Brass Knuckles

The handmade book occupies a particular place in the artistic practice of Sergei Shutov, combining text, image, and a conceptual play on meaning. Brass Knuckles is one of his first books. It is small‑format, three pages with India ink drawings and poetic text, extremely laconic, but filled with a structure in which avant‑garde tradition, the aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism, and the influence of Eastern philosophy intertwine.

Shutov, who worked at the Oriental Museum when Brass Knuckles was made, absorbed Chinese and Buddhist poetics, which is reflected in the rhythm and morphologism of this work. Here, the lubok print is side by side with psychedelia, and disparate registers form an integrated whole: cosmology (“No, that’s enough comets and planets…”), folklore from Soviet primers (“Mama washed the frame…”), and at the same time a kind of predetermination (“It’s mama’s karma…”). Shutov explores the boundaries of text and the form of drawing, creating a book‑gesture with the potential for multiple interpretations.