Grisha Bruskin

Grisha Bruskin’s work possesses the clearly articulated qualities of a personal artistic system: a unified poetics, consistent motifs, recurring characters, and general compositional schemas. His work includes several large-scale, time-consuming projects. These are: 1) an existential project related to the “boundary” state of the individual; 2) an ideological one framing the “Soviet” as a vanished civilization; 3) an ethnic one constructing a Jewish visual mythology; and 4) a futuristic one detailing the fusion of the hopes and dangers of the past, present, and future. All of Bruskin’s global projects are devoted to the themes of memory, history, and myth, and they proceed from the metaphorical framing of the book and the theater as prototypes of the world. In most of these, the method of artistic research is based upon the discovery of incorruptible and universal “matrices” of social behavior—the axioms, the idioms, the commonplaces—and his work is oriented toward certain visual and textual forms: lexicons, dictionaries, alphabets, primers, and instructions. He reduces his objects to signs, but his art nevertheless connects emotionally with the viewer, because he relies on his personal memories, feelings, and experiences.

Bruskin’s development has followed an idiosyncratic trajectory, and though this has brought him into contact with both sots art and conceptualism, it is difficult to classify him as fitting squarely into either of these categories. Indeed, while he has engaged in an analytical examination of Soviet ideology, identifying its mythic symbols and interrogating its mechanisms, he does not parody or demean them. Rather, he has viewed the past with a sorrowful, even despairing comprehension, as a historical trauma that spared no one. In general, Bruskin’s principal interests coincide with those of conceptualism: treating image as text, including verbal commentary in the artistic image, embodying the dependence of meaning on context, of image on idea, of work on consciousness “stricken” by ideology. He also deploys techniques and optics widespread in conceptualism (tautological repetition, serialism, reduction of objects to concepts, etc.). However, he does not limit himself to intellectual operations, to the “bare idea.” Rather, aesthetic details beyond the typical ambit of conceptualism remain extremely important to him, including the meaningfulness of the final result, the “constructedness” of form, the quality of material, and the perfection of execution. It is through the metaphor of the “theater of memory,” elaborated by the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giulio Camillo, that Bruskin’s art can be understood. This metaphor has been repeatedly invoked by authors writing about Bruskin (especially Silvia Burini and Ekaterina Bobrinskaia), as well as by the artist himself, who used the term as the title of one of the “chapters” of the total narrative in his exhibition Change of Scenery at the State Tretyakov Gallery in 2022.

Bruskin’s entry into artistic life came early and was quite conventional. In 1966, he participated in the Seventh Youth Exposition, and in 1969, he joined the Painting Section of the USSR Union of Artists. By this time, however, Bruskin was already feeling out his own path, which diverged from the USSR’s official creative and behavioral standards. Gradually, he made his entrance into the circle of unofficial art, while keeping largely to himself until the late ’70s and early ’80s, when he befriended poets Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007) and Lev Rubinstein (1947–2024) and began growing close with artists Rostislav Lebedev (b. 1946) and Boris Orlov (b. 1941).

Until perestroika, Bruskin kept himself almost totally uninvolved in the notorious actions of the nonconformists, and he came to public attention later than many of the artists of his and even the next generation. For a long time (from 1976 to 1983), his primary venues were exhibitions mounted by the Sculptors’ Club and the Painters’ Club, which both maintained a nonconformist orientation despite the strictures of “registration” with the authorities. One such exhibition included Fragment, a painting that would prove foundational for Bruskin. Bruskin’s solo exhibitions (Union of Artists, Vilnius,1983; Central House of Art Workers, Moscow, 1984) were shut down by cultural bureaucrats for ideological reasons. Perestroika brought Bruskin fame, if not glory: at the exhibition The Artist and the Contemporary (Na Kashirke exhibition hall), filmmaker Miloš Forman purchased the first part of Bruskin’s Fundamental Lexicon; a year and a half later, the second part was sold at a legendary Sotheby’s auction in Moscow for the record sum of $416,000. Before long, Bruskin emigrated to America, where he was signed by one of the most prestigious galleries in New York, Marlborough Gallery, which in 1990 mounted a solo show of his work.

This “existential project” has a long history, beginning with the paintings of the 1980s and culminating in his 2012 sculptural cycle On the Edge, created twenty years after his “ideological” productions. Bruskin’s works evoke questions about the universal basis of inward, “authentic” human existence, about personality as such in its unique existential experience, about the fundamental realities that give rise to feelings of fear, horror, and anxiety (alienation, loneliness, “abandonment-in-the-world,” awareness of one’s own mortality, existing in a “liminal state,” freedom of choice and the burden of responsibility it carries with it). An important role within this project is played by the painting Fragment (1980, ZAM, 1998.1331.001–009), which consists of nine completely identical pictorial compositions fitted precisely together. Bruskin here closely approaches the form of his new painting (later he would call it “a special painting”): rows of similar, autonomous images, the uplifting and demonstrative stasis of anonymous figures that have lost their individuality, elementary abstraction of the place of action, specific relationships connecting the fragment to the whole. Bruskin depicts a person standing on the edge of a mountain, one leg dangling in the air. This motif becomes a recurring metaphor, a marker of the existential in the artist’s work—after all, the fundamental theme of existentialist philosophy is the person in a liminal state, someone standing “on the edge,” and Bruskin has managed as no one else to find a visual formula for representing this complex state.

In 1986, Bruskin painted Fundamental Lexicon (one part of which, III, is housed at the Zimmerli Art Museum, 1995.0887). In it, he focuses on the mechanism of power and the social order it creates. The “Soviet world” appears here as a specific social mythology, artificially constructed. Imagining the addressees of his work as residents of the future encountering an unfamiliar civilization, he takes on the role of a witness-decipherer, hence the choice of a “fundamental lexicon”—i.e., a set of basic images and concepts—as his form, and his use of the compositional matrix. The motif of the grid serves to inhibit the image’s mimetic potential, emphasizing its conceptual, lexicographic qualities. The grid also doubles as a metaphor for a totalitarian society, disciplined and regimented, without free will. Each individual cell fits the pattern of unified persona plus symbolic accessory. The sculptural aspect of each figure is frozen in a state of “anxious astonishment” (the artist’s words): white paint, uniform shaping and arrangement, stable location. The one sign of differentiation is the symbolic accessory, which, acting as a kind of pass, is presented by the character to someone standing outside the canvas. Appearing in color, these attributes, salvaged from the arsenal of Soviet symbology, accentuate the characters’ ghostly unreality. The painting shows us an iconostasis paradoxically combined with an honor board, a pantheon with a panopticon.

In the same period, Bruskin created Logies, a kind of variant “periodic table” of the Soviet system. Here, each cell contains not a “unit” but rather an ordered “grouping” of five figures, walking in circles like wind-up toys. The Zimmerli Art Museum houses an early example of one of these groups. It is curious that, among the attributes of Soviet affiliation in the Logies, we find strange, surreal images that seem to stand out. This gesture, accentuating the absurdity of events and discrediting Soviet symbology, at the same time assimilates them into a general mythological context, once again postulating a kinship between Soviet ideology and archaic religious practices. In parallel with the Fundamental Lexicon and the Logies, Bruskin was working on another project, Birth of a Hero (the mythic archetype of the hero being one of the primary resources for propaganda and patriotic education in the USSR), for which he created actual sculptures of those depicted in his paintings. “Typical representatives” of the Soviet people find themselves in the company of fantastical beasts—six-winged seraphim, fallen angels, evil demons. Early versions of both types of creature are housed at the Zimmerli Art Museum (D12244.01–04).

Bruskin’s project General Instruction (1993), represented at the Zimmerli by a series of lithographs (1994.0275.001–072), ironically borrows the illustration style of handbooks on safety engineering and civil defense to create a Soviet Book of Genesis—a set of rules and regulations designed to instill emotions like fear, anxiety, submissiveness, dependence, and obedience. The vocabulary and semantics of a bureaucratic document turn out to be the vocabulary and semantics of public life, a way to model both social relations and individual connections, while strictly situational instructions bode ill in their universal regimentation of the entirety of human life. General Instruction provides the clearest image of a totalitarian system, revealing the principles by which it operates and the very meaning of its existence.

 The “ideological project” culminates in the large-scale installation Archaeologist’s Collection (2001–09, exhibited in various versions). The viewer is transported to an archaeological excavation in a future that regards the Soviet Union as we do ancient Egypt. Bruskin created life-size sculptures of the characters and attributes from Fundamental Lexicon, then destroyed them, only to reassemble them from the surviving fragments, cast them in bronze, and bury them in Tuscany. He dug them up three years later, after they were imbued with a natural patina. Bruskin stands contemporary humanity before a tragic spectacle, reading the death of the Soviet state within the framework of the “end of history” or the “death of the gods.” Having felt our involvement in the drama of history, he forces us to understand the foreboding scale of events, driving us not to forget but to overcome the past.

Bruskin’s “national project” was developed at the same time (if not earlier), in intersection with his ideological project. The artist conceives a system of visual correspondences to the world of Jewish thought. He invents a nonexistent Jewish visual mythology, giving visible form to conceptions of the world, its commandments, magical knowledge, rites and rituals, sacred signs and symbols. He finds a visual structure adequate to this task (the same “special painting,” built on an endless repetition of identical elements—character, accessory, text). He creates various versions of the “alphabet” (culminating in a large textile panel made in 2006), a universal and unique “interpretive dictionary” of the Jewish spiritual tradition.

Bruskin has created his own version of Jewish symbology, combining signs and symbols with a stable visual form (menorah, star of David, matzo, the Torah, tefillin, tallit, etc.) with others of his own device. Mystical images of “pure abstraction”—angels and demons—invade the ranks of “ordinary” figures.

In 2012, Bruskin showed his sculptural installation H-Hour at Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, marking the start of a new period in his work. Here, the point of departure is the present, and the protagonist is contemporary humanity in general. The artist continues his investigations of new mythology. What occupies him is the elaboration and functioning of the myth of the enemy—the tool of all propaganda and manipulation, the basis of many collective phobias and individual fears. The impulse for the project comes from the artist’s reaction to the current crises of the 2000s: extremism, terrorist attacks, regional wars, migration crises. Here, contemporary characters are physically merged with symbolic and fantastical ones, with ancient images connecting the layer of current events with the “electricity” of mythology, eternal themes and forms “shining through” contemporary events. As in General Instruction, the style and semantics are connected with visual guides to civil defense.

Bruskin continues his exploration of contemporary apocalypse in his project Change of Scenery (2022), which portrays the irreversible onset of a perilous and unsettling new world. The artist presents the image of a new reality, in which humanity finds itself bound up with the development of digital technologies, transforming the environment, conditions of life, and social practices influencing human psychology and behavior and turning many long-established humanitarian ideas on their heads. The basic metaphor here is an image of the theater as a model of the social sphere, for which the  artist relies on the “theater of memory.” This notable analogy is not without the skepticism implied by an ironic subtext: against the backdrop of a harmonious Renaissance image of the world, the contradictions and deformations of the present stand out all the more starkly. Bruskin limns the contemporary world in an ancient language, rife with magic and mysticism, which guarantees the effect of semantic estrangement. Other, often absurd coverings enable us to better discern what is happening, what may be escaping direct observation, what is diffused in everyday experience. The turn to the ancient presents an opportunity to view the contemporary from without, in clear perspective.

Bruskin’s most current project, entitled The Great Tomorrow (2024), is a bitter science-fiction dystopia that demonstrates what the human dream of a happy future can curdle into.

Irina Karasik

Translated by Ian Dreiblatt

Photo portrait by A. Vorobiev