TURNING BANALITY INTO MAGIC

KO: What are you working on now?

AR: I am preparing an exhibition titled "Shacks and Flags". I have a big archive of images of shacks and flags in my computer, which I took over the years around the world kind of unconsciously without knowing how I would use them.

I'm attracted to shacks for aesthetic and social-political reasons. Shacks are usually invisible structures, a "non-monumental architecture". Nobody treats them seriously. Often they look like tree houses built by children or shelters constructed by homeless people living on the street. More and more, you can see them in the news because wars and natural disasters create them, as well. The roots of the shabby aesthetic in my works, of course, come from my Russian past.

KO: There are even architects now that design shelters specifically for disaster areas.

AR: Yes, shacks are often spontaneous, fragile structures that are a temporary solution.

In the exhibition, there will be small wooden models, objects built of scraps of found wood. Sometimes I incorporate books into them - book covers as roofs for the shacks. The presence of the models will add a sculptural dimension to the installation.

The second element of the project is the flag. When I photograph flags, mainly I'm not taking pictures of political flags, but commercial banners, which I see in the streets. Photographing them against the light makes them looks like flags.

KO: Flags are also used to mark borders and keep the familiar (houses) safe from the threatening Other. In M. Night Shyamalan's movie, The Village, a small rural community is cut off from the outside world by a border made of flags, which symbolizes an agreement between the villagers living on the inside and the monsters living on the outside.

AR: Flags, in my Russian mind, are strictly for propaganda and political speculation. They are aggressive in their nature; they hang quite high and are meant to be visible.

A shack, on the other hand, is ephemeral, almost invisible. They can be destroyed at almost any given moment. You can often see them next to the railroads. In Russia, Italy, in Germany even, you see those houses, because the land around the railroad doesn't belong to anybody. People build shacks and make little gardens . . .

Flags are related to being in the sky, while shacks are about being on the land. There's a different spirit coming from flags. Those connections will be explored in the show.

KO: My understanding of you is primarily as a conceptual artist. Would you agree with that?

AR: To some extent, I am a conceptual artist because I care about the content. But for the pure conceptual artist, I'm too much of a romantic and aesthete. That said, I feel that art is not just supposed to be "food for your eyes." Art is also "food for the brain", the imagination.

KO: But you do always have a concept or a theme?

AR: Absolutely. There is always a title and a theme. Traditionally, these come from my actual traveling experiences.

KO: There is a certain manic obsessiveness, not just in your collecting images, whether you photograph them or they appear in your drawings.

AR: Traveling and collecting are very much part of my identity. A few times I was trying to stop or limit myself. This is always the hardest, most important part: the process of editing, and being able to stay focused. Sometimes I spend hours taking pictures and then I have to spend hours looking through them…

Sometimes it can create a crisis, but someone said recently that "confusion is a beautiful state of mind". It depends on how you deal with it. If you accept it as a form of intuitive creation, you pull and push constantly - one step forward, one step back. It's not linear. It is reexamining things, analyzing things, discovering things, turning banality into some kind of magic. It's the most rewarding and most interesting metamorphosis. Turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

KO: Objects seem to find you just as you find them.

AR: It is often almost as if the camera asks me to take a picture. I am attracted to a certain vision, to certain sounds, a certain relation to reality in music, movies, photography, visual art, and, in some way, I want to promote that vision. Fifty percent of the time I know where I want to be and the other half of the time I want the street to tell me where to go. My work is based equally on intuition and empiricism. Art is meant to inspire, to wake up the viewer, to give them a chance to see something they don't usually see.

KO: There is something that does interest me and it has to do with a certain visual nostalgia I detect in your work that I also see in other artists that come from similar political backgrounds as yours. Someone like Neo Rauch, for instance.

AR: Neo Rauch and I were born the same year, we went through very similar experiences except his family experience was different. But we both went through similar political and social changes and confusion. But nostalgia . . .

KO: A kind of retro visual language.

AR: Partially. Growing up in Russia, I feel familiar with old, shabby things. But for me it is important to be connected with the present, as well. I don't only want to live out of my past. At the same time, I'm aware that I spent thirty years of my life in a very different visual environment. I would like to authentically stay connected to both my past and present.

KO: You mention authenticity. I like that word a lot despite its unpopularity since the sixties. I was teaching my students at MOMA that all works of art consist of two basic elements: intention and execution. Only if the execution is consistent with the intention, and vice versa, can art be authentic.

AR: Absolutely, that is exactly the reason why my paintings have different styles. When I look at an image I want to paint, it radiates with a certain way of execution. For that reason, some images are painted big, some small; some on a piece of cardboard, some abstractly, some figuratively, because I want to listen to the voice of existing reality instead of forcing my ideas onto reality. So execution is not first. First is reality, found objects or discovered images. I can see myself as some kind of a romantic archeologist and collector, working at a big excavation.

KO: You seem to prefer to present your works within a larger group, as accumulations of images.

AR: Yes, because I would like he ultimate result of my installations to hold the spirit of a collection. You might compare it to "treasures" found in an attic.

KO: It was Kant who first understood that the experience of art is an activity of the mind by distinguishing between perception and experience. While perception is completely passive, just absorbing sensory impressions from the external world, experience is an active form of perception, which requires, as Hegel later said, the "labor of the concept."

AR: Experience is intellectually or emotionally digested perception. Perception can be stimulated by many different things, but it's really the depth of experience that matters.

The desire to create or unlock a paradox is not very common. It can sometimes even be considered a sickness. Paradox is what makes art special and that's what I am addicted to. It's like a virus that's inside of me and it creates a desire, a longing for the paradox, the surprise, the discovery of finding spirituality in the most banal things.

KO: Art is, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, a sickness unto paradox. Or as Wittgenstein said, one is always running against boundaries of language, representation etc. Artists run against boundaries full force, constantly.

AR: My inability to express myself well enough through verbal language drives me to the territory of visual signs. It's like being in a train and seeing the landscape outside as one giant installation.

I wish to inspire the viewer to see things differently. Some try to physically change the world, pollute it, destroy it, but I feel it is better to just transform the optics, the perception. For instance, after hearing John Cage, you start appreciating daily noise as a form of potential music. Art refreshes your senses.

KO: You mentioned that traveling was part of your identity and you often refer to your nomadic lifestyle.

Aside from using images from my travels, sometimes my finished works travel with me. For example, I have this small painting, titled "Restless". It fits perfectly in my carry-on suitcase. It has traveled with me across the Atlantic several times and it's interesting to watch how its voice changes each time on the walls of new spaces and in hotel rooms.

It reminds me of Edvard Munch's habit of leaving his paintings outside his house, being in the rain and snow until they changed. This way he felt he was collaborating with nature. Instead of protecting them by putting them in a safe storage, he made them suffer and live.