The habit is given to us from above,
It is a substitute for happiness.
— A.S. Pushkin
Representation of the Signifier on Blue
In order to escape verbal explanations, the artist resorts to alternative means of representation. However, even after creating a visual model, they are asked to explain in words what they have conceived. A cycle of translations from one medium to another and back again. In fact, the theme for this work was initially assigned by curator Daria Sedova. By drawing lots, I received the controversial yet insightful lines of the great Russian poet. So this short text of mine will slightly expand the range of perception of the work—nothing more. For several years now, I have been searching for alternatives to the verbal.
In the project “Until the Word is Gone”, I sequentially translate a spoken word into a clay sculpture, changing media step by step. I am interested in languages as holistic systems of world perception, in the sense that Ludwig Wittgenstein interprets them.
I am also fascinated by the hieroglyph and its predecessor—the ideogram or pictogram—as components of a universal symbolic system of proto-writing. In the ideogram, image and writing meet. The image and the word are one and indistinguishable.
In my work “Representation of the Signifier on Blue,” I precisely translate the poet’s lines into an image-based system distinct from the verbal. I invite the viewer to examine it closely and compare. This painting contains plenty of the signifier, but no signified at all. We see only the “greeting” of the image instead of the image itself, yet the “greeting” is also an image. The image simulates the image—twice. In the painting, we see a pair of dustpan profiles.
In quantum physics, there is a well-known experiment called Young’s double-slit experiment. It demonstrates the dual nature of matter. In the presence of an observer, particles behave as particles; in their absence, they behave as waves—acting differently depending on observation. This phenomenon has no explanation. The double-slit experiment remains a mystery of quantum mechanics. In a certain sense, the dustpan profiles in this work play the role of those very slits.
