Dmitry Gutov
1960, Russia

Smash, 1992
installation

Dmitry Gutov’s professional arsenal includes an academic knowledge of psychology and a specialist artistic education, and he works with almost every medium: installations, objects, paintings, films, drawings, and texts. His works are full of associations and references to the most unexpected, and sometimes even apparently forgotten subjects and figures. For instance, the installation Above Black Mud gestures to Yuri Pimenov’s Wedding on Tomorrow Street, and there are entire series of works where he uses graphic design from Soviet magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, or images from ancient Greek vases. As well as devoting a significant amount of attention to left-wing intellectual discourse, which attracts many contemporary artists, Gutov also insists on working with the theoretical legacy of the Soviet Union. He rediscovered the Marxist philosopher Mikhail Lifschitz and, together with Konstantin Borokhov, founded the Lifschitz Institute with the goal of reviving the thinker’s ideas, which had become stale during the Soviet era and were forgotten. Gutov created his series of “aerial works” (Amphibian Man, Hammock, and Smash!) in 1991 and 1992. These works could only have emerged in this historical gap. At the point of rupture between two states, two temporal and sociocultural realities, Gutov found a vacuum inside of which it was possible to construct something that would dispassionately juxtapose past and future. The installation is based on a volleyball match, frozen at the moment of its culmination, when the player needs to make a powerful shot. For Gutov, space must possess the quality of a structure that, like a net, is pulled taut in different directions, and which, in his view, embodies the Soviet, with the “multifacetedness” of its architecture and cinema. The ball suspended in the air symbolizes less the idea of an abstract, empty space and more that which appeared after the collapse of an enormous state and big ideas.