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Five years ago, local artist Leonid Tishkov took flight - in a high-ceilinged Stockholm exhibition hall, inside what appeared to be a giant red foot with wings and a very small head, while similarly costumed actors danced on the floor below. The audience was enthusiastic, if dumfounded, by the performance - one that is not unusual for Tishkov.
"They thought that either the world had gone mad, or that the author of the performance was making fun of people with too many ideas in their heads," Tishkov said.
Or possibly both. Tishkov's world, at least, is populated by the absurd and the grotesque, including, most prominently, the flying, foot-like creatures, which he calls Dabloids. The Dabloids, who he says haunt his dreams, are accompanied in his imaginary world by the faceless Deep-Sea Divers, the Stomachs and a race of beings who live inside the trunks of his sketches of elephants.
In addition to his working as an artist for the last 14 years, Tishkov's various professional incarnations have included museum curator, caricaturist, publisher, gastroenterologist and science editor at a medical encyclopedia. His artistic media today includes pen-and-ink drawings, paintings, stage plays ("Dabloids" was staged several times in the United States during the 1990s), video art, stuffed toys, illustrated pamphlets ("Living in the Trunk" in 1991 and "Stomachs in Sadness" in 1995 are two of the dozen he's published), stuffed toys, wearable art and even tablecloths and napkins printed with drawings of intestines.
But it is the surreal, fairy-tale adventures of the Dabloids, the Divers and the inhabitants of the elephant trunks that pervade his work, which since 1989 has combined this fantasy world with the comparative reality of folk tradition and religion.
Tishkov was born in 1953 in a small town called Nizhniye Sergi in the Ural Mountains. He graduated from Moscow's Sechenov Medical College in 1979, at which time he went to work as a caricaturist and book illustrator for six years. After working for one year as a medical doctor and two years at the encyclopedia, Tishkov left medicine to become a full-time artist.
He began what he calls his "never-ending novel about the Dabloids" in 1990.
"They came to me in a dream, settling in my brain and taking up residence in my consciousness," he said during an interview in his southern Moscow studio last week.
In Tishkov's world, the Dablus, a milk-colored oval-shaped form, appeared somewhere in the Ural Mountains in 1990, and gave birth soon thereafter to the Dabloids, small creatures that resemble red human feet with very small heads where the ankle might have been. Each Dabloid, Tishkov said, is paired with a human companion for life, sharing his consciousness and comforting him in times of difficulty, much like a favorite toy or a pet.
"The Dablus appeared in Russia during a period of transition from one political system to another [just after the demise of the Soviet Union], when society found itself in a state of confusion, unrest and distress," Tishkov wrote in a 1997 press release about the Dabloids. "And that is how [the phenomenon of the Dabloids] appeared to bring order to the psychological chaos: by substituting political and social myths with Dabloids."
Tishkov incorporates tales and beliefs from various world religions in his stories of the Dabloids, creating his own fantastic mythology. The story of the Dabloids has parallels, according to Tishkov, in Urals folklore, Chinese hieroglyphs, Mahayana Buddhism and Russian Orthodox worship of the
Virgin Mary - parallels including, but not limited to, the fact that the Dablus resembles a cushion on which the Virgin Mary is seated on in many icon depictions, and that the Dabloid's stress-relieving function is similar to that of Mahayana Buddhist mantras.
But if Tishkov likens one's personal Dabloid to a loyal pet, he said foreign Dabloids can actually be dangerous, a fact he demonstrated in the 1998 short video "War With the Dabloids" (Voina s Dabloidami). "Dabloids do not let us know the real nature of things," Tishkov wrote in a manifesto he released in 1999 to promote his work. "Your mind has been controlled since the very moment you were born. They placed Dabloids into your immature brain. When we can recognize this, we have already acquired our Dabloids. But there is still time left to recognize the parasites and clear our minds of them."
Themes of struggle with one's own subconscious are also present in Tishkov's work that focuses on other imaginary beings, in particular the Divers, or Vodolazy. Inspired by a childhood memory of divers dragging the bodies of drowned scuba divers out of a lake, Tishkov draws his Divers (at lower left) as mere black wet suits that appear to have no wearer inside.
Only when the Diver sheds its exterior, or wet suit, he said, can it achieve freedom and understanding. "We are all Divers. We are released in time with the unwinding of the umbilical cord, and it drags us away to the bosom of the Divers' big momma, where we throw away our diving suits and become who we always were."
In many of the drawings, Divers battle the substitution of culture for self, as in "The Suffocating Leading the Unseeing" and "Having Come Under the Influence of McDonald's Philosophy, the Diver Turns Into a Big Mac."
Others hark back to that terrible memory of the drowning victims, such as "A Friendly Family of Divers Goes to Submersion," where two Diver parents lead their trusting, non-Diver daughter into the water. Others are simply absurd, such as "A Diver in the Snow Means Spring is Coming," in which a skier discovers a diver half-buried in snow and draws the conclusion that spring is near.
Though Tishkov has been exhibiting his work on the Divers, the Dablus, the Dabloids and the Stomachs for more than a decade, any two exhibits by the artist - even on the same theme - are rarely the same, as their content evolves constantly, with Tishkov spinning new tales for his absurd menagerie.
The entire imaginary population has been presented in drawings, videos and plays screened and exhibited all over Russia and Europe and in a dozen cities in the United States and Latin America. In the capital, the New Tretyakov Gallery's permanent collection of contemporary Russian art also contains some of Tishkov's work, including several drawings and paintings of the Dabloids and the Stomachs. His work is held abroad at collections in Illinois, at Duke University in North Carolina and in a number of German galleries.
Despite the wide exposure of Tishkov's work, however, his restless creatures are not content to live only on paper, canvas and videotape.
They pushed him, he said, to create a "social installation" as well, and in 1993 he established the noncommercial Dablus Fund "for greater activity toward the Dabloidization of the world." One of its first stated, but unrealized, goals was to place a monument to the Dabloids on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, in the spot where the statue of the feared secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky once stood.
Despite the real-world chores of running the Dablus Fund - now called the Dablus Foundation, the nonprofit, privately funded foundation organizes group exhibits, book printings and generally promotes Dablus and Dabloid in Russia and abroad - Tishkov still regularly retreats into in his fantasy world of internal organs and enigmatic entities.
"I continue into a fantastical, critical world. For me, the surrounding world is half-made," he said, seated on a couch in his studio, among stuffed Dabloids, Divers and an anatomically accurate heart.
Pointing to one of his wearable art items, a shiny boxer's robe labeled "DSD" - short for Deep Sea Diver - he said: "You can see the robe, but you have to know the rest. The picture is pretty, but it is not enough. You need the story."
Tishkov's work is currently on display at the Slought Foundation of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at the Washington's Corcoran Art Gallery. His next local exhibit opens at the New Manezh Gallery in May.
By Megan Merrill
The Moscow Times, 2003, April
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