Sergey Shutov
TERRATHERAPY OF RORSCHACH

(paintings, graphics)

03. 06. 10 - 04. 07. 10

Opening reception - June, 3-rd at 6 p.m.

A. Petrovichev And who, pray, is Rorschach?

S. Shutov Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In 1921 he offered a psychodiagnostic personality test that came to be known from his name as the Rorschach inkblot test. It is one of the tests used in personality and its disorder studies. A person undergoing that test is asked to interpret ten inkblots placed symmetrically in relation to a vertical axis. Every such figure prompts free associations, and the person under test should give any word, image or idea that comes to his or her mind. According to this test, personal characteristics determine what any individual sees in an inkblot. In such projective methods the test material is organized in a special way to study the personality as a whole and its individual aspects.
These methods are based on the projection mechanism, which was first discovered by Sigmund Freud and described as a process of ascribing one's unacceptable feelings and desires to an object without. Such projection is unconscious and has a protective function by easing the contradiction between man's real (unconscious) aspirations and social norms, assessments and conscious convictions. The latter account for the constitutional, which presupposes structuring the given stimuli and giving them some meaning (the Rorschach inkblot test, terratherapy)
The offered version makes it possible to establish a link between a graphical picture of a country and a percipient lover of geography. For instance, a representation of the southern part of a northern country in its north, south, east or west can have a beneficial effect on the health of its population. Or else terratherapy can be applied to industry by showing the industrially developed north on the map of the country's south. Let me cite a simple example: if the Crimea - the national health resort - had been placed in the north, south, east and west of the Soviet map, our national history would have been different.

A. Petrovichev I wish we were in the national health resort of the Crimea now. Pity it's on the other side of the axis at the moment. As for your exhibition, what was it prompted by?

S. Shutov Now that the idea of the State has exhausted itself, the fact is causing numerous neuroses and psychopathic reactions. My task is to mollify and offer therapy to the frustrated section of society. Maps as a conventionally truthful representation of the country are a perfect instrument. Distorted longitudes along the meridians, distance distortion along the parallels, distorted angles and map shapes make it possible to use cartography as an instrument of psychotherapy. And finally, the Rorschach inkblot test can be seen as a medical community response to the explosive development of artistic practice of the period.

A. Petrovichev I can't agree with your statement that the idea of the State has been exhausted. Rather lack of ideas on the part of the State has led to a deadlock. The appearance of an idea will put an end to frustrations. I wonder what caused that 'medical community response to the explosive development of artistic practice' in the period you did not specify.

S. Shutov I mean the 1920s and the 1930s when modernism and psychoanalysis triumphed as a result of the ideological and cultural discoveries between 1910 and 1920.

A. Petrovichev Do you want to say that now the artistic community has eagerly embraced methods of the medical community?

S. Shutov Artistic technologies willingly draw on medical technologies and vice versa. A member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and a training and supervising analyst of the Moscow Society of Psychoanalysts have used my work of 1979 with equal success. For example, in 1996 I staged an exhibition named Medicinal Art.

A. Petrovichev The name of the current exhibition comprises the word terratherapy. Everything is clear about therapy, but what about terra?

S. Shutov Earth has traditionally been one of the oldest medicinal agents. Soils are used in cosmetology, medicine and so on. .

A. Petrovichev As I see it, the key to understanding the unusual maps of 'medicinal' geography shown at this exhibition is somewhere near, isn't it?

S. Shutov A national map picture has long become a symbol. Everybody knows about the boot-shape peninsula of Italy. And everybody knows about the problems of the north and the south of this beautiful country. I suggest that modified representations of the country be used to soften the mores of the especially frustrated section of the population. For those who are fond of the south the southern part of the country can be placed in the north, south, east and west in order to get an 'ideal' picture of the country. Island countries of the wonderful Avallon in the ocean of base human passions.

PHOTOS OF THE EXPOSITION