Artist Maria Dudko about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, the artist Maria Dudko shares her stories about favorite books.
I don’t remember exactly what I read at a very young age, I only remember that I reread Raymond Chandler and Douglas Adams a hundred times. But at some point, being a child of immigrants in Australia, I received from my parents a stack of books with the words that now I will read only in Russian so as not to lose my language. I sat, sifted through the pages and spoke the words out loud. It was quite painful; especially the scarecrow, the number of letters in the alphabet, the mysterious signs that have no sounds, and the fact that the letter Ж really looks like a bug. So I read a lot of books, having no idea what they are about.
The first conscious book was "Two Captains" Kaverina. I walked for a long time and repeated under my breath: “Sanya, Katya,” for some reason, these two heroes fascinated me, not to mention that Sanya’s name for the boy seemed to me to be something amazing in general. The story remained completely unclear, not to mention the socialist-realist style that was present in it, but I suddenly liked the way the words sounded in it. And about pigtails, and about Kati's big eyes.
When I came to study in Russia in the ninth grade, literature became the most difficult subject: not only did I have to constantly write about various images of Russian life, in which I did not understand anything, so besides, I was immediately explained that a person who did not read Pushkin in childhood, can not be called a man. I confused Anna Karenina and Anna Karina. As a result, I read with pleasure from the school curriculum only "The Master and Margarita" and "Crime and Punishment": they had the feeling that they were books, written for me too.
In the tenth grade, I got sick with chickenpox and lay at home for a long time, dying with shame. I then read the "Black Obelisk" Remarque. Graves, Germany of the 1920s, a portrait of the aftermath of the First World War and an analysis of the circumstances that brought Hitler to power. All of this made a strong impression on me, and I made an important discovery for myself: you can read not only in order to enjoy the language, but also in order that everything inside would shrink and burn.
Until the tenth grade, I read mostly fiction. Then I began to draw a lot and spend all my free time in museums and decided that it was necessary to figure out what was on them and how to talk about it. I went and bought a 1000-page "World History of Art" written by John Fleming, and I read three pages a day with the expectation that in a year I would be well versed in the works of Donatello, Botticelli and Titian. This, of course, did not happen, and when I subsequently studied the history of art at the university, we were generally quickly weaned from treating history as a ruler on which trends in art arose in chronological order. So I first discovered that the analysis of a work of art consists not only of composition, light and shade, style and plot, but also the context in which art was created, the mode of production, how and by whom it was exhibited. A critical theory and philosophy appeared in my life, without which it is very difficult to understand how culture developed in the 20th century.
Due to the fact that I often move, I do not have a library, and it is very difficult to trace my personal literary history. It's still easier for me to read English. The situation, which was in childhood, is repeated, but now I read, so as not to forget the "first" language. Sometimes it is possible to take radical measures and get on the train to finally finish reading some novel. When there is no such opportunity, I, like many, read an essay. Of the permanent journals in the bookmarks, I have a fairly standard, I think, set: The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine and Triple Canopy.
I usually work on a project, and in order to better understand the topic that I think about, I am looking for various texts that help me to reflect on it. The books that I included in this list at one time prompted me to formulate some questions about art in general and what I do. It turned out a set of texts that most strongly influenced my work.
Tikkun
"Theory of a Girl"
When I entered the first course, I talked a lot with anarchists, went to all sorts of meetings. I went to them, thinking that we would hit the glass in the shops, but mostly we sat and discussed the books. So I got into the hands a collection of texts "Tikkun": this is a French philosophical group, which was formed during the student unrest at the Sorbonne in 1997 and disintegrated after the attacks of September 11. "Tikkun" beautifully write about the boundaries of the human body in modern society, about neuroses, love, infinitely and exhaustingly refer to the texts of other philosophers. Unlike most of the political theory, they do not articulate their positions, but insist that the main thing is to be constantly in the process of searching. This is a book that you can start reading from any page and get immediate pleasure.
Robert Venturi
"Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture"
At the university, I was taught by a professor, with whom we invented architectural forms based on observations of how the frost deforms the trees from the inside. I didn’t really understand why we are doing this until I read this book, although it is very interesting to read it outside the context of architectural education. Venturi in the 60s, one of the first to draw attention to the fact that, despite the active rethinking of modernism in the visual arts and literature, architecture is noticeably lagging behind. In this book, he formulated a rather simple thesis: in order for the architecture to solve the tasks of the future, it needs to stop being afraid of being complex, controversial and ambiguous. He writes in very simple language and refers to many architectural objects, revealing in them interesting, in his opinion, paradoxes.
Jacques rancieres
"Aesthetics and politics"
Rancier is developing his own interpretation of modernism, allowing a new look at the history of art in general. His concept of art regimes, and especially the analysis of the "aesthetic" regime as a potential key to significant changes in the social order, help to see how the boundaries of the "permissible" are erased in art. His theories are often found in art criticism, and I came back to this rather concise book, built in the form of an interview, many times, armed with other texts.
Claire bishop
"Artificial Hells"
Art historian and critic Claire Bishop analyzes art processes that take place outside the gallery space during the 20th century. In the first part, Bishop compares various theatrical and artistic works of futurists, situationalists, the Soviet public theater and other avant-garde artists, pushing the boundaries of interaction between the viewer and the work itself. After that, she proceeds to the analysis of modern forms of various socially engaged art and analyzes similar phenomena in terms of aesthetics. The curator and art critic Nicolas Burrio, who defined the term "relational aesthetics", acts here as a kind of antagonist to theses Bishop.
José esteban muñoz
"Cruising Utopia: The Then And There Of Queer Futurity"
Munoz headed the Performance Studies Department at NYU, and this book is a collection of texts in which he analyzes the works of various artists and writers, from Kevin Avians to Elizabeth Bishop, finding and revealing in them grains of an almost non-articulated, not yet come political "future". This book is a very interesting archive of alternative artistic and social life in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.
"Ana Mendieta: Earth Body"
This album was presented to me by a friend, and he is a collection of works by the artist Ana Mendieta and an essay about her. Her art is a response to the forced relocation to an orphanage in the United States at the age of 12 due to her father’s participation in the movement against Fidel Castro. It incredibly accurately conveys that feeling when you are stuck between two cultures and you no longer understand which one you belong to.
Paul Chan
"Selected Writings, 2000-2014"
I like books made by artists. Here Paul Chan combines his personal texts, visual material, critical essays and travel notes. In many articles, he very accurately captures various fears about the state of modern art today: for whom is it done, who watches it? At the same time, he constantly enters the analysis of his own artistic process into a wider context of cultural and social space that influences him: in one essay he particularly touchingly talks about his experience of the financial crisis of 1991 in America, when the only McDonald's in the area closed in which he grew up. Personal texts are supplemented by comments about the works of such artists and curators as Chris Marker, Marcel Duchamp and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Carole S. Vance
"Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality"
A collection of essays and poetry on the philosophy of sexuality, published in the footsteps of a conference held at Barnard College in New York in 1982. As the name implies, this is an attempt to consider human sexuality as a field in which different issues intersect, including pain, pleasure and power. This is one of the first books I read on gender theory and which has greatly stimulated my interest in further studying the issue.
Rebecca solnit
"Men Explain Things to Me"
This book begins with the fact that Sunshine describes the incident that happened to her at a party. One of the guests gets acquainted with her, and having learned that she recently published a book on the industrialization of America, she begins to talk to her for a long time about an incredibly important book on the same topic, which also recently came out, only from the fifth time she heard that it was her own book, which he, as it turns out, did not actually read. It is clear that in itself this funny episode from the life of the author does not prove anything - people who are condescending to others are found among both men and women. But from the second chapter, the book suddenly changes its tone, and Solonit switches to analyzing statistics on physical and sexual abuse in America. In places it is wildly funny, in places it is incredibly sad, in places it is a little pretentious book. As a result, Solitt succeeds in isolating a number of urgent problems and linking them into a single system. Just do not understand, what have the essay about Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag.
"The Little Red Schoolbook"
Generally speaking, this book did not affect me in any way, because I found out about it when I was very young, and it was written for children. But her story fascinates me. This is a guide for teens, written by two Danish teachers in 1969. In it, they completely unflatteringly characterize models of school education that do not refer to children as fully formed, independent people, calmly talk about sex, drugs and alcohol, and generally write things like: “Relations between adults are much like relations between children. They can hate each other, or make friends. They often meet in groups to argue among themselves. " They, of course, were fired, and the book was banned and republished only forty years later, in 2014. In my opinion, cool story.