The Agent in Norway

The album genre occupies a special place in the art of Moscow Conceptualism. The creators of this genre were Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov. The album is a hand‑drawn entire artwork with its own narrative and dramaturgy consisting of a set of unbound sheets. A postmodern phenomenon, the album combines several elements: book illustration, text, and a kind of ritual‑performative action that takes place during a reading or public demonstration.

The emergence of the conceptual album was largely influenced by external circumstances. Unable to show their works publicly, artists exhibited them in their studios, at apartment and semi‑legal exhibitions. In these circumstances the album form proved to be extremely organic, suitable for display to a small group of people or in the limited space of a studio. The genre was also influenced by the fact that many unofficial artists, including Viktor Pivovarov and Ilya Kabakov, worked as book illustrators. For them, this was practically the only way to continue working in the field of art without being fully integrated into the official artistic environment, where socialist realism reigned supreme.

In 1982, Viktor Pivovarov emigrated to Prague. During this period he began to rethink the genre of the conceptual album and adapt it to new conditions, in particular to the possibility of public display at exhibitions. The content and structure of the albums become more dynamic and a clear plot emerged.

The Agent in Norway was created in that period of Pivovarov's work. It is the artist's largest album, consisting of three parts and containing 72 separate sheets. The work is a pseudo‑documentary archive of an anonymous agent who infiltrates various Norwegian closed societies of intellectuals, poets, and artists. The first part, “Equipment and Characters,” presents photographs of the protagonists and completely unbelievable and absurd spy equipment, such as the “Microapparatus for Recording Mental States” and “The Agent's Special Device, the So‑Called ‘Spare’ or ‘Third’ Hand.” The second part, “Deciphering Reports,” presents the agent's reports. However, they do not contain the linguistic clichés of dry official documents, as the text is more like personal notes. These reports are simply a deciphering of messages that are presented in the form of surrealistic drawings. The third part, “Secret Operations in the Fjords,” documents all of the secret operations mentioned in the second part. As with his reports, the agent provides the information in the form of drawings.

The Agent in Norway retains a feature that appeared at the genre's inception, the use of personae. In Kabakov and Pivovarov’s conceptual albums there is always a specific character. Mostly it is a “little man” with his own existential problems, thoughts, and anxieties, often generated by the outside world. Yet Pivovarov's characters, unlike Kabakov's, always bear the imprint of the author's personal experience. This is the case in The Agent in Norway. The main character here is not a “stranger.” He invades the environment in order to reveal any irregularities or to find out information. He is an active participant and observer of various processes.