Maxim Spivakov

Constructed using scaffolding with three massive overlapping plasma screens installed on it, Maxim Spivakov’s installation resembles sports equipment supplemented by the Suprematist planes of customized mats. It references bodily techniques that are also articulated through a musical performance, as noted in the title G Minor (the main minor key of Mozart). The subject of the artist’s speculative exercise is the well-known conspiracy theory linking the spread of the COVID-19 virus to the 5G telecommunications network, which resulted a number of arson attacks against 5G towers in 2020. YouTube witness videos showing 5G towers on fire, “authorized” through camripping, are superimposed on a legally clean digital copy of Leon Theremin’s archival film in which he plays the theremin, the instrument he invented. In this inaudible, contactless music, the fevered imagination sees the manipulations of the invisible agent responsible for the pandemic.

Even though this popular conspiracy theory seems to have been analyzed and diagnosed here, the artist is in no hurry to neutralize the charged fanaticism obsessed with “offscreen” will. On the contrary, he uses symmetrical manipulative gestures to enhance the incendiary pyropoetics that is zoomed by the sensory touch of the screens, removing the principle of image economy¹ he once proclaimed in order to expose the hidden mechanics of affect. The collision of two historical forms of technical imagination based on the action of electromagnetic waves (playing music with “tamed” electrical vibrations and using high-frequency signals for cellular communication) as if leaves in the air a noticeable smell of ozone, an extremely toxic and explosive modification of oxygen. Spivakov’s essay “Fire [ALV – 5G]” connects the burning towers with images of the planetary “fiery youth” from Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s work “Cosmology of the Spirit.”²The paradoxical logic of conservative resistance, which paves the way for new speeds (6G, 7G, etc.) through destruction, can be read in the spirit of the devastating “wolf fire,” opposed to the humanizing hearth, or “the fire of the inferior ones” in which the father of accelerationism, Nick Land, saw “the apolitical element in war, literature, psychosis, and catastrophe.”³ Land’s “fire of the inferior ones” and the minor key merge with the “minoritarian” of Gilles Deleuze: minorities that are innumerable, determined by the potential for becoming/creativity, and reveal a break with the abstract standard and power/domination of the constant majority.

EL

1. Maxim Spivakov’s exhibition 1/2 (2018) explored the problem of image, the practices of its negation, and modern-day iconoclasm. See: www.mmoma.ru/files/spiv_ctl.pdf

2. Maxim Spivakov, “Ogon’ [IVL – 5G],” Sinii divan, 24, 2020, p. 178.

3. Nick Land, “Spirit and Teeth,” in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, edited by David Wood (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 48.