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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.113 >>
Letter L (October 1986) – B(L)ack art • PoPs from the USSSR Letter L begins with Evgenij Kozlov’s birthday greetings. As always, they recall Halloween:
I made this funny photo series especially for your celebration! Do you like it? I wanted you to remember me and Leningrad vividly again — those impressions, entertainments, meetings, the spiritual atmosphere that I created for you here. The other people in the pictures that you don't know are our Halloween (and everything else, too, what do you think?) (P. 1) I'm sorry that we don't have an official Halloween day on some day of the year, but I just thought that in the Soviet Union, Halloween happens every day! But how did you celebrate your birthday, how was London, Cambridge, how have you acclimatised at home? (P. 2) The date of the letter is not visible in the picture, but because of the birthday greetings and the reference to Halloween, it must have been written towards the end of October 1986, not long after Catherine Mannick’s Leningrad visit earlier the same month. On 1 October, Kozlov received her letter announcing her visit from 9-12 October (Letter 35). Because her letters might be read by censors, Mannick didn’t pass this kind of information early on, but Kozlov had already known of her plans to travel to the USSR by a common friend (Letter K) and was looking forward to seeing her again. On 3 October, she sent him a short letter from Moscow, telling him that she was going to stay at the Astoria hotel and suggesting a meeting for 9 October at 4.00 p.m. at Dom knigi, where she would be waiting for half an hour. Dom knigi.
 The House of Books, was – and still is – a famous bookstore on Nevsky prospekt, located in the splendid Singer building, the former headquarters of the Singer Company. The letter arrived on 8 October, but Mannick’s telegram from 5 October had made the information obsolete.
It was one those rare opportunities Mannick and Kozlov had to meet personally. They had last seen each other in October 1984, and in Letter L, Kozlov stresses the importance of her visit. Mannick’s slides and Kozlov’s black and white (painted) photographs show that he prepared a rich programme for his American friend, introducing her to the Leningrad art and music scene. They visited the flats and studios of New Composer Valery Alakhov and of Evgeny Yufit, a well-known painter, photographer, experimental filmmaker and founder of the Leningrad "Nekrorealists".
Together with Valery Alakhov and Georgy Guryanov, drummer of the legendary KINO band, they spent an evening at a restaurant. At Kozlov’s own flat and studio “Galaxy Gallery”, Mannick documented the painting “USA-CCCP” (also “CCCP-USA”; see Letters J and K) and a double page of his album of collages “SEXPOPS”, of which today only some fragments have remained. This picture also shows a part of Dore Ashton’s illustrated book “American Art Since 1945” from 1982, possibly Mannick’s gift to her friend.[2]
Kozlov concludes his impressions:
If the visit catapulted Kozlov outside his habitual situation, it also left a strong impact on his friend. Some of Mannick’s impressions can be read on the reverse of her photo of Evgeny Yufit. It is a picture Kozlov possibly received as an attachment to her answer to Letter L.
The concert Mannick mentioned was one of the UB40 concerts at the Yubileinyi bowl, which was part of UB40’s Soviet tour – according to Rolling Stone, “one of the first big tours of the country by a major band from the West”.[4]
She recalls the concert:
The “real high” of Mannick’s visit stood in contrast to the conditions restricting Kozlov’s creative work. He already mentioned them in his previous letter, but now contrasts the constraints limiting his self-realisation with the opportunities enjoyed by his friend.
Although Kozlov had every reason to complain about his situation, he suddenly felt that this was taking him nowhere and turned to irony. Over-exaggerating his lament (“horror, nightmare”) he introduces the term “ASSA”, the New Artists’ playful slogan commenting on an outstanding yet unlikely occurrence (see also Letter I >> and Letter N Part 2 >>). The passage ends with a rather laconic remark.
Kozlov wrote the text of Letter L with pencil on the reverse of eight vintage prints, each in a 10 x 15 cm format, painted in the bright, sophisticated graffiti-comic art style he started developing in 1985. These small formats provide an idea of how such works would have looked like on a ten-metre canvas.[6] Five of the works refer to Mannick’s 1986 visit; one of them carries the ACCA (ASSA) script. The other three pictures are from a Pop Mekhanika performance on 20 October 1986 at the Leningrad Palace of Youth. It was called “The Goat Concert or Introduction to Pop Mechanics” (Козлиный концерт или Введение в Поп-механику) more >>. The Pop Mekhanika pictures features, among others, Natalia Pivovarova, leader of the “Kolibri” band. Two of the eight pictures also exist in different painted versions in Kozlov's album "It’s the Fashion" (1984-1990), where they appear as collages on coloured cardboard more >>.[7] It actually seems that all pictures from Letter L had originally been fixed to cardboard sheets, because the corners of the text pages show marks of adhesive. In this case, it is likely that Kozlov detached them from their respective “frames” in order to send them off in a small envelope.
B(L)ack art Shades of blue, grey and black dominate the picture from page 1, giving it a metallic look. It shows Catherine Mannick in profile, standing on a sidewalk. Her urban outfit has been covered with a rural costume and her beret turned into a spiky cap. The angular, compact forms of coat, skirt and boots, outlined with the help of contrasting contours, stand in plain contrast to an effervescing shape coming down from her head like a contrail of white steam – perhaps an uncontrolled growth of hair or a huge bridal veil. The funny sharp-edged points of Mannick’s boots are directed upwards, and she seems to be touching the earth only with her heels. Thus, the boots and the “steam” imply up-and-down movements, while the figure itself is static. As a result, Mannick appears to be walking and standing simultaneously. Kozlov adds: “Look at those psychedelic wiggling figures with their smiling faces breaking through the sidewalk, which isn’t a sidewalk at all. It all happens in some futuristic, surreal cosmic space, some kind of chaos orchestrated by the peasant lady.” The composition exemplifies Kozlov’s creation of polarities and paradoxes by adding strange, often humorous elements. This is why the image is spirited, vital, and animated.
In the same picture, above Mannick’s head, there is a script logo appearing on numerous works from 1986: “B(L)ack art”. However, in these works, the “L” is not put in brackets, but acts as a dotted separator between B and a, so that the word can also be read as Back art. “B(L)ack art” reproduces this double reading through the use of brackets. In an article from 2012, I used this logo to determine Kozlov’s specific style from the period of 1985 to 1987, which adapted elements of graffiti art and sequential art (comic strips).[8]
In this paragraph, I related “black” to black humour and “back” to the subversive, anarchical aspect of Kozlov’s style, as it goes beyond established motifs. But the Black art / Back art pun can, of course, be interpreted in different ways, depending on what one connects with the terms “black” and “back”. The T-shirt “Napravlenie”, Kozlov’s gift from 1985, is a different example of B(L)ack art. Instead of graffiti painting, the artist used his earlier more geometrical (“zigzagging”) new wave style (see Letter G) to create a play on words and meaning typical for the New Artists. The front shows the back of a walking female figure with evening gloves, while the reverse shows the front of a standing male figure wearing a costume and top hat. In his uplifted left hand, he is holding two letters, ready to throw them into the air like paper planes. Accordingly, the female figure is hurrying to catch them before they fall down. Napravlenie, “direction”, a Russian word written in Latin letters next to the female figure, is short for “Новое направление” / “New Direction”, which designates a new style in fashion, as in one of Kozlov’s collages from 1984 for the illustrated New Artists magazine more >>. On the T-shirt, however, Napravlenie can be understood literally, as the female figure’s movement from here to there, from the front to the back of the T-shirt.
The script on the sleeves, BACK and ART, respectively, support such an interpretation. The “missing” letter L of B(L)ack art can be found in the carefully designed word NAPRAVLENIE – as a fine angular line separating NAPRAV and ENIE.
At that time, Kozlov enjoyed carrying out semantic and phonetic experiments with Russian and English words and syllables, which he systematically worked out in numerous sketches. It is a creative game he has been returning to ever since, especially in his large cycles “Fairy-tale” (1982-2007, more >>) and “Century XX” (since 1989, more >>). In Catherine Mannick’s collection, now part of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection, there are four painted photo-collages from 1986 entitled B(L)ack art on the reverse. Two of these works are portraits of Timur Novikov – portraits in a larger sense – and the other two show street views with New Composers Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev. The latter display fragments of German texts which can also be seen on two larger – untitled – works on paper from the same period (E-E-186010 and E-E-186011 more >>).
The lettering B(L)ack art actually appears as a graphic element only in 1986, and even then, only on some of the paintings, works on paper and painted photographs that can be described by its features. For instance, as a logotype, B(L)ack art is present in just one of the eight painted pictures from Letter L, but its features can be found in all of them. In terms of content, they display humour, ambiguity, and the struggle of polarities. In terms of style, their rhythmical, dynamic lines and hatches create fast tempi that could be considered as “punk” if the compositions weren’t worked out in every detail. Most likely, the artist himself determined them all as B(L)ack Art. The letters B.AN, followed by a letraset (transfer letter) number and added in bracket at the lower right corner of a text page, must be an abbreviation of B(L)ack Art Number. (The respective number peeled off on some of the pages.)
There are two outstanding examples of Kozlov’s B(L)ack art paintings from 1986 carrying not the B(L)ack art logo, but different scripts reflected by the respective titles: “Когда вы начинаете чувствовать мускулы! / When You Start to Feel Muscles!” and “CCCP-USA”. Their destinies were also different. The first is in the collection of the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, the second was later destroyed by the artist (see Letter K).
Among Leningrad’s New Artists, graffiti and comic art was almost a general trend, perhaps stimulated by their interest in collages and artists’ books. Both genres became very popular in the mid 1980s, and artists often collaborated for joint works, for example when re-designing printed journals and books.[11]
But when it came to style, approaches differed. B(L)ack art is specific with respect to some important technical aspects as well as regarding the aesthetics of lettering. Technical aspects concern resource material in the first place. Kozlov frequently used his own photographs – in a literal sense in his painted photos or photo collages and as an inspiration for a painting or for a fragment of a painting.[12] Patterns scratched directly into the negative film emulsion, when it is still soft after the chemical processing more>>, provide motion lines and emanata — sequential art features that visualise emotion when applied to characters more>>. Lettering generates carefully planned ornamentations. For instance, the words B(L)ack art may appear as a handwritten chain of rounded, three-dimensional letters, as if they had been laid out with a rope. In this way, the sign quality of text, its reference to something else, fuses with its visual quality as an image. Accordingly, text can be perceived both ways, as a sign as well as an image, and its function remains indeterminate.
Such a twofold property of letters as sign and image becomes apparent in the pictures of Letter L, three of which are supplied with an additional “CCCP” (USSR) design – respectively, with CCCCP and CCCCCCP designs. On Yevgeny Yufit‘s shirt, the letters “CCCP” are inscribed like huge medals (page six). In the picture with Natalia Pivovarova (page seven), Kozlov applied the letters CCCCCCP to her catsuit – vertically, all the way down, like a band of buttons. In the picture with Alakhov, Mannick, and Guryanov (page five), the artist arranged the five letters CCCCP on Guryanov‘s coat in a pattern similar to that of the five dots on the face of a dice. Using transfer letters, he placed two words on top of it, “ПоПс из”, so that it now reads “ПоПс из ССССР” — PoPs from the USSSR.[13] Transfer letters also determine the three figures in the picture from page three: in the centre, Катя (Katia, Catherine Mannick), on the right, ВалЕрраа (ValErraaa / Valera Alakhov) and, on the left, an unidentified phantom simply called оно (ono, “it”). The names ono (left) and ValErraaa (right) are pointing upward, like the legs of a triangle, with Katia forming its horizontal tip. In this way, the letters shape a kind of gable roof sheltering the figures. With the exception of Mannick’s face and hands, which show the original surface of the photograph, the picture has been entirely overpainted. It is framed at the top with a handwritten ACCA (ASSA) line which reappears at the bottom, less strikingly. At first glance, Kozlov’s lettering reminds the viewer of the explicative (reference) function of a text in sequential art. Yet his individual approach to script – as a sign as well as an image – becomes apparent when contrasting it with Roy Lichtenstein’s now famous paintings from the early 1960s (Drowning Girl, Masterpiece, Hopeless, and others). Lichtenstein used speech balloons for text, which he adapted, together with the corresponding images, from other authors. In this way, the functions of text and image are clearly separated: texts provide the message of the image and an image becomes an illustration to a text. Yet an illustration, an image tends to become a message, too, a sign – Pop art. Kozlov, on the other hand, intersperses images with text or text symbols, thus making them constructive elements of an image. Put differently, Roy Lichtenstein’s images tend to become signs, while E-E Kozlov’s signs tend to become images. Besides, Kozlov asserts that he never looked at a single comic-book. “In the Soviet Union, there were no comic-books – what came closest was the Krokodil magazine, a satirical magazine with caricatures serving political propaganda or criticising some local bureaucrat or nonconformist behaviour. It wasn’t always very funny. On top of that, stylistically, these caricatures were quite traditional. On the other hand, comic-books weren’t considered as a valuable gift to be smuggled in from abroad. Most foreigners visiting the Soviet Union were educated people, and in those years, comic-books were regarded as trash. With regard to western culture, books on art and records set the standard.” It is not that the artist was totally unaware of the existence of comic strips – rather, what he saw didn’t leave a lasting impression on him.[14] Around that time, Kozlov started to create his own graphic novel, but didn’t pursue the project further. Two – undated – pages have remained. The pencil drawings, carried out in a semi-realistic manner, show elegant dandified figures inspired by Kozlov’s own photographs of Georgy Guryanov and Sergei Bugaev. They also include quadrangular spaces for text. Stylistically, they are very different from the graffiti approach of B(L)ack art and much closer to Kozlov’s “New Wave” drawings from 1984 (see Letter G). Later, in 1988, this semi-realistic style finds a new, painterly expression in Kozlov’s large multifigure compositions more >>.
Both styles looks very trendy and hip, but in 1985, B(L)ack art took the lead. So if we do away with comic art, what else can be said about international sources of B(L)ack art, provided there were any? Kozlov’s body of works has mostly been figurative, with a strong narrative element, which sparked his interest in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. He translated into Russian Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene, Steven Hager’s book from 1986 which, apart from colourful accounts of the New York art and club scene of the 1970s and 1980s, contains a number of art reproductions. But when did he actually translate it, and what exactly did he know of these artists in 1985, when he turned to B(L)ack art?
There is no obvious answer. All that can be said is that Kozlov, like his fellow artists, was familiar with contemporary western art at least to some degree through books and occasional exhibitions, although stating “to some degree” is not saying very much, as long as there are no precise references.[15] Perhaps what helps us further is to realise that B(L)ack art was part of a larger international trend: artist and art-historian Andrey Khlobystin sets the New Artists in the context of such movements as East Village artists (USA), Figuration Libre (France), Die Neuen Wilden (Germany) and Transavangarde (Italy), generally considered as Neo-Expressionism.[16] But what makes B(L)ack art particularly attractive is that it represented current international trends with compellingly original images. When we compare Kozlov’s compositions with those of his contemporaries, we notice his powerful individual position and style, as distinctive as those of Basquiat, Scharf, or Haring – PoPs from the CCCCP. Hannelore Fobo, 3 August 2023 [1] Since Kozlov had no telephone at home, the idea was that she would call his friend Kolya and that Kozlov would call him to find out more. [2] booklooker describes the book as “A survey of American postwar painting and sculpture focuses on major artists, including Pollock, Rothko, Oldenburg, Johns, Warhol, and Motherwell”. [3] The Beatles – P.S. I Love You [4] See Michael Benson, Rolling Stone, December 4, 1986: UB40 in the U.S.S.R: [UB40] did know it would be one of the first big tours of the country by a major band from the West, with six gigs in Leningrad, six in Moscow. External link >> [5] In 2017, Kozlov remembered an exhibition of American artists at the Hermitage, which took place in 1983 or somewhat earlier. He spoke of the strong impact on him made by paintings in a ten-metre format. The exhibition could not be identified. [6] The artist nevertheless found a way to use the tiny space of "Galaxy Gallery", his Peterhof flat, for large works. In 1987, he carried out the painting "CCCP" in a two by six metre format on two adjacent walls more>>. The work is now in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London. [7] The album also includes some other painted prints from the Pop Mekhanika “Goat” concert, one of them with Joanna Stingray, Viktor Tsoy, and Mariana Tsoy. [8] Note that not all works from this period were carried out in this style. [9] It is important to emphasise that Kozlov’s “humour with an aggressive note” is creative and not destructive. Put differently, here, aggressive means assertive and autonomous as opposed to passive or being manipulated by others. [11] See also: Andreeva, Ekaterina. “ASSAmblage as an operative principle” in: The New Artists. Edited by Ekaterina Andreeva and Nelly Podgorskaya. Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2012, pp 57-75 [12] A distinguishing feature of E-E Kozlov’s art is that a work of art, once accomplished, can itself become a resource for a follow-up work. See: Hannelore Fobo. E-E Kozlov. The Atlas of Ontology (2021) more>> [13] In the same picture, Alakhov is holding up a “smiling sickle", a symbol that already appeared in the painting “Animated Films” from 1985 (Letter I). Kozlov later used it for T-shirts and paintings more>>. [14] In Kozlov’s archive, there are two pictures from 1985 / 1986 of a girl leafing through a magazine. A closer look (a very close look) at the pictures reveals that it is a comic book with a text in French. In 1987, the artist overpainted one of the vintage prints, giving it the title of a work on paper from 1986, “Sex Industrial Style”. While the magazine became an important structural element of the composition, its content plays no role in it, and Kozlov doesn’t remember it, either. [15] A rare piece of information is in Kozlov’s diary from 1983 p. 68, where he mentions an exhibition of West-German artists in Leningrad and includes the names of some of the artists (Lüpertz, Middendorf, Baselitz, Kiefer) together with the titles of their works. However, these works have no relation to graffiti art. [16] See Andrey Khlobystin, Schizorevolution, p. 30. On the same page, the author considers веселая брутальность / hilarious brutality to be a common denominator for the New Artists’ graffiti style, as opposed to the намерено и синтетическо / intentional and synthetic style of their American colleagues Basquiat and Warhol. However, following this categorical distinction, B(L)ack art remains closer to American art than to Leningrad art. Khlobystin, Andrey. Шизореволюция. Очерки петербургской культуры второй половины ХХ века. / Schizorevolution. Essays on the Petersburg culture of the second half of the twentieth century. 2017, Borey Art Center, Saint Petersburg, p. 30
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see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University >> Published 8 August 2023 |
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home // E-E // biographie // art // eros // Leningrad 80s // Valentin Kozlov // 2 x 3m // events // sitemap // kontakt /
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