Poet and Pistol

Gor Chahal is a mathematician by training, the author of poems and musical‑poetic performances, and one of the pioneers of multimedia art in Russia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was a member of Moscow’s art underground and rock scene. He was the founder of the performance groups Parallel Actions (1985–1987) and Theaterpost (1987–1988) and performed a series of actions with the art group World Champions (1988). In 1989, he played the lead role in Oleg Teptsov’s film The Initiated. In 1990, his debut solo exhibition took place at First Gallery (Moscow). In 1995 and 1996, he was a scholarship holder at the Berlin Academy of Arts and in 2004 at the Museum Quarter in Vienna. Since the late 1990s he has explored Christian themes, combining contemporary art, scientific methods, and theological discourse. In 2014, he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts and in 2022 a corresponding member of the Academy’s Department of New Art Trends.

Poet and Pistol is one of Gor Chahal’s earliest works and comprises photographs made by Andrei Bezukladnikov, collages, painting, and poems. Addressing himself to the binomial “artist‑personality,” who was an important element of the conceptual art of the 1970s, he is transformed into a romantic decadent poet and depicts him in the monochrome style of noir or the filmmakers of the “new wave.” Using curly hair, white shirt, tie and black jacket Chahal aestheticizes the life of his lyrical hero, contrasting it to Soviet reality and that of the Perestroika period. He brings together contradictions — life and death, abstraction and reality, invention and fact‑in a single series without a defined narrative, anticipating the consciousness of the video clip. The handsome dandy wanders Moscow’s boulevards, gateways, and hotels in attempt to find a victim or escape the uncertainty of death, and life goes on in the background: mothers with prams, passers‑by on benches. He is a superfluous person, an aesthetically alien element who is out of time and place. This is how Gor Chahal visualizes the poetic metaphor of his art, which was marginal in the Perestoika period and unable to catch up with rapidly changing reality.