such death is not acknowledged by the artist, it is rejected by him.
Another death becomes the object of meditation in Memory of Grandmother. A photograph of a young lady singed at the edges (fire symbolizes this drama of time). The complex honeycomb structures, as the artist testifies – the exact situational plan of a once existing settlement; dried grass and a leaf – are also geographically and poetically (a grammar-school album with dried flowers, a school herbarium) attached to a concrete locality, to the homeland. These are facets of a concrete, completed fate and the artist respects this biographical concreteness and personal privacy. He fears destroying this completed, private life with a crude touch, hence the distance, the fixed point of view, like a bird’s eye view. This work brings out the attempt to activate personal contacts with the material and the personal – biographical, generational or other – “ties to locality.”
Much later, Sacharow-Ross contributed to an interesting project. This was a scheme to use art to refine an urban environment that was extremely inauspicious in the ecological, aesthetic and memorial sense – the remains of the Soviet military settlement in Potsdam. The artist recalls that when he saw “his” object – the ruins of a wall on which the soldiers did assault practice, as if on a training apparatus – his personal memory was immediately switched on. Sensations, smells and sounds … Student military training – shouts, the heaviness of the submachine gun, sweat, fatigue…Ugly ruins and unpleasant memories – it is impossible to ennoble the traces of such a civilization. All he could do was to address the natural, organic and botanic (the experience of “work with the leaf” was not in vain). Sacharow-Ross lifted up the special capacities of the green shoots running down the walls, establishing a spotlight in the empty window frames – a green“chlorophyll” luminescence. The organic, botanic processes initiated by the artist won. They swallowed up the militaristic artifact, which does not seem to have been organic enough for a “normal” habitat. Damien Hirst presented a similar victory of the organic over the artificial, alienated from man and nature, in his“aquarium” installations – flooded offices inhabited by marine flora and fauna.

The personification of historical experience (in Sacharow-Ross’ relatively early works, this theme is given in a slightly naive articulation of authenticity – exact topography, natural leaves and plants taken “from the exact same place”) from the days of Joseph Beuys, who was able to create an entire mythology of the autobiographical (albeit not without apocryphal mystification), became an important line in contemporary art. With typical Russian maximalism, Sacharow-Ross takes this theme of personal participation to the bounds of the possible. In the often described Saatbet action in Cella, Italy (1986), he mixed his own blood with the earth. The Russian tradition of “churches-on-blood”? An ancient ritual of a binding agreement? Probably a deal with nature. The relationship with nature, i.e. with the natural and the unstructured, is, in general, for him, extremely important. This also defines everything subsequent – the ceremonial of feeling and living in another time and space (historical, social and theological).
Working “on the earth,” organizing rituals and various forms of establishment and regimes of the behavior of man and nature, Sacharow-Ross could not help addressing the experience of primordial peoples, the distant vestiges of which he encountered during his childhood in the Far East (as we have already seen, he encountered representatives of indigenous nationalities who had somehow held onto their own identities). The artist needed a direct, albeit metaphorical, link with the universe, a revelation of the main codes of contact with it. In La Pensée Sauvage, Claude Lévi-Strauss links the creativity of “primitive” communities to modern art. He cautions against the feeling of the supremacy of professional art over the “primitive” and non-literal, along the lines of the presence of codes. A professional artist ostensibly works with cultural codes, possibly to the detriment of his own persona, whereas the primitive artist simply projects his own, few I-predicates into space. Lévi-Strauss showed a bifurcated and complex system of codes, typical of the culture of the Indian tribes of the northern shores of the Pacific Ocean. So the matter does not lie in the presence of codes as such, but in the character of these codes – in archaic cultures, unsplit and magistral, or what Lévi-Strauss called privileged chemes conducters.

Why did the artist hold such complex, multi-part actions as Yagya, including the digging of a graveshaped hole orientated to the North Star, the preparation of vegetative broth, “conversations” with a real snake, the recording of the beating of his own heart and the audio-documentation of the micro-sounds of a nocturnal forest? He clearly attempts to feel out certain collective registers and mental matrices, common for this type of thinking, typical of a pre-word, non-literal culture and usually described in terms of structural anthropology and certain versions of psychoanalysis. But why?
Sacharow-Ross seems to move here into a very important line of philosophizing, one only beginning its consolidation in contemporary art. From the unrestrained emancipation of the “thinking ego,” “pure consciousness” outside, when it is demiurgically equal to the world or moulds the world in its own likeness, there is a transition to what some modern philosophers clumsily call “non-egoisticness.” The “I” begins to aspire towards a “departure” from the structured, hierarchically arranged, cultural space, in order to once again find itself in a certain primordiality, from where the consciousness takes its sources. Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili describes this transition in the following way: “The consciousness can, in general, be introduced, as a dynamic condition of the transition of some structures, phenomena or events not relating to the consciousness, into the plan of the action of intellectual structures not relating to the consciousness either …. Intellectual structures can be regarded as something to which the consciousness led man and where it left him or came out of him.”
This “departure” from or „abandonment” of the cultured space for the sake of an everyday, non-egoistic space – filled with the existence of events as such, and not their traces in the form of cultural interpretations – provides the aspects of the new adequacy in perceiving the world. I think that Sacharow-Ross feels about for this particular vector – liberation of the communication of art from solidified and hierarchical formations of meaning; movement from systems of patencies to fractal (transitional) non-patencies; and non-evident, primordial guiding schemes demanding approbation through trials, tests and mistakes (including archaic, non-literal, pre-word ones). Modern semiologists speak in this connection about the replacement of the classical narrative with the “singular narrative” (“not death, but flight; not dying, flying”). Sacharow-Ross“dies” in his grave-shaped hole, articulating the processional nature of his own life and death alongside others.
Does the artist attempt to break through to this horizon of the pre-word and the direct, to a non-egoistic space? Or, in another language of description, to the “mute designative”? Jacques Derrida wrote about something similar: “The distinction between phonetic and non-phonetic writing, although completely indispensable and legitimate, remains something secondary and derivative in relation to what could be called synergy or synesthesia. From this follows not only that phonetism was never omnipotent, but also that it always worked over the mute designative.” I think that this gravitation towards synesthesia (manifested, albeit in a different system of description and in different movements of science, for example, in Stanislav Grof’s “perinatal matrices”) as a way of activating the mute designative is the manifestation of the more general need of modern man to understand his own fore-history – a need not always reflected in the sense of the competencies of concrete philosophical and scientific movements. This need is cyclical and appears to be manifested at the turn of centuries. At the start of our own, it is exacerbated by a new nostalgia for wholeness, for the lost existential infrastructure that assisted the full-fledged, full-blooded self-realization of human existence. This need appears to also lie at the basis of the new and widespread – not only in the sphere of the professional, but also in the sphere of the naive, “mass” philosophizing – interest in the Old Testament, Gnostic philosophy and the Kabbalah. As we have already seen, Sacharow-Ross is a philosophical kind of artist. He remains one of the few masters of his generation consistently interested in scientific thoughts, following their development. He does so seriously, outside such playful practices as Mock Archaeology or Mock Ethnography, which were popular in the West in the 1970s. In the Soviet Union of those years, the link with science was a matter of grave concern for unofficial artists – above all in the sense of Weltanschauung. In the age of total distrust of the Soviet philosophical picture of the world, the natural sciences promised an objective, non-ideological picture of the world. The “physicists,” with their constant “fronde” towards the authorities, held unofficial exhibitions and were even “patrons” – in the Soviet situation. As much as their modest means allowed, they bought works by underground artists (it is symbolic that many of the Moscow masters of a Conceptualist bent were centered around a journal called Knowledge is Power).
Few, however, managed to thematicize the “scientific” in the sense of art. One can only recall Vladimir Yankilevsky’s Nuclear Power Station (the spiritual-religious vector was more in demand). Even in the Soviet period, Sacharow-Ross attempted, completely consistently, to appropriate explanatory and fixative “scientific” techniques – the devices of mediation and abstraction. Probably for the first time since the 1920s and the time of Kliment Redko’s electro-organisms, all these schemes, vectors and formulae, set in motion (for example, in his System of Coordinates) were something more than merely signs of the scientific discourse. Working in Germany, the artist maintained his links with his friends from the Centre of Nuclear Physics in Gatchina (where his wife, Alla Voloshkina, had been head of the laboratory, before coming to the attention of the KGB and emigrating with him).

Sacharow-Ross gradually expands the sphere of his interests, which now includes esotericism.
This expansion of borders is completely reflected in and is directed, as we have already seen, toward the human need to understand our fore-history. A need hardly capable of being satisfied within the bounds of scientific discourse. In the late 1990s, something else came to Sacharow-Ross’ art practice, replacing actions concerned with probing out the psycho- and anthropo-technical and dating back to archaic sources of consciousness.
This something was graphite. Sacharow-Ross fell in love with this medium and the very process of its working – milling and grinding. These procedures seem to correspond perfectly to Theo van Doesburg’s approach and his Art Concrete manifesto: “Technique should be mechanical, that is to say, anti-impressionistic.”
His graphite bars and blocks, in their asceticism, also recall the art practice of the Zero group, who followed many of the principles of Art Concrete – extreme reduction and radical rejection of what Max Bill called “naturalistic representations”. Naturalistic – yes, but natural – no. Sacharow-Ross’ approach is to give the medium the right of “direct speech”. This right, however, must be realized and implemented. The artist must establish communication and introduce this medium into a certain context. This is the context of these same world-explorative procedures, which the artist articulated in his actions-rituals, regulating the relationship with the flows of time. For Sacharow-Ross, graphite represents a concentration, an objectification of this temporal issue. With its transcendental connotations, the word “represents” is ideally suited for expressing his relationship with graphite; the artistic (media), the natural scientific and the mystic are merged in one. In his mind, graphite is a concentrate of life, a clot of fore-consciousness, the same “mute designative” of Derrida that the artist summoned to deliver from “muteness”.

Sacharow-Ross’ graphite blocks, beams and columns are objects of a “screen” type, prototypes of mirrors, monitors, etc. The pressed millennia of organic life, permeated with the energies of fore-consciousness, look at the viewer from these screens. Whether reflected or not, the artist links up with the remarkable tradition of Russian philosophical poetry, linked to “geological” metaphors and expressed most consistently in Osip Mandelstam’s Slate Ode – the imagery of which, in turn, accumulates in Derzhavin and Lermontov – with its chain of flint, shale, lead, chalk and slate. In search of itself, culture turns back to the sources of speech, where “the water teaches them and time sharpens them,” i.e. nature “teaches” or prepares a primordial, sheep-and-goat culture, from which a “slate” or written culture emerges.
Sacharow-Ross has works in which the dialectics of geological and human times are shown clearly and directly. Inserted in a graphite block is a strip with the prints of the development of a human embryo.
This is a small, “pre-natal” history, yet a history completely discernible even against the background of geological landslides, as it is the necessary constituent component of the processes of the realization of life. The sensation of the unity of the temporal processes is upheld by the visual reference. This strip of prints – a form of vertical chronological prospecting hole – looks like a vein or the impregnation of one layer in the massive mineral bed of the other. Yet this profoundly concrete geological association also has a metaphorical continuation – a tense Mandelstam image (“with a layer of darkness, with a layer of light”). Sacharow-Ross also has works in which the merits of a graphite, slate culture, inheriting the logic of the natural processes, is upheld by a form of “reverse mathematics”. One work dedicated to Sergei Prokofiev employs the slate (an objective-meaning motif – a school slate as the field of a certain clearness, evidence, objectivity and purity of the experiments put forth by the artist – was actively employed by Joseph Beuys in his Siberian Symphonies). On one side is the sheet music for Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. On the other is a readymade – a cage with a musical tilting doll inside. In this combination of the uncombinable – a great work of music and a vulgar toy – one can see a typically Fluxus device for eroding the status of high art. One can also seek an historical-social subtext: Prokofiev was humiliated at the hands of Stalin’s cultural officials, who demanded that he compose melodies “that the common people can sing.” Also logical is the interpretation in the spirit of the aforementioned aspiration of contemporary culture to “depart” from ameliorated space into the everyday and the non-egoistic. What can be more non-egoistic than this anonymous readymade – a tilting doll? This interpretation is confirmed by the cage, an image of the repression to which low culture was subjected by the “highbrow.”
I think that all such interpretations have a right to exist, though the main thing is the following: for Sacharow-Ross, the slate board is standard in the sense that it represents the voice of primordiality, thousands of years of experience, pressed in graphite and appearing on the surface in the form of signcharacters. This is the main, irrefutable message. The others are interesting for their variety, their ability to replace one another.

We have already noted Sacharow-Ross’ ability to work in different registers of consciousness. He equally freely appeals to both the scientific and the mystical experience. He does so with his hand on the“button,” i.e. he relates to the crossover of registers completely pragmatically, as a choice of language and means of expression adequate to the task that he sets himself. A contemporary philosopher wrote: “The field of mystical experience consists of phenomena … which can be called ontologically borderline: phenomena in which the talk is not about the overcoming of borders, the exit beyond the bounds of the very means of the existence of man and the ontological horizon of human existence – i.e. ‘local existence’, available empirical reality.”
In actions like Yagya, the artist worked in a regime of primeval consciousness, demonstratively dissolved in the natural environment. Mythological consciousness is still not separated from the sources of existence.
In the “graphite” works, where “direct speech” often “conceded” to the medium, to mineral formations, the mystical combines with the natural scientific.
In another series of works, Sacharow-Ross employs the strategy of self-removal. This occurs in a project in which he works with the pages of the 1941 Königsberg telephone book. Here the subject is not the crossover of registers – anonymity as a means of self-realization, widespread in contemporary art. Neither is it about appealing to matrices of primordial consciousness. No, the total rejection, the “self-removal” of the artist is governed by something completely different. He “goes away,” not having the power to reconcile himself with the realities created by the contemporary consciousness. Sacharow-Ross simply magnifies, on a display, pages of a telephone book. Although the telephone numbers of Königsberg Jews are still present, unlike other subscribers, they do not indicate their occupations. This is a prohibition on profession – and nothing more.

Sometimes, as in the Cello for Full Moon object, Sacharow-Ross manages to combine the two approaches – the “scientific” and the “mystical.” The inverted commas show the nominal and even ironic nature of this terminology: the artist specially lowers the pathos of both discourses. Both are archaicized and even mystified. The “scientific” is represented by a system of lenses likened to an historical optical apparatus (and, of course, bearing in mind the movement of the celestial bodies). The second, the “mystical”, is theatricalized and stage-directed. A readymade – a cello – is placed in a special cupboard, the analogue of the stage box. The system of lenses catches the moment when the moon enters the full phase and the light floods into the hole specially intended for this. A Kunststück – the miracle of the birth of music in a flash of moonlight! The banality of this metaphor corresponds to its literalization. But, at the same time, is there not, in this radicalness, the reduction of some other, profound meaning? For example, an answer to the summons of Cage? With him, we have the principle of chance, the aleatory. Here we have iron determination, supplied by the movement of the celestial luminaries (or, if you like, a miracle). In any case, Sacharow-Ross achieves a new quality of the realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Working with time regimes as intensely as Sacharow-Ross does, one cannot help pondering over the regimes and interpretations of the very process of perception. I think that, in a series of things, the artist thematicizes these processes in the most direct way, finding himself new forms of content. The talk here is not about works of photo-based art. This essay began with a description of one such work, based on the photograph of a girl emerging from a forest, taken by the artist in his youth. We have also mentioned a certain optical sorcery – and not only in the biographic-thematic context (the girl was the daughter of the local witch doctor). The optical context, directly linked to the context of meaning, was more important. It is more distinct and condensed in the work dedicated to Pope John Paul II’s visit to Argentina. This was made on the basis of a constantly magnified photograph, in turn taken from a possibly high vantage point. The creation of the work activates other photographs of mass actions. In the given case, the term photo-based has an exact technical meaning – a basis of visuality is created via work with the photographic sources.

Without going into the details of the fractal theory of perception, I only note the presence of several zones of transitivity. The visual field is resolved in such a way that the eye moves along in it in a specific regime. Zones of clarity and distinction alternate with zones of non-observance. These are not traditional planes of representation, developed by the classical picture. We refer, naturally, not to the direction of the vision, which is realized by the perspective. The fractal (transitory) regime is realized through work with visibilities – crowds of human figures like mists of micro-particles captured by the Brownian movement.
The primary, virtually tactile tangibility; the optic collapse into different spaces of meaning, secondary perception, new focusing. The alternation of zones is accompanied by the overcoming of the clots of energy.
This very process is linked to a definite spurt – the expansion of the consciousness. Thanks to the energy of transitivity, the sensation arises of a new wholeness of everything existing, implemented on several levels, ranging from the molecular to the cosmic.
A long distance runner is, by definition, permanently in a state of transition. Spatial, temporal – the change of speed is an analogue of existence in different regimes and the ceremonials of the passage of time – and existential transition. A key concept of postmodernism – transgression – is also linked to the symbolics of transition. Crossing the border between the possible and the impossible; “surmounting an insurmountable boundary” (Maurice Blanchot). Far removed from natural-scientific terminology and inheriting, to a certain extent, the phenomenon of revelation investigated by mystical theology, the concept of transgression offers versions of non-linear evolution, the mechanisms of which are recorded by synergy. The postmodernist openness and metaphorical capaciousness of the terminology allows the artist to give his own definition of the transgression-exit of man, outside the bounds of both the experience keeping him within certain borders, and the bounds of “local existence.” In the given case, these are the borders of a concrete sojourn in a definite place.

Sacharow-Ross’ definition is syntopia (syn = together + topos = place). While realizing all the individuality of meanings and associations invested in this term by the artist, I shall nevertheless risk interpreting it.
Syntopia, according to Sacharow-Ross, is a qualitatively new sensation of the unity of the sojourn of man on earth, outside geographical, politico-geographical and topographical localization, given as a result of the act of transgression (with its mystical – illumination – and philosophical components). The place of sojourn is concrete and universal – just like the concept of sojourn itself. Certain interferences exist between the places where you are situated at a given moment, were located in the past or will be in the future. One learns, remembers and anticipates sounds, smells and visual images.
The place of sojourn is, therefore, not a chance geographic point, but the point of apposition of directed existential and metaphysical forces. Work with the topos – or, bearing in mind the philosophical connotations, with the topic – began back in actions of a mythological bent. I recall one action in St. Petersburg in 1993, at the point of apposition of the most diverse elements – on the pediment of Lenin’s armored car. The car had a machinegun nest and dated from the time of the First World War. According to Bolshevik mythology, after returning from exile in April 1917, Vladimir Lenin had made a speech to workers from this same car. It stood in the courtyard of the Lenin Museum in the former Marble Palace, before the Lenin Museum was closed down and the building was awarded to the Russian Museum. On the empty podium left by the car, the artist erected an enormous tub in which he boiled grass from the banks of the River Rhine and his homeland, the Pacific shore in the Far East. This was a form of ritual of union and purification.
For the end of the millennium, Sacharow-Ross found a new form adequately suited to the ideas, energetics and metaphors of syntopia. This was tried out in the Sapiens/Sapiens project at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, in the Salle des Pas Perdus, a somewhat pompous example of German architecture of the 1930s. Everything was important – the architectural environment; the surrounding landscape; the purpose of the building (used for sittings of the UN Commission on Human Rights). Sacharow-Ross created a zone of complete interference. The simple entrance implied participation in a process. Going out into the“fresh air” presupposed a witting or unwitting transmission of a political message outside. The nearby Lake Geneva promised deactivation and liberation from the concrete-political, while recalling the age-old traditions of freethinking and exile.
There was no salvation inside. Crowds of viewers – or, rather, not viewers, but the dramatis personae of real politics working in the international organizations of the United Nations – entered this packed political zone. There was everything here – traditional art objects; video projections; mass media materials of an informational, propagandistic and statistical order; a performance situation, in which actors used the language of the corporeal to create a metaphor for the body politic; and the presence of a radical propagandist-journalist as a figure of the direct expansion of politics.
Sacharow-Ross did not plan a political provocation. If such a provocation was pre-programmed, it was only as one of several possible means of expression. Which is what happened. Russian diplomats attempted to rip part of the materials off the stands, regarding them as an impermissible provocation. Yet the artist’s aim was not political recoil or ideological gain. The very aspect of repression aimed against his art meant far more to him than a concrete political result – be it purely PR, an attempt to evoke compassion for confederates or the transmission of a concrete political message. It meant direct involvement. The flow of visitors, sympathizing or protesting, was both the subject and the object of the art he created.
What Sacharow-Ross created became known as a room collage. Spatiality is present in the traditional collage, only in a rolled-up, removed or potential form. In the assemblage and installation, it grows to the point of fully ousting the voids. The form found by Sacharow-Ross is not afraid of voids. It does not operate with the concepts of plane-space and objectivity-space. This form is afraid of inactivation.
The sources of room collage can be seen not only in the world-exploring ritualistic actions of the 1980s, but also in the major Reanimation project at Tourcoing Fine Arts Museum in 1997. An enormous space was filled with traditional art objects and symbolical artifacts. There were columns, scrolls with the names of “enlighteners of the mind,” computers, tables, display cases for drawings and witnesses of scientific quests – diagrams, graphics, conspecti of scientific ideas, material from research into cancerous cells and genetic technologies and, finally, simple objects from the material world of laboratories and research centers. An acting archive of all the cross-sections of the study of life – natural scientific, spiritual and mythical-poetic…
Representing the intermediary outcome of many of the artist’s quests, Reanimation begs to be compared to Ilya Kabakov’s total installations. Yet despite the external similarity – totality in the sense of mass impact – the differences are more than evident. Sacharow-Ross’ work is not actually an installation. The processional cannot be installed, even though the subject of the given work is a process and its nerve is temporality. Comparing Reanimation with an archive, we note that it is an acting archive – an archive with the connotations of activation; a slumbering explosion (“what a bomb lurks in these files!”) and, essentially, reanimation. The processional can probably be modeled or fragmented, which is what the artist does.

What is more, the issues of representation can be applied to this material. This term presupposes selectiveness and management. Control. A total installation and total control. Notwithstanding all the assurances of interactivity, this implies a definite orientation with respect to the viewer, who is given a result, the product of alien intellectual manipulations, something installed and represented, i.e. ready. Sacharow-Ross avoids this path, concealing the directing right up to the point of the strategy of selfremoval.
In his understanding, syntopia presupposes the inclusion and activation of the viewer.
Correspondingly, it implies multiple channels. In Reanimation, the viewer is offered the choice of any path of cognition. In Sapiens/Sapiens, despite the reactions of the diplomats, he is not an agitator or a political provocateur. Most of the “channels” of his room collage lack topical-political content.
The viewer can – and is obliged to! – switch channels, outside the hierarchy, without divisions into main and marginal, in order to feel the presence of the political as such, in a direct regime. The extremes – tearing off the materials and the temporary detention of the journalist-agitator by the security forces – are a sign of inclusion. This means that these participants of the process selected – and displayed – the most brutal channel of political behavior. The artist’s aim was strategic – to return syntopia to a place, the Palais des Nations, conceived as a point of the apposition of diverse political forces, yet long since grown purely bureaucratic.
The idea of syntopia fascinating Sacharow-Ross constantly leads him to architecture. This is natural.
For all the symbolism, energy and transgressive self-sufficiency of the concept of place in the context of these ideas, he needs physical establishment, objectification, architecturalness. The Syntopia Room project at the German Research Center for Biotechnology (GBF) in Brunswick provides an extremely interesting example of an attempt to create a functional and simultaneously ritual-symbolic architecture, directly echoing, a century later, the architectural experiments of Rudolf Steiner. The Center of Biotechnological Research houses a unique collection of cultures of all diseases known to man, from such ancient ailments as leprosy and the plague to AIDS. Here was everything that Sacharow-Ross needed – concentration (in one place) of things found everywhere and extending throughout the whole of world history. This was virtually an incarnation of his eternal idea of an acting archive – a repository addressed to the future.
In the collection of the Center of Biotechnological Research, Sacharow-Ross appears to have seen the possibility – a realistic and not “artistic” possibility – of thematicizing a potential, multi-variative, multichannel evolution. This is now known as if-history (history would have developed along different lines had one culture been victorious). The artist offers a form deeply embedded in the earth, combing features of handmade pottery and modern technology.
The theme of cautiousness and danger lying in wait, proceeding from the collection of diseases, is continued by the narrow, glazed-over window, which is interpreted as a viewing chink. Sacharow-Ross resolves the fully functional inner space in the spirit of his favorite devices of articulated science and rituality.
The steel laboratory capacities are solemn and enigmatic, like the alchemist’s flask. Any disease in the world can be called up on the plasma screens, at the wave of a hand.
Syntopy Place is a permanently acting outpost of syntopia in Cologne. This is a Russian-Udmurt peasant hut, assembled and erected as a satellite of the Simultanhalle, the former modular building of the Ludwig Museum. Originally, this was the space for the implementation of the second stage of the Sapiens humanecological project. Although contrasting in all possible parameters, both buildings represented an integrated, spatial drama, in which fascinating subjects of the most diverse forms – ranging from social to historicalcultural – were acted out. Today, the hut exists separately, yet its creative potential gradually grows. It was originally founded as a type of building concentrating ethno-cultural memory. Sacharow-Ross attempted to retain every single grain of this memory. The assembling and installation of a Russian house in Germany by carpenters and volunteers – all these procedures were, for him, filled with profound symbolical meaning.
A house without windows becomes a zone of extreme concentration. The visitor senses the vast scale and self-sufficiency of the peasant cosmos; the meaningfulness and the symbolism of each gesture and movement implemented in it. At the same time, there is a need for navigation in this cosmos. This need was once expressed by an urban dweller who embarked on a tour of the Russian villages: “In these remarkable peasant huts, I encountered, for the first time, the miracle that consequently became one of the elements of my works. I learnt not to look at the picture from aside, but to revolve in the picture myself, to live in it.”
These words were written by Wassily Kandinsky.
Syntopy Place is a space where students, children and viewers “learn to revolve and live.” Inside the wooden walls, artists hold multimedia projects. The timber nevertheless retains memories of the warmth and simplicity of communication. Joseph Beuys probably experienced something similar when creating his wooden postcard. Two dimensions were “normal,” corresponding to the needs of the postal department.
The third dimension – breadth – turned the postcard into a wooden beam, concentrating the warmth of preliterate culture. One critic correctly noted about Sacharow-Ross’ project: “The highly complicated social and cultural organization of a megalopolis of many facets necessarily entails tribal substructures.”
“The loneliness of the long-distance runner” – this image of the artist implies, besides everything else, the status of overcoming. Overcoming the borders of discourses, the competence of traditional artistic disciplines, stereotypes of perception. And, of course, overcoming oneself – personal doubts, ambitions and fears. As Boris Pasternak wrote: “With whom did his battles pass? With himself, with himself.”