A plaster copy of an African ritual mask, sandwiched between a comedian’s bald-head wig and a mass-produced bust of the Red Army Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, is not an obvious or predictable encounter. The mutant creature brought to life by overlapping cultural narratives belongs to the world of Prigov’s storytelling. There are meanings running in all directions, searching in vain for a butterfly effect that could explain their sudden togetherness. The totality of each separate medium or social sign system is undermined by being combined with others.
The sculptural collage of found objects, created as a spoof of Soviet power and revealing its ritualistic and religious nature, is more than mere political critique. Its absurdity contains a mystical horror related to the cultural crises of the globalized world, where to endure doubt is the ultimate human condition and the starting point for a new type of anthropology with which to study our habits and social instincts.