Status Updates From Art and Revolution

“Until comparatively recently the condition of the world was not intolerable…The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread…But it was not globally intolerable because the full measure of the truth about the condition was unknown.”

“It is those who accept the world as it is who are becoming the disinherited at the same time as the dispossessed are rediscovering their inheritance.”

“The people of the three continents are involved in a struggle which they will never abandon until they have achieved their freedom: not the nominal freedom of independent states, but the freedom for which all others so far imagined have been a preparation: the freedom from exploitation. When they have achieved this freedom…they will produce art unimaginable by us today.”

“It is impossible because the positive role of endurance cannot be demonstrated by any single act, event or outcome. The role is essentially a dialectical one of process and growth transcending the individual case.”

“By comparing this figure with the Dead Soldier one can see all that Neizvestny means to imply: this mutilated man is a Prometheus because he is alive; his mutilation adds to his Promethean character by allowing him to show the extent of human adaptability, and the strength of the will to survive.”

“Those who measure towards death become very aware of the precariousness of life; Neizvestny, by contrast, is aware of the extraordinary adaptability and obstinacy of life.”

“The poles of Neizvestny’s imagination are life and death: a polarity so fundamental and general that it can seem banal…Death for him is a starting point rather than an end. It is FROM death that he measures, instead of towards it.”

“A State can be judged by the future its sculpture sets out to promise it.”

“It is their tragedy that under the autocracy of Stalin, the belief in the prophetic quality of art was subtly but disastrously transformed into the belief that art was a means of definitively deciding the future now.”

“It is true that all works of art exercise an ideological influence — even works by artists who profess to have no interest outside art.”

“In certain situations academicism may appear to be progressive but it is always fatal to art.”

“Or worse than that, for it is impossible to disregard his intelligence. For his enemies his intelligence is transformed into cunning. And once again his manner can encourage the illusion. He gives the impression of a man driven by deep inner compulsions, who nevertheless misses nothing of what is happening around him.”

“Does the interior it to Neizvestny’s work relate to the ‘inner life’ of the psyche or of the body? The answer is both.”

Neivestny holds that physical experience and consciousness/self-consciousness are inseparable. So, the soul is as much in our sensations as in our desires. Interesting that he realizes this in warped bronze and ambiguous erotica.

The limitations of art relate to its content as death does to life. If, while fully conscious of death, we could concentrated our entire attention upon life, what we experienced would acquire the quality of a work of art.