Viktor Misiano.
Vadim Fishkin’s Soft Machines

One of the specific features of Vadim Fishkin’s poetics is its indifference to questions of language. For him, language has never been valued as an object of research in itself but is merely an instrument that must satisfy certain basic requirements: to carry information, communicate effectively, and be easy to use. In other words, Fishkin’s poetics has never treated the phenomenon of art as an absolute but, on the contrary, is interested in everything beyond its borders. The object of Fishkin’s investigations is the phenomenon of being; he tries to restore ontological status to artistic creation.
Fishkin reconstitutes ontology through an appeal to elementary, pure, and archetypal constructive acts. Constructivity appears to be possible only through the total reduction of tradition and reflective allusions; i.e., it becomes possible only as the reconstitution of an act of transformation. So Vadim Fishkin’s new ontology manifests itself as a new artlessness; his art, a new handicraft; and he himself, with all his machinery, a new Kulibin. Just as with any result of a fundamental action, his works are to be valued for themselves, self-contained, and can be perceived only from their inner nature. Another specific feature of this poetics, then, is a total indifference to issues of context.
The reconstitution of ontology also happens through an appeal to constructive procedures; every work by Fishkin has the character of a model, a model of the universe; the machina mundi is the prototype for his machines. His appeal to constructivity and machinery is something positive; the procedures by which the mechanisms work manifest the processes of a universe coming into being, not its disintegration. Fishkin’s poetics is far from being any cultivation of tautology, “graphomania,” or schizophrenia. So yet another feature of his poetics is the way it overcomes the strategy of deconstruction and actualizes a strategy of reconstruction.
The combined focus on primary status and constructivity reveals a striving toward absoluteness and universality in Fishkin’s poetics. The image-world of his works, which combines fragments of traditional cultures with normative archetypality, presents claims for a post-historical classicism. Finally, the combination of totality with positivity gives this poetics a utopian perspective. In this way, Fishkin’s machinery aspires to a genetic link with Tatlin’s tower for the Third International.
Two distinctive features of Fishkin’s constructive poetics distinguish it from the poetics of historical constructivism. The first of these features presumes a method for revealing aesthetic conventionality: the utopian universe appears as banalized and is likened to a bugle-bead kaleidoscope. The aim is not to reduce pathos but only to define the boundaries of the statement; in other words, it’s about confining utopia within the aesthetic sphere. The second aspect presumes a method for destroying the wholeness of the poetic organism in one of its elements: a breach is made in the utopian universe, through which other worlds and other utopias can be seen. Again the aim is not to reduce pathos but only to acknowledge openly the limitation of the statement. In other words, without lapsing into anti-utopia, Vadim Fishkin acknowledges the legitimacy of the existence of other utopian dimensions.
To the degree that Fishkin’s poetics appeals, on the one hand, to acts of first creation, and on the other, to the post-historical condition, the sphere of its realization is the “eternal present.” At the same time, to the degree that his poetics appeals to constructive acts, it doesn’t accept mythologems about the “eternal return of something similar,” but presumes a positive appropriation of this permanent actuality. And finally, to the degree that his poetics contains a utopian perspective, there is inherent in this eternal present the perspective of the future – not the near future, but a distant one. It goes without saying that this future must be beautiful; otherwise, it may never be at all.

 

February 1994