Evgeny Yufit

Evgeny Yufit is better known as a film director, but he was consistently and notably present on the Leningrad/Saint Petersburg art scene from the 1980s through the 2010s. The founder of “necrorealism” in film and in visual art, he exhibited his work with the New Artists (Новые художники) group throughout their active period (1982–92) and was part of the first cohort of young artists whose works were acquired by the State Russian Museum in the early 1990s. The list of exhibitions in which he took part is longer than his filmography, and the rhetoric and semantics of his paintings, graphics, and photographic works have occupied art historians and scholars of visual culture for several decades.

Yufit, whose father was a radio engineering and metrology specialist, graduated from the Higher Institute of Technology at the Leningrad Metal Plant in 1984. He’d studied mechanical engineering, but by the time he left the institute, Yufit was already drifting away from mechanics and factory work, applying his technical acumen toward photography and cinematography, as well as methods of developing film. As legend has it, the first “experiments” of Yufit and his friends began in the late 1970s. Descriptions of the future necrorealists’ early projects are ambiguous, a result of the fact that all the information comes from the participants themselves, and almost all of it lacks documentation. For instance, group lore holds that in 1978, seventeen-year-old Yufit and his friends held an “action” that was unplanned, unpremeditated, and not even called an “action” by the group. The teenagers had been hanging around outside of a movie theater during a screening they had no chance of seeing, since there was a long queue waiting for tickets. At some point, an administrator of the theater offered the boys the coveted tickets in exchange for shoveling the snow by the theater entrance. At first everything went according to plan, but once they’d been working for a while, Yufit, and then the rest of his friends, took off their clothes and ended up half naked, some above the waist, others below. At this point, they stopped shoveling the snow and instead started throwing it around. Visually, of course, this was a powerful gesture: bare torsos and legs, a whirlwind of snow, wild screams, freezing temperatures. The people waiting in line took an interest in the proceedings, and when it seemed like a scandal was about to occur, the boys ran off. This sounds like an innocent prank, but it happened toward the end of the Era of Stagnation, when anything outside of the bounds of normalcy attracted attention and drew questions from the authorities.

As spontaneous actions of this sort began to occur more often, they started being called “experiments,” which grew increasingly original. Much later, the necrorealists (in addition to Yufit, the group contained Vladimir Kustov, Andrei Mertvyi (Kurmayartsev), Evgenii Debil (Kondratiev), Yuri Tsirkul (Krasev), and others) explained their actions by suggesting that they’d wanted to get a reaction from passersby—to offer these accidental viewers something that went beyond social stereotypes, to lure them into a place where logic didn’t apply. Soon enough, they began planning the experiments in advance. Around 1982, someone from the group acquired an old copy of Atlas of Forensic Medicine by Eduard von Hoffmann (Saint Petersburg, 1890), a heavy tome with 193 color illustrations. Familiarizing themselves with the atlas and other books about anatomical pathology and forensic medicine became a favorite hobby of the group, sometimes providing material for a new “experiment.” Members of the group would read and loudly comment on these books in a crowded metro car, drawing the desired reaction from the public, who were outraged and frightened by the fact that, right next to them, people sat discussing wounds, methods of murder, and the marks of heavy beatings.

Another acquisition that contributed to the group’s actions was an old medical mannequin retired from the Institute of Forensic Medicine; they called the mannequin Zurab. Zurab was the size of an adult male and made from a material that allowed his limbs to be manipulated. When dressed, Zurab could easily be mistaken for a real person from a distance. The necrorealists held many actions that involved Zurab. The most famous of them were the scenes they performed by the railroad tracks. These locations were selected specifically so that the train’s driver and passengers could see what was happening, but were unable to interfere. Sometimes, people from the train saw a group of people beating up poor Zurab; other times, a fight broke out, with the fighters wielding knives that glinted in the light of the train; or there were male figures moving rhythmically along the field. Other actions in the group’s repertoire included staged mass brawls, which passersby could see through windows. They walked down the streets wearing old military uniforms and bloody bandages (they’d used tomato paste for blood). There were also unexpected, soul-rending cries emitted by sad-looking men who, until that point, had blended in with a rush hour crowd of Soviet citizens, none of them too happy themselves.

The next stage in the development of necrorealism was Yufit’s acquisition of an 8mm hobby video camera (1982–83). The experiments began to be filmed, and these unsanctioned film and photo shoots drew the attention of some odd people at the KGB, though in the end this came to nothing more than instructive conversations at the local police station. In 1984, Yufit founded the unofficial experimental film studio Mdjalalafilm. The titles of the first films made at the studio speak for themselves: Санитары-оборотни [Werewolf Nurses] (1984); Лесоруб [The Woodcutter] (1985); Мочебуйцы-труполовы [Urinebusters-Corpse Catchers] (1985, dir. Andrei Mertvyi); and Вепри суицида [Suicide Boars] (1988). In 1987–88, Yufit had an internship in Alexander Sokurov’s film school at the Lenfilm studio, and in 1991, he made his feature-length debut at Lenfilm: a move called Папа, умер дед Мороз [Daddy, Father Frost Is Dead], which received some critical attention and screened at several festivals. By the end of the 1980s, Yufit had become one of the most important figures in “parallel” (independent) cinema.

The precise date on which the term “necrorealism” first came into being is uncertain, but the term’s initial meaning would be crystal-clear to contemporaries who cared to give it some thought: “necro” (death) juxtaposed with “realism,” which in the USSR, for the past fifty years, could only be “socialist.” But socialism was decomposing in plain sight, along with the physical deaths of the leaders of the Communist Party. The period between 1980 and 1985 saw the deaths of three General Secretaries of the Party, four members of the Politburo, and two leaders of the Communist Parties of the Union Republics. People called the period “the five-year plan for lavish funerals,” and the endless days of mourning, with sad classical music on the radio and TV, funeral horns and salutes, and the quite reasonable anticipation of the next Communist Party death (since most of the members of the CPSU Central Committee were elderly) all gave rise to a multitude of jokes and a degree of mental toughness regarding the idea of death. The emergence of necrorealism seemed to its creators, and to many onlookers, to be a totally natural process—necrorealism made visible everything that was already in the air, equating the death and decay of the body to the same processes occurring on a society-wide scale.

The best definition of necrorealism was offered by the film critic Sergei Dobrotvorsky: “The necrorealism of the early 1980s was, in essence, the healthy reflection of popular culture, which was doing away with the taboos of the Stagnation period through a grotesque dance of death.” [1] Later writers on necrorealism have tended toward Freudian psychoanalytical perspectives (Viktor Mazin, Olesya Turkina) or toward characterizing the necrorealists as actors of “outsideness,” a position that allowed the group to exist simultaneously inside and outside the system (Alexei Yurchak). This approach is a fitting way to analyze Soviet society in the era of late Stagnation, since it emphasizes the sore spots of public discourse. Yurchak’s “irony of outsideness” [2] concept does characterize necrorealist practices, but this concept alone doesn’t explain the specifics of their visual language, and Yurchak is certainly wrong to separate the “experiments” from their other artistic practices, like actions and performances. Yurchak relies too much on the artists he’s interviewing, forgetting that the necrorealists themselves are masters of irony (or stiob).

Necrorealism is a merry art, and that’s exactly how it was perceived during its inception and development. American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino had not yet taught audiences to laugh at rivers of blood when the necrorealists were already getting their trupaki [dead guys] to pummel one another, while zombie makeup transformed their faces into poor, dumb, and very funny homages to the solemn heroes of German expressionism. The artistic names of the necrorealists (Mertvyi [Corpse], Debil [Idiot], Trupyr’ [Dead Dumb]) weren’t meant to frighten, but to reflect the new culture of the courtyards, where such nicknames were given to close friends and neighbors.

At first glance, Yufit’s photographs and paintings seem to share the aesthetic of his films. His most famous photograph is Composition No. 2 (1991, in the collection of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg), in which a line of men in identical black suits wander between slender trees. Dobrotvorsky mockingly notes that the “the procession is led by a man who looks like Yeltsin, while the spitting image of Godard brings up the rear,” but that’s when the image is seen on a large screen. When seen as a photograph, this shot reads more like a rhythmic progression from nowhere to nowhere. Composition in general is important in Yufit’s photography and painting. His favorite figure is the circle, and his color scheme is almost always black and white. He frequently uses countertyping, the transfer of an image from negative to positive. Until the middle of the 1990s, Yufit’s work was characterized by a view from behind, from the position of a witness rather than a participant. Hence the many compositions that place the viewer above the subject of the photo, looking down, a situation of noninvolvement.

People are almost totally absent from his works from the 1990s to the 2010s. The series Немой горизонт [Mute Horizon] and Долгожитель [Long-Lived] are complicated compositions of unearthly-seeming landscapes. In the series Возрождение [Renaissance], if a person does appear, he or she is somewhere in the background, naked, tiny, almost blending in with the scenery. Yufit returned to painting late, around 2007. His painting-shots were replaced by “zoomorphs” (Yufit’s term), as in his early paintings, but instead of people, the zoomoorphs are pseudo-ornaments. For example, what’s more ornamental than a cell, which divides infinitely? In this way, the chaos and absurdism of necrorealism were finally defeated by ideal structures and a flight toward the beautiful line of the horizon.

Kira Dolinina

Translated from Russian by Elina Alter

Photo portrait by Igor Khadikov, used by permission

Notes:

1. Dobrotvorsky, Sergei. “Daddy, Necrorealism Is Dead.” In Seance 7, 1992.

2. Yurchak, Alexei. “Dead Irony: Necroaesthetics, ‘Stiob,’ and the Anekdot.” In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005: 238–81.