Made on
Tilda
ABSOLUTE
In 1820 Pushkin wrote "Dagger. He set out three instances in which a dagger was used. Brutuskills Caesar with a dagger. There was a reason.
The sacred Rubicon roars at Caesar's feet Sovereign Rome fell, the law Wilfredat the head but Brutus roseup in love of freedom: You slayed Caesar- and dead, he covers Pompeii’s proud marble.
Next the Eumenides, Charlotte Corday, stabs Marat, the "apostle of death. Finally, the student who for some reason kills the poor dramatist Kotzebue is called plainly speaking, Sand.
What unitesthese scenes? A dagger.
It's not a mere detailor a piece of evidence. Pushkinshowsrespect for the dagger, setting out its historical and symbolic connotations. He also understands how it is made. The god of Lemnos forged you for the hand of the immortal Nemesis The secret guard of freedom, dagger of retribution the last judge of shame and injury.
The god of Lemos is Hephaistos who, born lame, fell from Olympus to Lemnos, once more injuring his legs. The dagger is not meant for just anyone, but for Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution. One could ask questions of all three murderers but their daggers are undoubtedly those of fate. Pushkin pays attention not only to the origin of the dagger but also to howitiskept and to its usage in critical situations.
You are concealed beneath the throne's canopy by the glitter of Probes. Like a hellish ray, like the lightning of the gods the mute bladeshines in the eye of the evildoer and glancing around, he trembles at his feasts.
Your unexpected blowfinds him everywhere on land, at sea, in the temple, in his tents Behind Secret locks, in his dreams, among his family the fate of the dagger is followed through to its memorial function and on the solemn grave the uninscribed dagger glows
Lermontov also shows such respect: “love you, my dagger of damask steel, my bright and cold comrade a thoughtful Georgian forged you for revenge, a free Cherkessk sharpened you for battle”.
Here in a single, short verse there is the story of the making of the dagger its provenance and event emotional question. Bryusov also had his "Dagger, but he understood it quite differently, as the dagger of poetry. But Gumilev got it right-
"The broad yatagan is covered in blood".
Overmany centuries, a deep love for cold weapons developed in Russian culture. Forfire arms, too, but on the anonymous level of folk culture-"Our Wives are primed shells". Any normal aristocratic poet respects LePage pistols, although he can't explain why. LePage isn't Hephaistos. And it's not a unique product, but made on an industrial scale. Cold weapons are another matter Here Russian culture has accumulated an enormous number of lyrics and, at the same time, almost professional representations.
In the field of visual art, a large archive of images of such weapons was gathered over the centuries. Battle painters right up to the Mitrofan Grekov Studio of war artists loved heroic attacks. They had a thorough knowledge of weaponry, and rightly so, as they made their money portraying sabers and bayonets. But now we're wasting the creative capital amassed using the military theme. It has been released on a liberal-pacifist wind.
There's an enthusiasm for the theme but as a rule it has an intonation of inferiority. Alexander Ponomarev builds his submarines in all seriousness, with great respect for the armed forces, and they float like the real thing. But their roots are in the silty depths of entertainment, no matter how much one fills the ballast tanks. Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt and Kirill Preobrazhensky made a plane from felt boots which was, of course, an homage to Beuys, but as far as the glory of our air force is concerned it was sabotage, pure and simple, Dmitry Tsvetkov, with his military haute couture, plays with both scale and material. Hishandmade medals are disproportionately large against the greatcoats. It's a game. Any sergeant-major Would hand outpunishment for spoiling military property, no matter how hard one tried to persuade him that it's a post-modernist joke.
Only a few artists have the strength to stand up to the intonation of inferiority, playfulness, irony and teasing. I can name but a few. They're incomparablein terms of direction but in any case, they don't take weapon slightly. Beliayev-Guintovt with his state aestheticism. Alexey Morozov with his cyber-military machinery paradoxically overthrown in an indifferent, self-immersed, Hellenistic World. And Of course, AES+F how they love methods of destruction. But what's interesting is that if one takes their most recent work, Allegoric Sacra", where heads roll and swords glisten, there is no sense of a blow and no horror at al. It is mimicry, refined to the point of self-definition and confirming its own vitality.
The situation repeats Delacroix's thesis, in which he painted notions but the flash of their fangs. Not the anatomical consequences of a sabre blow but the glitter of the blade. Tatyana Hengstler has approached the theme of cold weapons with confidence. Her approach is neoitherinonical, nor playful, nor fearing Not that she throws herself, like the Erinyes, at the mischief-makers, who make fun of any appearance of, as Pushkin would have it, 'Warlike animation
And she's certainly no "girly-cavalier, sharpening her Sabre among her fellow hussars. However, she demonstrates an unexpected determination in her relationship with cold Weapons. She clearly loves these different blades which she turns. The forms are important. The artist doesn't work with the real thing. To change their appearance would be barbarism, to leave them as they are, like ready-mades, would be to act as a collector. (That's a separate discussion-why do found objects so rarely includereal cutting and gouging objects? Maybe the suggestion of real weapons s too strong and overpowers the artist's own ideas).
Hengstlermakes new objects, trying to put across the nobility and pedigree of the originals. Her work with metal, forging and polishing, Working with the surface to the levelof jeweler, is done in all seriousness. In fact, these are elements of the language of blades, demonstrating its rootedness in our consciousness right back to the archaic.
It is only thanks to this discussion common language' that Hengstler manages to retainthe multifaceted cultural layers which are 'externalized, to use Bakhtin'sterm, in cold weapons: symbolic, mythological, totemic (as in Yoruba culture),memorial and otherlayers.
The main thing here is sacredness. A distant echo exists in the reductive and eroticized" (here psychoanalysis can find a Whole raft of definitions) felicitation of weaponry in youth culture and among collectors. In every culture, using Claude Levi-Strauss'smethodology, one can move from the examination of separate myths to the examination of defined guiding schemes. At the center (Levi Strauss's axis) it's entirely possible that there is a dagger or a sword, in all their myriad physical forms. Hengstler's work produces an almost physical sensation of the sacredness of weapons. Her arrangement of internal awareness' (to quote another Levi-Strauss term) is so sensitive that it can easily be translated into terms of external awareness, i.e. an artistic image.
The researcher meant ethnological intuition, which becomes an instrument of the construction of anthropological theory. We mean the intuition of the sacred, which becomes an instrument of the construction of the image. It's interesting that Triumph Gallery is placing an accent on this intuition by installing the work regarding altars).
This note of caution about the memory of the sacred" allows Hengstler to move to the second stage, manipulation of function. She removes from the blades their most important functional details, their handles. This is not about spoiling or disarming. It's not Evgeny VuchefichsUNheadquarters sculpture "Let's Beat Swordsinto Plow Shares Although thoughts of sabotage may arise - What sort of sabre lacks a handle?
But in opposition to that is the image of a new object. Feelings of incompleteness and a breaking of the rules of composition do not arise. A new type of composition appears from the re-centering and mirror imaging. And a new functionality? The lack of handles has connotations other than pacifist ones along the lines of A Farewell to Arms. There are numerous others-protection from Vulgar traditional functionality, from the routine of killing ("Who knows how boring / is the art of the executioner / Without taking in hand / The heavy sword"-Fyodor Sologub). Or inaccessibility and a lack of desire to be held (the first battleship in the Imperial fleet was called "Don't Touch Me"). it's impossible to escape the thought of another function, the metaphysical (Why not? Once again, we recall Pushkin-the dagger glows on the grave). It materializes in Hengstler's images.
All these Swords primordially absorbed the metaphor of 'small flight. Arrows darkened the sky, Sabers flashed like lightning, a sword blow feel like thunder Now, transformed by the artist and with their handles removed (and, consequently, their ability to "land" in the scabbard), they are obliged to change trajectory. Loaded with the symbols, rituals and memories from which they cannot separate themselves, with difficulty, like aero planes, they tear themselves away from the function which is written in to the metal. And, it seems, theytake off.
Alexander Borovsky