Incidents by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky

The Background
Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky have recently collaborated on a number of projects including film and photography but they each have established individual practices that began in USSR prior to Glasnost.   Their individual art works first became familiar to audiences outside Russia in the early 1990s when they began showing in major survey exhibitions and International Biennales.  They both exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, Boundary Rider in 1992 and at that time Svetlana's Trainer was acquired for the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection.

The couple were among a group of conceptual artists working under the influence of Ilya Kabakov during the dying years of the old regime in Moscow.  In those late days of the Soviet regime no amount of policing could stem the flow in electronic information across borders. Conceptual artists were able to process and electronically transmit information and scaled down text and image works internationally.  None the less after 60 years of relative isolation the Russian Avant Garde was strangely different from anything we had seen in the West.  Their work was never accepted by the Soviet Union of artists and therefore could not be officially exhibited in Russia or exported from the country.  Even after Glasnost and the beginning of exposure in USA and Europe in the late 1980s getting an export license for works not approved by the Union was very difficult politically and potentially an expensive process.

Igor understood that under the Soviet regime his work would never be publicly shown and would not survive his death.  In acknowledgement of this ephemertality he adopted a conceptual strategy of destroying his own work once it was completed.   He later had the idea of making convincing copies of old master paintings, destroying and then restoring them.  This way of working reflected his understanding of how the political and social potential of art from all periods could be appropriated by politicians to shore up their power causing even the interventions of the avant-garde to work against intellectual freedom.  The potential instrumentality of art was dramatised by Kopystiansky who used his copies of old paintings to line furniture or to hang as curtains.   He laid them on the floor as carpets so that the fetishised masterpiece found itself trodden underfoot.   In Sydney Biennale 1992 he furnished Ivan Dougherty Gallery as a domestic space.  Copies of old masters lined floor and walls and even the covers of sofas were made from the paintings.

Svetlana also reworked cultural forms; in her case it was text and books that she manipulated.  She claims that the book holds a very powerful almost sacred status in the popular Russian imaginary.  Writers were looked up to for their leadership and vision.   The work she produced for the Art Gallery of NSW integrates a library with the furniture of a gymnasium.  Bookshelves take on architectural proportions implying the idea of a public library with the rows of boxed books suggesting rows of windows or building modules.   Within these structures she has created niches or apertures in which punch balls and punch bags of the gymnasium are symmetrically placed.  The juxtaposition immediately makes us think of the totalitarian state's ideology of healthy minds and bodies at the service of the well-oiled machinery of a supposedly utopian society.  In this way Svetlana represents control of information in the form of books with ideology, with architecture and the apparatus of repression.

The contents of the Library are displayed with their spines to the back and the pages spread out open to our gaze.  They are all identical, a reflection of the uniformity of the state system however we can not even be sure that they are genuinely identical because although the open books suggest access in fact with the spines hidden we cannot even identify the book hence apparent openness masks concealment and lack of access.

Since 1991 the artists have lived outside of Russia.  They first settled in Berlin where they went to take up residency in an East Berlin artist's colony now converted into a smart gallery in Auguststrasse.  Recently they have divided their time between New York and Berlin.  Soviet avant-Garde artists in the late 1980s were 'discovered' by the Western market at a time when the postmodern interest in regionalism was taking hold.  Popular theoretical critiques of the hegemonic nature of the market and of art institutions supported by the relativism of Post-modernism created an ideal environment in which the market could legitimise its own expansion into new potentially lucrative fields.  In fact the Russians were the first wave of exotic others to be commercially embraced by the West.  They were quickly followed by Latin Americans, African artists, then Asians and most recently by the Chinese.

Svetlana and Igor were well placed by the nature of their work to receive commissions and invitations to exhibitions.  His display of traditional painting skills treated as conceptual art offered a critique of the social appropriation of art works by political systems.  This institutional critique easily translated into commodity critique thereby fitting very well into the dominant movement of the time.   The work attracted additional curiosity because of the somewhat musty virtuosity of his technique that hit the same note of quaint difference that Komar and Melamid had exploited a few years earlier.  Svetlana's work slotted more seamlessly into an aesthetic of found materials and modular structures in a post minimalist, post Arte Povera art scene while still dealing with aspects of life under Communism.

Incidents
The couple were often invited together to participate in exhibitions such as the Sydney Biennale but they resisted being always seen as a double act.  Eventually however they began to collaborate on certain kinds of works including conceptual photographic works that explored time and chance on the streets leading to a number of films such as Incidents.  Projects like this take them many months even years.  They also work on parallel projects.  At the same time as this film was being compiled they were taking twin photos of the same scene just a few feet apart and with a slight time delay.  The resulting images capture chance moves and conjunctions, figures move out of frame from one shot to the other or figures come together or pass each other on the street.  This strategy feeds into the procedural logic of Incidents. 

Their studio is on the Lower East Side in what used to be the 'meat district' of Chelsea.  It is close to the Hudson River and subject to the cold winds that lash the grey streets.  When they first moved in it was very affordable but as usual the galleries follow the artists and gentrification takes a hold.   Much of this area is now home to the most prestigious New York galleries and foundations but it is still rather desolate at street level.  The detritus of consumer life lies about everywhere as it does all over New York, possibly the scruffiest city in the world as well as the wealthiest and most powerful. 

The Kopystianskys have not made a film about dirty streets so much as a celebration of chance encounters.  Many hours of footage carefully collected on windy days have been meticulously edited to capture these magical moments.  It is remarkable how quickly we start to read characters into these discarded objects.   The particular formal properties of each of the objects determine the very individualistic movement each of these characters acquires through the animating breath of the wind.  At times the characterisation becomes so strong that audiences spontaneously burst out laughing.   When an empty hamburger box moves forward in a series of jerky steps with the lid flapping up and down it becomes a vividly anthropomorphic image and zanily Muppet like.

There are also moments of great elegance particularly when pieces of fabric or a plastic bag twist and twirl their way along the gutter or fly up into the air defying gravity then shudder and spin back to earth.  There is a long and interesting history of rubbish in contemporary art but this work brings to the genre to a new level of
aesthetic pleasure.  We think of Joseph Beuys sweeping the streets and the forests of Germany as an environmental gesture and then framing the resulting material in a vitrine.   There were the D�collage artists in France in the late 1950s whose torn billboard posters aestheticised everyday Parisian street furniture.  Before them Kurt Schwitters elevated old bus tickets and fragments of paper into high art and Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornel kept up a long exchange of such fragments some of which found their way into artworks and journals.

A more recent example might be the installations of Tony Cragg in the early 1980s.  Many of these works were assembled from fragments of coloured plastics found along the banks of the Thames in London at low tide.  Cragg arranged them into geometric or pictorial configurations that elevated trash into valuable art, a sleight of hand that was only partly a conceptual critique of commodification and the art market.   The other side of Cragg's assemblages was a finely balanced form between the chances of nature and cultural signs.  This balance revealed his genuine delight in the visual and tactile qualities of things.  The same is true of the Kopystianskys the history of their work makes it clear that they understand the critical context of art in society but they always also raise the aesthetic value of the work to a level that brings a surprising degree of pleasure to the viewer.

While the department of Contemporary International art has acquired some video works over the years this has largely been for monitor display or as documentation of performance works or for specific exhibitions in which video spaces have been constructed.  With the advance in digital projection quality it has for the first time become possible to display video projection without blackout, awkwardly constructed rooms and the inevitable black drape.   In anticipation that the next generation of projectors will achieve even greater brightness and resolution we are hoping to be able to acquire more such works that can now be shown in open spaces alongside other media in the collection.