avatars for the action departs.
May 22, 1996Kiev city, street, OlegovskayaArtists: Konovalov I., Vrvarov A., Zaichenko V., Militinskiy K.,Militinskaya OThe genesis of the video work Goldfish was prosaic enough, sparked by the arrival of a technological novelty at the Olegovka squat: a video camera. Little did we know at the time that the final edit of this footage would precipitate the inauguration of the Fiction Gallery Expedition (FGE), where the video would serve as the debut screening.
In the interim, Vova Zaichenko (Zayats) had borrowed the camera for a week, indiscriminately documenting reality, mesmerized by the immediacy of playback on a standard television set. The selection of subjects gradually narrowed, ultimately settling on the death mask of A.S. Pushkin that hung on my studio wall. I conceived the idea of performing a "dactyloscopy" of my own face—a life cast—and this process was recorded against the sonic backdrop of The Residents’ Eskimo.
Reviewing the footage instantly on the monitor, we discerned something sacred in the act—a liminal state between life and death, between the living flesh and the calcified gypsum identity of the cast. The hollow mask resembled a vessel capable of holding water; however, a specific camera angle created a reverse optical illusion, making the concave void appear convex. This sparked the conceptual framework for Goldfish: the notion that a living organism can inhabit a vessel, provided there is a medium for existence.
By analogy, art can exist only until the gypsum cast hardens. Art is perpetually situated within the process itself—akin to a fleeting magical epiphany that can never be definitively captured. Fixation is merely a frozen, artificial impression, a testament to a creative process in time—an artifact that can be preserved or destroyed.
Ultimately, art belongs to the realm of the ideal, the sublime, the intangible, and the abstract. Fixation—that is, the "artwork" as a category of exhibition, collection, and the market—serves merely as a memento of the eternal Goldfish, which has already swum away into another dimension of the process. In our specific case, it swam into the inauguration and departure of the Fiction Gallery Expedition.
To be continued ... >>>
Igor Konovalov