Installation entitled 3113. Dimensions: 15 square meters, 3 meters high. Media: aluminium plates, MDF boards, wood & steel structure, polyethylene, LED lights, paintings (acrylic, Indian ink), 5 drawings (pencil on paper), wall text and book – Indian ink on paper. 2012.
The main purpose of the Installation was an exploration of the Utopia Concept inspired by the Art Practices and Theories of Yoko Ono, who is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art in America since the early 1960’s. As my Installation was exploring the concept of Utopia which is a quite Imaginative concept and also because my original goal from the beginning was to create a purely conceptual art work I decided employ the technique of ‘making and unmaking’ art practice which is obviously inspired by Robert Rauchenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).
‘Making and Unmaking’ is also one of Ono’s Art Practices from the 1960s (e.g. Ono’s Grapefruit Book of 1964 which was meant to be burnt after it was read). I also ‘made and un-made’ my first version on the Installation and turned it into a music video but it was done through Art Practice not Theory. Therefore, I thought that it would be interesting to experiment with ‘making and unmaking’ Art via Theory somehow, without the deliberate destruction of the Art Work itself (anyway, my Installation is site-specific, after the Show it had to be disassembled and hence destroyed).
So, after I did my Research I decided to combine references to the Utopia and Dystopia (or Anti-Utopia) Concepts in one Installation as an act of experimentation of ‘making and unmaking’ through the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of Utopian theories via Art Practice. I find this task very challenging and therefore very exciting.
The title of the work indicates a year – 3113 when the scenario of the Installation is taking place and also it is a reference to George Orwell’s Anti-Utopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the first line of the novel, ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’.
I decided to cover the walls, ceiling and floor of the Installation space with aluminium as a reference to the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) by Russian writer and Political philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky. This novel was a first ‘communist Utopia’ which influenced Vladimir Lenin even more than the writings of Karl Marx. Chernyshevsky saw the Utopian future as the result of the progress of a scientific advance of humankind, and the notion of ‘Crystal Palace’ and ‘Houses of Aluminium’ long since became iconic images of a communist Utopia.
So, I decided to make the entrance to my Installation, a ‘lobby’, from transparent material as a reference to ‘Crystal Palace’ (I used polyethylene, I am sorry I cannot afford do it out of crystals) and the main room of the installation is made completely with aluminium as to the references of ‘Houses of aluminium’. Fyodor Dostoevsky was a contemporary of Chernyshevsky and he wrote a novel Notes from the Underground (1864) as a response to Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Dostoyevsky believed that the ‘Golden Age’ was past, and not in the future, so his novel was dedicated to the concept of Anti-Utopia. This novel of Dostoyevsky was an influence on three major Anti-Utopias of the 20th century – Zamiatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). I decided that the central-piece of my Installation should be based on the Anti-Utopian concept of a ‘machinery-age future’. I thought that it would be interesting also to incorporate Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts which will introduce a different facet in my scenario of Anti-Utopia. In February 2012, I attended a Lecture Deleuze & Guattari and Occupy (Organized by Dr Andrew Conio) in Occupy School of Ideas in London as I wanted to enhance my understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts on Politics. Attending the Lecture gave me the idea to use Deleuze and Guattari concepts of the tent and tripod, monument, and deterritorialisation (ref: Dr Nicholas Thoburn’s Lecture). I changed the shape of the Installation to look more like tent from outside and a whole Installation is a kind of Deleuzean Monument as it is represents main concepts the Philosopher, for example, in the central-piece of the Installation which is a ‘news paper’ with the Anti-Utopian scenario on it and the drawings in the middle – a scenario of a whole art work – I was exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s most famous concepts of ‘body without organs’ and the ‘desire-machine’.
So, now I need to start from the beginning to illustrate how I solved the task of ‘making and unmaking’ the theories of Utopia and Anti-Utopia. So, the spectator will enter the installation space via a Utopian ‘Crystal Palace’ into the Utopian ‘Aluminium House’.
Then the spectator will be naturally drawn to the text, which narrates the story of futuristic society ruled by robots (‘bodies without organs’). The robots are now under mortal threat from the virus which is mutation of computer and human viruses. The only way for robots to escape death is converting back into humans as the virus doesn’t affect them. Humans are enslaved by robots and one of the humans/slaves build the Installation – a ‘desire-machine’ which will, as he believes, be able to train robots to become humans. So, when the spectator will read the text, to start with – it is Anti-Utopia, but as the scenario develops it turns into Utopia again (a slave wants to help his oppressors). Also I think that even within the scenario, for its characters – robots – the possibility of turning back into humans is a Utopia meanwhile for their savoir – a human/narrator – the possibility to save these monsters from death will more likely promise only a continuation of the Anti-Utopia he is living in. But there is still hope that they will turn into kind humans as their savoir hopes (so, it is Utopia again). Also the ‘beautiful drawings’ in the middle of the paper with text are meant to give the robots that Utopian dream of ‘being a human’. And finally, two boards on the opposite walls and the book with song ‘Imagine’ lyrics is a reference to Ono’s and Lennon’s Art which has always been Utopian. In the text the narrator never mentions who is the author of that ‘black square book’ on the stand. I did it deliberately to illustrate the idea that in the future people had long forgot the author’s name, but the book became a kind of ‘Bible’ (nobody now does not know who actually wrote the Bible, but in fact someone wrote it!).
An Important part of my installation is the ‘Instructional art’ feature (in the text are instructions how to use a ‘desire-machine’) which is also influenced by the Instructional Art of Yoko Ono since the 1960s. In the Installation’s scenario those ‘instructions’ aimed to the characters of scenario – the robots – but the text would be read and the whole installation will be viewed by the exhibition visitors, so they will also be engaged into trying to follow those instructions (step 1, step 2, etc., as described in the wall text), so, the spectators will become the characters of the scenario, and therefore they will interact with my Installation physically (following instructions) and virtually - via Imagination (as scenario describes the story 1000 years into the future).
In the text the narrator mentions that he writes on the ‘last piece of natural paper’ which he found when the humans/slaves built the cave/shelter for robots. He also said that along with the paper he found images from book and redrew them by hand as the images were very small and not in a good condition. He also said that he guessed that the paper and pictures belonged to some anonymous artist of the past. Here I decided to include a kind of Feminist critique – in all the images women are depicted – so we can guess that the ‘artist of the past’ was a man. Also, one of the images with Banksy’s graffiti in the ‘Grand museum’ scene I created with Photoshop software, so it does not represent a real scene, but for the narrator, who supposed to have found that image, it is real representation of ‘human life’, as he put it. So, it is kind of joke too which raises the question – what is false and what is true about our lives and how could it be misread in the future.
Also, in the second column of the wall text the fonts have a different width as I wanted to create the impression that after the narrator had spend so much time to build that huge Installation and to draw such meticulous pictures he had started run out of time to create the ‘desire-machine’. So, he didn’t bother to make the text beautiful, when one pen runs out he just uses a new one.
All the other bits of the Installation I have produced being inspired by the Art of Yoko Ono.
On 9th October last year I participated in Yoko Ono’s annual event – Imagine Peace. Yoko Ono created a public sculpture the Imagine Peace Tower (2007) – a monument which is constructed purely from light and dedicated to the memory of John Lennon. Every year on the 9th of October the birthday of John Lennon Yoko Ono travels to Reykjavik, Iceland where the sculpture is situated to turn on the light and switches it off on 8th of December – the day Lennon was shot.
Imagine Peace Tower was conceived by Ono as a wishing well which is sending people’s wishes via a beam of light from the Tower into the Sky. Yoko Ono always says, “Think peace, Imagine Peace, Act Peace, Spread Peace”, she believes that if everyone would imagine peace and love then people will have no time to think about aggression and war and hence the world would change. ‘It is that simple’, says Yoko Ono. So, I decided to include the lights into my Installation too as a kind of connection with Ono’s sculpture light beams which are symbolically transmitting messages of Love and Peace as everyone’s main human wishes and that is also relevant to the main message of the wall text scenario of my Installation.
During Yoko Ono’s annual event Imagine Peace the song Imagine of John Lennon is constantly playing and when I was participating in the event I saw how every word of the song was embodied by the Project Imagine Peace Tower. I wrote the Dissertation on Yoko Ono’s concept of Imagine which as my research has shown, invented by her long before she met John Lennon.
I chose to do the art work in the form of an installation also as a reference to the Fluxus art movement which Yoko Ono belonged to in the 1960’s and their experimental sound installations which was lead by John Cage.
So, I knew that in the installation which is homage to Yoko Ono’s major work, the Imagine Concept should be a reference to music and in this particular case to the song Imagine. So, I decided to ‘frame’ the lyrics of the song Imagine into a square black book which is a symbol for Malevich’s painting Black Square on White Background from 1915 which Malevich himself called “the face of new Art” and the door to “4th dimension” – a world of pure creation and imagination. The book with the lyrics of Imagine is placed on a plinth as the Bible in Church which also is a reference to how the Black Square was hung at the first Suprematist exhibition, in the left top corner of the room as Russian icons are displayed in Church.
Black Square was meant to be an icon of New Art. And the Lyrics of Imagine are meant to be a sacred text of Nutopia – a conceptual imaginative country which Yoko Ono and John Lennon created in 1973 as one of their art projects. Letter N stands for word ‘new’ – so Nutopia means – ‘New Utopia’. They also published the ‘declaration of Nutopia’ which conveys the same ideas as in the lyrics for the song Imagine. Declaration of Nutopia was even printed on the back cover of John Lennon’s musical album Mind games (1973) and on the front cover was a photograph of Yoko Ono. Now Yoko Ono runs a website called ‘Join Nutopia’ where everyone can become a ‘citizen of Nutopia’. I have also joined and now I am a Nutopian too, ‘you may say that I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one’ as Yoko Ono has millions of followers worldwide as you can see by the data on her web site, facebook and twittwer accounts.
When I placed lyrics written in the book I assumed that the music of Imagine is so famous that everyone while looking through the book will hear the melody in their mind, so the music becomes imaginative. You do not hear it physically, but just Imagine that it is playing while you read the text.
Two Paintings Imagine Peace and Imagine Love are reference to Yoko Ono’s and John Lennon’s Project The War is Over. If you want it. which has run since 1969 when they first started to put advertising billboards on the streets of different cities. Yoko Ono is still placing posters and billboards with the text “Imagine peace” – on the street, exhibitions and the internet and invites all people to distribute that message everywhere they can. Message “Imagine Love” I invented myself as homage to Yoko as she always signs all her letters and messages with text ‘I love you. Yoko.” Ono constantly advertises the idea that everyone should spread peace and love, and I am doing it as one of Yoko’s adepts which I consider myself now.
I am very satisfied with the outcome of my current art work as I believe I found out a quite innovative method of Interaction with spectators while keeping my work conceptual which is very difficult to achieve in the margins of ‘white cube style’ exhibition space. I am going to destroy the Installation and film the whole process, and publish the film online with a Project Description and research for it. So, the art work would be fully completed after it actually would be physically destroyed and turned into a video format. Then the Installation you see now will become just a set decoration/a scene for the film. That would be the final stage of the ‘making and unmaking’ art practice for this work and a kind of experiment with the evolution of the work. In fact, I believe that the creation process never ends for any art work as one work is usually followed by another, so it evolves from one into another anyway. So, I think I have said enough about my art work, now please take your time to look at the Installation and read the wall text. I hope you will enjoy it. Thank you.
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