Журнал Andy Warhol's Interview Россия Interview № 6 | Page 194

192/ ENGLISH SUMMARY
DUBOSSARSKY
& VINOGRADOV
p. 134
by GOR CHAHAL
“Sold out,” “schlockmeisters,” “poets of the
trash aesthetic”—that’s what’s on the surface.
Deeper inside—there’s classical training, con-
ceptual vision, virtuoso mastery of the subject
matter and the art medium. Despite all this,
the Vinogradov-Dubossarsky duo has never
had a retrospective show. Until now: their first
retrospective in 20 years is on display at Mos-
cow’s WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary
Art. However, this show is not the real thing ei-
ther, it’s just the “schlock,” the clunkers kept for
a decade in the backrooms.
None of them—Gor Chahal, Alexander Vinogra-
dov or Vladimir Dubossarsky—can recall where they
first met: it could have been at Gor’s Poet and Pistol
show in Moscow in 1991, or when Chahal took over
Dubosarssky’s wall at the 1993 Art as Power and
Power as Art exhibition. Their friendship took hold
in earnest in Berlin, where they hopped from one
bar to another, drinking mescaline and laughing
their heads off as never before. That was 1995. Or
maybe 2001... In a word, our heroes’ memory is like
a sieve, but they’ve got talent to spare. Twenty years
later, Gor went to the “VinDub” studio in Khimki
just outside Moscow for the first time for a heart-to-
heart talk about art.
DUBOSSARSKY (handing each a teacup):
We won’t be drinking tea today, we’ll have wine
instead. I’ll water it down, but that way it’ll last
longer. I must say, though, this is a new low—water-
ing down red wine! And we’ll get some pirozhki
from the fridge... So, what are we going to talk
about?
GOR: Let’s start with your new project.
VINOGRADOV: Okay, here it goes. What hap-
pened is this: over the past 10 years, a lot of unfin-
ished paintings piled up in our studio. It’s common
practice with artists to paint over old paintings to do
new ones on top of them. And that’s what we want-
ed to do... at first. So we got these canvases out of
storage, lined them all up, and discovered they
weren’t as bad as we thought. But they’re pulling us
back into a karmic hole. (Laughs.)
GOR: But why 10 years? No earlier works lying
around? Something from 20 years ago?
DUBOSSARSKY: We had a different work plan
before then: we made paintings “to order” for spe-
cific exhibitions and did not allow artistic “acci-
dents” to happen.
VINOGRADOV: We’re like a factory: we work
on several dozen things at the same time. A nice
little “candle factory.”
GOR: Do you have apprentices working for you?
DUBOSSARSKY: No, just master painters.
(Laughs.)
VINOGRADOV: We had someone like that in
2003 in Italy, helping us with purely technical tasks.
He would stretch canvasses, transfer drawings. This
is when we started getting “schlock”—things we had
neither the energy nor time to deal with.
DUBOSSARSKY: We had a contract with Clau-
dio Poleschi, an Italian gallery owner, which re-
quired us to do 24 pieces a month. Can you imagine
making one picture a day?!
VINOGRADOV: We would paint and draw,
and he would just put everything in storage. He’s
still putting them on the market little by little.
A smart move, especially in a downturn. And he
doesn’t push down the prices.
DUBOSSARSKY: He would tell me then: “Vla-
dik, glory for you, money for me. You are my com-
fortable retirement.” Besides the honorarium, he set
up an exhibition for us and made us a catalogue, and
we could paint and draw whatever we wanted. He
was buying us in advance. Those were not the best
terms, but...
VINOGRADOV: ...we couldn’t refuse. We had
sold individual pictures for more, but we could never
have made so much money all at once.
GOR: So, did you pull it off—did you get it all
done by the deadline?
VINOGRADOV: Yes, in two sets. We did the
first 24, then another 24.
DUBOSSARSKY: Some of them were larger,
three meters by two. And we also made 50 drawings
sized 100 by 60 centimeters or 90 by 70. We had to
do half a painting and one drawing a day. The prob-
lem was not the actual drawing or painting, but
coming up with ideas! That’s when we hatched our
new work plan and became true...
VINOGRADOV: ...schlockmeisters. Our dream
came true. In fact, the first article about us, penned
by Kurliandtseva, the late art critic, was called “The
Makers of Grand Schlock.”
DUBOSSARSKY: But we were pretty bad
schlockmeisters back then, because nobody was or-
dering any of our stuff. Then this Italian grandpa
came along, we rolled up our sleeves and started
cranking out schlock like there was no tomorrow.
VINOGRADOV: Hey, don’t make it sound
worse than it was.
DUBOSSARSKY: Think back! It was Novem-
ber, a huge, unheated studio. An old dilapidated
house where they put in light bulbs and a gas stove
just for us. Almost like the trenches of Stalingrad—
we had recordings of old Russian war songs for
a reason! And four warm wooly pullovers each.
We refined our work plan at ArtKlyazma. We
had a project where we had to produce 50 pieces in
a very short time, so we hired 50 young artists to
work as assistants. In fact, the whole thing was a big
pain in the ass. We have many unfinished pictures
from that exhibition too. Over time, the pile of un-
finished work got bigger. Until finally, just recently,
we realized we could make a project out of it—we
saw that much of the work was viable.
VINOGRADOV: And we called all of this
a Ret rospective.
GOR: It’s your first, I think, right?
VINOGRADOV: We got offers to do a show
many times, but we always begged off. The name
Retrospective is sad somehow, and besides, we have
a lot of pictures—how do you put them all together?
DUBOSSARSKY: And we didn’t see much
point in it either.
GOR: Why not—look at everything you’ve done,
evaluate it. It could give you a push for future work.
VINOGRADOV: We made a large catalogue for
that kind of evaluation.
GOR: There’s a difference between a catalogue
and an exhibition!
DUBOSSARSKY: Not for us. The Yermolae-
vsky (the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.—Inter-
view) has retrospectives every three months. In
a way, it’s already become trivial, but everybody just
keeps doing these “reports.”
VINOGRADOV: We’ve got about 500 pictures.
Some are better than others, but how do you split
them into the bad and the good? I don’t know.
Do we display all 500?
DUBOSSARSKY: We decided this project
would be therapeutic. This reminds me of my favor-
ite story about Munch, who used to punish his work.
Munch had a very complex and delicate psyche. He
lived in Norway and would put his worst paintings
out into the cold for the night. In the morning, he’d
bring them back inside.
VINOGRADOV: And would ask them sternly,
“Have you seen the error of your ways?” (Laughs.)
GOR: I am in love with my works. I stroke them,
empathize with them.
DUBOSSARSKY: He also loved his works!
Anyone can see that: “To beat is to love.” We also
felt responsible for ours.
VINOGRADOV: In a way, this is our sin, so we
should pray for forgiveness.
GOR: But here’s something else that interests
me. Why painting? You have to work with your
hands, the volume of work is huge, it takes a great
amount of effort, you have to work fast, and it’s
a tremendous undertaking—all of this on the one
hand. On the other hand, you positioned yourself
from day one as schlockmeisters.
VINOGRADOV: We are not classical painters.
Mass production is our method. You say it’s labor-
intensive? Well, an artist has to exert himself. The
more of himself he gives, the better his output.
GOR: As a lazy person, I find this quite inter-
esting.
VINOGRADOV: We only control what we have
in our hands. We find it much harder to do photog-
raphy. I like the smell of paint, a white canvas, all
the attributes of art. Actually, painting is an act of
pleasure.
GOR: So it’s painting all the way?
DUBOSSARSKY: Not painting—the picture.
Painting ran head-on into photography and died,
apparently, but the picture lives on. It finds a back
door, emerging like a ghost here and there. You can’t
take away the functionality of a ghost. We make pic-
tures out of the things the world stands on at the
current moment. In the 1990s, it was semi-fantasti-
cal illustrations to the break-up of the Soviet Union:
Soviet and Hollywood stories transformed into
some kind of madness. Then we embraced new
mass media and glamour as our response to pop
kitsch. Right now, it is contingent realism. Time
raises an issue, and we respond to it—this is our in-
ternal justification. We are certainly not mercenary
schlockmeisters, we are artists. It’s just an image we
invented for ourselves that helps us do our work.
Creating pictures as performance art in the age of
mass circulation is hard, pointless labor. But every
one of our works is unique, with texture and energy
all its own.
GOR: Is that downshifting?
DUBOSSARSKY: Yes! A picture is a tradition
that has retained its mystery. A cold and empty me-
dia thing could look cleaner, but it carries no energy
within.
GOR: Of course it does. As a media artist, I can
tell you there are ways to do that.
DUBOSSARSKY: But they’re different. A pic-
ture more often speaks directly to a person’s aes-
thetic sensibilities.
VINOGRADOV: Even the surface there is dif-
ferent. A photo or a banner repulses.
DUBOSSARSKY: And another thing to remem-
ber is that Russia is not a producer of advanced
computer technologies. It is very important in media
art who invents a new technology first and who is
the first to master it. Sasha and I have mastered
painting and drawing techniques, we know the his-
tory of our art form and methods. Our mass media
artists are behind the curve in many ways because
Russia doesn’t have an environment yet for accept-
ing it. In Russia, a picture is a typical thing, and an
artist is someone creating pictures. It’s always been
that way.
VINOGRADOV: Wait a second, Vladik, we’re
also media artists now. (Laughs.) Our Retrospec-
tive has audio: a visitor can put on headphones and
listen to our thoughts on art, paintings and pic-
tures.
DUBOSSARSKY: And we’re going to use music
for some pictures. For example, in the room with our
Roses, we’ll put on White Roses.