By Linda Rampell
Satan’s great spring ball is something to look forward to. If you were not invited to his magic show, now is the time to just go! But mind you, it would be futile, if not outright stupid, to only seek to classify the strange things that will happen – not to mention the glimpses of shadows under the mask multiplying and musicians dancing under the candelabra of dreams – with what you know. Because we know that to know often means to fall victim to a ready-made consciousness and succumb to prejudice. “I meant to tell you of this a some while ago, but something or other put it out of my head.” (Nikolai Gogol) What other? The Master and Margarita has already returned twenty times by now, but we still want more and we are getting it from the computer Cloud.com in Pants, in which each of us are living. White fog forms haunting images on the black sky’s screen. But who is the haunted one? Your mirror image? “That’s a totally different matter” (Gogol) from the delicate subject we are dealing with now. But how different is it? The madeness that occurs here has already taken place in another room and in another time and in another way. Now it returns several times in another way … we (I am several) have just said.
As a student at the Filonov School (former Masters of Analytical Art, MAI) the architect Igor I. Tajiev became acquainted with madeness, artistic craftsmanship, which Pavel Filonov described to as an analytical realism vis-à-vis universal flowering – the idea that a drawing or painting would grow and flourish through its own crafted merits. Flowering is indeed happening here, in more ways than one; each of the eighteen original artworks bloom in twenty signed copies by the architect Anton I. Tajiev as an homage to his father. These certified copies could not be realized without computer-based techniques allowing an original to surpass itself in imitations.
Stop! Because, as we (you are several) have seen, even within the origin of the originals IT happens. If we have to categorize, do we not see a kind of synthesis of artistic styles, such as surrealism and facet cubism? “Ah! So you are here?” (Ivan Goncharov) Yes, and if we were even more here, and looking closer, a cluster of minute strokes would appear, made with a fine-edged brush dipped into a jar of Indian ink and placed tight together, as if mimicking each other in another way, only to emerge at a distance, gathering into a single image, but when you come up close again you get lost in a therapeutic method that repeats itself. The gaze is almost caught in a net of strokes that take countless hours to complete, indeed a feat of craftsmanship and labor. Ha! Might seem like it, says the one who knows. Because as we have realized by now, every stroke is reproduced after the fact by another process. Each of these eighteen originals with their twenty signed copies is flowering from within and without, until we no longer can talk of an original and a copy. In fact, such a Platonic divide is obsolete. We do not even see images of a model, itself a copy of the images it evokes inside us. And to complicate things further, before you saw this, every so-called original was scanned, digitally revised, increased in scale, altered in color, and reproduced as an excellent-quality Epson print, highlighting the delicacy of the details and deepening the black-and-white effect. Furthermore, three of the images are also screen printed to achieve abstract elements of gold as a contrast to the overall figurative impression.
Have we reached a stage where the copy pays tribute to the original, makes it original, affirms it only to surpass it? Serially, yes, these copies do not only outnumber the originals, but also transcend the very idea of the original. An act that in itself might be the “triumph of the simulacra” (Gilles Deleuze).
The prefix re-, as in remake, implies a return. The comprehensive history of the copy shows, since the transcription of manuscripts, sign by sign, stroke by stroke, that to repeat was to reintroduce. But what is brought back when repetition takes place within images, stroke by stroke, faces within faces, cut up and multiplied. It is hardly a face anymore, but a grotesque mask “already seen by too many people, and hardly wearable any longer” (Franz Kafka) except at “a gala night within the lonesome latter years” (Edgar Allan Poe).
So I cannot tell you how this happened, because it occured before you saw, and don’t pretend to hear the cat playing the violin, he’s already done that at Satan’s midnight ball. And here you are, looking at your life from the inside only to form it from the outside. What shape will it take? Before answering “a word made him shudder […] ‘schizophrenia’” (Mikhail Bulgakov). Who is not several? Wait and see.