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Adapted guided tours of Pavel Pepperstein&rsquo;s exhibition The Human as a Frame for the Landscape
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Pavel Pepperstein. The Human as a Frame for the Landscape

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The exhibition opens with a series of &ldquo;philosophical paintings&rdquo; that each feature two key elements: a pattern that reinterprets a particular traditional craft or a suprematist design and is composed of figures that are formally close to the geometric abstraction of the Russian avant-garde&mdash;and an inscription of a term from a particular philosophy or religion ranging from Sufism to German Idealism. All terms are written in the language and font of the culture they come from&mdash;Hebrew, Arabic, gothic Fraktur&mdash;so each inscription, and therefore each idea, becomes part of the pattern. Pepperstein&rsquo;s patterns are never reduced to meaningless ornament. Following Goethe (On Arabesques, 1789), Kant (&ldquo;designs &agrave; la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on their own: they represent nothing, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties,&rdquo; Critique of Judgment, 1790) and even Derrida, who spoke of the gravitation of patterns toward &ldquo;signification and representation,&rdquo; Pepperstein believes in the autonomy of beauty and the ability of pattern to convey meaning, of which the artist&rsquo;s use of ornament throughout the exhibition provides numerous examples.

Philosophical Categories 

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Gangsters have been frequent guests in Pepperstein&rsquo;s works since his early childhood drawings. Tracing his interest in the theme back to cinema, he describes them as &ldquo;post-film characters.&rdquo; Pepperstein&rsquo;s gangster pointing his gun at the victim is a variation on &ldquo;the man with a movie camera&rdquo; facing the viewer. (Film title designer Maurice Binder brought this metaphor to life in the famous gun barrel sequence for the first James Bond film). Pepperstein&rsquo;s gangsters are never armed with real guns: they carry toys or odd imitations of weapons, but toys that can help create a fairer world in the future. Building on a tradition that spans E. T. A. Hoffmann and the cult Japanese anime feature Akira, Pepperstein has chosen toys&mdash;strange mechanical aliens that break the normality of the adult world&mdash;as one of the key themes in his work.

The Gun & The Heart

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One of the central figures in Pepperstein&rsquo;s mythology, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was an object of his platonic pre-adolescent love and sincere admiration. Solving the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy became an obsession that saw the young artist meticulously collect publications and any other information on the subject.
The project includes two texts, one of which is attributed to Jackie O herself and the other a testimony by Pepperstein as one of the experts invited to confirm her authorship of the drawings and collages presented in this room. The collages and drawings, as the story goes, were discovered in Minsk, at the house where Marina Oswald lived before she married Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy&rsquo;s future assasin. The folder with the works also contained a letter written by Jackie O in 1975 on the Greek island of Skorpios. In the letter, she explains that following the advice of her two doctors, she has been putting the visions that haunted her onto paper in order to rid herself of them. Later, the reader finds out that the doctors themselves are figments of her imagination and Jackie&rsquo;s drawings are part of her autotherapy.&nbsp;
Although his work with characters in Jackie O clearly demonstrates Pepperstein&rsquo;s mastery of conceptualist techniques, unlike the older generation of conceptualist artists he is not afraid of long, absorbing, and compositionally clear narratives that activate collective memory, intimate experiences, and mystical and religious revelations.

The Secret Drawings of Jackie O 

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The phantasmic library presented here is a depository of real and imaginary books, and is meant to show that the latter can influence us as much as the former. Looking back at the artistic and literary tradition of rewriting one&rsquo;s own biography around imaginary books (literary examples include E.T.A. Hoffmann and Vladimir Nabokov, and Ilya Kabakov has done the same in art), Pepperstein explains that he has created the library based on two opposite ideas: the fetishism associated with books as sacred objects and their potential interchangeability, which allows for endless variations in the canon, where Kant can be replaced with Schmant and Pascal with Mascal. Momentary appearances by Levi-Schmuel and other non-existent people are fairly common in art: non-existent characters light up before us and vanish without a trace to make way for others, as in Pepperstein&rsquo;s series People Who Have Never Been. The same could be said of books: the great texts that transformed our view of the world never existed, even if we can see them: there they are, standing on the shelf with their gold-embossed spines.

Library

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The Human as a Frame for the Landscape could easily be a retrospective tracing the evolution of the artist&rsquo;s style from his earliest works. However, it is not a retrospective and the exhibition&rsquo;s relationship with time is a complicated one, so the &ldquo;early works&rdquo; in the show are represented by the childhood drawings Pepperstein produced from the age of seven. Were they not been dated it would be difficult to distinguish works made during Pepperstein&rsquo;s childhood and teenage years from his mature output. He says that his works emerge from a kind of ornamental structure, only to submerge again later, and it&rsquo;s entirely possible that they continue to exist within in a regime invisible to us. Pepperstein himself seems to have emerged as a fully-formed artist with a developed style. Like a kolobok, the round bread roll from the Russian fairy tale, he rolls through various landscapes of art, bringing them to our attention and then disappearing from sight.
A separate installation occupying an entire room recreates the time during a school lesson when children put themselves into a through monotonous action (picking at the desk, looking out of the window or at the back of the head in front of you) or enter a real meditative state. Pepperstein&rsquo;s meditations were focused on the teacher&rsquo;s face, the most horrifying thing he could find in the classroom. Here, this face becomes the focal point of all nightmarish paintings: a monstrous Frankenstein composed of Goya, Bruegel and Bosch.

Childhood Drawings

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These drawings were produced during what Pepperstein describes as his &ldquo;psychedelic era.&rdquo; New states of consciousness and the rediscovery and reinvention of the world went hand in hand with creative experiments, some of which are presented here.

1980–1990s Drawings

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The idea of a summit, an encounter between important people and things at a round table, is a recurring theme in the work of Pepperstein and Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, the group he founded with Sergei Anufriev and Yuri Leiderman. Entities gathering at a summit range from philosophical concepts to animals and microorganisms. Here, we witness a meeting of phantom leaders that has somehow created an impossible flourishing, where the energy of the earth and its flora oozes from the attributes of power: the armchairs, the flags, and the table. The &rdquo;brotherhood of man&rdquo; from the songs of John Lennon and Simon and Garfunkel has proved possible in a particular state of consciousness and the dreams of the psychedelic revolution have come true.
Explaining his interest in inventing and designing new states and regimes, Pepperstein connects it to &ldquo;a certain asymmetry&rdquo; in his consciousness, which &ldquo;replaces memories with the activity of the imagination.&rdquo; &ldquo;You keep forgetting things, but your imagination reconstructs the missing pieces, so in the end you find it easier to invent things than remember them.&rdquo;

Summit

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Another recurring image in Pepperstein&rsquo;s work is that of Lenin, the roots of which go back to his first kindergarten visit to the Lenin Mausoleum. To this day Pepperstein considers the Mausoleum one of the most perfect and complete projects of the Russian avant-garde, archaic yet futuristic. When he was younger, the visit to the Mausoleum created in him an irrational love for Lenin, who became a fairy-tale character from a parallel world, a spirit one could communicate with or appeal to. Mystical communications with Lenin became ritualized at a later age, as the leader started appearing in Pepperstein&rsquo;s writings and artworks. Like a real superhuman being, Lenin lying next to a beautiful girl as if he were in the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, grants humanity the promise of his impending miraculous resurrection.
&ldquo;It was not death but a magical dream that was exhibited there. You could not linger inside the mausoleum. The model of eternity presented there could only be experienced for a fleeting moment.&rdquo; (Pavel Pepperstein, The Exhibitionist)
The sarcophagus&mdash;originally designed by Konstantin Melnikov&mdash;is reproduced in a room filled with foliage: here the two-dimensional pattern permeating the exhibition reaches its peak, becoming real and tactile and giving off a calming rustle.

Deciduous Hall at the Calendar Collective Farm

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This series is genealogically linked to numerous themes and characters in Pepperstein&rsquo;s art. Revisiting these works as a single whole, Pepperstein connects them to the &ldquo;zen theory of the moment.&rdquo; &ldquo;The cameraman points his camera as the assassin pulls the trigger, there&rsquo;s a flash [. . .]: these are stills from history, time slows down and we see the moment in which things happen.&rdquo; In a strange way, the zen philosophy of time and the apologia of its absolute value can be expressed in the language of photography and film, entering in an unexpected relationship with Antonioni&rsquo;s Blowup, the most important film about photography. Conjecture by commentators seized by intellectual or cultural ambition is always part of Pepperstein&rsquo;s work.

Assassinations

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The genre developed by Ilya Kabakov and Pepperstein&rsquo;s father, Viktor Pivovarov, was naturally picked up by Pepperstein, who, as a child imitating the adults around him, started making conceptualist albums almost at the same time as Pivovarov and Kabakov. The albums are intended for intimate study within a circle of friends and contain both images and text, the relationship between which can create meaning and also reveal its absence by underscoring the discontinuity between different realities. This space features two complete early albums. More albums can be found in the part of the exhibition devoted to Pepperstein&rsquo;s childhood works.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Albums

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One of the central series in Pepperstein&rsquo;s career, The Human as a Frame for the Landscape inverts&mdash;both verbally and visually&mdash;the classical painterly composition that places the human at the center of any landscape, adjusts perspective to the human figure, and positions wild nature, with burbling waterfalls and rocky cliffs, behind it. Here, on the contrary, the human merges with and dissolves in the landscape, becoming a part of it. For Pepperstein, this is a nod to the psychedelic experience and anyone who has ever lived it (even Goethe&rsquo;s Young Werther rediscovers the wonderful life of bugs and flies at a moment of extreme emotional experience and literally becomes part of the landscape around him).&nbsp;&nbsp;

The Human as a Frame for the Landscape

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In a theatrical finale, the last room in the exhibition features a golden baby gleaming inside a dark space. The image of a golden child brings to mind a host of alchemical, mystical or esoteric associations and forms a final point at which the various practices, themes, and personal stories that form Pepperstein&rsquo;s world converge. Could this be Pepperstein, the crown prince of Moscow Conceptualism? Or perhaps it is Pasha Pivovarov, the boy who grew up surrounded by the love of his parents? &ldquo;My parents rose above me like two suns that lit up the silent planet of my childhood,&rdquo; Pepperstein recalls. &ldquo;I could barely identify the borders between them and myself: it seemed to me that I was entirely made up of the light they emitted.&rdquo; The golden child is an almost non-material source of light (the tiny figure is about three centimeters high): a souvenir of a god or a grandiose superpower, as in Pepperstein&rsquo;s short story &ldquo;The Architect and the Golden Child.&rdquo;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

Golden Child

Introduced to the circle of Moscow Conceptualists as a child, since the beginning of his career Pavel Pepperstein (b. 1966, Moscow) has been one of the most prolific mythmakers in Russian contemporary art, an inventor of systems, universes, languages, cities, and political projects. Pepperstein&rsquo;s solo exhibition at Garage reviews the key myths he has created since the 1970s: from ecstatic or, on the contrary, ultra-logical visions of the future to religions, cults, beliefs, rituals, and alternative realities that exist in parallel dimensions and modalities.
Although it includes new work alongside existing projects being shown in Moscow for the first time, The Human as a Frame for the Landscape is not a retrospective, nor is it organized chronologically. Time is an elusive concept, which Pepperstein&rsquo;s art seems to have overcome. Its logic is that of an arabesque, a constantly growing and expanding pattern woven from literary impressions, philosophical meditations, experiences of reality in altered states of consciousness, political utopias, and much more. In this neural pattern, Pepperstein&rsquo;s projects become visible as they emerge on the surface and then disappear, only to reappear in other artistic, literary, and musical experiments. The exhibition design mimics a gallery of airtight capsules inside a spacecraft (or perhaps on the set of Stanley Kubrick&rsquo;s Space Odyssey), immersing visitors in each of the subjects as if in an alternative reality filtered from the flow of daily routines, memories, childhood impressions, and visions.
In each room, visitors will find leaflets with short descriptions of the projects, which they are welcome to take. These explanatory (or mystifying) texts are based on a conversation with the artist that took place at his studio on January 24, 2019. Had it happened elsewhere or at a different time, the commentary for the exhibition and the interpretation of each project might have been very different, so visitors are free to expand on and add to the interpretations suggested, enter into their own dialogues with the artist, and contribute to the production of the pattern structure of Pavel Pepperstein&rsquo;s art.

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