kostya goldtv: «I am cutting off the senses from the cannibal state»
“We were always accompanied by a large crowd of punks on set. In the crowd, volunteers played dead people.” Necrorealism was a formula for survival in late Soviet society: hey, you're alive, pretend to be dead - the dead are killed less often. The same thing is happening now in Putin’s Russia.
I met the artist and cinematographer Kostya Mitenev when he came briefly from St. Petersburg to Zurich for an exhibition where his digitized art was presented among the works of many contemporary authors. Afterwards, news about his life came through mutual friends: he suffered from Covid; exhibited in Venice in the spring of 2022; did not return to Russia; asked for asylum in Switzerland.
And the other day news came from Jean-Philippe Jaccard. The Swiss Slavist and honorary professor at the University of Geneva wrote that he had known Mitenev for forty years, from the era of the Leningrad underground and the Saigon party. The words were accompanied by a scan of the article with a photograph showing young Jaccard and avant-garde musician Sergei Kuryokhin at Mitenev’s house in Leningrad. From Jaccard’s letter it followed that the Swiss authorities denied Costa asylum because they considered that he was not in danger in his homeland.
I contacted the artist, and this is what he told Radio Liberty.
“After Covid and three operations, I was discharged from the St. Petersburg clinic with a diagnosis of healthy,” Kostya recalled. — He walked on crutches. On Sunday, February 20, my mother died. And early on Thursday morning, Russia attacked Ukraine. A terrible depression crushed me, as if in a vacuum, there was a feeling of the end of the world, I did not understand how to live. The action within the framework of the Venice Biennale and the exhibition of the Swiss gallery ArtBox.Projects were planned even before this. And in the spring of 2022, I went to Italy to present my ideas in reality, not virtually.”
On May 17, 2015, in the Arsenal and in the Giardini Gardens during the 56th Venice Biennale, Kostya declared in front of the Russian Pavilion: “Here and now I separate Art and the State!” — by that time, Russia had occupied Crimea and supported the separatists in Donbass. And on May 14, 2022, at an exhibition in Venice, Mitenev held an art picket: he unfolded a print of his work “Black Hole” in front of its digital image and chanted: “Do Art! Not War!
In the spring and summer of 2022, the artist was preparing to participate in anti-war exhibitions in Switzerland and the Netherlands. “In Geneva I met with Jaccard, I know him from St. Petersburg from the New Wave. My work was included in the exhibition, but I was not. The day before I felt weak because of my leg, I barely got to the free first aid station next to the hotel. The doctor immediately called an ambulance. At the hospital they cleared out the blood clots in my foot and told me I had two to three months to live. When I came to my senses, I began to think that I would make it in time. I decided to physically separate myself—Art—from the cannibalistic Russian state, to really separate it.”
On June 9, in the commune of Boudry in the canton of Neuchâtel, the artist asked for political asylum in Switzerland and began drawing an art diary. The pages in the notebook were enough for three months, the stories fell into my hands. Because emergency medical care sent Mitenev to a hospital in Neuchâtel, where he was diagnosed with bone gangrene and on July 8 his right foot was cut off. The wound had not yet healed, but the mail had already delivered the refusal to the Swiss Confederation.
“I have Finnish Schengen,” explains the artist. “That’s why they promised to deport me to Finland before January 8, 2023.” Of course, I was against it; a free human rights activist from Caritas helped me refuse to appeal.” When the doctors gave the go-ahead, the Russian was transferred to a hostel for people with disabilities in the commune of Ecublens. And in the summer they again invited me to Boudry. There he wrote a new application for asylum. Last November, a refusal came from the Berne court: “We will be deported to our homeland within 30 days.” And 30 days to appeal.
“I don’t even want to think about returning to the Russian Federation — there is war there! I hate war! I hope that Switzerland will not deport me to the Russian Federation: it is strange to expect medical assistance from a state that has already buried me, kills people every day at the front, persecutes and kills dissidents in the rear. Why doesn’t Bern see this? A lawyer told me that Switzerland helps disabled people.”
Mitenev speaks English fluently, learns French, lives with artistic ideas and new opportunities. And he considers himself lucky.
The hostel that sheltered Kostya and a couple of hundred others in trouble in Ecublens consists of two three-story buildings. People of different genders and ages from different countries are waiting for refuge there: Turkey, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran and others. The rooms are mainly for several people; kitchens, toilets, showers, laundry are shared and can be cleaned yourself. And Mitenev is alone in the room, he has set up an art studio there, working “in a format limited by the interior”: fate is pulled by the strings not of wishlists, but of pragmatists.
At his current place of residence, he initially received goods in a special store by bank transfer at the rate of 6 francs per day. “The prices are special, once you fill the refrigerator, you can live,” the artist does not complain. — And six months ago they gave me a Post Finance bank card, they charge 368 Swiss francs per month. I buy paint, paper, canvases, I also have enough for food, I’m looking for a studio for normal work.”
Mitenev says that life is in full swing around him. I am constantly in touch with my childhood friend Jaccard. I was talking with a neighbor in the dorm, it turned out to be a guitarist from Ukraine, they were discussing Tsoi’s work, the history of St. Petersburg rock. And recently it was heartbreaking — an academic musician and composer was deported to Georgia.
The turnover among residents is high. During the year, the police caught illegal immigrants hiding in the hostel a couple of times. Security at the entrance quickly calms those who are too nervous. Much depends on the social assistant. “I have a very good one,” Kostya boasts, “in all difficult cases I always find understanding and help.”
From the refugee hostel in Ecublens it is easy to reach “Plateforme 10”. And there are three museums, permanent and temporary exhibitions that attract artists, curators and art historians. And even the name of the art space in Lausanne echoes “Pushkinskaya-10” in St. Petersburg. “You talk to people, and almost every time you find a connection with the St. Petersburg underground, and this is part of my life, youth, happiness,” there is bitterness in Mitenev’s words.
In the 1980s, Kostya wrote poetry, was friends with musicians from the Leningrad rock club (“Kino”, “Alice”, “TV”, “Pop Mechanics” — now their works are considered among the classics of Russian rock) and with underground artists Oleg Kotelnikov , Yufit, Andrei Mertvy-Kurmayartsev, Timur Novikov, Andrei Medvedev participated in samizdat and the parallel cinema movement, studied at the Lenfilm film school with director and screenwriter Alexander Sokurov, made his own films, acted with necrorealist authors.
“Our body is being devoured by fat beetles. After death comes life, that’s what it takes, guys,” the necrorealistic folk artist from St. Petersburg in Switzerland sings. — The term “necrorealism” was coined by Kotelnikov. Evgeny Yufit came to him and said: “I’m filming something with the Dead and I want to understand what.” “You’re filming necrorealism,” he replies. The new word parodies the term “socialist realism” and refers to the dual nature of art, which is dead and alive at the same time.”
In the 1980s, there was a wave of new art in Leningrad : cinema, painting, graphics, pop mechanics. It merged with “Parallel Cinema”, freedom of expression, manifested at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov: apoliticality, interest in perversions, unmotivated violence and death, rejection of “manufactured beauty”. Mitenev shot on 16mm film with the Aleinikov brothers in the film “Someone Was Here”, with Yufit in “Boar of Suicide”, “Courage” and “Knights of the Sky”, in “Drops Remain on the Trees” by Evgeniy Kondratyev. Spectators at the screenings had fun. At the same time, exhibitions of Igor Bezrukov, Sergei Serp, and Yura Tsirkul were held.
They lived their own world with a sense of belonging to the art nation that Timur Novikov created around the St. Petersburg New Academy of Fine Arts. The inherent duality of parallel cinema was their world. No one could tell them what to think, what to talk about, or how to have fun. They had their own directors, composers, writers, poets and publicists, painting and theater. They knew and loved each other and had no idea about “likes.”
The screening of the necrorealists’ film on television during Soviet “workdays” produced the effect of a bomb—the average person was stunned by the unprecedented style and the meanings penetrating into the subcortex, and some were blown up into rage. However, Kostya did not care much about “national recognition”; he did what he wanted and loved to do. And in the early 1990s he moved away from necrorealism.
Perestroika and technological progress opened up something new for the Soviet Union and what remained after it, both in propaganda and in the visual arts.
In 1996, Mitenev came up with the mother of modern AI — a personal computer or electronic computer. He called her “Masha Pentium” and created the art group “Kostya Mitenev & Masha Pentium”. Photographs and films appeared in collaboration. Over the years, these and other works by Mitenev were shown at exhibitions in Germany, Finland, France, Russia, including in 2020 and 2021 at the St. Petersburg Center for Contemporary Art named after Sergei Kuryokhin.
“Masha” taught the artist everything she knew, and he began to make paintings himself. A totalitarian state uses television as a weapon of mass destruction, an emitter of distortion and lies. In 2008, Mitenev tore off the frame of the TV box, blew it out with bronze and began making films through it, making paintings with the tag “kostya goldtv”, including street art in different cities of the world.
Time knows how to twist spirals; at the beginning of the third millennium after the Nativity of Christ, AI received a new incarnation. And Kostya also turned to an entity under the general name “neural network”.
“Now many people are interested in Russia after Putin. And I also formulated and sent prompts on this topic to AI-art,” the artist shares the secrets of the method. — Artificial intelligence drew on the screen, and I transferred it with a pencil, markers, pastels to paper or canvas. As a result, we got a map like Africa, which is divided by borders and means, perhaps, autonomous parts of the continent. Other works describe the modern image of Putin: “Russian President”, “Infant Hercules strangling Putin the Cobra”, “Glory to Kyiv-16S”, “Down with the Orcs!”
Mitenev’s works are reminiscent of rock paintings after abstract art. “My art is called “metasymbolism,” that is, post-digital symbolism,” Kostya finishes his cold coffee and continues. — From the history of art, those closest to me are Caspar David Friedrich, Kandinsky, Magritte and Andrei Krisanov. Among my contemporaries, I follow the art of Kotelnikov, Barbara Küger, Olga Tobreluts, Gosha Ostretsov, Maurizio Cattelan, Inal Savchenkov… Of course, they have their own art.
After necrorealism, I am not a member of any art group, but I am still a New Artist.
A year and a half ago, Switzerland gave me a chance for a new life. And I want to give her my idea of “Separation of art and the state.” Art is I. I have feelings, but I am not given the ability to know myself, therefore it is unknown what Art is. The state evolves towards humanism from a cannibal state with “feathers and claws, puffy cheeks, bulging eyes.” It is devoid of feelings, therefore it is omnivorous and always breathes down the neck, always from behind. It doesn’t want to know who I am, it wants to eat — that’s all. I cut off my senses from the cannibal state. I change the language. I am cutting off part of my body, my leg, for the benefit of the state — fuck off already!”
…According to the State Secretariat for Migration, at the end of 2023, more than 260 Russian citizens sought asylum in Switzerland.
Marina Okhrimovskaya. Publicist and poet, co-founder and editor of the magazine “Switzerland for Everyone” / schwingen.net. Collection of poems “Divination by the Clock”, Zurich, 2021.
Kostya Mitenev did the translation.
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Images:
Kostya Mitenev before his work at the exhibition of the Swiss gallery ArtBox.Projects. Zurich, August 19, 2019 (© schwingen.net)
Art picket “Do Art! Not War! May 14, 2022 at an exhibition in Venice. (© kostya goldtv)
“No Putin!” Single picket by Kisti Mitenev in front of the UN in Geneva. August 20, 2023 (© kostya goldtv)
Work by Kostya Mitenev. (© kostya goldtv)
Video: “Behind the Mystery” / “Over The Mistery” by Kostya Mitenev, 1989. Leningrad Studia Docfilm, YouTube. (© kostya goldtv)
Andrey Mertvy, Evgeny Yufit and Kostya Mitenev. St. Petersburg, 1989 (© kostya goldtv)
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