ANDREY MONASTYRSKI
"PANITKOV'S APPEARANCE TO THE PEOPLE"
At first, we thought that we might do a sort of remake of S. Romashko's action Interaction in the botanical garden from 1980, but it contained too many odd papers, old charts, instructions, in short, too many semantic and faktural "cobwebs." And then all of a sudden, in the underground passage leading out of the southern exit of the VDNKh metro station (where I photographed the merchant stalls for the action Stalls), in one of these stalls, my attention was drawn to an icon of the Savior Not Made By Hands, richly decorated with artificial gem stones; especially attractive and strange under the showcase lights were the large shiny red ruby-like stones attached to the halo around the head. It was this luminous red sparkle from the stones that drew me to this icon as a sign of "spiritual delusion," well known to me from my "Kashirsky" adventures of 1982. This icon perfectly demonstrated the hypnosis by "external appearances," the sparkle of "adornment"; the decorative splendor entirely seized for itself any "inner" content. But this effect materialized only under certain lighting conditions – it is then that the stones shone with a scarlet light, producing a hypnotic impression of "spiritual delusion" (from the old Slavonic lest' for falsehood, lie). Having spotted this icon with its emanating "light of spiritual delusion" (within myself, naturally), I immediately came up with a plan for an action at VDNKh with this icon on a tree, illuminating it with a flashlight, and Panitkov as the receiver of its presentation (in keeping with Panitkov's authorial line and at the same time as an active participant of certain actions, as well as a collector of icons).
That same day, after visiting the lobby of the cosmonautics museum located "beneath the rocket," there in the same vicinity of VDNKh where I discovered the icon in the underground passage, I also discovered in the museum's souvenir shop some round lidded metal containers (the kind that might hold pressed powder) on which, in a particularly successful, large, and flashy way, were images of the first artificial satellite of the earth, and inside, when you open the "compact," two mirrors, one regular and the other magnifying. They were on sale for a remarkably low price: 150 rubles each (the icon cost significantly more: 4000 rubles). I immediately had the thought of purchasing 10 of these mirrors and distributing them to the action's audience members after the presentation of the icon to Panitkov. Both the icon and these mirrors with the sputnik worked well together on the level of "outer space," the level of opulence and the cheapness of the consumer "attraction," the sumptuous and flashy "souvenir" quality of their faktura in both cases.
Then again, the situation of the icon is not so simple: it contains something more than "spiritual delusion" (which in reality is a property and capacity exclusively of our own consciousness, not the property of an object, even if an object may be so organized, or "directed," so that with its help, consciousness easily falls into a state of spiritual delusion as though under the influence of some narcotic substance). Under certain lighting conditions and in a certain context, this icon can also be an excellent aesthetic Stimmung for spatio-temporal contemplation.
The weather on the day of the action did not work out in our favor as far as comfort: there was a strong, cold wind, swinging the icon on the tree so that we had to tie it down with a string. As we were mounting the icon and the flashlight, a large, heavy, dry branch fell from the tree above and landed very near, having been dislodged by a strong gust of wind. On the whole, there was an atmosphere of unrest: not far from the place where the action took place (the fairground ride was in our field of vision) the different life-sized dinosaur puppets roared, enhanced by the expressionism of the large, gnarled trees (from one of which the branch had fallen nearly upon our heads), and the rampant tiles of the tiny footpath that ran between them, along which 20 minutes after the arrival of the audience members to the place of action, appeared Panitkov.
(The troubled-unsettled feeling of the action caught up to me later in a dream/nightmare: a typical dream/"delusion"—apparently this is how this aspect of the icon realized itself to me—in which I enter the apartment on Tsandera Street, from which the front door is missing and in one of the rooms (maybe in the bath?) on a high bed like a bier or even a coffin, I see the reanimated (but only in the eyes) corpse of my mother in icy feathers. Her eyes are living, but the rest of her body was encased in a chrysalis of opaque, white, feathery ice with other details of "non-life," of the icy nightmare hell too, clearly having gotten into the dream/"delusion" from the sumptuous setting of the action icon: strings of artificial pearls on the chest of the Christ image (transformed into this very icy plumage around the body of mother's corpse) etc.)
The appearance of Panitkov after the twenty-minute wait (the viewers did not know that it was Panitkov who was supposed to appear) in my interpretive space was more likely not an "Appearance" out of the line of indistinguishability between life and art in the style of early CA actions, but an "Appearance" like the Appearance of Christ to the People in the painting by Ivanov – from a "state of painting" (this was, above all, the context created by the icon). This took place not on the level of action, of reality, where life and the everyday exist on one side and art, specialization, and separation on the other. In other words, not in the "world," but in a "picture of the world," into which the world has been transformed in the time of my own age and in the age of CA. Panitkov's figure appeared not into the pure snowy field or among the furrows of the freshly-ploughed field, where there are not yet any trodden-down pathways (as it had been in the early actions, including in the action Gazing at the Waterfall – though there, too, he was "sketching a picture" with his feet in the snow and with the movement of his body along the field, and then approached the viewers as though having exited "out of the picture"), but on the narrow path, the narrow walk-way created by time, the years of both individual fate and CA's actions. On one hand, we can see here "the narrow gate and difficult road" leading to "eternal life" (from the 14th verse of the Sermon on the Mount), while on the other, all this conflicts with the luxury of the "external," which is there in our icon, and is presented to Panitkov. After all, it is precisely the rejection of all luxury that creates this "narrow gate and difficult road." This semantic conflict was also the reason from the action's conceptual "unsettledness" on the level of external circumstances – the weather, etc.
Having received the icon, Panitkov placed it next to his heart. In other words, the famous expression "next to Christ's heart" without any planning (this was a pure improvisation on Nikolai's part) is reversed in Panitkov's gesture where he places the icon of Christ to his own heart.
In this gesture, an "exit from the Text" takes place, a reversal of direction from the narrow path of the "picture of the world" and toward the wide field of the world at large, by its very nature koan-like, slipping away from definition.
A. Monastyrski
3/30/2014
P.S. To the atmosphere of "unsettledness," in which the action occurred, we should add also the unpleasant background of the events taking place in Ukraine and the sin of Russia's "land-grab" of Crimea, formalized literally several days before the action.
Since around 1997, starting with the action Library, a series of actions can be sketched out that may be called "Underground and in the Trees." "In the Trees" (objects attached to trees as the central element of the action) consists, besides the new action with the icon, of Slogan-2005, K, The Crossing-2, Three Megaphones for Kapiton, Translation-3, Panitkov's Progress, Decoration-2010, Installation Auerbakh, 132; while "Underground" (objects buried in the ground) consists of Library, Library-2005, Library-2007, Wintering in the Ground at Heidegger's Clearing (the proto-action in this series of burials is Slogan-86).
Translated by Y. Kalinsky