Inspection Medical Hermeneutics

Klinger’s Boxes Cold Reduction was first exhibited at Galerie Grita Insam in Vienna in 1991. The installation comprises seven wooden boxes each with its own fantastical drawing by Pepperstein under a glass cover. From each box hangs a pair of woollen mittens. The eccentric and erotic drawings are copies of a series by the turn-of-the- century German artist Max Klinger, which all focus on the motif of the glove. Pavel Pepperstein described the idea behind the work thus:

"The series Klinger’s Boxes is dedicated to the theme of Russia as a memory of Europe.

Russia is a northern country with a cold climate and this prevents things from quick degradation and decay. Therefore, traditional forms of European thought and orientation, now forgotten in Europe, have been preserved in Russia. Some elements of traditional Russian winter clothing act as the keepers of European memory. Elements of bourgeois and dated European culture are warmed up by typical Russian objects connected with cold.

These objects, such as felt boots, woollen mittens, hats with ear-flaps, downy (fluffy) shawls, which were elements of the basic peasant’s clothing, are still very much ‘alive’ and being worn to this day. Some objects have even become fashionable.

The installation’s idea is linked to the development of ideas and aesthetic practices related to the cold, freezing and warming. We explored the basic differences between Russian culture and other cultures in respect of how other cultures look at death. Russia’s cold climate makes the figure of a man dying from freezing cold a very important theme in Russian culture (in Russian fairy tales, in coachman’s songs, in poems by Nikolay Nekrasov ‘Grandfather Frost-Red Nose’ and so on ... ).

Death by freezing is one of the most blissful forms of dying. A person dying from freezing does not feel pain; he experiences euphoria and pleasant hallucinations. This characterises a more painless attitude towards death in Russian culture in comparison with the European culture which is in many ways built on pain and suffering. Here it is relevant to recall the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who considered that the message of all of his literary work consisted in the phrase ‘Death is sweet; this is a secret’. Nabokov enciphered this phrase into one of his stories".[5]

Side Space of the Sacred was created and shown in 1992 in Vienna. The design of the installation is quite simple. Located at the centre of the room are three smooth, large, white “Kolobok spheres” with tranquil, sleeping faces (Kolobok is a character from Russian folklore, a round bread bun who runs away from the woman baking him and has numerous adventures). In the corners of the room there are four “little altars”. Each “little altar” includes an Orthodox icon, a red cushion, a small dish, and a wrinkled apple.

IMH in their introduction to the installation catalogue explain their idea as follows: “In speaking of the installation 'The Side Space of the Sacred', the very first thing to note is that, like most of our exhibition works, it possesses both 'internal' and 'external' functions simultaneously. Both functions are fundamentally illustrative.

The “external” function is basically an illustration of several hallucinatory plotlines, existing at the level of fundamental patternings of delirium on the ethno-semiotic plane, and, moreover, they exist not as “legitimate” components of these “narratives from the collective depths”, but as cavities, defects, whispers, cracks, parasitic “subplots” and other flaws of these narratives. Art, like hallucinosis, encounters in the first instance the spatial and acoustic parameters of all these “lower-depths events”, and therefore the metaphor of “parasites that leave tunnels in the compacted strata” is entirely appropriate, as is the metaphor of “cracks in the foundation”.

It is “hallucinations on a global theme” that are illustrated. The important thing here is the conceptual background of “common doings and things” which pervade “common bodies and spaces” through and through. Naturally, these global themes can be themes of the state, religion, money, the city, war and so on. What is important for us is that the unfolding of these hallucinations inevitably results in a comic effect (since this is an unfolding inwards into the banal). The psychodelicised levels of consciousness that have engendered these visions create them, in a certain sense, as “self-caricatures”.

The other, “internal” function of this installation is to illustrate the plotlines of our own text-formation, as performed within the framework of Medical Hermeneutics Inspection’s “laboratory of discourses”. From the viewpoint of this “internal” function, each element of the installation appears as a quotation from or reference to one or another of our texts (either already written or as yet only planned, and sometimes existing as a memory of an oral discussion). This kind of “reading” of our texts is in effect possible only for ourselves and also, perhaps, for certain of our close friends and co-authors. It is this that gives rise to the requirement for textual commentaries “for the catalogue”, by means of which this “laboratory” space of intersecting and unfolding or, on the contrary, stagnating discourses can be engaged as the exhibition background of the work itself".[6]

The Alley of Longevity was created in 1995 for an exhibition in Prague called ‘Flight, Departure, Disappearance’, curated by Milena Slavicka. It has since been presented in several important exhibitions in the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland, including at Art Basel Unlimited.

The installation consists of a wide tube hung at eye level surrounded by portrait drawings of babies and elderly men. Visitors can look through the pipe using binoculars. Inside, a small light bulb illuminates the scene of a cozy furnished room. In terms of the well-known metaphor “the light at the end of the tunnel” Pepperstein and Anufriev reinterpreted an ordinary object as a much more significant and sophisticated thing: as an attempt to find out what is at “the end”. The installation gives everyone the opportunity to pass along the Alley and momentarily come close to the final moment, which seems to be a quiet, beautiful, perfect place. But make only one step to the side, and this little paradise will disappear, revealing the mythological figure of the “Kolobkovost” or “Escape”, a recurring theme in the aesthetics of the Moscow conceptual school. The installation reflects the ideas and concepts of Medical Hermeneutics, and in particular is connected with the art movement of psychedelic realism. Articulating such categories as distance, time and disappearance, the artists reduced their size to infinity and embody a conceptual view of issues of life, death and immortality. This idea is revealed in the portrait gallery of the elderly men, whose ages reach astronomical numbers, and their infant counterparts, whose ages impossibly span backwards into minus figures, before they could be born. The Medical Hermeneutic group’s characters are outside of the past and future. They are the embodiment of eternity.[7]