Tanya Hengstler got an arts education and is well-versed in the creation of artworks.

She had barely taken her first steps in her profession when time issued new challenges to art. To stay in the limelight, artists had to reconsider their attitude towards art as the aesthetic creation of form. The spirit of the times called for struggle and radicalism. In 1994, Hengstler had her first show at Regina Gallery. At this time, small kiosk shops were growing from under the ruins of the Soviet Empire. They were symbols of the rhizomic organization of the new social relations.

They made the commercial process extremely intimate: to buy something, you had to bend down towards a small window. For this reason, this series of 300 black-and-white photographs was displayed on the lower parts of the walls along the entire perimeter of the gallery. Viewers were invited to experience the roles of the new reality not only visually but also performatively. Bankers in cashmere jackets, the masters of the neoliberal economic model, made their way across the rickety boards.

​They nimbly jumped from one photograph to the next, poking fun at the tackiness and tastelessness of cooperative ventures and shuttle traders from whom they had already distanced themselves. Tanya Hengstler’s Moscow Kiosks was exhibited together with an installation by Dmitry Gotov, who covered the gallery floor with mud.

Hengstler’s first major project already showed traces of her new artistic method. The exhibited photographs were not images but artifacts that were meant to provoke. The success of such a strategy depended on the artist’s ability to be “impudent, uncaring, ignorant, suffering from persecution mania, unreliable, beastly, strange, poor, subject to ideological brainwashing, career-minded, naïve, trendy, cruel, artificial, unfriendly, crazy and stubborn.” This was the title of her next show that took place at Regina Gallery in 1995 with Anatoly Osmolovsky as curator. Hengstler’s radical artistic experiments were in tune with the latter’s provocative avant-garde aesthetics. Their artistic union created the most significant works of the 1990s and gave Hengstler a place of honor in radical art.

At this exhibition, she became the Russian pioneer of the new genre of video sculpture. Her sculptures were three heads covered with black bitumen and equipped with video monitors emitting the deafening sound of screeching car brakes, screaming seagulls and a shouting crowd. One of the monitors showed a mouth gnawing a bone, the second a road coming at you at a great speed, and the third a flaming bonfire. They had entitled Give Me a Catheter to Empty My Mind; Be Happy and You’ll Be Able to Stop; and When I Come, I’ll Be Everywhere.

This was a conceptual rejection of figurativeness, insofar as the latter’s functions began to be implemented by monitors.The idea of man being a product of the media was the subject of her subsequent self-reflective performances/exhibitions.

​“I’m Better than a Rose” was part of the exhibition Antifeminist Feminists. This declaration was a mockery of the enormous material noise of the contemporary world, where everything has a price, where all objects of reality are viewed as objects of consumption, and where the woman becomes such a privileged object.

Another important work of this period was Oh, part of the exhibition My Bloody Love, a joint project with Anatoly Osmolovsky. This was an exhibition about love and an attempt to create an adequate feeling of it. For this reason, it made use of heat, sound, and color.

​The gallery represented a vagina that anyone could symbolically enter. The flashing (inhaling/exhaling) interjection “Oh” on the outer wall of the gallery expressed the “external” aspect of love. The exhibit had a clear humoristic aspect: visitors were instructed to enter in pairs and to remain alone for some time. The visitors coming in and out and the “Oh” sign turning on and off were part of the same machine representing a single process. Subsequently, Oh became an independent work: this female exclamation, amplified on a monumental scale, became a parody of advertising and a direct challenge to the social conventions of society.

In the 1990s, Hengstler became one of the leading figures of Russian radical art, which was experiencing a profound identity crisis at the time (perhaps because it was unable to overcome the “kiosk syndrome”). Hengstler tried to force it to “make a choice” at the exhibition Antifascism – Anti-Antifascism (1997), where she built a wall that divided the exhibition space in two (right and left parts). Before entering the gallery, viewers had to choose a stance. However, Russian society rejected the game proposed by the artist and chose to reflect about motives other than contemporary art.

In 1997, Hengstler received a scholarship and went to the USA, where she tried to get recognition for her radical artistic method in new international exhibition practices. The exhibition/performance Where are you from? issued a challenged to New York, the mecca of contemporary art and a place that grinds up talents like a monstrous mincing machine. Waving the American flag on Times Square hinted at the project’s irony. It was a symbolic nod towards Pop Art – Jasper Johns’ American Flag and Andy Warhol’s well-known phrase “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” The second part – a documentation of the performance in the exhibition space – was no less provocative: anyone who wanted could go up the red staircase, wave the flag on a platform with a view of the World Trade Center that had not yet been destroyed by terrorists, and express his thoughts and wishes for America.

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At that time, Western democracies were inexplicably patient with Russia and did not interfere to prevent liberalization from entering a blind alley. For this reason, local critics perceived Hengstler’s powerful action as simply an extravagant gesture and ignored her self-irony and defeatist attitude. Had this manifestation of Russian radicalism gotten the recognition it deserved, it could have become the hit of the Venice Biennale at the time, just as Oleg Kulik’s Man Dog subsequently did.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a time of disillusionment about social activism and the possibility of influencing the political situation and public consciousness through critical projects. Artists came to believe that art was being submerged by a flow of commercial trash and that society lost the necessary receptors for understanding it. Thus, they decided that the only way of restoring art’s significance was to make it elitist. To this end, artists gathered around the negotiating table and chose a system of conventions that could bring them together into a powerful entity.

This is how the idea of “non-spectacularism” arose. It was endorsed by artists for whom radical art meant something more than just a method of self-advertisement and a means of making a career.The concept of “non-spectacular” art that hides reality instead of representing it inspired Hengstler to create the project Warm it! Touch it! (2001). Small photographs were covered by a black “liquid crystal” mixture. When viewers touched them with their hands, the photographs “opened” because the heat, showing depictions of human figures. This represented the rejection of the meddlesome attention of mass media and an attempt to escape their intrusion into “private life.”

Unlike “untouchable” museum items that create a distance between themselves and the viewer, Hengstler’s “black objects” called for performative interaction and urged viewers to cast the unfriendly prohibitions aside. “Please touch!” said the sign as well as the exhibit’s title. However, the objects that were concealed under the chemical layer tempered excessive optimism: “Does the visible object want to look at the viewer?” Hengstler found an answer to this paradoxical question: “The visible object will look at the viewer if it is a work of art.”Thus, one only had to find out what it was.

Studying the reasons for the disappearance of the artwork in the 1990s and continuing the idea of the “non-spectacular,” Hengstler presented her new project Auto-Graph in 2005. It depicted unwashed Moscow cars – the crude material symbols of the age on which objects inadvertently became visible on the dirty smears on trunks, doors and windows. Hengstler tried to liberate them with her hands from the layer of dirt and give them a voice in the visual noise of the city. These drawings on dirt were made with cigarette filters and depicted various symbols of the time: soldiers, nightclubs, policemen, hunting, and haiku…

Nevertheless, these images were not artworks yet. To present them to the viewer, Hengstler reproduced the drawings in high-quality color photographs.The problem of the artwork is that it does not strive to show itself or explain the concept behind it. As Osmolovsky noted, “its main meaning is to remain unrecognized for as long as possible.”

The artwork is a material object that is the product of the artist’s work. One may well wonder what mystery it can conceal after so many centuries of art and aesthetic thought.

​In each period, there is something elusive about the artwork. The artwork teases the market with its consumer qualities yet is not simply an object of commercial fetishism. It violates artistic conventions that had been developed for years yet acquires meaning only as part of a series of historical artistic phenomena. It is a purely formal experiment yet also has original social and political implications. The artwork is indifferent to the viewer, yet it alone can give him the pleasure of aesthetic contemplation.

The reemerging interest in the artwork has been responsible for all the recent interesting events in contemporary art, at least in Russia. For Hengstler, a subtle master of form, the aesthetics of the artwork became a natural continuation of her artistic experiments of previous years. Responding to the challenges of modernity and implementing radical strategies, she nevertheless remains true to the lessons that she learned in art school.

Her project Fracture at Triumph Gallery was a return to the foundations of formal workmanship at a new stage of development. It was a series of spearheads made of obsidian (volcanic magma) that artisans had learned to manufacture during the Paleolithic Age. These were sculptures rather than ready-mades, as they were intentionally larger than life. Stripped of its practical functions, the obsidian spearhead became a “work” and served as a symbol of anthropocentrism, power and cost equivalent. Made with the traditional “faceting” method, the spearhead referred to diamond faceting as the highest manifestation of rationalism. The stone spearhead can also be considered as a forerunner of the silicon microchip, the material foundation of information society.

​At the exhibition, the spearheads were mounted on podiums that visually resembled the iPhone 5S. Incidentally, stone appeared in Hengstler’s work already during her “non-spectacular” period when she presented the work Tanya, Come Out! at the exhibition Instead of Art. This work was barely noticeable in the exposition, as it simply consisted of a small stone in the glass of the gallery window. Generally speaking, formal moments play a major role in modern sculpture.

Giacometti’s Walking Man (1947) is an utterance about the sculptural medium, where the inner carcass plays a major role. Usually invisible to the eye, it holds together all the parts of the whole. The artist laid this inner construction bare for the thinking gaze and made it an object of contemplation, creating a symbol of modern man. Hengstler’s Fracture visualized and made tangible the process of removing all that is redundant (per Michelangelo, this is the essence of the sculptor’s work). Her objects were not only depictions of Paleolithic tools but also stone fractures, i.e., the redundant elements that a sculptor removes.

This utterance can be understood as a radical division of material into “art” and “non-art.” Thanks to the technology of cleavage, Hengstler’s sculptures overcame their material limitations and acquired a symbolic status. She showed to all intents and purposes that the idea of the artwork is based on the old Biblical proverb, “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”

​This thought also provides deep insight into the genesis of form in the history of world art. Focusing on stone tools as objects of the free artistic creation of form, Hengstler opposed them to the developed system of corrupted civilization.

The project Absolute Weapons at Triumph Gallery (2014) was the next successful experiment in the search for the idea of the “work.” Hengstler studied weapons of different countries and ethnic groups and concluded that an absolute weapon cannot be held in the hand.

This led her to remove the handles of Vietnamese and Roman swords, sabers, Samurai katana, and many other weapons and symmetrically geminate their blades, destroying the idea of the target and turning the blades into “wings.” Such weapons cease to be functional and can be used only for war in the absolute sense: a war that lacks human participants and whose only outcome is absolute art.

This project was a successful continuation of her artistic experiments and contributed to the development of the aesthetics of the artwork thanks to Hengstler’s original view of the development of modern sculpture and the social content of art.

​Hengstler is an artist that keenly senses her time and “spearheads” the artistic movement. We hope that her work will continue to open new and interesting areas indicating the direction of development of contemporary art.

Konstantin Bokhorov