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Alexander Petrovichev Leonid, poetry is an indispensable element of your art. Are you focused on Khlebnikov at the moment? Leonid Tishkov Khlebnikov's poetry has surrounded me for many years. For me Khlebnikov isn't just a poet - he is an artist in the broad sense of the word. What is more, he is a work of art himself: his life was pervaded with creativity. I have always admired everything he said, written or composed. Is there much we need?
A slice of bread,
A drop of milk,
And all these clouds above
Will be our salt. Everything that we see and that surrounds us, like bread, spaghetti or salt, can be blessed with the genius of poetry. Velimir Khlebnikov was an ideal artist of the 20th century. Many artists subsequently referred to his poetry in their works. I have a video installation, Solveig, in which the sky is made of Velimir's salt. I have accompanied my kinetic installation Cicadae, which is made of cocktail straws, with a quote from Khlebnikov. Wingletting with the golden scrawl
Of its finest sinews,
The Grasshopper loaded its trailer-belly
With many coastal herbs and faiths. This sound of tiny electric engines, together with the lightest and thinnest cocktail straws, a thing always wasted, turn from rubbish into live and "thinking" reed. As Anna Akhmatova once observed: If you knew
what rubbish poems come from
Without any shame? For me, art is primarily a sublimation of poetry. Is it possible to show anything poetic and intangible with the help of visual images? The more ephemeral the material, the more it matches my understanding of poetry and life; I mean life as it is. The awareness that our existence is ephemeral and celestial and that everything is fragile and passing is a central theme in my art. A. Petrovichev Is pasta in line with this value category? L. Tishkov Absolutely. A detached look will show that vermicelli, spaghetti and pasta are rather poetic; they can be seen as a source of "unspent poetry". A. Petrovichev And how did you come across this material? L. Tishkov At first glance it all happened quite spontaneously. The door of my kitchen cupboard opened, and a pile of spaghetti fell on the table. An unusual and airy structure appeared. As an artist I could not but notice it, its elegance and architectonics. Kazimir Malevich would have described this structure as a colony of Suprematist elements created by dynamic circumstances. Next my poetic narrative approach is switched on. I do something only when I feel that the thing is poetic. I saw a very powerful image potential in pasta because constructivism and futurism came from Italy, the birthplace of pasta. Tommaso Marinetti, the founding father of futurism, was from Italy, too. Pasta is a very Futuristic material. I have studied the structure of pasta and looked it up in the Internet, searching for links to spaghetti and art. There appeared a slogan, 'Pasta is art!' It turned out that many books, articles and surveys deal with this theme. Cooks have invented so much with this product!
Pasta is the general term for the product. After scrutiny I was surprised by the correlation between the diameter of tube-like pasta, trademark calibration, length and other details. I was impressed by the uniform standards of this product. It really smacks of conspiracy and some mysticism! There is a global pasta mafia on earth as an image of the Global Government.
It all unexpectedly came together. The Budetlyanin (would-be man) Khlebnikov, Chairman of the Globe, found himself in the favorable environment of Italian-born pasta futurism. A. Petrovichev But Budetlyanins is not exactly analogous to futurism. They have the common idea, but different starting grounds and fuel. L. Tishkov Yes, I have transformed the futurist idea into the Budetlyanin one, more idealistic and less mechanical or rational than that of the Italians. After all, the Russian Budetlyanins were utopean missionaries. They dreamed of an ideal future, hence there appeared the wonderful land Ladomir (Harmonious World). My Ladomir is built of pasta. Ladomir is a world out of a dream, which exists in our imagination, because if we take this installation seriously - what sort of a material, with such a questionable future, is this? It may be questionable for futurists though, but is evident and indisputable for the Budetlyanins. If you accidentally touch the exhibit, it will fall apart, and this is what makes it poetic. This is the main idea, the idea of fragile castles in the air and their fictitiousness.
Architectons referring to Malevich's works are mirages in this case. Everything is like an apparition and phantom in this exhibit. We have Nikolay Fedorov's staircases, which an ordinary man is unable to climb, but a soaring man, that very resurrected Father, is able to go up and down. These radio towers receive radio frequencies of our souls. When we come and see the exhibition something echoes in our souls.
The shape, as if spread all over space, resembles constructivist sketches and drawings by El Lissitzky. Although utterly speculative, it exists in the ephemeral material. You can imagine whatever it is impossible to build. It is a land of imagination. The Ladomir poem is present in the exhibit as a refrain or epigraph because from there I go into other things. As Khlebnikov put it, Ladomir is a world of full harmony, inhabited by people with different skin color, intentions, and beliefs. They all come, unite and create a new shining world. This is wonderful and remarkable.
In general I think that the task of the artist is to bring the ideal to the Absolute. Others make their lives comfortable, and who is there to speak about the ideal? That is why Khlebnikov is an example for me, a flower priest, a Ghul Mullah who goes across the desert carrying his poems in a knapsack. There comes the night, he makes a fire and builds strange radio towers of dry branches to transmit his poetic revelation to all of us, who lived then and are living now.  A. Petrovichev You have molded 317 Khlebnikovs. L. Tishkov In his time Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov had a formula, according to which there should be 317 Chairmen of the Globe. He was one of the first to preach the unity of the whole world. My chairmen are made of bread - another rather complicated metaphor. Indeed, bread is an archetypical thing, and pasta is a derivative from bread, rye or wheat. There are 317 chairmen, and they spread throughout the gallery. One is sitting in an airplane, and others are climbing the stairs. This isn't the main thing. More importantly, they are made of bread and are the prototypes of chairmen of the Globe that Khlebnikov spoke about. To be more exact, these are their souls, whom I call Khlebnikovs (khleb is the Russian for bread - Translator). A. Petrovichev Do you mean that the entire exhibit will be a huge pasta installation? L. Tishkov My installation is like a hypertext. With ever more pasta pasted to build these towers, the installation begins to grow like a fractal, and the gallery turns into a strange shimmering space. Again the material is important here: it is a new esthetic approach when it is more important to use a new, even unexpected material than to produce a new shape. I am not a pioneer here: both Americans and Europeans did it. Joseph Beuys is one example. For me, the same as for him, the poetics of the material is important.
Paradoxically enough, contemporary art has a literary form both in Russia and in the West. I am dead sure of that. An artist works with the material as if it were a text. Contemporary art is searching for new plastics. It is abandoning conceptualism and practical things in favor of an abstraction. It starts seeing something new, conveyed in post-conceptualist idiom. This is where the text, information makes its appearance. The Swiss painter Thomas Hirshhorn makes fairly abstract compositions of used packets and other waste. Damian Hirst uses pills to make beautiful compositions.
All of that has a hidden meaning. Pasta too conveys a lot of information. To begin with, it is a product that is consumed in large amounts. People have to work to earn money to buy food, to work hard so as to eat well. Suddenly, there appears an artist who builds some post-constructivist objects of pasta (by the way, real Italian pasta, which is rather expensive), instead of eating it. Why? It seems to be a kind of light version of criticizing consumption, but there's no deconstruction. If you will, there is ephemerality, dematerialization, and the obliteration of the social function. It looks simultaneously topical in the world context and somehow Russian style. We are not even sure how to utilize spaghetti after the exhibition is over. Just throw it away or hand it out to old people. A. Petrovichev The West is rather reflecting, while Russian artists think in ideal categories, right? L. Tishkov And yet I see myself as an international artist: I don't draw a dividing line in this respect and find like-minded artists in different cultures. I believe it is irrelevant today to divide the artists into those of pure plastics or, say, critically minded, or else, thinking in terms of symbols. I feel I have much in common with Ilya Kabakov, for example. He has an installation, A Case in the Museum. My bread figurines are a kind of tribute to this artist. Like him, I always find it important that the exhibition visitors are not simply viewers but participants in the installation through their empathy and involvement in this world of, in my case, pasta, from which towers, stairs, monuments and "letatlins" are made. Visitors should be very careful though because exhibits are so fragile. Visitors, as it were, become Ladomir inhabitants. They should be very delicate and careful to be able to live in this sparkling tube reality made of dough.
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