The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Dmitry Gutov is an artist and art theorist who works with various media, from painting and video to metal sculpture and spatial installations. His main theoretical interests are focused on the aesthetic views of Karl Marx and the heritage of the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz. Gutov began exhibiting in the late 1980s (in the perestroika period) and his first works referenced the aesthetics of the Thaw (Art in Everyday Life, Cosmos, etc.). The artist often uses appropriation or reinterpretation of images from the wider history of art, be it the avant‑garde, icon painting, Soviet heritage or eastern calligraphy.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is an interactive object comprising fifteen cubes. They can be used to create six images depicting everyday scenes from life in the Soviet Union: a school, the golden ears of wheat at VDNKh, a summer pioneer camp, gymnastics, light industry, and a picture with an infographic about capital investment in the economy and major building projects. The inscription on the box states: “Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. To mark his seventieth birthday.” Gutov uses this souvenir set as a readymade and adds nothing but the title- The Psychopathology of Everyday Life-which is also borrowed, although time not from the Soviet trade organization but from Sigmund Freud. The Austrian scholar and psychoanalyst dedicated this work to the study of the concepts of the norm and deviations, using examples of the appearance of the unconscious in the everyday life of people. Accordingly, by rearranging the cubes over and over again, Gutov suggests that the viewer look anew at the established models accumulated by Soviet propaganda: what is a norm and what is a deviation.