"Signs and Fate in the Works of Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina" by
Iosif Bakshtein

One can state with a justified degree of confidence that Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina have now become acknowledged classics of modern Russian art, whose work reflects the upheavals of Russian history from the legendary 1970's onwards. One could even say that they were and still remain the custodians of the "soul" of the Moscow school of conceptualism, carrying on and expressing the "common sense" with which it is imbued. Because only those endowed with this "common sense" are capable of revealing the absurdity that exists in various aspects of man's symbolic existence, especially in the context of the most dramatic periods of Russian art history.

A basic defining feature of Makarevich and Elagina's work is their treatment of meaning and signification. Their approach is solidly fixed in the various movements of Russian (but not only Russian) twentieth-century art. The most important and fundamental of these is the classical avant-garde of signification that has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. However, these various artistic references are interwoven and layered on top of each other in order to create the maximum expressive effect.

However, many of these meanings and signifiers are derived from other everyday sources as well as art. For example, Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio steals his way into the space of Kazimir Malevich's works. A poisonous fly agaric mushroom, insinuates itself into the podium for Tatlin's Tower. A brand of children's soap becomes transformed into a pop-art artefact. And Eagles - the symbols of imperial majesty take on a suspiciously similar character to the toys from our totalitarian childhood, which are still capable of terrifying the world around them. These are just a few of the examples of how Makarevich and Elagina devise roles for characters and objects that they borrow from the everyday world around them.

It is important to note the deliberately infantile origin of the artists' metaphors and their essentially dreamlike trajectories. The infantile nature and fairy-tale appearance of their characters are an important and ideologically motivated statement, a reflection of anxieties concerning the marginalization of the artist in the modern social environment. It is also the continuation of the "little man" theme in Russian literature, and generally an expression of the universal doubt that art can maintain its autonomy in a world of aggressive ideologies and in cities whose streets are seemingly "paved with gold".

In most of Makarevich and Elagina's works we see the Moscow conceptualists' widespread deconstruction of artistic devices, evident in different stylistic forms. The artists demonstrate that they can produce a free and distanced mathematical melding of plastic, colour and composition. Here we have surrealism, abstract expressionism, the crude strokes typical of the Moscow school, and official Soviet colour photography from the end of the 1950s. The history of art develops a collage-like reality. It assumes material form and becomes a visual aid both for cognoscenti and for novice collectors of valuable works of art alike, and the classics themselves are transformed into characters inside their own works.

But Makarevich and Elagina work not only with the material of art history, even as it is broadly understood. They create their own version of Arte Povera. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the celebrated "Closed Fish Exhibition", a master work of the craft of exhibition that was exhibited to a narrow circle of friends and like-minded artists in 1993. This outwardly squalid exhibition raised everyday domestic objects to the level of "the basic elements" of universal creation, thus transforming the fishing industry into a physical embodiment of Divine Providence.

However much this work might resembles Herman Hesse's "Glass bead game", it would be wrong to think that Makarevich and Elagina's art shares the same optimism. The elderly Buratino may be the most sympathetic of their characters. He appears in later works both as the alter ego of the ageing artists and as a sign of fate and the unrealised Dream. The world has changed radically, but everything has stayed the same. The Dream has remained a dream. Just as Tatlin's Tower never became a real tower.

Iosif Bakshtein