Маrina Аlvitr
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov, in his work “Philosophy of the Common Cause”, writes about the need to achieve personal immortality. Death is declared an evil that must be stopped, and corporeal life is declared to be more important than the life of the spirit. Fedorov’s teaching was not popular among his contemporaries, but was influential in the future development of Russian philosophy, science, and even politics. As Tsiolkovsky would later write, the question of the Earth’s limited resources and the conquest of Space (“resettlement”) would inevitably be raised by the idea of eternal life and the resurrection of ancestors. Overcoming death becomes the idea of overcoming and subordinating Nature, as well as other planets. Mankind’s future supremacy turns out to be more important than both the past that is drowning in the darkness of religious creeds, and the present that must be sacrificed for the benefit of a great future. The ideas of cosmism support the ideas of the Soviet state and are included in the very fabric of the culture of Soviet people.
It is worth noting that Russian cosmism is not a unified teaching. The Biocosmists (Aleksander Svyatogor) built their reasoning by both relying on Nikolai Fedorov’s ideas and refuting them; for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky the idea of immortality is intrinsic to nature and energy that exists in Space and transforms from one state into another, never disappearing; Alexander Bogdanov attempted to find a biological way to prolong life. If Nikolai Fedorov’s ideas are sooner philosophical and funda mental, then subsequent thinkers endeavoured to link them with the development of technologies and reinterpret them from a practical point of view.
Thoughts about the impossibility of overcoming and conquering Nature appeared at the end of the 1960s both in Soviet culture and in the world at large. For instance, they were expressed in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films: the inevitability of falling after a short flight – the first episode in “Andrei Rublev”; the search for one’s own identity, encountering oneself – in “Solaris”; the attempt to abandon the past, everything that has been done and, perhaps through insanity, search for another path – “The Sacrifice”. Andrei Tarkovsky reflects upon the life of a modern man who, in pursuit of progress, in an attempt to get off the ground, to build something magnificent, has lost himself and his sense of the surrounding world, and disappeared like Ilya Kabakov’s hero “The Man who Flew into Space from his Apartment”.
Today the ideas of immortality are more relevant than ever. Man is again dreaming of eternal life in bliss and pleasure. However, today, he is not ready to build the future, to conquer the planets, but dreams of the present lasting endlessly. Overcoming Nature has turned into overcoming Time and the struggle with it, the creation of internal time and the creation of an inner personality that can be saved in the present moment, scanned and digitized. Such time – slow and viscous, looped in the circle of one thought, of one movement – is the stuff of Robert Wilson’s plays; it becomes a character, and people become puppets in his carnival. Their faces are hidden behind masks, they exist eternally on the border between life and death, dream and reality.
Ivan Plusch’s project deals with the concept of immortality at all three stages: he studies Nikolai Fedorov’s hope for immortality, Andrei Tarkovsky’s disillusionment with the overcoming of Nature, and Robert Wilson’s carnival. At the same time, his works are not mere illustrations of the ideas of these three, but an attempt to understand how they coexist, influence our consciousness, and how dreams of eternal life turn into nightmares of untimely death. The project is deeply embedded in the culture of contemporary Russia and, through various allegories, attempts to reveal what we have lost and what we have managed to preserve in pursuing the dream of flight.
The project contains works created in different techniques – phantoms of painting are transferred into ghostly projections on the walls. Projection, as a technique, is in itself a reflection of the ambivalence of existence in the modern world: on the one hand, it is visible, on the other, fundamentally impalpable – a flow of light, exactly how we understand what a ghost is. Painting (that is embodied) passes into the ghostly state of new technologies. The objects created by Ivan Plusch emphasise the carnivalization of the modern world: that which cannot always be perceived – exists.
