V–A–C Sreda online magazine presents a new three-month programme dedicated to the interrelation of art, technology, and landscape.
This issue publishes a conversation between Daniil Beltsov, editor-in-chief of V–A–C Sreda, and the artist Francisco Infante-Arana about the symbolic nature of art, the experience of infinity, and why the beauty that will save the world lies in constant rebirth.
Kinetic mirror objects by Francisco Infante-Arana are a part of the Celestial Artefacts installation, which currently stand on the Prospekt and Square of GES-2 House of Culture.
Daniil Beltsov: Franciso, it seems to me that in your art, the object plays a special role: it acts as a mediator, as a conduit between a person and the world. Is this so?
Francisco Infante-Arana: The role of the object is very important, but in order to convey your message to another person, you need first of all a particular language. In art, everything comes down to the creation, the articulation of this language, and the question of how this language be made comprehensible to others. No matter how many books I read, I have yet to find an answer to what art is, to how artistic consciousness is formed in a person—perhaps I’ve read little and important philosophical texts have passed me by, or perhaps it’s something that can’t be defined, can’t be described. All the same, I make art, and I have to create this language. It seems to me that an artist’s confidence in the idea they follow is necessary. The idea can be significant or secondary—but it allows you to say: I am an artist, and I see the world in its entirety. For me, this idea has been the concept of the Artefact—a man-made element, something unpredictable, something which, at first glance, should not exist.
DB: So an Artefact is a symbol of language?
FI: Precisely, a symbol—this is a very important word. Because art is the act of symbolisation. I will give a simple example: a person looks at Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and says: “I could also do that!” In the case of Black Square, even if you criticise it, it’s important to recognise the symbolic nature of the work, which was created in its time. You could be a contemporary of Malevich but have a fairly traditional idea of culture and beauty, that is, one founded on the past, on that which has already been. Without a “key, ” without the symbol that allows a person to take their bearings in art, we won’t understand how to approach Malevich and his Black Square.
DB: What is beauty for you?
FI: Beauty is always something created anew, something that isn’t considered to have inherent beauty, in contrast to things typically cherished by a culture. It’s very easy to look at something old and to say: “I like it.” But “the beauty that will save the world” is a new beauty, not a retrospective one, and one that often goes unnoticed. The German-Swiss artist Paul Klee, for example, created works of fantastic beauty, but many of his contemporaries did not understand them: the colour relations seemed strange. Nonetheless, Klee is already a part of the past. Or—going back to Malevich—I remember the collection of his works that I saw at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The best there is in Malevich, that wall is still before my eyes. Such beauty!
DB: How old were you when you saw the collection?
FI: It was when they allowed people to travel abroad, during Perestroika. I don’t remember how long I stood in the museum—a long time. But the point is not in time, but in state of mind. In such moments you don’t feel time.
DB: Sensation prevails over time.
FI: Yes, time— relativity—ceases to having meaning. Once, I looked at a painting by Anthonis Van Dyck for a long time—all of the acquaintances with whom I’d gone to the museum had already left, and I just stood there and stood there. And when I went back to them, I understood one very important thing: I could have passed by that painting, not noticed it, like all the others, but in that moment something took place in me, I felt a different life pouring through that small portrait. This state is what allowed me to stay. But again, the point is not in time—in that painting, I saw more life than in the people I was talking to. It was a different quality of perception: I felt a consonance with myself, gratitude.
DB: What do you think, how did this happen?
FI: It’s difficult to describe. There are four hundred years between me and that painting, but they turned out to be of no significance. The value lies in the living message I received from the portrait, and in this lies the most important characteristic of art. I haven’t felt the same in communication with living people. These moments occur rarely, but they do sometimes happen.
DB: In this sense, art really does create a universal language and communicate with us through symbols across time. Your story with Van Dyck speaks to the fact that art becomes a symbol of something outside time, something eternal. How is an artist able to pass on this “living message”?
FI: It’s impossible to explain, it can only be felt. There are no reference books to which you could turn and learn what art consists of or why one or another work strikes us—it’s a mystery. Pondering this for a while, you find yourself faced with the weakness of verbal language, of the word. Poetry, of course, goes beyond these bounds, but many intelligent people arrive at the conclusion that silence is golden.
DB: Yes, poetry truly exists outside language, beyond the text. In a poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov, for example, the line “Freedom is” is repeated six times… And then the seventh line—“Freedom is freedom.” It seems there are only three words written down—a noun, a verb, a noun—but they grow in our consciousness into something greater than just “a noun, a verb, a noun.”
FI: Yes, yes, into something infinitely greater, into the knowledge that freedom—is. A person always strives for freedom, in as far as they are born with it.
DB: You often talk about the “unexplainability, ” the “unknowability” of art, of artistic creation. Today, however, people are focused on infinite knowledge. We want to watch, read, listen to as much as we can, to study not one language but seven. What for? For some reason. And this “unknowability, ” how important is it for you in life? You said that many books had passed you by, but, this said, you don’t pursue them. Why?
FI: I don’t pursue them, and I will say openly that I am not an erudite. Many people strut about saying that they know a lot, that they read a lot… But I don’t understand what for, if afterwards everything they read lies around gathering dust, and a person doesn’t use the knowledge they gain for their work.
DB: For pleasure?
FI: For pleasure—by all means! But I have met many people who read a lot, know a lot, but don’t know the most important thing—what they know everything for. Though what is culture? Culture is harmonic, balanced perception of the world, where everything is in its place and proportionate to objects of divine origin. It can happen that the beauty of a person—and I don’t mean glossy, magazine beauty—reveals itself as a result of communication. This is a living beauty, it is not already given, but arises at a particular moment, in a particular place. It shines. It is in this that the value of communication lies, and not in a person acquiring knowledge and telling others about it. Yes, he’s great, and so what?
DB: I would like to return to what you were talking about at the very beginning. The nature of art truly is unknown, mysterious, and I’m convinced that art is always a dialogue with God. From where does the impulse, the stimulus come from, when suddenly an idea comes into your head? I must admit, I can’t really believe this process is simply some biological mechanism… What do you think, to what extent can the creative act be considered a dialogue with something above us, with something, again, unknowable?
FI: You can derive meaning from the simplest thing, and in order to come up with something, it isn’t necessary to read, for example, the Gospel, Shakespeare, or to constantly contemplate the works of Rembrandt. This isn’t the point. It can happen that you walk by an ordinary puddle, and that in it you find a source of inspiration. How does Aleksandr Blok put it? “And bewitched by mysterious nearness,/ I gaze through a shadowy veil,/ and see an enchanted shoreline/ and an enchanted distance.”… This “strange nearness” of the world, to which I am “chained” might be the formula for how art of any form arises. Beyond the “dark veil” hides an enchanted shore, an enchanted distance—unknown, far away, unintelligible. This veil is the border between my inner world and the world to which I am chained by a “strange nearness.” I as it were see through the veil.
DB: And, again, this isn’t physical vision, this is feeling?
FI: Feeling, of course. And what is in that world, beyond the “shadowy veil”? All possibilities are there, it is a divine structure. If we recall the Gospel of John, where it is said…
DB: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh”?
FI: Yes, thank you! “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” This is precisely what Blok was talking about. Of course, we are all born of the flesh, but this is only a nominal existence, this is not becoming a person. It’s important to be born of the Spirit. The philosopher Merab Mamardashvili has a precise thought: we are only truly born after our “second birth, ” that is, of ourselves.
DB: Did you have a “second birth”?
FI: Yes, twice.
DB: Could you talk about it?
FI: The first such birth was the moment I became conscious of standing before the infinity of the world order. And my turn to geometric art was an attempt to understand this infinity—I began to run a pencil along paper, to draw geometric forms, and it turned out that all these systems were already in me, they came out automatically. If you study metaphysics, you intuitively come to these forms, and it’s the same everywhere—not just in art. In 1963, I created my first moving construction, Space, Movement, Infinity, and in this it’s important to find one’s own language, without relying on authorities that might overwhelm you. From my experience, I can say that you should under no circumstances skip from your autonomous movement along unexplored paths to the opinion of authorities—this always ends badly. Many people have imitated Malevich and continue to imitate him; as before, people draw squares and quadrangles, paint them different colours. But Malevich is a self-sufficient figure, closed in on himself, like, for example, Marcel Duchamp or, in fact, any other artist. There is no continuation in repetition, it does not become an entry into the sphere of art, which allows one to feel oneself alive. I repeat: the most important thing is sensation…
And the second birth took place when I read Clifford Simak’s book The Goblin Reservation, for which I did the illustrations. In the world of this “fairytale” a black-coloured object appears unexpectedly, it resembles an obelisk, but no one can say what it is—stone, metal, it’s unclear. And a dragon lives in the object. And in the places where the black obelisk appears, miracles occur: evolution takes an entirely different direction.
DB: An opposite direction?
FI: Not necessarily an opposite direction, simply a different one. And this black object is referred to in the book as the “Artefact”—a symbol of mystery and infinity.
DB: Is this why the word “artefact” became an important symbol for you?
FI: After my encounter with the book I begin to approach my “Suprematist games, ” spontaneous games in nature, as I call them, as artefacts. I understood that I needed to continue working in this direction, and I began to think: what, to my mind, is an artefact? It is a form in which nature as a sign of infinite beginning and divine origin and the artificial object— something created by man— coexist.
DB: In which year did your first second birth take place, when you became conscious of yourself before infinity?
FI: At the start of the 1960s, I began to create geometric objects, and in 1962 my work Birth of the Vertical appeared—a kind of boundary, the ultimate expression of what I had found on my path in art. But its important to say that then it was not considered art—I had to have the courage to continue, to not react to people who said: “And what’s this? Some sticks… I could do the same.” Birth of the Vertical remains an important work for me to this day, a good metaphor, I think… the Horizontal gives rise to the vertical.
DB: Yes, I also think so. I would like to return to the Artefact —is it a category of time or space? Or is it their point of contact?
FI: Empirically, we distinguish time and space, otherwise we would be absolutely lost. But the empiricist remains unable to provide an answer to what these categories are. Albert Einstein declared that time to be relative, to change its character depending on where it runs. And space has a kind of… twistedness.
DB: Spirality.
FI: Yes, because we live in a spiral galaxy—and everything in it has a metaphysical state of spirality. That ray of light is a wave. We look at the starry night, and some physicist says: “You see this star, over the course of your life it will not change, it will burn like this, because the light from it travels a very long way.” Sunlight reaches the Earth in eight minutes, and what distance does it overcome? These are incomprehensible things, and is it our task to look into that distance, that infinity? But man is drawn in that direction. I, for example, was struck by the infinite essence of the world, and in my mind I made it commensurate, first of all, with God. I will go back to the Gospel: it is an absolutely wonderful book, one that appeals to man—after all, God took on human form. And this allowed us, who are so minute in comparison to the cosmos, to approach, if only a little, this infinity. And the most important: why am I drawn, as an artist, to what is essentially inscrutable? Speaking of the artefact, I relate to myself as to a kind of object—I remember, how I experienced this, spending my own resources, energy, life. It was…
DB: It must have been very difficult.
FI: Yes, because when a person puts all of his being into a work, he expends all his energy. And this is remarkable, because there is no hack work, only complete enthusiasm, an attempt to articulate something very important. Whether it works or not is another question, it can never be foretold, but in fact it is in this indeterminacy that man’s strength lies, his volition. It’s remarkable, how certain people, people like Malevich and Kandinsky have a phenomenal intuition—how were they able to come to their thoughts, their work?
DB: We’ve already touched one the theme of poetry, and I would like to recall certain elements characteristic of poems—scale, rhyme, and metaphor—and consider them in relation to your work. Let’s begin with the first: the works currently exhibited on GES-2’s Prospekt are striking in their scale—how important is this element for you? If you’ll allow the question, is scale significant?
FI: The question of scale arose during my work on The Architecture of Autonomous Artificial Systems in Cosmic Space. On the basis of my concept of the spiral I created a cosmic necklace that girdles the Earth, and this phantasmagoria was a notion of maximal scale.
When I lived in a communal apartment, in a seventeen square meter room, with my mother, children, and innumerable neighbours, I drew all my constructions on my knees, and, of course, I couldn’t work in large formats. I formulated everything on scraps of paper, scribbles… It was only later—significantly later—that Polina Ivanova Lobachevskaya appeared in my life, the person who proposed realising all of this at GES-2. I had to await the opening of the exhibition to see my works in large format. Each construction is based, first of all, on my metaphysical feelings.
DB: Let’s turn to rhyme.
FI: For me, the pinnacle of contemporary poetry is actually Vsevolod Nekrasov—most often he has no rhyme, because he appeals to living speech. I will admit that at the start I read his poems with effort. It was difficult. We were friends, he was a fantastic person… His death had a strong effect on me. It seemed to me that life had lost something, that a shift had taken place. I haven’t met more people like him. He would visit the sets of the artefacts, we would talk, and I was delighted by his fantastically sober relationship to the word, inexorably exact. He had no classic, intonational rhyme, but, this said, you understood that what was before you was poetry. The assonance was somehow inward, hidden. How does this happen? One could, of course, compare the poetry of Vsevolod Nekrasov with the Japanese haiku, but, honestly speaking, I don’t believe in the truth of such parallels, because he didn’t belong to that tradition. It’s the same with Van Gogh—yes, his paintings were inspired by Japanese art, but it was his vision.
DB: And the third question, about metaphor. I know this could be considered endlessly, but let’s try to be succinct. What is metaphor for you?
FI: Metaphor is the meaning of life for an artist. It allows for the prolongation of the elusive, fleeting phenomenon of life.
DB: Could we say in this instance that reality is the human lot, and metaphor—communion with God?
FI: I am not a philosopher, but I think you could put it that way. It’s no accident they call art divine: divine Mozart, divine Raphel…
DB: Divine Infante!
FI: That we will know later, when all the “i”s will have been dotted. The most important thing is to be alive. I remember, thirty or forty years ago, everyone was shouting: “Art is dead, the artist has died…” But it’s even more terrible when an artist is dead in life, when there is nothing at all in his art. Probably, this emptiness can be compensated for with words, but the “enchanted shore” Blok wrote about will prove unattainable.
DB: Could the reason lie in the fact that today divine accident is lost?
FI: Of course, accident must be let into the space of art, as it was, for example, in the work of the director Federico Fellini. That’s why his films turned out remarkably, were so alive. The artist is always the one who creates, and in art one ought to do rather than speak.