Observer

Vladimir Kozin joined New Blockheads in the summer of 1996. Like other members, he was drawn to the collective’s absurd approach and the transformation of the mundane into art. A graduate of the Department of Architectural and Decorative Sculpture at Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design (1980), Kozin developed a performative rethinking of sculpture as a central direction of his artistic practice.

The Observers from Garage Archive Collection were created in several stages. Between 1996 and 1997, Kozin conceived the idea of viewfinders—portable windows for framing reality, thus turning looking into a performance referencing modernist experiments with perception and the utopian belief that art, through scientific methods, could consciously transform the viewer’s experience. Later, Kozin realized that viewfinders and similar objects could materialize concepts such as the horizon line or the point of view. At the performance and lecture event The Inevitability of a Masterpiece, Conference Dinner (March 23, 1997, Borey Gallery), the artist presented new devices—eyeglasses with a small frame attached in front. The framed field could be bisected by a single wire (forming a fixed “horizon line”) or two wires (resembling a “gunsight,” i.e., forming a “point of view”), positioned directly before the eyes.

Archival video footage shows Kozin wearing these devices himself and inviting the audience to try them. Later, he decided to turn the performative objects into sculptures, using his own profile cut from sheet iron as stands for the eyeglasses. According to legend, in the early 1990s his wife, Elena Kozina, traced his shadow in full height. Various versions of this documentary silhouette were used by the artist to create dozens of self‑portraits, including the Observers.