Senior curator of the V-A-C Foundation Katerina Chuchalina about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask heroines about their literary preferences and editions, which occupy an important place in the bookcase. Today, senior curator of the V-A-C Foundation Katerina Chuchalina tells about favorite books. Now in MMOMA the third act of the “General Rehearsal” project prepared with her participation is underway.
All the books I’ll talk about are, of course, super important in their own right, but they can easily be replaced by others. This is not my DNA book - it is rather what takes me here and now (partly because of the projects I work on) or occasionally comes to the surface. This is not a “survival kit,” but rather one of the playlists. There are so many books around us, they are piled up on the tables and in the devices, they need attention - it is difficult to organize a literary life, but I am glad that I somehow succeed.
In my childhood - and I was born in a province in the family of Soviet technical intelligentsia - I was heroic, my “nutritional mixture” was composed of Soviet parables about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and Volodya Dubinin, “Young Guard”, Gaidar, a library of adventure. Then - a fracture, like everyone else: Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Selin. Only later were Russian books and contemporaries: Lemons, Letov, Prigov, Sorokin. At some point in my youth, when I was studying Romance-Germanic philology, a lot of American and English literature appeared in my life. I remember that it was very boring: the sagas and thick novels were viscous and took a lot of time — I read them at a time when time must go fast, but it continued to stretch and stretch. But then in my reading there was an interesting shift: the plots went into the background, but there remained minor characters, sometimes just decorations, scenes, unpopulated literary wastelands, which could have had their own lives, cut off from the plot. It's like watching a football match, not paying attention to the ball. And because of this, it seems to me, I basically had an interest in how relationships with a place arise. My profession is connected with the creation of relationships between people, images, things in space, and, perhaps, much has come from books, often not related to art.
Another part of my relationship with literature is work in the library in the department of rare books. There was a lot of entertaining, it is such a book Kunstkamera: precious European incunabula (first printed books), Russian book romanticism of Pushkin's time, books in the 19th century Arabic, daring pale books of the 1920s, as if made of road dust. In general, the department of rare books is a very strange place: oversized furniture and a specific smell. For the people working there, publications are almost always associated with investigations: finding out losses, losses, studying field marks, ex libris, mysterious signs and notes found between pages. There, the book as an artifact often supplants the content, and therefore it is necessary to constantly make efforts to return to what is actually written in it. In addition, there you get a good lesson in the sociology of reading and cultural production: who wrote books, printed books and why. This is essential for the work of the curator: you need to do similar exercises for approaching and removing all the time, analyze the form and content, uniqueness and typicality.
When I thought about this interview, I also thought that there are favorite phantom books. Books ghosts, which I try to remember, but I can not. From them there is either a vague memory of the cover, or the circumstances of reading: the room in which I read, or the voice, if read aloud.
Pliny the Elder
"Natural history"
I recently realized that the closest to me from different knowledge systems is a system of biological knowledge. Biology is now the fastest growing science, moreover, it is one of the few, whose evolution is described in detail in the books. On the one hand, the fascination with “natural stories” occurs because of my long leafing and viewing of old folios with engravings of animals and plants. On the other hand, it seems to me that this is a very significant (and well illustrated) example of what our knowledge of the world consists of, how the optics of authenticity is changing.
These atlases of flora and fauna are an area of pre-scientific knowledge, where the documentary image of the world imperceptibly intertwines with involuntarily fictitious: centaurs and unicorns coexist on pages with bunnies and chanterelles. They are given Latin names, they are equal within the same system. It was a giant source of inspiration for me and reminds Pliny the Elder with his “Natural History”, in which he (an obsessed encyclopaedist and compiler who never went anywhere) created a picture of the whole earth and its inhabitants: sometimes people came across with eyes on their shoulders or one foot. Incidentally, I never believed that he did this out of pedantic loyalty to the sources — he probably wanted everyone to rush to check and refute it.
Donna haraway
"Antropocene, Kapitalocene, Plantaciocen, Ktuluce: the creation of a tribe"
I have already said that the pace with which biology develops is amazing. It provides schemes, analogies and metaphors for the study of social systems, in particular, the cultural situation and politics. But Donna Haraway is not only about that. A socialist, a feminist, a researcher of science and technology - she is an important figure for me, it is not only about this book. She connects within me flowers in old albums and the super-sophisticated modern environment of the symbiosis of nature, man and machine, which feeds my interest in modernity and its visual culture. In addition, its schemes are very helpful in reflecting on the modern cultural institution that we and our colleagues are designing for HPP-2.
Vladimir Odoevsky
"Town in the snuffbox"
"The Town in the Snuffbox" is a very original thing in the corpus of children's literature, and it seems that I first came to be in the form of a plate. I often return to it as a model for constructing spatial fantasy from one single taken entity - from the snuffbox in the living room. The boy gets from a snuffbox to a musical city, and a recursion unfolds there, a mirror system of worlds, infinite repetition, nausea, one space comes in another.
Russian "Alice in Wonderland" or Hoffman, only without humor - rather a pure play of romantic imagination, completely let go of the leash. True, this book and "Black Chicken, or Underground People" for me, as Scylla and Charybdis: I could never embrace them at the same time - they are mutually exclusive, redundant. Odoevsky, by the way, is a very remarkable figure - a writer, musicologist and occultist. He has a utopia "4338th year" with the Internet (magnetic telegraph), climate change, copier and morality management through hypnosis. Actually, the "small town in a snuffbox" is nothing more than a musical urban utopia.
Philip dick
"Saving machine"
For several months I was involved in the “General Rehearsal” project and various related issues related to museums and collections. The third act of the General Rehearsal has now opened, and I recalled this story: it partly summarizes these issues and their inconsistencies. This is a super-small work about how the professor was concerned that everything would soon disappear from the Earth, how to preserve art and, in particular, music, as the most fragile. He ordered the scientists to create a new machine that should turn the music into animals - this should help them survive, because they will receive the adaptability of living beings. He then compiled a list of favorite things, sent scores to a preserving machine, and sent the resulting real and fantastic creatures to live in the woods behind the house.
Everything develops rapidly: when the professor finally visits the forest, he discovers that the creatures (his favorite sonatas and operas) have degraded beyond recognition and devoured each other. When the hero catches a little insect - the former fugu of Bach - and puts it in the car to return to the score, then in desperation gets unprecedented disgusting sounds. This story is about curatorial work in general. We are constantly trying to create transforming mechanisms so that art remains alive, actualized through new symbiosis and contexts. But with this you should always be alert, because you, perhaps, with the best of intentions, can change the essence of the works themselves.
Vasily Grossman
"Abel (Sixth of August)"
"The Sixth of August", as you can guess, is the day of the bombing of Hiroshima. The company of guys (pilots of the Enola Gray crew who dropped the Bombshell bomb) is on a training base on a Pacific island. Almost holiday atmosphere, tropics, night bathing, letters home, evening drinks, talking and flirting with the waitresses. Each of them is a pro, a wonderful technician.
One night they take off on mission. This is such a warm human bone inside a global catastrophe. One of the heroes is a blond youth scorer, who is constantly overwhelmed by his love for life and for his mother. And through this lyrics, Grossman oversees the technical side of the war, the change in optics, the remoteness of the object and the reduction of responsibility. Very relevant topics. This story is for me - part of the interest in the war in its modern form. You can read a lot about this, I have this subject attached to, for example, the collections of Paul Virillo's essays or the book “War in the era of intelligent machines” which was miraculously translated many years ago by Manuel Deland.
Gennady Barabtarlo
"Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov"
This is a book that I am reading now because of my interest in the structures of sleep, memory, oblivion and time; It is associated with one long-running project. Nabokov, chronically suffering from insomnia, in 1964 conducted an experiment with dreams according to the method of John Dunn - a British scientist and aviation engineer.
Eighty days Nabokov wrote down the dreams and events of the day following to sleep, in order to discover connections and test the scientist’s theory of time. He put every dream and day episode on a card like the ones used in library catalogs. Cards - they are stored in the New York Public Library, if I am not mistaken - and they make up this insomnia diary, in the book they are placed in a biographical and literary context. These cards of sleep and reality are an interesting document, if you think about how we construct memories and interpret them and what connections we have between the psychic inner life and the real world.
Hito Steyerl
"The Wretched of the Screen"
I like to read the texts of artists, they are very different - sometimes theoretical, sometimes artistic, journalism. Communicating with artists, working together is part of my life. You can't work with everyone, but you can read their books, this is also a way of communicating. This is useful to understand how the systems of contemporary artistic practices are intertwined: texts take the artwork far beyond what you see at the exhibition.
Hito - director, artist, theorist of new media. Her books are edited similarly to her works: these are not comments, no additional explanations or reasonings - these are the works themselves, only in text format. The subject of the texts are the various phenomena of visual culture at the junction with digital: viral videos, Nigerian scam, criminology, geopolitical conflicts. Often it quickly disappears from our sight, but constructs our modernity.
Charles Baudelaire
"Philosophical Art"
Honestly, I did not immediately understand how all the French Symbolist poets, or the so-called “damned,” are associated with art. In my youth, I absolutely sinlessly enjoyed the hellish machines and colors of evil Baudelaire, Rambo, Mallarmé, Lotreamon and Aloiziyus Bertrand, and even secretly clumsily translated them. Then, of course, it became obvious how much influence they had on the formation of the culture of the twentieth century — brilliant observations of the life of art, how it was perceived by various social strata, behind salons, public, citizens, collectors and their impulses.
Baudelaire had a brilliant intuition in the field of artistic journalism, critics. This collection contains essays of different years about contemporaries and contemporary phenomena, he described all the most important moments, the shaky and indefinite in his time.