The Packed Story 3

Svetlana Kopystiansky became part of the Moscow unofficial art scene in the late 1970s, creating paintings in which image and text are in a complex interplay. Unlike the “damaged” and “restored” paintings of her husband Igor Kopystiansky, with whom she has closely collaborated for decades, her works of the 1980s invariably incorporated extensive textual fragments. The artist carefully covered an already completed painting with text, then crumpled the canvas and fixed it onto the stretcher in this altered state. Kopystiansky borrowed her texts from classical literature—novels, short stories, plays—and copied them out by hand. Quotations from different authors appeared within a single work, often breaking off at the edge of the canvas or becoming “disrupted” by folds, making it impossible to read the text without semantic gaps.

The handwriting and the unconventional treatment of the pictorial surface invoke a literal collision between visual image and literary narrative. Yet the final configuration of the work and its meaning depended both on the artist’s physical actions and on chance factors. Treating the canvas as a bodily, pliable material allowed Kopystiansky not merely to fragment the literary source but to literally model its visual fabric, in which folds, tears, and bends generate new combinations of letters and signs, granting legibility to this play of forms.

The Packed Story 3 was created in the year the Kopystianskys emigrated from the USSR to the United States and marks an important stage in the artist’s practice. A canvas backpack is primed and covered with manuscript text. The fragmentation of the text is minimal, however, and the arrangement of the lines follows the object’s plastic form. Small lacunae do not hinder the reading of excerpts from Mikhail Prishvin’s lyrical prose Phacelia—specifically from the chapters “The Drop and the Stone,” “The Gramophone,” “The Abyss,” and “The Key to Happiness,” where the theme of loss intertwines with reflections on spiritual resilience and the healing power of art. The found object thus acquires an existential significance that transcends its utilitarian function.

By the early 1990s, Kopystiansky had expanded her practice to include installations and performances in which books and printed texts functioned as readymades. Among the key works of this period are The Library (1990, MUMOK, Vienna), where volumes of Edgar Allan Poe were placed in wooden crates and the open pages served as visual surfaces, and Universal Space (1994, Centre Pompidou, Paris), which combines books with gymnastic equipment in a surreal dialogue of forms and functions.