artists-from-russia

"Да, это было пять месяцев назад, когда войска наши в Восточной Пруссии настигли эвакуирующееся из Гольдапа, Инстербурга и других оставляемых немецкой армией городов гражданское население. На повозках и машинах, пешком старики, женщины, дети, большие патриархальные семьи медленно по всем дорогам и магистралям страны уходили на запад. Наши танкисты, пехотинцы, артиллеристы, связисты нагнали их, чтобы освободить путь, посбрасывали в кюветы на обочинах шоссе их повозки с мебелью, саквояжами, чемоданами, лошадьми, оттеснили в сторону стариков и детей и, позабыв о долге и чести и об отступающих без боя немецких подразделениях, тысячами набросились на женщин и девочек. Женщины, матери и их дочери, лежат справа и слева вдоль шоссе, и перед каждой стоит гогочущая армада мужиков со спущенными штанами. Обливающихся кровью и теряющих сознание оттаскивают в сторону, бросающихся на помощь им детей расстреливают. Гогот, рычание, смех, крики и стоны. А их командиры, их майоры и полковники стоят на шоссе, кто посмеивается, а кто и дирижирует — нет, скорее, регулирует. Это чтобы все их солдаты без исключения поучаствовали. Нет, не круговая порука, и вовсе не месть проклятым оккупантам — этот адский смертельный групповой секс. Вседозволенность, безнаказанность, обезличенность и жестокая логика обезумевшей толпы. Потрясенный, я сидел в кабине полуторки, шофер мой Демидов стоял в очереди, а мне мерещился Карфаген Флобера, и я понимал, что война далеко не все спишет. А полковник, тот, что только что дирижировал, не выдерживает и сам занимает очередь, а майор отстреливает свидетелей, бьющихся в истерике детей и стариков... А сзади уже следующее подразделение. И опять остановка, и я не могу удержать своих связистов, которые тоже уже становятся в новые очереди, а телефонисточки мои давятся от хохота, а у меня тошнота подступает к горлу. До горизонта между гор тряпья, перевернутых повозок трупы женщин, стариков, детей."

"Sheet from the album “Forms of the Future”, based on the texts of Russian self-taught scientist and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who recreated a project of an ideal society and city of the future in his books. The left side of the sheet is devoted to selection of ideal city residents for dormitories, the right side is a description of a high-tech house equipped with an autonomous life support system. Rewriting the scientist’s texts by hand, the artist as if reincarnates into him, trying to grasp and hear the cosmic flows that controlled Tsiolkovsky."

"Vladimir Vladimorovich: The Kremlin walls became your prison walls. You have already lost. You know it. That's why you are so afraid. You lost in spirit. The world is on Ukraine's side. The world is with the people of Ukraine."

"The global community was extremely complacent, and I see two reasons: hypocrisy, based on greed. People would make statements that they did not support Putin’s politics, and his oppression of the political opposition, and the wars that he started… But at the same time they would continue doing business with him. ... People underestimate how dangerous dictators are. In 2014, we spoke to the UK parliament, we spoke at the Senate in the US, we were asked by a lot of people how they should talk to Putin, how they should frame the conversation, and I always advised that they should be as strict as they could. You cannot play nice with Putin."

"Vladimir Putin became intimidated by Ukraine choosing the path to freedom and democracy. That's why the Russian army bombs maternity wards, schools, hospitals, rapes and kills civilians and throws their bodies in mass graves. Putin and everyone who supports him are dead inside and they must be defeated."

"Dealing with the Russian government is not new for the rocker. Tolokonnikova took part in a protest inside of Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in 2012, after which she spent almost two years in prison. The protest aimed at criticizing the Russian Orthodox Church's close ties with President Vladimir Putin. Two other members of the band were also imprisoned after screaming, "Mother Mary, please drive Putin away."...Individuals and entities labeled as "foreign agents" are required to submit regular financial reports and detailed lists of their income and spending. They must also display a disclaimer on all articles, social media posts and other publications that say, in part, "This Message (material) is creted and (or) distributed by a foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent..." Tolokonnikova wrote on social media that she will not be marking anything as described above and will dispute the label in court."

"When we were jailed, Pussy Riot immediately became very popular and widely known, and it turned from just a group to essentially an international movement. Anybody can be Pussy Riot, you just need to put on a mask and stage an active protest of something in your particular country, wherever that may be, that you consider unjust. And we’re not here as the leaders of Pussy Riot or determining what Pussy Riot is and what it does or what it says. We are just two individuals that spent two years in jail for taking part in a Pussy Riot protest action."

"I think the most fascinating fact about Ukrainians, and I hear it from them, is that they’re never going to give up. A lot of Ukrainians have said that Putin was expecting them to give up the control of the country to him. But that didn’t happen. They just have this spirit of, “This is our country. This is our baby.” And I really think that the president of Ukraine, Zalenskyy, is doing really, really well. He refused to leave Kyiv and he said, “We’re just going to defend it.” And they’re achieving amazing results."

"I think it`s just a - it`s a question of moral choice, and I cannot say that everyone has to make that choice, but I definitely have much more respect to those people who make moral choice not to be silent and go and express their position, whether it`s on the streets or on the Internet. Use your voice while you still can use it, because maybe tomorrow you`re not going to have it anymore."

"I cannot kill. Unfortunately, there are so many who can and do kill. As I cannot kill I cannot authorize others to kill. Do you see? If you are buying from a butcher you are authorizing him to kill — kill helpless, dumb creatures, which neither I nor you could kill ourselves. So that I am for that reason a vegetarian, as most Russians are. For nine years I have been a vegetarian, and I shall be one — mind, I am a man with strong convictions — to the end of my life."

"Prince Paul Troubetzkoy is one of the few geniuses of whom it is not only safe but necessary to speak in superlatives. He is the most astonishing sculptor of modern times. … Troubetzkoy is a gigantic and terrifying humanitarian who can do anything with an animal except eat it. Some of us remember the inaugural banquet in London of the International Society of Painters, at which the late Lord Haldane, presiding, announced, when all the conventional speechmaking was over, that the illustrious sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy desired to address the company, and how a figure of Patagonian stature arose amid polite applause, and began "Mr. President: is it not a monstrous thing that we, who are supposed to be artists and civilized men, and not savages, should be celebrating a great artistic occasion by gorging ourselves on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures?""

"From time to time he [Leo Tolstoy] posed – a tiring obligation – for painters and sculptors: for Repin, Pasternak who did a study of the family, Aronson, and Paolo Trubetskoy. Trubetskoy, a Russian educated in Italy, did some splendid little statues of Tolstoy – one of him on horseback. Father was very fond of him. A sweet and childlike person in addition to his great gifts, he read practically nothing, spoke little, all his life was wrapped up in sculpture. As a convinced vegetarian he would not eat meat but cried: “Je ne mange pas de cadavre!” if anyone offered him some. In his studio in St. Petersburg there was a whole zoo: a bear, a fox, a horse, and a vegetarian wolf."

"I wanted that work to carry the most important message ... that a person mustn't sell himself. I made a chocolate bar that can't be bought, using a giant panel of concrete."

"Put simply, I want to teach people in this country to tell lies from the truth and to tell bad from good. ... This is what our people still cannot do."

"Science looks and observes and art see and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist."

"The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute."

"[ Constructivism is] not as a tool or even a specific method, but rather as a perfect union of the coming state and the movement's 'spiritual' aims."

"The growth of new ideas is more difficult and lengthy the deeper they are rotted in life. Resistance to them is the more obsitnate and exasperated the more persistent their growth is."

"Up to now sculptors have preferred the mass and neglected or paid little attention to such an important component of mass as space.. ..we consider it as an absolute sculptural element. I do not hesitate to affirm that the perception of space is a primary natural sense which belongs to the basic senses of our psychology"

"I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists.. ..by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision."

"From the very beginning of the Constructivist Movement it was clear to me that a constructed sculpture, by its very method and technique brings sculpture very near to architecture.. .My works of this time up to 1924.. ..are all in the search for an image which would fuse the sculptural element with the architectural element in one unit. I consider this Column the culmination of that search."

"What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of Science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. It is for that reason that I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same; for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness - to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world, as our consciousness want it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself - Naum Gabo"

"The true artist always refuses to conform to any standards others than his own. That’s why the attacks in Russia against Shostakovitch and Prokofiev are identical to the attacks that have been made here against American pioneers of abstract painting like Davis, Holty, or Morris. In Russia it was Malevich and Gabo, in this country at the moment it is people like Rothko, Baziotes, Pollock, my self and many others who are being attacked. The names may vary, but the methods, the motives; the objects of attack are essentially the same. Only meritocracy is forever immune, because it is forever ready to conform. (his comment on the attacks on artistic freedom in 1948."

"The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time... For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody’s porch in the summer."

"..adding Space perception to the perception of Masses, emphasizing it and forming it, we enrich the expression of Mass.. ..through the contrast between them whereby Mass retains its solidity and Space its extension."

"Either build functional houses and bridges or create pure art or both. Don't confuse one with the other. Such art is not pure constructive art, but merely an imitation of the machine."

"We take four planes and we construct with them the same volume as of four tons of mass."

"Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed... The realisation of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art... We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time."

"No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life. Until all artists will say with us... All is a fiction... only life and its laws are authentic and in life only the active is beautiful and wise and strong and right, for life does not know beauty as an aesthetic measure... efficacious existence is the highest beauty. Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals... need is the highest and most just of all morals. Life does not know rationally abstracted truths as a measure of cognizance, deed is the highest and surest of truths. Those are the laws of life. Can art withstand these laws if it is built on an abstraction, on mirage, and fiction?..."

"I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living."

"We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities."

"If I were an academician.. ..or a believer in a higher reality outside me, as most people are (lucky creatures!), I would have no need for any justification for painting landscapes, or portraits, or social realism. I would rely on my so-called common sense, on which I see and feel, and I would enjoy it. Or I would fix one point in the distant haze of that unknown reality, would try to approach it as nearly as I could, and would find solace in the fanatical belief that I am the only one who is portraying that reality which is the only truth."

"Art and Science are two different streams which rise from the same creative force and flow into the same ocean of the common culture, but the currents of these two streams flow in different directions."

"More often than not, [people] expect a painting to speak to them in terms other than visual, preferably in words, whereas when a painting or a sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision,"

"He (Piet Mondrian) couldn't look after himself properly. He was terrible [sic] thin, and seemed to live mostly on currants and vegetable stew, because he followed the Haye diet."

"There is no indication of success up to now in the bringing together of art and science. To achieve success the artist must be spiritually at home in the field of science so he can think and feel in the same way as the scientist. A spiritual union, not a technical one, is requested."

"It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look, to choose and to fit them into a comely order."

"[The Constructive idea..] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected."

"I have these large pieces of recycled brown paper stretched on my apartment wall and when I am not doing anything fashion-related, I'm drawing on it, playing with colour spectrums."