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Inke Arns

 VADIM FISHKIN - OF ANGELS AND DREAMERS, MACHINES AND METAPHYSICS

 

-- ‘volatil’ se dit d’un être qui porte des ailes; puis d’une substance qui change, vite, vers l’état subtil; enfin d’une apparition qui, aussitôt, disparait. Voilà, que je sache, trois attributs angéliques. [...]

-- ... l’angélique, pour finir, [...] s’occupe à connecter les lieux vers le global. (Michel Serres)[1]

 

Vadim Fishkin, born in Penza in the Soviet Union in 1965, has been living and working in Ljubljana since 1992. Fishkin is not merely an artist working with all kinds of different media, but also an architect who studied at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, a stage designer, an “angel researcher”, a botanist, a spiritualist, a photographer, a pyrotechnician, an engineer, an inventor, a geologist, etc. He has been collaborating as set designer with the Slovenian choreographers Mateja Bučar, NSK’s theatre department Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung, and others. During the Transnacionala trip[2] in 1996 Alexander Brener characterized Vadim Fishkin as “showing an awareness of the metaphysical tradition of objectness”[3] while Eda Cufer characterized his artistic work as a “metaphysical embodiment expressing his ability to create an unusual and even esoteric feeling or condition”[4].

This ‘esoteric feeling’ is mainly created by the fact that Vadim Fishkin’s works link the physical to the metaphysical, or sometimes even the supernatural. He tries to make visible what remains invisible, or at least point to the invisible, or to the invisible connections between two points. In addition to that, all of Fishkin’s works are ephemeral (time based) and immaterial, non-material works. As the metaphysical generally remains invisible, ephemeral and immaterial, so do Fishkin’s works: he constructs machines (media) which produce the metaphysical, which at least make it visible for a short period in time, disappearing very quickly. Fishkin quotes one of his favourite writers, the French René Daumal: “The door to the invisible must remain visible.”

All of these aspects - ephemerality, immateriality, and a linkage between the physical to the metaphysical - could be found in Fishkin’s installation Darkness Orbit (1993) which consisted of projects installed in the Guelman Gallery, the Dar Gallery, the Shkola Gallery, the 1.0 Gallery and the Contemporary Arts Center in Moscow. The show was open at night from 12 p.m. until 6 a.m. in the morning. During the day all the exhibition spaces had their regular exhibitions. Only at night it was possible to notice the project Darkness Orbit installed in these five venues. The project was based on light and sound material entirely unnoticeable during the day, thus underlining the possibility of the discovery of another parallel layer or reality within the same space. By using slide projections, sound, ultraviolet light, photo flashes and a radio receiver the premises were transformed into completely different spaces where one would suddenly discover the silhouettes of flying saucers and angels. They were there all the time, but they were invisible during the day.

Darkness Orbit, as well as many of Fishkin's other works, stresses the potentiality of space. What we are confronted with here could be described as a non-technological deconstruction of the notion of virtual reality. What is normally called »virtual reality« often proves only to be a »fictional reality«[5], as Elena Esposito puts it. Whereas »virtual reality«, resp. »fictional reality«, is merely appealing to our sense of reality, »real virtuality« is about appealing to our sense of potentiality. »If there's a sense of reality there must be also a sense of potentiality.« (Robert Musil) Darkness Orbit does exactly this: it opens up our sense of perception for the potentialities of everyday spaces.

Similar to Darkness Orbit, the aspect of “im/materiality” was a predominant focus of the exhibition ... incommensurabilis ... This project was initiated by Vadim Fishkin, curated by Gregor Podnar and took place in Škuc Galerija in Ljubljana at the end of 1999[6]. The conceptual framework for this exhibition was to present art projects based on an “immaterial nature” – light, shadow, fire, fog, water, electronic media and alike. The concept drew on Ludwig Bolzmann’s idea that invisible properties of the atom (e.g. mass, charge and structure) define visual properties of substances (e.g. viscosity, thermal conductance and diffusion). All the works of the participating artists (Olafur Eliasson, Vadim Fishkin, Marko Peljhan, Eulalia Valldosera) were ephemeral and dealt with the divide between the material and the immaterial.[7]

Like in Darkness Orbit angels also appear as faint forms on Fishkin’s photographs Breathing (1991) and Orbit 2 (1993). These works actually look like spiritist photographs from the end of the 19^th century when people tried to catch spirits of dead relatives or other unearthenly beings during a séance[8]. We are there all the time, but you cannot see us. Primarily in Western religions (i.e., Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), an angel[9] is a benevolent spiritual being, power, or principle that mediates between the realm of the sacred (i.e., the transcendent realm) and the profane realm of time, space, and cause and effect. Angels are volatile intermediaries between the physical and the metaphysical realm.

Many of Vadim Fishkin’s works link the physical to the metaphysical by literally tracing angel's invisible activities. Vertikalna Projekcija (Vertical Projection, 1995) which was shown in the exhibition ‘Interregnum’ at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg consisted of a model of the Russian space station MIR combined with angels attached to the model as if flying around it. The object and stage set Molitveni stroj (Prayer Machine, 1993) built for the Kozmokinetični kabinet Noordung connects the notion of a machine (i.e. the physical) with the notion of praying (i.e. the metaphysical). Fishkin’s Machine for catching angels serves a similar purpose: using the physical to catch or obtain access to the metaphysical, or supernatural.

Fishkin’s projects make us aware of the invisible connections between two points and of the interconnectedness of the most diverse phenomena. In the Lighthouse installation (1997) Fishkin's heartbeat was transmitted to the cupola of the Viennese Secession from where it was re-transmitted as a pulsating light installed inside the the gold-leaf filigree of the cupola placed on the rooftop of the Secession. In the interview Fishkin compares the Lighthouse project with On Kawaras ”I am alive” project which consisted of telegrams being sent to friends which only contained the phrase ”I am still alive”[10]. Another kind of link, much more global in scope, will be developed by Fishkin within the project What is on the other side? which up to now remains only a concept. What is on the other side? intends to make visible the opposite point of a particular location on earth (the ‘antipode’) in its actual size (1:1). The ‘antipode’ is by definition located exactly on the other side on the globe, at the other end of a straight line drawn directly through the center of the Earth. Imagine the floor of a shopping mall located in the center of Ljubljana being covered by a life-sized model of a piece of sea ground – the antipode of that particular shopping center will be likely sea ground as most of the surface of the Earth is covered by sea. What we will be confronted with here is an intrusion of the literally opposite real into everyday reality.

Interdependence was the focus of Dependance (1997), a collaboration between Mateja Bucar (choreography, dance), Vadim Fishkin (stage) and Marko Košnik (music). The performance was dedicated to Aleksandr Chizhevsky[11] (1897-1964), a Russian biophysicist, historian, cosmist painter and poet who further developed the theory of the influence of cosmic factors (cosmic radiation and periodic sunspot activity) on the behaviour of organized human masses as well as on the universal historical process. Chizhevsky’s “geleobiology” thus presupposes the dependence of all living processes on Earth, biological and social, from the activity of the sun. The performance consisted of two stages/spaces, one set up in Ljubljana, the other set up in the Centro Cultural de Belem in Lisbon, Portugal. Each stage consisted of an object, similar to Malevich’s planits, suspended in front of a vertical wall covered with light-bulbs. The intensity of light was conditioned by the activity of the sun on 7^th February 1997, Chizhevsky’s centennial birthday. The rhythm of the light on the Ljubljana stage was determined by the heartbeat of the ‘antipode’ dancers dancing simultaneoulsy in the performance of Paula Masson in Portugal, and vice versa. The ultimate goal of the performance was to reach an understanding for the interconnectedness of things, and by “understanding what our own existence depends on” gaining a certain freedom from total outside control. Each of the communicating vessels to an extent became free to depend on itself.

Having mentioned Kazimir Malevich and Aleksandr Chizhevsky one cannot let go unnoticed Vadim Fishkin's fascination with »dreamers« he also talks about in the interview. Within Russian history there has always been an abundance of these eccentric dreamers – not to mention the certainly best known, the Dreamer in the Kremlin as H. G. Wells called Vladimir Illich Lenin after having met him in Moscow during a visit in 1920.[12] These »dreamers« are characterized by the coupling of rational, scientific ideas with eccentric, esoteric, or even irrational concepts. Fishkin is not so much fascinated by the »visionary« aspect or even (least of all!) by the content of these »dreamers'« concepts but rather by the obsessive element driving these »dreamers« to develop and imagine their excessive fantasies combining technology and esoteric ideas. These obsessive metaphysical 'amateur' scientists include not only the already mentioned Aleksandr Chizhevsky and Kazimir Malevich, but also Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, science fiction writer and ‘inventor of the Russian rocket’, and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), who, with Edouard Le Roy’s and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work in mind, developed his own conception of the noosphere, defining it as a new phase of evolution brought about by the conscious human activity. [13] Besides thinkers connected to the tradition of Russian cosmism[14] also theoreticians of the Fourth Dimension (G.I. Gurdjieff, Petr Demianovich Uspenskij[15]) and visionary engineers such as Nikola Tesla and Hermann Potočnik Noordung[16] fall into this category.

 

For Vadim Fishkin working on certain questions can lead to the rise of totally new, different and sometimes even embarassing questions. This kind of transformation, i.e. that one starts with one thing which then unexpectedly results into something totally different was typical for the One-Man-Show exhibited in Mala Galerija in Ljubljana in 1995. When Fishkin was invited to do a solo exhibition he asked himself how he could reflect on the meaning of a one man show nowadays. This process resulted in an installation consisting of a futuristic wooden construction placed in the middle of Mala Galerija, lots of slide projectors installed in the wooden construction, projecting slides of Fishkin’s work (as a kind of retrospective) on the walls of the gallery space at an unbearable speed, speakers and a recording device inside the construction and 22 (prerecorded) questions posed by curator Viktor Misiano. The audience would answer the first ten questions (e.g. »Do you remember the name of the artist whose exhibition you are visiting?« and »Are you sure that you pronounce it in the right way?«), but at least starting with question 13 and 14 – »Has this exhibition enriched you somehow? Has anything changed in your live?« – the whole situation – with the projected images rushing by, and the questions getting more and more heavy and esoteric – became simply absurd. There was nothing to be seen (in a double sense), and still the voice obtrusively articulated these paradoxical questions, like an unwanted but persisting intruder. Vadim Fishkin recorded the visitor’s answers given at the exhibition. While most of the people still answered the first questions, the majority tended to stop giving answers later on and remained silent. Most felt uneasy with the questions being posed in public which so well reflected what they were thinking just for themselves but did not dare to formulate publicly: »Why then [...] hasn’t [the artist] presented anything substantial?« Indeed, why? And how dare this voice articulate so clearly what the spectator is thinking? How embarrassing to be caught on the spot.

Three years later, as in an act of reconciliation, Vadim Fishkin exhibited Dedicated... at Knoll Gallery in Vienna and at Kapelica Galerija in Ljubljana. In the center of an almost completely empty and dark gallery space there’s a red button on a dramatically lit board. The text says: “Press the button” and “tell your name” and then “wait”. After some seconds the prerecorded announcement correctly repeats “This exhibition is dedicated to...” and then plays the voice of the visitor “...Inke Arns”. It remains unclear which exhibition the voice is talking about, and also why it should be dedicated to the visitor. A feeling of uneasiness (again) emerges within the visitor. Suddenly, there’s a noise coming from the wall - a firework. Like a real Chinese firework the fire performs revolving geometrical movements, with the flames and the smoke darkening the wall – and all this leaves the spectator overwhelmed. When the visitor finally realizes that Fishkin dedicates his exhibition to him or her, joy replaces uneasiness. This experience that is seemingly shared only by the artist and the visitor establishes a very personal relation between the two.

One of Fishkin’s most recent works is Ognegraf (Fire-Dropper, 2000), a machine which translates data from various sources into the language of fire. It produces drops of fire which fall from the ceiling (where the machine is fixed) to the floor in various rythms and can have different intensities and colors. The drops of fire remind one of stars falling from the sky. It is an old tradition to make a wish when one sees a shooting star. During the installation of Ognegraf in the private apartment of Vlasta Delimar and Vlado Martek, two Zagreb-based artists, Fishkin said about Ognegraf: ”Children often daydream about catching a falling star. Dolina [Delimar and Martek’s daughter] will be able to watch falling stars from her bed... In a way, this will be a dream come true... For me, this is a sort of vertical link between children’s imagination and dreams on the one hand and the sky on the other. A very physical link, for each drop produces light, from top to bottom, yet this link only exists for very personal reasons.”[17] While the realisation of utopias in the course of history has almost without exception proven to be of a totalitarian nature, daydreams coming true are of a very different sort. Realized daydreams give rise to ever new daydreams. And Vadim Fishkin is the artist-engineer of this transformation.