The artist Anton Ginzburg is a connoisseur of stasis, forming sculptural and light-based installations that freeze a moment from history — or just as frequently, a moment of artistic conception—in time. Born in Russia and based in New York, he creatively inhabits the fertile space between the waning days of the USSR, which he witnessed growing up in St. Petersburg, and the current disarray of the Capitalist West, where he was educated (at Parsons). It’s appropriate, then, that Ginzburg has adopted the mythic classical figure of the Medusa as the motif that runs through much of his work: an ambivalent figure who can petrify (and therefore sculpt) with her gaze, she stands at the border of cultures as an Ethiopian monster/demigoddess who Perseus has to conquer to establish his kingdom.
Ginzburg—who has exhibited at SFMoMA, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and White Columns, and who has his latest exhibition of laser-based work, It Has Never Been Otherwise opening at St. Petersburg’s NEVSKY_8 artspace later this month — showed his most fully realized Medusa installation, No Echo, No Shadow, in last year’s Moscow Biennale. I spoke to the artist about his use of the mythological figure, the Medusa’s deep connection to Russian culture, and its relevance to the sculptural process.
Andrew M. Goldstein: In your work you’ve embraced the medusa as a conduit for different conceptions of seeing, for instance for the artistic gaze. What do you see in the figure of the Medusa?
Anton Ginzburg: Well, the character of the Medusa is a very curious one. It kept reappearing from the Greek times through the Baroque period. For me she is kind of a metaphor for sculpture, as a way of stopping time and being able to encapsulate the moment, which I find to be essential for sculpture. It also provides an interesting view on identity, because the way Perseus was able to kill the Gorgon was by looking in a mirror. It was a form of self-awareness, a way of defining who you are in a specific moment. And because whoever looks into her eyes turns to stone, according to the legend, you have a reversal of the roles where the spectator who comes into the exhibition and sees the Medusa becomes the one who is being seen. It becomes a notion of reversed perspective, with the viewer and the art object exchanging places. There are interesting texts by Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky who himself was quite close to the avant-garde artistic circles in the early 20th century. One of the explanations for the reverse perspective, through the particularities of Russian orthodoxy, is that the icon ceases to be an idol and becomes an active, watchful presence. The spiritual aspect of painting was adapted later by the Suprematists, which set it apart from the classical notion of western Moderism. And a lot of Suprematism at the turn of the century was quite connected to this idea of reverse perspective, where the black square was viewed by Malevich as the ultimate icon.
AMG: How were you first drawn to the idea of the Medusa? AG: In St. Petersburg the architecture has a theatrical quality. The Imperial Russian capital was built in just 25 years, which was unbelievably fast. It became a slice of particular time and worldview, so I look at it more as a sculptural expression. Since the city is primarily neoclassical in style — there are many images of Medusa used in reliefs on the walls, doors, and the ironwork on the canals — the image is really present. I appropriated it in part because to me it’s very familiar both visually and by my classical education that incorporated Greek and Roman mythology.
AMG: Why is the image of the Medusa so widespread in St. Petersburg?
AG: It was really embraced by Eastern Europe, all the way through Turkey actually. There are a number of things the Medusa can represent historically. One of the most obvious ones is a defense against the evil eye, so it’s viewed as a kind of protector of the city or the house. But the Medusa was also one of the children of Poseidon, so there is a nautical angle to it as well. There is a multilayered metaphor that’s built around the character of Medusa, because she’s also the origin of the Pegasus, the symbol of poetry, which rose out of her body when she was killed.
AMG: Other artists have employed the Medusa, from Antiquity and African art, to Caravaggio, Rubens, and Dalí. But you don’t see very much contemporary art that references classical mythology, aside from examples like Matthew Barney. Its refreshing to see an element of this kind of historicity appear in conceptual art.
AG: The classical Greek tradition is quite present for me, but it isn’t so prevalent anymore and when it’s introduced it has kind of a kitsch aspect to it. But I think the classical tradition is embedded in the culture, and it was quite popular in the beginning of the 20th century at the tension when Modern art was founded. So you can see it then in decorative art and design and the work of Surrealists. That’s territory that I’m quite interested in, not in High Modernism as you might call it, but actually the beginning and the transition into Modernism that appears in design as well, like the transition from the Vienna Werkstatt into the Bauhaus where certain kind of ideas are being injected into the culture but it’s still trying to find its form.
AMG: Do you plan to have the Medusa recur in your work?
AG: It’s not something that I want to stick to as a focus, but it’s an image that has appeared in my work a number of times and I am interested in exploring its formal and conceptual aspects for now. Lately I’ve been interested in the “notion of the impossible”, trying to overcome physical limitations, whether it’s working against gravity or working against the formal properties of the medium. In my recent projects, I’ve been working with lasers in an attempt to dematerialize the artwork, in a similar way to how Fred Sandback was able to create spatial tension with minimal formal intervention. And for me the Medusa is a representation of an invisible tension that can be formally revealed and recognized.
AMG: An installation you did in Lille, France combined your motif of the Medusa with your light art through the use of neon signs. How did that come about?
AG: I was commissioned to do a public sculpture in France. I had noticed that in Soviet countries during the late 20th century store signs were defined by their function, rather that in the West, where they were expressing ownership, whether it is corporation like Walmart, or the owner, like Ray’s Pizza. I found that a very interesting way to experience ideology through language and also your day-to-day life, so I collected a series of historical signs that composed a whole lifestyle cycle in eastern Europe at the time I was growing up, going from “bread” to “books” to “glove shop” et cetera. Today, of course, these signs remain only as the memory traces from the epoch that is gone
AMG: Another way your work uses the gaze of the Medusa is as a unifying element, as you did in your recent show in Moscow, No Echo, No Shadow. tell me about that show.
AG: I was working with psychological space of utopia and the transitional period of Perestroika. A lot of my work focuses on the intersection of the ideal and the real, the actual and the potential. In the late 1980s, Perestroika was the end to one of the biggest and bloodiest social experiments. It was meeting of the influence of the West, its popular culture and the sexual revolution. At the time I was 15, so I was able to witness the decay of the old empire and the beginning of the new era, and all of the tensions and conflicts that came to the surface.
In the exhibition I constructed two spaces, with one as more of an ideal space and one dealing more with real, with an emphasis on pop culture as I experienced it as a teenager. For the ideal space I used the notion of collector’s cabinets of traditional objects like bronzes, masks, and drawings as an expression of alternative, constructed reality and the key to that was the mask of Medusa. On the other side of the room was a piece of polished aluminum that was reflecting the mask, so around the installation there were several trajectories of reflections, almost like an invisible Modernist drawing.
AMG: The “pop-culture” installation was built around the Russian actress Natalya Negoda. Who was she?
AG: That room was a tribute to the eponymous cult film Little Vera [1988], a point of culmination in a vector of late Soviet time, the end of Perestroika and its relation to the Western eighties. After this film Playboy approached leading actress Natalya Negoda to pose for its centerfold. It was a pivotal point for the sexual revolution in USSR. The iron curtain gradually moved aside revealing a robust sex industry in the very center of the morally squeaky land of communist utopia. This became the epicenter of interaction and acquaintance with the newly available, always desired, and equally desiring West. The exhilaration of the sexual body newly liberated from constrains of ideology.
One of the exhibitions during the 3rd Moscow Bienniale was No Echo, No Shadow, Anton Ginzburg’s solo show at Galerie Iragui.
After the show opened I sat down with Anton to talk about the exhibition and his impressions of this year’s Biennale.
Alexandra Lerman: What is the driving idea behind your show?
Anton Ginzburg: No Echo, No Shadow explores the concept of alternative history as defined through the prism of personal memories and revisions of the past. My focus is the end of the 80’s in the USSR, the period of Perestroika, which coincided with my teenage years in Leningrad prior to my immigration to the United States.
This was a time of transition for the USSR and for me personally. The existing political system was in decay and was moving away from the Communist ideology with its mutant Modernist inspired rhetoric. Simultaneously I was experiencing my own ”coming of age,” [and was] being exposed to Leningrad’s underground contemporary art and music scene.
The title of the show is based on one of the neon text works in the exhibition. It portrays the psychological and cultural condition with the “phantom limb” syndrome, something that cannot be seen or heard, yet is present, similar to the sensation of an amputated limb that is still mentally attached to the body. It is a second chance to reveal the potential that hasn’t been realized.
For this exhibition I was interested in tracing the invisible moments between intention, actualization and interpretation of an art project. I divided the gallery into two spaces by a wedge-shaped wall to create an “inner” space and a ”collective” one.
The “inner” space takes the form of an idealized collector’s cabinet and is comprised of a table with small bronze sculptures, a Medusa mask, text works and drawings, artifacts that would be typical for an enlightened collector of the early twentieth century. The multiple reflective surfaces in the gallery, from the polished aluminum circle, to a convex mirror in the mouth of Medusa (allusion to Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait), to black vinyl floor, create a “hall of mirrors” with refracted trajectories expanding the wall space through illusory doublings, making text pieces written backwards in neon legible.
The sculptures are compositions of everyday objects, like stacks of bronze cast vegetables or plastic bread loaves and abstract geometry represented by onyx and amethyst spheres. The intersection of the mundane and the ideal captures the invisible tension between the intention and outcome.
The “collective” space features a blank tiled wall with a hole smashed into it with a trail of steam coming from inside. A yellow neon “No Echo, no shadow,” written in Russian is placed on the upper left corner. On the opposite wall there is a poster featuring an image of the Soviet actress, Natalya Negoda, from her 1989 Playboy photo shoot and a bronze cast of an audio tape with a torn magnetic ribbon, typical of the bootlegs circulating in the USSR at the time. These artifacts are the urban remains of the transformation of the late Soviet popular culture, totems of the Dionysian expression of the end of utopia.
AL: The quote by Natalya Negoda on top of your press release reads, “I’m amazed by how easily I was able to fight off a lot of complexes. I invented a role for myself, as an actress in America, and it started to please me very much.” This sets the tone for the exhibition. What made you pick this particular quote?
AG: The idea to use a Natalya Negoda quote from her Playboy interview was suggested by the art critic Brian Droitcour in response to one of my works featuring a spread from that issue.
Natalya Negoda was an actress of the Perestroika period—star of Little Vera, a film, key to the transformation of sexual identity for the last Soviet generation, which happened to coincide with my teenage years in the Soviet Union.
The film was a realist portrait of Soviet youth in a Russian province. It had a scandalous quality because of the erotic scene in it, quite modest by today’s standards, but for the squeaky clean Soviet morality it was revolutionary.
After that movie Negoda was invited to pose for Playboy magazine, which she accepted. She was the first Soviet actress to do it, creating a huge discourse within society, even though the magazine or photo shoot was not available in the USSR. The morality of her action was questioned and discussed publicly, revealing that the body of the Soviet utopia was changing from the inside. It was a clash of two Cold War ideologies, and the female body was the meeting point for it.
In my opinion the photo shoot had particular historic significance and defined the end of the epoch. For my generation it was a period defined by hope and anticipation of a new beginning, a chance to reinvent ourselves, reinvent the culture, reinvent the country. It is reflected in the title of my show No Echo, No Shadow, defining the space that exists only as a phantom.
AL: This is not the first time you appeal to art history, particularly to modernism, in your work. What makes you come back to it?
AG: The beginning of the twentieth century was a fascinating period, dominated by the spirit of innovation, hope and discovery, with a longing and search for utopia. That period created a number of aesthetic, social, and philosophical road maps that following generations including mine actually lived out, and witnessed its results and occasional decay.
In my work I try to bring together the projections and hopes that were anticipated, and the historical realities that have resulted—the intersection of the imagined and the actual. I explore the alternative history, the possibility of Modernism 2.0, following the route that hasn’t been realized, in order to reveal dreams, free from the gravity of the real. Also, I’m attracted to the precise and laconic language of Modernist expression, its search for clarity and harmony of the form and the message.
AL: Why do you feel the symbol of Medusa is strongly connected the your home town St.-Petersburg?
AG: The myth of Medusa has always fascinated me, it is full of mystery and has multiple layers of meaning.
Once Perseus cut off Medusa’s head, Pegasus, a symbol of poetry, flew out of her body, yet Medusa retained her deadly gaze turning whoever looked at her into stone. I recognize Medusa, as a symbol of sculpture in its pure classical form, as an urge to stop time. There is a reverse perspective in action, when the spectator and art piece exchange places. Medusa turns spectator into stone by returning his gaze —a switch of agency from viewer to object.
Growing up in Saint-Petersburg you see the image of Medusa quite a bit. It can be found all over the city on building facades, iron fences and doorways. Medusa gives away Saint-Petersburg’s personality, a paradox of imperial vision that is frozen in time and exists by its own swamp laws.
AL: When you start working on a project, do you begin with the idea or the material?
AG: Its usually an idea, but sometimes it can be a feeling or reaction inspired by a particular material.
Material and texture deal with emotional, intuitive aspects of the project, they create the setting, the mood, and a way to enter the artwork. The conceptual component of an artwork establishes the historical and intellectual backbone of the project. Ideally, both the conceptual and the emotional parts of the artwork should be in dialog as they are both necessary to reveal its invisible essence, poetry, and tension.
AL: This is not your first time in Moscow for the Biennale. What is your impression of the exhibition this year?
AG: I think the Biennial this year was very coherent and clear. The Garage is a beautiful space, and architecturally the show was very well resolved.
I feel it was an important show to see but there were not many risks taken. It was well articulated and direct in its presentation, but I was missing the creativity of the first Moscow Biennial, where there was a fascinating display of chaos, anarchy and sense of discovery, between the freezing cold January weather, recent transition of post-Communist Russia, and the anticipation surrounding this cultural experiment.
For me the essence of the 1st Moscow Biennial was encompassed by Gelitin’s project—an enormous urine icicle on the facade of the historical museum in Red Square. It was daring, witty and couldn’t be ignored.
