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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Letter O (Beginning of 1988) – Joanna Stingray’s Wedding A double card with a collage and three text pages constitutes the beginning of Letter O; the other pages have not been preserved. The pages are not dated, but is easy to infer an approximate date, since Letter O is quite obviously an answer to Catherine Mannick’s Letter 41 from 26 December 1987, which Kozlov probably received by the end of January 1988. Mannick had asked him about Joanna Stingray’s wedding “to a musician of KINO”, and he tells her about Stingray’s and Kasparyan’s wedding dinner (November 1987) and also sends her a colourful description of an artists’ New Year party he attended.[1] Likewise, he thanks his friend for her New Year wishes and mentions that he managed to send his New Year greetings and a drawing with an American friend.[2] Therefore, Letter O must have been written at the beginning of 1988, perhaps in February.
 The collage, signed E. Kozlov, is a surrealistic portrait of a young man with an asymmetrical moustache and a bright smile. Regarding technique and style, it stands out among Kozlov’s collages, especially among those sent in his previous letters, as is not based on one of the artist’s photographs. Instead, Kozlov cut the facial features into a marbled piece of paper of light blue and yellowish shades he then placed onto a matt black background. The sharp, swift cutting lines reveal his artistic skill: like little fish swimming in the water, flat elongated structures are floating around the left eye, while the right eye is surrounded by a wreath of ornamental, sharp-edged “petals”. The stark contrast between the shimmering skin and the blackness of the facial expression is further enhanced by silvery shapes applied to the top layer. Presumably made of aluminium powder, they create facial shadows and highlight some other areas, giving the portrait a “snowy” appeal. Possibly intended to be a self-portrait, the image bears little resemblance to its author, except for its delicate, slightly grotesque humour. In his letter, Kozlov continues paying attention to what is somewhat outside the norm or strange, but all the same amiable and amusing, for instance when he tells Mannick about how their common friend Andrey prepared a chicken for Christmas – “very peppered, quite in his style (when he’s drinking wine)” (p.1). Put differently, he not only keeps his friend updated on what is happening on his side of the world, but entertains her with some intriguing details to make sure she’s coming back to her “beloved Leningrad and Petrodvorets which are waiting for you with impatience and miss you very much!". In a recent remark on his correspondence with Catherine Mannick, Evgenij Kozlov said that his encounters with his friend created in him a positive feeling of alienation towards what surrounded him in everyday life. Because he perceived those exceptional moments as natural, the habitual became insignificant. On the other hand, looking for the exceptional also means experiencing the fantastic as augmented reality.[3] This approach becomes obvious with Kozlov’s account of how he spent the New Year.
What Kozlov called “the work of the outgoing year” relates, in all likelihood, to his artistic activity, since he no longer worked in what he called “a government job” (see Letter K). It would therefore be wrong to assume that he complained about work; quite the contrary, work was essential to him.[4] Yet he much welcomed a break from his solitary occupation – a break in time spent in the company of friends, and this “unlimited temporal dimension”[5] had the aesthetic quality of a fantastic feast, reminiscent of the Spring Ball in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, although perhaps lacking some of its extravagancy and mysticism. Kozlov comments on his impressions:
The spirit of fantastic magic was also present in the wedding of Joanna Stingray and Yuri Kasparyan, the guitarist of the band KINO, related in the last paragraph of the fragment from Letter O. Stingray writes about it in “Red Wave”, her autobiography of her Russian years lasting from 1984 to 1996.[6]
The sheer fact that the wedding finally happened was almost a miracle. Originally planned for 6 April, 1987, it had to be postponed indefinitely: after Stingray’s 1986 U.S. release of the Red Wave album of Leningrad bands, Soviet authorities blocked her from entering the country, although not immediately (see Letter N Part 1). But after January 1987, a campaign against Stingray was started in the Ogonyok magazine and the Komsomolskaya Pravda,[7] obviously launched by some high-ranking people working against Gorbachov’s perestroika. Stingray was still quite confident that the numerous contacts she had established with Soviet officials from the cultural field would protect her, but this wasn’t so. As it turned out, her name was on a blacklist, of which she learned only when she was denied her tourist visa to fly to Leningrad for her wedding. She immediately started moving heaven and earth to lift the ban on her, but without much success.[8] The question was finally decided in her favour at the highest level. Joanna Stingray writes that in late summer 1987, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze discussed an upcoming meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov. “Thanks to the relentless persistence from Senator Alan Cranston, Secretary Shultz brought up my blocked visa.”[9]
The wedding eventually took place on 2 November 1987, orchestrated like an opulent theatre production, with a rock concert the previous day and a follow-up party in Moscow. Pictures from Stingray’s archive show a beautiful bride wearing a stylish white wedding dress[10] and a handsome bridegroom dressed in black tie tails. Stingray recaps, “Decades later, Russian media wrote that this ‘rock-wedding’ was the most pivotal, beautiful wedding of the ’80s, the day when the Cold War finally seemed to end.”[11]
Guests received a pass granting them “Access All Areas”. For the invitation card to the wedding dinner, printed in curly Cyrillic lettering many months earlier with the April date, the bridal couple found a pragmatic solution: the old date was crossed out, and above it, the new date was inserted by hand. E-E Kozlov attended the wedding dinner, described by Joanna Stingray as “the most beautiful, joyous mess”.[12] In his letter, he writes
Some of these gifts can be seen in Stingray’s pictures from the wedding dinner, including Kozlov’s present, a large work on paper from 1987 entitled “АМЕРИКА”, America. In his studio “Galaxy Gallery”, Kozlov displayed it next to his painting “China-CCCP”, thus completing the trinity of antagonistic powers.
The composition, a large drawing on paper painted with coloured ink, presents seven figures sitting next to each other at a long table, typing on keyboards. Each figure is mirrored by one of the seven letters А М Е Р И К А which thus substitute the respective computer screens. Placing a piece of gauze on top of the paper, Kozlov applied the strokes in a rapid fashion, with a thick spot at the beginning and a finer line petering out. The gauze absorbed some of the ink, and on the paper, this effect gives the brushstrokes a velvet touch more about the technique >>. Diagonal lines converge in a vanishing point placed outside the left border, providing the work with a dynamic perspective.The geometric, sketchy structure of the design turns figures and chairs into pictograms, especially the smaller ones – modern hieroglyphs. The head and shoulders of the figure to the very left actually resembles a reversed Cyrillic letter Я, Ya, which translates as “I”. The letter continues
Red Wave. "Unofficial" Contemporary Art and Music from the USSR opened at the Jerry Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, on 28 January, 1988, as a Greenpeace benefit. By all accounts, the first of three “Red Wave” exhibitions Stingray arranged in Los Angeles had already passed by the time Catherine Mannick received the letter. The exhibition then continued at the Stock Exchange on 7 April 1988 more >>; an invitation card is in the Davis Center collection. Both shows presented works from the collection Stingray had been building up for some time. In “Red Wave”, Stingray writes about her collection, “Over the last four years, while I had been smuggling in equipment and art supplies for all the rockers and artists, they thanked me by giving me pieces of their work.[13] The following year, the venue was the Sawtelle Gallery, where Red Wave. New Art from Leningrad lasted from 18 March to 16 April 1989. It was the first time one of the Leningrad artists was able to attend: Sergei Bugaev flew in prior to the opening, bringing along more works. During the opening, Paul Judelson from New York bought a number of pieces and, following that, promoted Leningrad art with two exhibitions in 1989 and 1990, thus starting a business as an art dealer more >>.[14] Of these five exhibitions, Kozlov’s name is present in all invitation cards and lists of exhibits, with the exception of the first one at the Jerry Solomon Gallery. However, Ksenia Novikova’s New Artists Chronicle includes his name for the this one, too.[15] Given the fact that in those days, printed names and lineups of artists didn’t always coincide, such a possibility exists. In 1986, Evgenij Kozlov created a group portrait with Joanna Stingray and two of her friends, Sergei Bugaev and Andrey Krisanov,[16] and in 1989, he depicted her in an outstanding semi-realistic portrait, dressing her in a Soviet space suit. Without any doubt, Stingray landed in Leningrad from outer space – and then got hooked, as she put it, on “this crazy, wonderfully terrifying land of unpredictable and unconceivable things”.[17] The Russian titles of her autobiography, which was first edited in 2019 in two volumes, reflect her impressions: “Стингрей в Стране Чудес” / Stingray in Wonderland, and “Стингрей в Зазеркалье” / Stingray Through the Looking-Glass.[18] In 2016 (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz) and 2018 (Akademie der Künste, Berlin), Kozlov’s portrait of Stingray was shown at the exhibition Notes from the Underground – Alternative Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1968 – 1994. It was part of the “Leningrad” section dedicated to the 1980s, hanging next to Kozlov’s self-portrait and his portraits of Timur Novikov, Georgy Guryanov, Oleg Kotelnikov, the New Composers, and his pictures with Sergey Kuryokhin from the Insect Culture series. In this way, the exhibition paid homage to a strong-spirited American whose extraordinary input to the Leningrad “unofficial” scene helped bringing out Soviet rock groups from the underground. Being very young and very determined, Stingray engaged in what she called “the dream I had from the beginning of a cultural camaraderie.”[19]
Hannelore Fobo, 7 October 2023 [1] Letter 41 also refers to Kozlov’s copyright questions in Letter N from autumn 1987; Mannick answers that the picture is not copyright-protected since it hadn’t been published under his name before. [2] The drawing could not be identified. Judging by Mannick’s Letter 44 from August 1988, she hadn’t been able to connect with this girl, and whether they met at all is not clear. [3] Concerning the principle of augmented reality in Kozlov’s art see: Hannelore Fobo. The New Artists. Timur Novikov: Roots – E-E Kozlov: Cosmos. Chapter 10. Fishing at Peter the Great’s pond (2020) http://www.e-e.eu/Timur-Novikov-Roots-E-E-Kozlov-Cosmos/index10.htm [4] Some years later, Kozlov would insist that “producing” art is not work (rabota), but creation (tvorchestvo) [5] Novikov, Roots, Chapter 13. A perception of pureness http://www.e-e.eu/Timur-Novikov-Roots-E-E-Kozlov-Cosmos/index13.htm [6] Co-authored with her daughter Madison Stingray. Joanna Stingray & Madison Stingray. Red Wave: an American in the Soviet Music Underground, Los Angeles, CA; DoppelHouse Press, 2020, [7] Ibid., pp. 154/155 [8] Ibid., pp. 159-182, chapters “Why are they so afraid of love?” and “Help Stingray”. [9] Ibid., p. 188 [10] “On top of it all, a designer and I came up with a futuristic peau de soie white wedding dress that I lovingly dubbed my Jetsons dress.” Ibid., p. 157 [11] Ibid. p. 209. In 2021, Stingray published a book dedicated to this spectacular story: Русский рок. Конец андерграунда. Фотографии. Интервью. Документы / Russian Rock. The End of Underground. Pictures. Interviews. Documents. [12] Ibid., p. 212 [13] Ibid., p. 226 [14] Ibid., pp 266/267 [15] Ksenia Novikova: The New Artists. Chronicle, p. 277, in: The New Artists. Editors: Ekaterina Andreyeva, Nelli Podgorskaya, 304 pages. Texts in Russian and English. Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Maier Publishing, Moscow, 2012 [16] Д.А.С. / D.A.S [Джоана, Андрей, Сергей / Joanna, Andrey, Sergei] [17] Red Wave, p. 183 [18] While the first volume (1984-1987) focuses on Stingray’s Leningrad years, the second volume (1988-1996) highlights her Moscow years, where Stingray settled after her separation from Yury Kasparyan, starting a solo career as a rock-singer. In 2023, a new Russian edition has united both volumes as История русской рок-музыки в эпоху потрясений и перемен / The History of Russian Rock Music in an Era of Upheaval and Change, with a subtitle written in Russian and English, СПАСЕМ МИР SAVE THE WORLD (see Letter N Part 1). Stingray’s vast archive of videos, interviews, photographs and other documents, recently published in a series of books in Russia, is invaluable for anyone who tries to recompose a realistic picture of an unlikely situation – when in the Soviet Union, all of a sudden, everything seemed possible. [19] Red Wave, p. 201
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>> |
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Published 18 October 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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![Joanna Stingray & Madison Stingray. Red Wave: an American in the Soviet Music Underground, Los Angeles, CA; DoppelHouse Press, 2020 Inside front cover with Joanna Stingray's dedication Left: МИР И РОК Н РОЛЛ! [peace and rock n'roll] Stingray Right: For Evgeny and Hannelore, Peace & rock n'roll. УРА [Hurray] Stingray](Joanna-Stingray-Red-Wave-2020-inside.jpg)
-Evgenij-Kozlov-Portrait-Joanna-Stingray-corr-600px.jpg)
