TOTART: Natalia Abalakova & Anatoly Zhigalov
The Project “Exploration into the Essence of Art as applied to Life and to Art”
BLACK CUBE
Performance/installation
1980 November, 19
Place: Room in apartment of the artists.
Duration: About 3 hours.
Material: 12 wooden bars 250 cm,screws & washers, black lightproof paper, a sheet of asbestos, paper ball, newspaper "Pravda" 1980. November,19, sources of light, razorblades, matches, sticky tape, fire.
Illumination: Lamps in the corners of the room,a lamp inside the Cube.
One side of a Cube serves as a door like that of tents and all participants may enter there. A.Z.is sitting in the corner of the Cube and is reading aloud "Pravda". In the centre of the Cube there is a newspaper ball on a sheet of asbestos. Then A.Z. wraps a ball with read over newspaper, sets it on fire and leaves the Cube, closing it. The room is immersed in darkness. A.Z.& N.A.are cutting the walls of the Cube with razorblades, giving the way to light and smoke.When the Cube is completely destroyed it's remnants are burnt to ashes outside near a highway.
Here is the same principle of getting "a sense" by turning it upside down through the process of construction/destruction/deconstruction which comes to some new "immaterial" situation... Destruction as as an impulse, generating a new vision. Permanent creative revolution. Carnival with it's inversion, only not in circular movement (eternal return), but in spiral one (negative dialectical eschatology). Positive opens through negative - denying - "not this-not that" of the eastern and christian apophasis. Artist is a mediator between negation and affirmation.