In 2000 rogue mushroom-pickers from the small northern town of
Krasnoselkup, intent on gathering the finest specimens, persistently
strayed onto the busy runway of a nearby airport, ‘causing havoc,
preventing flights from landing and creating a major security risk’. The
mycophiliac menace was only contained after local authorities hurriedly
issued strict new laws. Mushrooms – even the non-psychoactive kind –
often cause Russians to lose themselves: In a single month during the
summer of 2003, over one hundred and twenty-one persons went missing
while foraging for fungi in the forests outside St Petersburg. The same
year, a bumper crop was responsible for thirty-four reported deaths and
four-hundred and fifty-seven cases of poisoning.
The mania is nothing new: Stone-age petroglyphs on the banks of
Siberia’s Pegtymel river depict figures whose heads are crowned with
mushrooms. They are material evidence that Russians have embraced
fungus, as both food and visionary intoxicant, since time immemorial.
Throughout, mycomania has transcended social divisions – from gastronome
to hallucinaut, child to grandparent, shaman to city-dweller, peasant
to political leader. Lenin was supposedly no exception. A story goes
that while in rural Switzerland he was hurrying through the rain to
catch a train when he spotted a bunch of boletus and suddenly stopped to
collect them. Whether true or not, the tale is ideologically charged.
It makes Lenin look ‘like a simple Russian muzhik, one passionate
enough to flout adverse weather – and miss a train – for the sake of a
few mushrooms’. That is to say, it communicates the ‘simple essential
humanity’ of the great revolutionary.
The association of mushroom appreciation with the national character has
had the highest cultural consecration. The eponymous hero of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
– a dandy with a penchant for foreign delicacies such as Oysters –
eventually falls in love with a country-girl called Tatiana whose
name-day feast features fungi. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace the
character Natasha Rostova, a daughter of nobility raised by a French
governess, displays her genuine Russianness by appreciating the offering
of pickled mushrooms.
Along with such representations of ‘natural’ character, links between
fungus and self-abandon are also notable. In the latter author’s Anna Karenina
Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev is so distracted by talk of forest mushrooms
that he fails to propose to Varen'ka. Prefiguring Lenin’s missed train,
as well as the residents of Krasnoselkup’s disregard for planes, his
behaviour seems to encapsulate something essential.
The Russian Revolution may have been extreme, but it was thought
extremely reasonable by its proponents. The avant-gardes Kasimir
Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin disagreed about whether art should serve a
social purpose – Tatlin thought so – yet both prophets of modernity
shared a disdain for individual subjectivity and a desire for objective
progress. Tatlin’s stupendous design for a Monument to the Third International
(1919) was meant as a blueprint for a new headquarters of world
communist government. The political process was to be reflected in the
monument’s structure: its four rooms, decreasing in size towards the top
of the building, have been described by John Milner as paralleling ‘the
evolution of decision-making and power’. In ascending order from the
assembly hall to the propaganda centre they were to express as much as
condition the ‘purification of collective will’ by ‘the process of
dialectical argument and its continuing resolution and purification’.
Ostensibly, Malevich’s paintings were no less engaged with logic.
Described by the artist as a ‘hard, cold system, unsmilingly set in
motion by philosophical thought’, his ‘Suprematist’ visual language –
beginning with the square – symbolized the primacy of a reality that
transcended appearance.
The Mushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde implies that Malevich
and Tatlin were agents of irrationality despite their pursuit of
objectivity. According to Igor Makarevich & Elena Elagina, as much
is evident in the ‘hallucinatory forms’ of their modernist creations.
Apart from interpreting the past, the artists’ project also suggests
that contemporary Russian society – viewed through the prism of its
architecture – likewise displays signs of mystical delirium. ‘We were
seeking to find the impulses of irrationality in architectural
artifacts’, say the artists. The Tables (2003) series of
photo-montages function as ‘empirical material or evidence’ of these
impulses. They record its symptoms, which are manifest in the appearance
of both socialist and contemporary architecture. Supplementing these
pseudo-scientific revelations of reality Makarevich & Elagina also
supply a ‘formula’ in the form of sculptural objects.
The various pieces which make up the project might be characterized as
positing the supremacy of hallucination. Rather than the transparent
geometry which fascinated the avant-gardists – Rodchenko, for instance,
claimed that art was ‘a branch of mathematics, like all the sciences’ –
Makarevich & Elagina seem to be claiming an all-pervading
intellectual substrate that is uncontrollable and ungraspable. They
imply that the fundamental condition of avant-garde art was
pre-reflective mysticism and that today’s architecture is subject to the
same force.
Makarevich & Elagina employ the fly-agaric mushroom as symbol of this hallucinatory force. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International,
Malevich’s Black Square, The Lenin Shack, various Socialist Realist
monuments, the Patriarch House and other pieces of material culture are
all paired with this symbol. The implication is that each is underscored
by the transcendent hallucinatory principle. In Toadstool with Tatlin’s Tower
(2003) Tatlin’s monument actually sprouts from a fly-agaric, while in
the Tables series of photomontages both socialist and contemporary
architecture seem brimming with fungal characteristics.
Why the mushroom? Firstly, it is important to recognize that it is a
manifestation of the natural world which is, in a sense, prior to both
practice and discourse. We have also already touched upon its
longstanding cultural significance. On both counts, the historicity of
Tatlin and Malevich’s revolutionary and forward-looking art is reframed
by being paired with this ancient organism. After all, the Russian
avant-gardes are often characterized as ‘timely and responsive to the
Zeitgeist’ – as symptomatic of modernity itself. In the first case,
Makarevich & Elagina’s gambit inscribes Tatlin and Malevich’s
attempted breaks from the past within a continuum that transcends the
‘rupture’ of Russian revolutionary modernity, evoking prehistory and
even the primordial absence of man. In the second, it does so by
invoking ancient rites, folklore and tradition. For example, Suprematism
– a modernist vision par excellence – is equivocated with a more
archaic catalyst for transcendent experience – the fly-agaric, whose
role in shamanistic rites is of immense antiquity in northern Eurasia
and elsewhere. In this way, Malevich’s vision is denied its ‘white free
abyss’ of infinity, beyond the sky, and is rendered unto the Russian
soil. In Toadstool with Tatlin’s Tower this message is
reinforced. Not only is Tatlin’s monument to revolution, to the new
society – described by one historian as an ‘emblem of industrialization’
and ‘technological-“scientific” principles’ – of a piece with the
primordial Amanita muscaria; it is also associated, counter-intuitively, with classical architecture in the form of a Corinthian capital.
The nub of the matter seems to be a rather serious claim – that
sub-rational ‘hallucinations’ are unavoidable. So why do the objects
look absurd?
According to the artists, this kind of presentation serves to offset the
potentially ‘oppressive effect’ of the conceptual content. However, the
ridiculous look is not only the artists’ good taste to avoid pomposity
by deploying strategic bad taste. These objects wear awkwardness – or
ridiculousness – on their sleeves as part of their claim to truth. It is
a formal device which visually presents the pervasiveness of
hallucination in a graceless manner: Every seeking is guided by what is
sought, said Heidegger. ‘You need to search for the mushroom form’ in
order demonstrate its ubiquity, says Elagina; ‘[n]ot everyone can see
[it]’. Thus, both herself and Makarevich were already bearers of a
‘truth’ or so-called ‘impulse’ even before they began to gather their
mushrooms. Their foraging was guided by delirium; they were mad enough
to find mushrooms in bricks and mortar, plaster and paint. The pair’s
aesthetic senses are seemingly subject to an impersonal force.
Accordingly, their supposed compulsion is reflected in the look of their
sculptural objects, which constitute symptoms of hallucination.
The project’s absurdity is also the rhetoric of authenticity spoken in a
language shared by many artists of their generation – wry laughter.
Like Kabakov, the Gerlovins and other artists, Makarevich &
Elagina’s humour has a metaphysical weight that is informed by Russian
literarature, taking cues from Rabelais, Bakhtin and Gogol. More so, it
is informed by Absurdist poets and performers such as the Oberiuty –
Kharms and Vvedenskii. In fact, Elagina’s teacher Alisa Poret was
directly connected with these figures, having created ‘films’ – which
Makarevich characterizes as ‘performances’ – with them in the
nineteen-thirties.
The whole project, including the empirical fact-gathering, should be
considered an absurdist performance whose material remainder is a
conceptual installation.
The Tables series has an art-historical dimension that is worth
mentioning: It is informed by the memory of unstable links between
Soviet photography and its referents. One critic has pointed out that
almost ‘the entire photographic heritage of the Soviet Union consists of
manipulated or constructed social and documentary photography’. This
tradition has been termed ‘mythographic’ as opposed to ‘factographic’ by
another writer. The progenitor of its spirit was Anatoly Lunacharsky,
Lenin’s commissar of culture, who described the function of photography
as “a profound act of social and psychological creation”. He might have better said destruction – David King’s book The Commissar Vanishes
provides chilling examples of how Stalin’s purges were reflected in
re-touched pictures. It was against this background, during the
nineteen-seventies, that members of the Collective Actions group
including Makarevich & Elagina swam against the mythographic
current, pursuing ‘factography as resistance’ by documenting
‘marginal practices and activities’ as well as performances by Moscow’s
unofficial artists. Their aim, according to Victor Tupitsyn, was to
‘implement the principle that […] idiomatic narratives are endowed with a
destabilizing potential capable of shaking faith in the affirmative
culture of Socialist Realism (read metanarrative)’.
The Mushrooms of the Avant-Garde, while certainly an idiosyncratic narrative, is also factography as resistance. But how can its ‘empirical’ proof – in the Tables
series – be such if the Soviet Union no longer exists? Simply, because
as much as challenging past representations – Is that a statue of a
worker-hero or a fungal growth? – the project demonstrates the concrete
ambiguousness of the everyday in an exemplary fashion. The contemporary
world, supposedly comprehensible and ordered, is ‘proved’ hallucinatory.
It has been said that Tatlin’s Tower aimed to satisfy Russia’s
‘psychological need for a symbol of national progress and technological
acheivement’. In this spirit, it was to stand one hundred metres taller
than the Eiffel tower. The latter was so powerful a representative of
modernity that the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky implored the structure
to abandon Paris and “Come/To us”. The USSR never did receive a fully
realized Monument to the Third International. In the twentieth century its most spectacular skyscrapers would be the vysotki,
high-Stalinist pastiches of Russian Baroque, Gothic and New York Art
Deco. However, ninety years after Tatlin’s vision, a mega-building in
the neo-international style of computer-aided engineering has been given
planning approval by the Moscow Public and Architectural Council.
Foster + Partners’ Crystal Island is to be the ‘largest single
building in the world’. Beyond mere skyscraper, it will be a
‘macroenvironment’ which houses everything from apartments, offices,
shops and theatres to a hotel, a museum, a school and public space
within a single tent-like superstructure. Moscow will finally have a
totalizing and progressivist behemoth to replace Tatlin’s unrealized
vision. As if in acknowledgment of this fact, Crystal Island echos the Monument to the Third International by also incorporating spirals as a major structural feature.
Is the avant-gardes’ utopian dream about to be realized by petro-dollars
and Twenty-first Century technology? In an unlikely way, The Mushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde
offers an answer. As we have seen, Makarevich & Elagina’s project
suggests that hallucinatory visions are not the sole province of
shamans, lunatics or dropouts. They are closer to us than we think – in
the products of modernity as well as our personal projects. The question
of insanity need not only be asked of miscreants and eccentrics, but of
cultural and technological rationalism – perhaps of Crystal Island as much as the Monument to the Third International.
In the spirit of Makarevich & Elagina, one can observe that the
former resembles an upside-down fly-agaric whose stem takes root in the
sky. Its cap contains a microcosmos – a world, a society, within a
hallucination. That the artists have not mentioned this particular
example is unimportant: They have shown us how to gather mushrooms.