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Dieter Buchhart: You were born in eastern Siberia, and as a member of the non-conformist art scene in the 1970s, you were subject to political persecution. In 1975, you began your first actions and performances in the USSR, and were ultimately stripped of citizenship and expelled in 1978. How do you see the importance of these actions and performances today?
Igor Sacharow-Ross: My work at that time could be compared to a scream: it was a search for a place that does not prove to be a subject, but a space for communication between people. Only through the acknowledgment of others can I become free. A state cannot achieve this. Today my work is also about this free space, which remains forever incomplete.
DB: Your early exploration of the concept of nature seems to have been formed by your experience growing up in the Siberian taiga. What does the concept nature stand for in your work?
ISR: I am amazed by the insoluble secret – no beginning, no end.
DB: Is nature equally benevolent and destructive?
ISR: There is a global mechanism at work. A complex structure of unlimited rituals. In a rhythm of light and dark, complementary and causal.
DB: Since the 1980s, you have been working with molecular structures like cancer cells and leaf forms. Were you then already attempting to combine findings from natural science with ideas from the humanities?
ISR: That was already a key part of my work in the 1970s. After two years of intense work, Koordinatensystem [System of Coordinates], my first sound object, was completed in 1976. It was made of metal, wood, felt, a mirror system, an electric motor, elements form holography and electronics, materials from genetic research and biochemistry, and a quotation from Kant's Vom ewigen Frieden [On Eternal Peace] was integrated into the object. This Kant quotation is full of a hope for universal human rights, where he writes that a violation of human rights is felt everywhere, no matter where it takes place. In this way, the notion of universal human rights is no longer an “abstract, idealized conception of right“. The scenario of the 1980s was still more direct. Here, rough versions and finished parts from various systems and sources were operated with, for example in works like Kraftzellen [Power Cells] or Zwischenfelder [Intermediate Fields], where the border remains fluid and all fields of science and scholarship come into play.
DB: For a long time you have been working with the notion of syntopy, devised by Ernst Pöppel, professor of neurophysiology and founder of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. How would you define syntopy?
ISR: Pöppel’s notion of syntopy developed from his findings in basic research on brain functions and the emergence of creativity. He defines syntopy as the linking of the formerly separate in spatial and conceptual terms, and sees this as a precondition for creativity, which grows from the link between explicit knowledge, implicit ability, and personal knowledge. When today we speak of knowledge, we usually mean conceptual knowledge. But it has been established in neurophysiology that at least two equally important forms of knowledge also emerged in the course of evolution. The second form is pragmatic knowledge, intuitive or implicit knowledge – the experimenter's artistic knowledge and scientific awareness. This intuitive knowledge today has been lost as an educational goal, and has retreated in our society to a secondary position. The third, and perhaps most important form is visual knowledge. We make images of facts, as Wittgenstein put it: half of the human brain is solely concerned with images, not concepts. And these images appear to us in threefold form: current knowledge – for example, the direct presence of the other. And secondly the visual memories that we all carry with us, all the way back to the first decisive memories, always linked to a certain image that in turn is always linked to a certain site, and site and image are always linked to a certain meaning or feeling, with a smell, with an experience. The personal identity of each of us is a sequence, the compound content, the syntopy of images that we bear within ourselves. The life story of each person is something special, and makes us the people we are. And the third form of visual knowledge is graphic and topological knowledge of simple geometric forms, which we use to make factual matters clear to us. In the last three to four hundred years, however, an imbalance has developed in our culture in favor of conceptual knowledge, oriented towards Cartesian rationalism. At issue is thus overcoming partial cultures within our society, like the sciences, the arts, or the economy. This dynamic connection and bridging of limits is expressed by the concept of syntopy, as is the link between various peoples. It is an expression of the linkage of different things in a single place.
DB: In your project Sapiens/Sapiens, various people from different realms of life are brought together. How important is the individual?
ISR: Basically I wanted to contribute to answering the question of how to bring two people together, what role is played here by art and politics, and how concrete does the exchange of information need to be to in fact become an experience. For a half-year, this wealth of processes, concepts, and projects from the whole world has taken place. It was like an experimental setting. Decisive for me is that each individual is the bearer of an individually grown knowledge, and that this potential is also explored for social processes.
DB: How well has this worked in practice?
ISR: The point is triggering memory processes. A person, a society without memory is sick. Essential here is the visualization of processes, resulting in a web of linked forces. This linkage I think was successful, but of course it was also unsuccessful. It is a process within an experimental set-up like an inner collage that labels the world in us and around us visually, and at the same time is directed at a universal whole. If I said it succeeded, I would be setting an endpoint with a result. The result is dead – long live process!
DB: How can artists make use of the concept of syntopy for their work?
ISR: By not only taking conceptual knowledge, but also the two other forms of knowledge into view, and concentrating more on current life. They can become aware of this multilayered knowledge, integrating it into a productive transfer. The engagement with the direct environment, as well as our own ideas and possibilities, thought about unconventionally, laterally, can throw a new light on the relationship between democracy and personal responsibility, and explode the concrete to have a look outside.
DB: What opportunities do you see in syntopy, and where is your syntopia?
ISR: The interlinking of knowledge, experience, and ability in the age of a global information society moves the artistic work towards constructing new models of perception, to the recognition of life structures and knowledge units. In that way, syntopias can emerge. The opportunity is for the creation of a universalistic and all-embracing whole ideal condition – a network, in which the free collaboration of all levels of knowledge in the human spirit results in a space for creativity, independent thinking, and responsible action. The blockhouse, the syntopy sculpture, is to serve as a home for this free space.
DB: On the grounds of Cologne's Schule für Medientechnologie you have erected a huge Syntopieplastik [Syntopy Sculpture]. How does it work?
ISR: The syntopy sculpture engages with the original connections between humans and cultures. It is a site where various places come together. After starting the project Sapiens/Sapiens in Geneva, I continued it with a blockhouse as an annex of the Simultanhalle. The blockhouse was built in a traditional way, but I conceived of it in a unique form: it was produced in the Ural using pine, and then brought to Cologne-Volkhovem where it was erected by people of many backgrounds, including Udmurtians, Russians, Germans, French, Palestinians, Indians, and Israelis. Four years later the blockhouse was transferred to the grounds of the Georg-Simon-Ohm Berufskolleg (Cologne), where it symbolizes syntopy, is integrated into the school's curriculum, and is closely networked with Russia. The syntopy sculpture as a spatial collage is in constant motion, knows no hierarchy, and works against totalitarian thought. The inner collage forms a syntopic system in which ideas and quotations are combined, complemented, and set in new contexts in a constant recycling process. The syntopy sculpture develops as a creative, social process in an intermediate space as an open link and can emerge anywhere there is an interpersonal potential to depart from customary patterns of behavior.
DB: At the Kunstmuseum Bonn and Deutsches Museum Bonn, you are planning Unternehmensikonen [Business Icons] as a collectively produced, creative, shared work in which art and business enter in an open dialogue with the collections of both museums. What do you expect from this dialogue?
ISR: The Bonn experiment is in an alchemistic sense the search for knowledge about the possibilities for recognizing the “multiplicity of the world” and its totality as a “huge work of art.” Through the shared making of collages, the museum transforms itself into a temporary studio as a site of research and production. Here, where the common roots attempt to develop freely, it can result in the discovery of a fuel as an initial starting point, allowing for the mutual relationship of partial systems and a solid basis for further processes, in order for people to get along better with one another and also become politically effective.
DB: Do you see yourself in the projects of recent years as more a director or a mediator?
ISR: As a Euro-Siberian syntopist making creative interventions in society, here and there. The experience of various places that have meaning for us, are interwoven to provoke a viewpoint. The conscious event is created from the present.
DB: Your works are strongly political. In your newest film project, for example, Auftauen [Thawing], you engage with the political situation in Russia under Putin. What is the state of Russian democracy according to our Western conceptions?
ISR: Russia is a country that is learning to grow up the hard way. Russian democracy is still in its baby shoes. Adorno predicted the mafia-like dominance of business interests and politicians. In Auftauen, two Russians speak about the situation in their country before the background of a dramatic recent history, its potentials, and mental models. Are there any developments and perspectives at all? The film is determined by changing backgrounds of nature, forest workers, rural and urban space, housing, churches, blockhouses, and very strong refractions of light. The film shows that nothing remains of the decades of enormous effort, the great ideals, the self-denial, and the inferno – the “damned past”. The higher goals of social change were betrayed and misused, leaving the bitter, stale feeling of having suffered for nothing, having sacrificed for naught. Now we stand confronted with Western civilization and the capitalist world, which has also lost its innocence. The thaw could be a chance for a new beginning, but already the relations are again becoming fixed, so that individuals have few chances for starting over with more justice and equal opportunity. The question remains, should we still be involved in the efforts to build up a democracy? Is there any perspective at all any more, or should we just leave Russia alone? There is no solution in polarization: what remains is neither a flight into utopia, into Russian melancholy, but rather recognizing the current condition, a realistic view of the possible, and a patient step-by-step build-up of new structures – the networking of the existing positive forces.
DB: What does "Morgennikation" mean in your 2004 project at Berlin's Brotfabrik?
ISR: “Morgennikation” is an artist’s word: on a large black board, I wrote "self confidence", "self-determination", "Down with Utopias of the Homeless! Conformism as life strategy? Long live Syntopy!" "Europe?"
DB: In Hot Russian Line, a work you conceived for the exhibition Re-Act at the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, you again presented your work with the artist group GHETTO. Can you briefly describe this installation?
ISR: The installation is a series of interactive reports directly from Russia that are organized on the Internet. My collaborators are the anarchistic collective GHETTO. The action space at the Nikolaj was a tactical newsroom with a fast Internet connection and a place for the information material. GHETTO wrote weekly reports on current issues like the protest movement, telecommunication, wars, left-wing
forums, migration policy, and the like. The Copenhagen audience was able to pose questions and discuss the reports.
DB: Will GHETTO become a kind of human readymade?
ISR: With its raw data and current interpretations from the Russian world, GHETTO becomes an explosive material. This is again about a synthesis of life and media as a parallel world: to put it more precisely, the political and media technologies. Expanded ready-made? No, more „rough data/ref data“ that relies on new criteria and hopes for an impact on real life.
DB: To what extent do the works from the 1980s and 1990s concerning the natural sciences and your comprehensive artistic experimentation with cancer cells fit into your current understanding of art?
ISR: The intensive study of biogenetics and neurophysiology in the 1980s stands for continuity and constancy, for experience in turning to nature beyond all forms of cultural tradition and social engagement. At issue was observing nature from the inside, in its core, in its entire vitality. This search was based on a series of works in which pictures of cancer-destroyed cells were taken with an electron microscope. In this work cycle, that space for play was grasped on many layers, in which life and death, the artistic and the elementary, nature and technology were brought in line with one another. And above all in the choice of object: cancer cells mark an existence on the line between life and death – their life means death – second, this life becomes lifeless, technologically reconstructed, and third, this lifelessness is animated by the decision to identify with it, which is expressed by, among other things, these shots being colored. On first glance, these works are reminiscent of the photographs of star systems, of galaxies. The microcosm here proves equal to the macrocosm, and in this way, the law of the spread of cancer cells becomes the law of the world in which we live. Ten years later, in Munich’s Haus der Kunst a different kind of apparatus followed,
the Innere Observatorium [Inner Observatory], consisting of a mass spectrometer, a true-to-life model of the human brain, a telescope, and three different sound waves. The telescope, 15 meters long, penetrates the ceiling of the museum and has the reverse direction, that is, it gets very close to the human brain. It is directed towards us, our nearest surroundings, rather than a galactic distance. The technical manipulation, this getting the upper hand of the tools, runs the danger of threatening our human dimension. The open human brain, clamped in the spectrometer as if in a vice, appears surrendered and vulnerable, and demands all our attention and care. The gaze and what is seen intersect. At issue today in our dense present – this is shown by the current project Infektionskegel [Infection Cone] at the Gesellschaft für biotechnologische Forschungen (GBF) in Braunschweig – is the visualization of processes in which the web of humanity, society, place, and history emerge. The Infektionskegel is a sculpture that the visitor can enter into, conceived as a visually networked space of knowledge.
DB: How did you translate this networked space of knowledge into architectural space on the grounds of GBF?
ISR: The origins for this architecture are the three large fermenters, no longer in use, massive steel devices from the research on infection that made biotechnological history here in the 1980s. History is thus preserved and brought to life with a new construction. Here, the fermenters are transformed into supporting building components, columns linking numerous spatial levels. The sculpture, which can be entered into, has three floors and a cellar: it goes through the tripartite building design – past, present, future – the continuity of various historical lines of development: The history of infections and epidemics, the history of their research, the history of their treatment, the history of science in Braunschweig and at the GBF. The ground floor is the reception room, where upon entering the visitor can chose a direction. The cellar (past) is a space for projects, presentations, workshops – conceived as an interactive archive. The first floor (present) is a light-filled room for holding events. Here, people from various cultures and disciplines can meet. The second floor (future) is like an observatory: it has an open design, and offers a great view. This is a place that smaller groups or individuals can retreat to and find unusual and visionary literature. Plans and hopes are shared, and these are immediately registered, in a book and/or by a camera. Prof. Rudi Balling, the scientific director of GBF, renamed Infektionskegel [Infection Cone] Persisdom. „Persisdom – persisting, we are sustainable, we will not give up, we bear the continuity from yesterday, through today, and into tomorrow. With Persisdom, we are signaling that we want to get out of the ivory tower. We could provide a message for industrialists and politics, for the public“, as Rudi Balling puts it.
DB: Do you understand Infektionskegel as an interdisciplinary place of communication?
ISR: It is a place for the direct practical approach to all sorts of realities. It stands for the complexity of things. Here, interdisciplinarity, which today is a necessity, should not just be understood, but lived.
DB: You see your exhibition project Abgebrochene Verbindung [Lost Connection] in Passau as a synthetic work that secures a wealth of various materials as an intermedia space collage, processing and linking them. How would you describe this experimental situation, staged by you, within which various media and disciplines are tied together?
ISR: It is comparable to a laboratory with a multilayered coded basic structure, which spreads out through spaces as a syntopic net. The observer is part of the absolute center. There, he is a researcher and developer. The personal antennae are activated. The connections are not depicted in a linear fashion, but in layers and points of transfer. For the first time, I show here a huge „negative mirror,“ consisting of six parts, that threatens to absorb all light. The finely polished graphite plates also are of such a quality that the beholder can never recognize himself, only other persons in the space. The black mirror thus emblematizes the recognition of the other, necessary for us to find ourselves. Metaphorically speaking, in the mass of graphite dust, compacted over huge spans of time, the history of the planet can be reawakened.
DB: You are also working on a series of projects with sounds and odors. Why do you turn increasingly to dematerialized media and not to things available to haptic experience?
ISR: I love the transformation, and so in transformation you encounter a significant degree and feel unsure. Suddenly, you hear the inner side of the nuclear envelope. You come over and over to a certain point where something must be changed. You can feel quite clearly that things can't go on that way. An inner journey is unavoidable. An act of purification in which one breaks with the domination of iconostasis.
DB: Do you refer in this work back to projects from the 1980s and ‘90s?
ISR: What was yesterday is also tomorrow. There are always new moments and again a new beginning.
DB: Is the object-bound art world dissolving ultimately in the connection and communication between various disciplines and people?
ISR: The object, whether visible or graspable, is deeply rooted in our historical and cultural memory. My concept of art seeks to go beyond the referential object production and contemplative reception to the development and transformation of current reality. If artistic competency expands its field of action to the social space, the metaphorical layer of artistic work is supplemented by concrete social action. The object-related aspects of art decline, dissolve, but also return.
DB: In what art form do you see the future of contemporary art?
ISR: The borders separating life and art are melting away, the opportunities for both lie in the open process. The concern and the vision of art planning are accompanied by the faith in art. The plan for the future develops when thinking succeeds apart from production. At the foreground is the process, the processual. Already over twenty years ago, Joseph Beuys said, “Movement comes into being by way of a provocation, an introduction, and initiation to the purpose of movement. You cause something, the principle of movement itself… It is thus the principle of resurrection, to re-form the old form that dies or has petrified, into a lively, pulsating, life promoting, soul promoting, spirit promoting form.”
DB: Has art in the classical understanding completed its service, worn itself out?
ISR: Indeed. Art is good and eternal. How can "the coherent beam initiate the spiritual potential?" Serve on! |
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