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.