Your recent solo show is called "Observers". Do you believe that an artist, and with him/her a viewer, is a mere bystander, perceiving things as aesthetic events?

Alena Romanova: I actually don't think that the artist is an observer. An observer implies a certain detachment, and I have always thought that an artist, as the Chinese saying goes, should be like an empty bamboo through which the wind blows. In other words, the artist is a resonator, a conductor that should be open and ready to produce the sound that exists. I really appreciate when artworks are not invented, nor spoken out, but when they just happen. It truly annoys me when artists, as is common in conceptualism, formulate everything in advance and then add some kind of image to that articulation. For me, it is much more important when art, and that’s what I’m trying to do, is inherent, immanent in reality that surrounds us. I often recollect a line from Daniil Kharms, in which he says that one should compose such a text that a window could be broken with it. I am rather close to the idea of trying to make a thing equal to reality. In order to be able to do so, you have to be in this reality and not just observe it.

If I were to introduce your art, I would certainly use the term "multidisciplinary artist". How have you come to such a variety of genres and mediums broadening your artistic vocabulary when it was hardly the mainstream in this part of the world?

As a matter of fact, I have always been interested in working across media be it metal, wood or paper. Despite the fact that I studied at the Department of Graphics [currently Moscow State University of Printing Arts, formerly known as Polygraph.— Editor's note], I entered it more or less by coincidence. It happened that the entrance exams there were earlier than at the Stroganov Institute, so I applied. Paper always seemed to me the most unconvincing and unreliable material, and almost immediately upon graduation I found a way to change the media, and for quite a long time I worked with metal, mainly with enamel technique. In the midst of the Soviet period, it was a kind of escapism, because in enamel you could do anything you wanted. Nobody nagged you, you could be a formalist, unlike, let's say, in sculpture or painting. When the Soviet regime came to an end, I remember thinking to myself: "Why am I doing everything so small? It's time consuming, and besides who actually has time to look at these tiny things?". I realised that it was possible to make things on another scale and from a wide variety of materials.

When did a classically framed painting lose its attraction for you and experiments with space and volume begin?

Since I was making jewellery I remember thinking at some point: why do paintings have only one side? And back then, in the late 80s, I became interested in the reverse side of things… It was a kind of formal impulse, and on the other hand, it moved me to a broader understanding that art is an object. Not a screen, nor a window. Because a picture in a frame is, of course, a window, and I always wanted to enter it. And if it's a landscape with a mountain view, I always wanted to get in and see what's behind that mountain.

In the 1970s, Mikhail Roginsky, a key figure in Soviet Nonconformist art, was your teacher, and in the book of memoirs "Fools Eat Pies" you write: "He was my teacher. And as it turned out later, one of a kind." How did it all come about?

Initially, it was pure chance that I got enrolled in his class at the Art School on Kropotkinskaya Street, where he worked and was even the class master [now Art School No. 1. - Editor's note]. All students loved him, but I was struck by the way he taught. He would put up somewhat darkish, dirty still lifes, and we had to paint them in such a way that one should see the... truth. Little did I understand what kind of truth he expected us to produce: you sit and paint with watercolour, you try to paint your best. I still remember him standing behind your shoulder saying, "This bottle won't be accepted at the glass recycling centre." (citizens had access to such centres and got paid for returning glass bottles.) It meant you were lying. And how to make the bottle accepted? While studying at the institute, I realised that I was bored and that the most important person for me was Roginsky. My mum gave me a wonderful advice to find him. He was no longer working at that school, so I found his address, went to his house and told him that I wanted to study with him. He suggested we put together a small group because he had to make a living. I told everyone I knew about this opportunity, including those who had never painted at all. My idea resonated with some of my friends, and they obediently began to gather at my place, in a very small room. Roginsky put up still lifes, and we painted. It lasted probably a year, and everyone who took part in it was grateful to me to the end of their lives.

How did it shape your artistic practice from that time on?

Had I not met Roginsky and encountered his truth-telling at some stage, I think I would be doing nice cultural things. And there would have been no multidisciplinary approach. The very fact that there's a person behind who could see any kind of lie, even if it is beautiful, made me keep up such ability to see things in real light so that no one could say that I made it up. Or that it was for the sake of beauty. I told him once that I had him standing shoulder to shoulder with me the whole time. He mumbled something in response, as usual. We were friends afterwards, and especially in his last years, when he began to come from Paris to Moscow frequently, but he did not consider me to be some kind of successor to his work.

Does the current exhibition carry on your memories of Mikhail Roginsky or may be his spirit?

I do not mean direct quotations, but the art territory Roginsky created and marked in art is so significant ... I’ve noticed a couple of red doors in some of the works .... It's funny to imagine Roginsky's ghost walking around the exhibition, munching on an apple and muttering some regular ditty under his nose... as he often did during his classes. The exhibition, of course, is not an homage, and I didn't mean Misha, if there is a door there somewhere. And other artists have a lot of red, such as my favourite Petrov-Vodkin. It seems to me that his “Red Door” (one of the iconic works by Roginsky, 1965) was about something else, i.e., about the Soviet Union. He was a politicized artist. But he expressed his strong political views in his own way.

In some of your artworks, one cannot help seeing parallels with the Arte Povera movement or even Trash art. Other works are much closer to set design. Who inspired and influenced your art? How would you define what “fuelled” your work in terms of its sources?

Back then, in Soviets times, and even later in the 90s, Arte Povera was not so well known here even among professionals. I remember seeing some photographs in the magazines – mainly publications on Italian artists, such as Carlo Carrà to name a few. I saw it all in person in Italy much later. Actually, some art of that period was part of large group exhibitions which included certain pieces representing that movement. Many of those shows came from Poland. There were nail works by Günther Uecker, as well as some sculptures by Jean Tinguely. It was all so exciting. For me, it was a transition period: I was doing different things, combining metal with enamel. By the way, some works are in the collection of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art that often bought enamel works from exhibitions.

As far as I know you had a successful experience with the theatre, including stage design for the legendary Taganka Theatre Company?

Theatre came about more or less by chance. At the time, I was making metal nets and a friend of mine, composer Vladimir Martynov, invited the famous theatre director Yuri Lyubimov to my studio. He came around and decided that he would like to use my works in the production he was working on. [“Go and Stop Progress!”, 2004. The play was based on poetry of OBERIU members. - Editor's note]. The play was a success but in the long run it turned out that such artwork was not necessary in a repertoire theatre: in most cases set design can be done cheaply and quickly. I've always liked art as a small theatre, a sort of pictures coming to life. The chamber theatre I was thinking of is that of the Surrealists - Max Ernst or someone else from the Dadaists. As far as form is concerned, it's something like a Nativity scene. It has little to do with the real theatre, my idea is more like the principle of a music box.

Cardboard you widely use in paintings and maquettes adds a particularly fragile dimension to your works.
Why did you fall in love with this material? Was it a consistent process or an experiment that became iconic?

It was hard not to fall in love with it. It is light, figuratively speaking it’s all around under your feet and, in addition, it gives you the opportunity to cut, to break out of the plane, to work from different angles, and to get reliefs. At first it was paper and hardboard, then I tried tin - it can also be bent and painted. But you can't get so much of it, and it doesn't have enough thickness. It turned out that cardboard stayed with me. It is not designed for eternity, but in this ephemerality, if I may say so, is the truth of life. And I like old cardboard, so that its lifetime can be prolonged. The fact that it's a throwaway sends a certain message to Roginsky, because Misha, too, worked with whatever he could get his hands on. On the one side, there was no money then, and on the other side, he liked this very Arte Povera. By the way, some of his works, actually, did not survive because of the fragile materials. But that's the price of honesty. His was a leftist and could not tolerate anything bourgeois. Living in France, he did not accept the bourgeois life style, although he joked that if France were attacked, he would go to defend it. And I do understand him. He and I grew up when only poverty was honest.

Some of the works at this exhibition are clearly in dialogue with the space of the city, its past and imaginary future. What have you explored? Why is there so much emptiness in the city?

People and houses are separate entities for me. I am not interested in people's relations with these houses. There are no people in town because I don't need them there. Houses are quite self-sufficient. What interests me is the formula of the city. And a separate formula for a crowd. Well, there are works where you see only people, a lot of them. One of these works is at the exhibition. It was Pavel Filonov who dealt with formulas in Russian art, and from this point of view, I am fascinated by his quest in art. Formulas are what interests me, too, in many ways. In literature, perhaps, Platonov’s linguistic “engineering” deals with similar tasks. I think it's a very Russian theme, in the sense that it is inherent in this gigantic territory. It remains so unarticulated that it creates a need to put some formulas on it. My houses and cityscapes are of a very different nature compared to Roginsky's Moscow. Misha treated the space of the city from the perspective of Neorealism closely linked to his belief that art can change people.

You have also done a lot in interior design. Where is the boundary between design and art for you personally? How was your series of lamps born?

I've always liked things - witty, well-made things. At some stage, it also gave me the opportunity to earn money. Starting with the OGI Café [the Moscow club Project O.G.I. in a flat on Patriarch's Ponds, which opened in 1998. - Editor's note] somehow it has all worked out. And as far as the boundaries are concerned, design should be lighter. Design that is overly assuming is bad design. It should not be heavy or overwhelming. It is noteworthy that interior design has changed over the past decades: it has become sterile, hollow, and anything, including interior art, can live in this interior. But when I was doing it, the interior was filled with things with a distinctive appearance, with a history. Lamps for me are objects which work with light. It is always interesting to work with light, and then I had to make it so that people could live with it.


You are about to release your second book "The Witness Has Witnesses". Is there an inner connection between artistic and literary practice?

When I looked back, l somewhat realised how it’s connected. It's a collage here and there. The first book about Roginsky is a pure collage. It was not written, but assembled. One of the impulses for its appearance was clear understanding that twenty years from now, people looking at Misha's work will not understand much. Reality he depicted will be gone completely. And the second book, which I have been working on for the last few years, was originally conceived more as a family history in the form of my letters to my grandfather, who went missing at the front during the war. But the book grew to a weighty volume, which included a huge number of archival photos - almost 180 of them, memoirs of other people, and went far beyond the conceived. [A. Romanova's book "The Witness Has Witnesses: Travelogue" is being prepared for the press. Editor's note].

To what extent does the ability to work under Soviet censorship allow you to take a more relaxed, perhaps philosophical approach to the present circumstances? We are seeing cases of censorship again....

I can't say that the very fact of going back to such a system comes as a surprise to me, but people face this problem mainly when they plan exhibitions in state museums or galleries working under the censorship system. Another question is on my mind... Is it possible to capture all this in a particular language? Perhaps I don't have such a language because mine doesn't involve any political statement. Not because I'm afraid, but because it's just not my way. And if it's not a political statement, then what is it? The question is where to find this adequate language.

I’m sure you have some sort of a wish list of what you would like to accomplish? What’s on it?

Strangely enough, I never know what's next. Sometimes I don't even understand where it's coming from. It appears somehow. It would be great to compile and illustrate a book on the theatre and in parallel make a “small” theatre based on a play by Alexander Vvedensky, a poet who was a member of OBERIU (an acronym for Obyedineniye Realnogo Isskustva, "The Association for Real Art"), sometimes called Russia's "last avant-garde movement". He has a great play entitled “Yolka u Ivanovykh” (‘Christmas at the Ivanovs’) written in 1938 and subtitled “An Anti-Christmas Anti-Play” (by the end of the 1980s this formerly little-known play was listed among “classical” OBERIU texts). The play built on internal contradictions is a real masterpiece and reflects the absurdity of the world.  Also, I would like to illustrate “Happy Moscow” by Andrey Platonov (NYBR Classics, 2012, transl. by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler). For some reason, I see my future drawings in pencil.