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When communism fell back in 1991, Russian artists lost their favorite target - and the central focus of their work. These days, confronted with a squishy democracy, artists are turning out personal, narrative works - stuff that would have been squashed by the old regime.
"Now that the Soviet Union is over, artists are trying to recapture a sense of what it means to be Russian," explains area printmaker Dennis O'Neil. He should know -- for the last decade, he's presided over Russian American artist exchanges through the Moscow Studio project and, more recently, his Hand Print Workshop International in Alexandria. Many artists, he says, have responded by "inventing personal mythologies."
You'd be hard-pressed to find a better -- or more literal -- example of the recent fixation on legend than the drawings of Moscow artist Leonid Tishkov. For more than 10 years, the 47-year-old artist has drawn scenes from the lives of his kooky vodolazes (deep-sea divers) - over and over again. Although many of his drawings and screen prints speak to particulars of the Russian psyche, his show "Vodolazes," on view now at the District of Columbia Arts Center in Adams-Morgan, isn't just a course in cultural anthropology. Many illustrate psychic conundrums most everyone will find familiar.
Why the single-minded devotion to soggy heroes? "I use to explain different social and psychological problems," Tishkov tells me in fragmented English. "For me, deep-sea diver is a form of language. The pictures are like parables, or poems."
Call them odes to discomfort. These divers aren't suited up in the latest Lycra freedom fabric; their outfits haven't been high tech since Jules Verne published "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." These are bulky diving suits capped by bulbous metal helmets punctuated by tiny glass faceplates and oxygen tubes that trail off beyond the drawing's frame like some cosmic umbilical cord. According to Tishkov's lore, vodolazes are the elicate subconscious requiring shelter from psychic pain; their suits protect them from the hostile environment of daily living.
Sounds like the stuff of frothy soap operas. Thankfully, Tishkov's surreal humor takes the edge off the melodrama. In the 40-odd India ink drawings in this show, he's put his divers in all sorts of wacky situations - some absurd, where stick-straight vodolazes float through the air like autumn leaves; others show them acting like watery gremlins, goofing off in someone's bathtub. Like his hero, macabre cartoonist Charles Addams,
Tishkov has created his own breed of mostly harmless - but undeniably weird - monsters. And like Addams, his style is illustrative, too - characters are outlined and filled in with washes of gray and occasional splashes of color. The drawings are then captioned in Russian in Tishkov's shaky script, and translated to English below in neat gray type. The prints, presented on DCAC's walls in groups of 12 or 15, could be a suite of New Yorker cartoons.
These drawings may look like comics, but they act like rinks. Prints such as "He thinks that he's walking along an endless seabed," in which a vodolaz sleepwalks across a rocky countryside with his head stuck in a fish tank, point out prickly psychic conundrums. It's a vision of single-mindedness, that, according to the artist, is a particularly Russian predilection.
For the most part, Russia's woes are the same as most veryone's. "Russian and American looks different only on the outside," Tishkov says. The artist knows this much from experience -- he went to medical school before becoming an artist. Although he quickly traded scalpel for paintbrush, he
left medicine figuring that if the innards are the same, so is the psyche.
Those bulky wet suits are just window dressing, he says. "When open window for deep-sea diver, it's the same."
Despite Tishkov's pluralist intentions, a number of his drawings end up lost in translation. Even with the artist as cultural tour guide, I didn't get the image with a birch tree growing out of the diver's helmet. The piece is supposedly a riff on Russian nationalist fervor (the birch being the Russian state tree).
Sometimes not getting the joke is the whole point. One drawing has a big vodolaz, fat and happy under an umbrella during a rainstorm; two littlevodolazes crouch up top, shivering as they get pelted. The caption, "The little Vodolaz up top is soaked through, but the big one underneath is as dry as can be," seems obvious enough. Turns out the duh-factor is intentional: Russians accept inequality unblinkingly. Class stratification is as unremarkable as a weather report.
Tishkov's images add up to a portrait of Russian society taken from a decidedly unflattering angle. The handful of divers sitting on rocks looking down at their feet while "Waiting for the Flood" might as well be expecting Godot.
These divers are good-natured, but weary and slumbering. Tishkov shows us a society making do with the oldest technology - and drowsy from lack of oxygen.
Jessica Dawson
(special to The Washington Post)
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