TOTART

TOTART was the artist duo of Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, who started working together on a series of performances in the late 1970s. Each artist also produced hundreds of paintings, collages, and pieces in other media, apart from TOTART’s main body of work.

Abalakova and Zhigalov first met in 1962 and married in 1969. Both originally hail from Central Russia. Abalakova was born in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, to a family of intellectuals, and studied European languages since childhood, while also dabbling in painting. Zhigalov’s mother was lucky enough to board the early evacuation train from Leningrad in 1941, while heavily pregnant, and gave birth to the future artist near the town of Arzamas in the municipality of Gorky. Both artists studied to become philologists. After graduation, Abalakova briefly worked as a teacher of French and then embarked on her first trip to Central Asia in the position of “artist-copyist.” Zhigalov’s first creative pursuit was poetry, but after the series of political and cultural events in Moscow of the 1950s and ’60s (Khruschev’s report on Stalin’s “cult of personality,” the International Youth and Student Festival, the American Expo in Sokolniki, and so on), he experimented with abstraction under the influence of Polish and Czech constructivism.

Early non-collaborative work by Abalakova and Zhigalov could not be more different. In the case of Abalakova, there is a clear continuation of Soviet postimpressionism in her pearly white landscapes of the neighboring landfills and exuberantly colorful still lifes. Zhigalov, conversely, has tried several styles and methods of postwar modernism, from abstract expressionism to geometric abstraction, settling down on irreverent analytical explorations of Malevich’s Black Square (1915). Unlike his older peers in Kabakov’s circle, Zhigalov cultivated “a destructive and pessimistic relationship to the high ‘spirituality’ of Russian art and in particularly to Russian Constructivism.” [1]

Their collaborative entity, TOTART (i.e., “total art”), was subtitled “Explorations into the Essence of Art as Applied to Life and Art” and called for a radical blurring of lines between everyday existence and artistic gestures. In their mission statement, the duo listed the “issues of importance”: “The boundary and definition of art (by means of artistic provocations); the merging of life and art and the intrusion of life into art (programmed and accidental situations); the relationship between artist and the audience (subject-object-work-audience-viewer etc.); art as a means of communication (an artistic event as a stimulus to creative contact and decision making); a work of art as an open-closed system (an autonomous self-regulating system that is not destroyed by outside intrusions); art in its social surroundings (engagedness; ‘order’ and ‘chaos’; art as the society ‘free convertible currency’; art as the ‘erogenous zone’ of the social body; art in condition of freedom and captivity etc.).” [2]

As seen in the work itself, this meant an exploration of the private sphere and the dynamics of their familial relationship in ways that were unknown in the underground scene, which, at the time, upheld a strict separation between the mundane and precarious daily existence and the sphere of conceptually elaborate artistic quests. To that end, they transformed their apartment into “a continuously active center of alternative culture, where happenings, seminars, and artists’ meetings took place.” [3] In 1981, for example, they manifested their newborn daughter Eva as their “best artwork.” A year later, TOTART participated in the legendary exhibition APTART (portmanteau of “apartment” and “art”) with a philosophical readymade of a chair with a label that admonished the visitors: “This chair is not for you—this chair is for everyone.” A bold send-up of the populist agenda of Soviet official art, the piece became one of the landmark examples of Moscow Conceptualism.

Also in 1982, Zhigalov got a job as a superintendent of an apartment building in a Moscow suburb, turning this relatively lucrative gig into a complex conceptual piece. He exploited the double meaning of “work” as a job and a piece of art and conducted several public actions in the city space for which he employed the apartment dwellers and the underground community of artists. Together, they planted the “Avant-garde alley” and went out for the “Golden Sunday,” during the course of which the courtyard benches, picket fences, and trash bins were painted gold. Unfortunately, this last action was too visible, so consequently Zhigalov got arrested and briefly placed in a psychiatric facility.

TOTART’s activities oscillated between highly intricate, ritualistic durational performances (Burial of a Flower, 1980; Golden Room, or 16 Positions for Self-Identification, 1985, ZAM, 2011.023.040) and simple, iconic works. An example of the former would be We Polish the Parquet (Floor Sweepers) (1984, ZAM, PH01761.014), where an audience of friends and colleagues was invited to observe, though a peephole, the pair slowly sweeping the floor with feet mops while they performed a partial striptease. On the other end of the spectrum, In 1984, they went out in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Moscow and unfurled a banner that proclaimed: “Art is impossible in this cold.” As art historian Andrey Kovalev saw it, in this performance “the artist-character almost comically laments his sad fate, as if continuing the endless kitchen conversations of potential ways of producing ‘art of international quality.’” [4] It is ironic, therefore, that after 1991 and the opening of borders, TOTART has dramatically decreased production of new work, while their widely known pieces from the 1980s have traveled internationally to feature in numerous group shows and surveys of Moscow underground art.

Apart from TOTART, both artists were producing powerful paintings and drawings independently. Abalakova layered bits of paint, printed materials, and glue in her series Summa Archaeologiae, a riff on Thomas Aquinas’s foundational scholastic argument of Summa Theologiae. In her contemporaneous explanation, creating the series was like “breaking Duchamp’s Large Glass after somebody has already smashed it.” [5] A series titled Voyage to the Edge of Democracy (1990) recycled printed Chinese and North Korean propaganda in a sarcastic nod to society’s aspirations during perestroika.

In the late 1980s, Zhigalov dabbled in “new wave” figuration, combining gigantic hand gestures with austere modernist grids. In 1990, Zhigalov made a surprising turn to pop art and made several remarkable paintings that faithfully copied Soviet packaging design of basic products, like salt, oatmeal, or eggs.

Valentin Diaconov

Photo portrat: We polish the parquet, 1985. Documentation of performance. ZAM. PH01761.014

Notes

1. Anatoly Zhigalov, “Autobiography,” in Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov: Works 1961–1989. Third Eye Gallery, Glasgow (Moscow: E. V. Vutechich All-Union Artistic Production Association, 1989). Republished.

2. Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, “TOTART Project: Explorations into the Essence of Art as Applied to Life and Art,” in Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov: Works 1961–1989. 

3. Abalakova, “Autobiography.”

4. Andrey Kovalev, “Na takom kholode iskusstvo nemyslimo” [Art is impossible in this cold], in TOTART: Natalia Abalakova, Anatoly Zhigalov (Moscow: Meier Publishing, 2012), 118.

5. Natalia Abalakova, “Total'noye Khudozhestvennoye Deystviye i ‘Summa Archaeologiae,’” [Total artistic action and “summa archaeologiae”], 1982.