KOLLEKTIVNYE DEYSTVIYA (COLLECTIVE ACTIONS). THE DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE ACTIONS, Photo and Video
JOURNEYS TO THE COUNTRYSIDE. VOLUME TEN
115. UNSUCCESSFUL SLOGAN 1978–2008
The present action consists in the decision to place into the tenth volume of Trips to the Countryside materials from a 1978 Slogan piece, which was deemed unsuccessful immediately after its being carried out (when we walked away from it, turned at the forest’s edge, and could no longer see it).
Back then, it most likely seemed to us unsuccessful by all parameters – in the “flat” text, in the color of the sheet (brown), and in the place where it was hung.
But its greatest “mistake,” as it now seems to me (AM), was that it fell completely outside the formal and substantive contexts of the two earlier slogans – the one from 1977 and the one carried out in April of 1978.
It was done two months after Slogan-78 and this “rhythm,” its temporal distance, turned out to be completely wrong (too short) for the slogan series as a whole. Also, the text itself of this brown, “rapid-fire” slogan was too concrete, describing a kind of external episode in comparison to the “internal narrative” of the two earlier slogans: “I waited for you at the appointed time and left. You know the road yourself. Come, if you want to see me.”
It is interesting that the text on the sheet itself had a technical mistake: for some reason, there was a period after the words “I waited for you.”
The decision to carry out an action in KD was always made only in those cases where it was not completely CLEAR what would be the effect of this realization. This ambiguity or obscurity allowed for the further process of UNDERSTANDING in the commentary which, in turn, brought out new themes. In this way, the horizon of both the actuality and the discourse of KD’s actions remained open.
It is possible that in the realization of this unsuccessful slogan, it is this principle that was breached.
And yet, some further level of “incomprehensibility” was there, since it was actually carried out in time and space (in contrast to the action Twins, whose descriptive text was placed in the first volume of Trips to the Countryside as an unrealized action).
This “further level of incomprehensibility” (possibly as a breach of the incompletely realized but “pregnant” narrative of KD’s entire corpus of actions) is what allows us now to place this failed slogan as KD’s 115th action.
The existential-aesthetic “failure” of this slogan was “corrected” in 1978 by not creating a descriptive text of this action, and it was therefore not included in the first volume of Trips to the Countryside. We simply “forgot” about it.
The question of whether or not it is correct to place it into the tenth volume from this existential-aesthetic point of view remains open.
(For more, see links:
Text by N. Alekseev
A. M. On Trash)
Moscow, 17 November 2008
A.M.
Moscow region, Kievskaya Railroad, in the vicinity of the “Zosimova pustyn’” Station
July 1978
A. Monastyrsky, N. Alekseev, G. Kisewalter
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