Boris Klyushnikov is a lecturer in contemporary art theory whose work explores the philosophy of contemporary art, video essayism, and the intersections of art and science fiction. He has taught at institutions including the Russian State University for the Humanities, the British Higher School of Art and Design, the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and is co-founder of the Laboratory for Art Criticism at Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art.

Lecture on weaving

Someone proposes that contemporary art is already over, and we are living in the next stage. To name this next stage, we can use the term post-contemporary, but I do not like this concept of post, because it is very similar to postmodernism, conceptualism, post-conceptualism, and I argue that it is not what is happening now. Post means reconsideration of what was in the past. It is like criticising the historicity of art. I refer to my favourite philosopher from France, François Leruel. He proposed the word non. So it is non-contemporary art that we are talking about.

What is non. François Leruel said that philosophy is a mistake, a mistake of consciousness. All philosophical systems are based on one primal thing called philosophical decision. To be a philosopher, you jump into this philosophical decision. It is the division between something and the same. To have philosophy, you split the world in two. It can be binary, dialectical, different interconnections between the two, but it is that division.

From Plato and Aristotle you have worlds of ideas and matter, of soul and divinity, and of body. We split everything in two. This idea develops the working process for the philosopher. If you read Immanuel Kant, he had the system of the thing in itself and the thing for us. Here is the main split. The whole project of Kant is based on presenting this split in everything. If you read a lot of philosophy, Hegel, Kant, and so on, at some point it is boring. Leruel sensed it and understood that what is happening in philosophy is different. What every philosopher wanted to say about the world is that every concept that he or she invented is the same as any different concept. Everything is everything.

This partage of two terms is a veil over the idea that every concept is every concept. When you understand that everything is everything, it is radical. There is no myself, there is no Borel, there is no you. I am you and you are me. The philosopher starts connecting concepts, nuancing concepts, the same as weaving, making stitches, and all of a sudden the whole system collapses. When you understand this revelation — a psychotic revelation — that everything is everything and you are doing pointless work, the system crashes. This crashing down of philosophy Leruel calls non-philosophy: when philosophy goes through this crisis and realises it is a completely different practice of false binary systems.

I think it is the same with art. In art history it is well known that art is the progress of the modern age. It was constituted as an institute during modern times in the late 18th century. The main idea of art was crystallised in Friedrich Schiller’s work. He confronted a Greek statue in a museum and realised that the statue is arrogant towards him. Who are we in comparison to Mona Lisa. We will die, we are just people, and Mona Lisa looks at us with arrogance. This arrogance is educational, because the work of art shows different connections in the previous world that no longer exist in early capitalist relations. Schiller needed to work hard as a writer for the free market. He goes to the museum, sees this statue, and she does not need to work at all. God had no job. This became the ideal of art.

Art is the object from the past that reminds you of completely different attitudes in the social system. That is how in art we confront temporality. It is the romantic, Schillerian idea of temporality. Art space is where past, present, and future go together in one point. This interconnectedness is a European idea. Romantic temporality is Eurocentric. Through this idea you see the future coming to our now and the past coming as ruins to our now. The work of art is the collision of past, present, and future. Contemporary art is the same project, because con means conjunction and temporary means conjunction of temporalities. This conjunction should make transnational capitalist culture during globalisation.

In the last 20 or 30 years it was transnational capital. The language was post-conceptual, called by some Euro-conceptualist. It was based on installation art and video essays — black boxes with films and interviews. A core of this culture. For example, Hans Hacke’s Germania at the Venice Biennale in 1994 is a critical statement about fascism, about the fascist past. Contemporary art was based on resisting fascism by post-conceptual language, because the main institutions of contemporary art — Venice Biennale, Documenta — were raised by fascists. Mussolini promoted the Venice Biennale, with the meeting of Hitler and Mussolini at an opening, and then the whole idea of national pavilions. After the Second World War, culture needed criticism of fascism in the past. They appropriated Venice and started to criticise it from the inside through historicity. Historicity became the form of art.

There is a meme: a door, police smashing it with weapons — right-wing populists, ecological crisis, wars — smashing the door, cheetahs protecting, this is contemporary art. It is funny that contemporary art is the one and only left practice to oppose fascism, but it is not working. I am a critical left-wing activist and a fan of contemporary art, conceptual and post-conceptual. After the invasion in Ukraine — I am from Moscow — it was the crash of my psyche and the world. I ran to Paris and started to work with the Biennale. I was interested in what the institute would say about what is happening in Russia and Ukraine. Nothing. You can feel the impossibility of the system to do anything.

This idea of contemporary art was then criticised by so-called post-internet art. It was the first idea of anti-post-conceptual art. Not about historicity and context. Simply aestheticism of a digitalised world. I think contemporary art ended in 2016. I remember the election of Trump. The Berlin Biennale curated by Atul Shriya was very radical, with immigrants and very politicised. Rich people did not like it. They collaborated with Discollective, the platform where fashion and internet collided in a very corporate way. The Biennale was based on simulation strategies — high-tech aesthetics from Silicon Valley — becoming a crypto coin. The nightmare started. In 2016 the scandal at LD50 showed post-internet as a platform of fascists — white supremacist artists, Trumpists — using memes and post-internet aesthetics, meta-irony, post-irony. It was reactionary exit from contemporary and post-conceptual art.

At the same time, from 2016, we see something more interesting: more works with textile, more with ceramics, and what I call spiritual abstraction. Spiritual abstraction means it is not you who is the author, it is the spirits working through you. You are the place for impulses and spirits. Surrealism becomes interesting, but not the Western Breton version, for example Afro-surrealism. African philosophers and Afro-surrealist artists say there is no future in African philosophy. The concept of future is European capitalist. Science fiction coincides with capitalism to think over consequences of technology, building utopias and dystopias, startups in literature. In African surrealism there is one world like a tapestry where past coincides with now. The past exists right now, embodied in the past.

There are three branches: ceramics, textile, and spiritual abstraction. I see more works that collide them together. This is the field now — textile and representation of fantasy based on myths of different groups. I call them non-contemporary agents. Textile, ceramics, and spirits were here before the modern idea of art. Production of human subjectivity is parallel to textile, ceramics, and shaman communication with spirits and entities.

It is trans-historical. Textile and ceramics are practices uniquely transformed by capitalism at every stage of production. Capitalism is based on weaving. The first machine is the textile machine. Women were weaving by hand, intimate, body to body. Then the machine came, and the body was delayed from the process. The gap between body and textile was transformed to card with code. Binary code emerged from this. Everything started with textile. Our capitalist system started with textile.

It is connected with colour. As an art historian I can say colour is suppressed by art historians. They go through conceptual history of art, what were the circumstances for the artist to draw the line between his world and the outer world, an ontological, Hegelian question. Colour became important only at the end of the 19th century. At the Gaby Lena Manufacture the managers realised that if you put one colour here, the next colour here, and a third colour here, they affect each other. It is the third supplementary colour. If you are interested, read Matyushin’s text on the third colour. It is connected with industrial production of textile.

Here comes a simple philosophical question. When I say red, you imagine red in your head. What is that. We never see red itself. We see a particular red under circumstances of different colours. Pure colours do not exist. Yet we make up the concept of pure colour. This is the main step in alienation. Everything is everything, but the concept of colour says this is red, this is blue. With the development of languages there are more colours in the language. Perception of colour depends on knowing the concept of colour. There is a magical connection between the concept and the textile problem.

What is the main problem of textile. My favourite textile artist, Anne Hamilton, said that textile is close to painting. In painting the canvas, the textile structure, is suppressed by the subject. Even in symbolism, the canvas is a victim of the conceptual idea of the artist, make the canvas white and then start painting. Here the colour is the thing. It is not the colour that veils the canvas as in painting, it is the colour itself. Textile is a kind of non-painting. In painting we see the division between idea and material, a binary dialectics.

What is the medium. The classic text is Lessing’s Laocoon. He said you produce a great work when the subject of your work contradicts the material. Nika, the flying goddess, and stone, heavyweight material flying up. A contradiction between material and idea, platonic. Contemporary philosophers of art writing on conceptualism tell the same thing, there is the idea of art and you arrange mediums to fall into the idea of contemporaneity, on behalf of concept, never on behalf of the body of the work. In Venice pavilions they want us to rationalise contemporaneity as concept. Politically it is not working.

When we come to textile, we go away from this philosophical decision of the painter. Here we see what I call the operation of foreclusion. Foreclusion is a psychotic term from Lacan, the disappearance of the Other in the psyche of those who experience psychosis. François Leruel took this term and said this happens when you make the separation of non-philosophy. To make something you have to grab everything, the whole art from Greece to today, and put it away. I call it the blockage of art. You block the idea of art and it becomes external.

This is what mysticism does. To be a mystic, you have the whole world and you put it away a little. Contemporary art is like a left-liberal church, like the Catholic Church with reputations, tags, press releases, curators as priests giving blessings. A hierarchical, bureaucratised system. Church means you see God through mediation. In textile, ceramics, and spiritual abstraction you need no mediation to understand what is happening. You need no words. It is what it is.

Contemporary art as criticism of tradition is gone, or very hard to renew. Maybe someone can make a new step in this conceptual move, but I do not know how. Ceramics is like a mystic who shows you ceramics and it is all you need. Ceramics is a generic object of the universe, a model of cosmos and humanity. This cup of coffee, everything is inside.

Two books. Fray. The Politics of Textile by Julia Brian Wilson, curator and art historian. Read this book, references to artists and political activism. Textile was important in AIDS activism, the quilts with the victims of the epidemic, a massive global textile political movement. There was a radical feminist group called Radical Textile with a manifesto to oppose textile to every power structure. Making textile will make the world radically different.

Julia Brian Wilson is connected to another trend in exiting contemporary art, the turn to production. With a lot of ideas in the 90s distribution became part of the evolution of conceptual art. First you understand the idea, then the idea expands. To consider an artwork, you consider distribution, how you share it. The platform is part of the work. Julia Brian Wilson and Angela Dimitrakaki made possible the turn to production. The artist now is not only doing the work or deciding distribution, the work goes through the whole production chain. Textile is the only medium that can broadly be productive in variable ways, machining, handcrafted, collective, solitary, outsourced. The first question when we see textile, we spoke with Aisha about this, is how long did it take. Who made this. Alone or collective, fabricated, and so on. This problem goes through all the dots in human history. Working with textile, you work with production chains and can problematise production and collectivity.

The second book is by Katrin Damarov, The Philosophy of Textile. She elaborates on feminist theory of textile with emphasis on French feminist Lucie Rigaret. She called it two-ness. To make textile you are aware of the contact between elements, always a creative collaboration between two. She noted that textile is to be folded. Here is the idea of the fold. Gilles Deleuze wrote about Baroque in The Fold. Baroque is not a genre but the apparition of folding. Baroque is about folding.

From my personal experience, I experienced psychosis. I do not recommend it. I try to incorporate it. We were in hospital at the same time with a friend, and we decided to write a text about going mad. After this I am a completely different subject. I am no longer myself. Identity is a mask, culturally worked out. Nietzsche, when he experienced psychosis, wrote the thousand names of history. We are not ourselves. Because everything is everything. When you feel it, something happens with language and concepts. That is why I am critical towards conceptual art. The concept is foreclosed. The body comes to the foreground. Not hands, but something strongly bodily. A topology, folding. Your world starts to fold on itself. Deep narcosis or ketamine can make this folding, but it is not the same.

When it folds, I understood a great thing. If you think you are consciousness, a philosopher based on concept, you are melancholic and will end with depression. Inevitable. Language is grief. The signifier is connected to inexistence. I say Velazquez, he is not here. Words mean loss. Emptiness is produced by words. If you go mad, words do not matter, the body matters, and there is no emptiness. In textile you feel multiplicity of colours and dots, spaces are not emptiness but fullness. With ceramics it is different, ceramics is about the void, an open question. In textile there is the joy of life, the joy of fulfilment, colours, folding. AIDS activists who lost partners, when you lose something, you go through a crisis that can lead to psychosis, but you go out to weaving. Many friends during these catastrophic years went to weaving and said something happens in this practice. You do not try to work with words, discuss problems, you try to become something else through weaving.

Post-conceptual art had a pinnacle with Lebanese artists from Beirut Art Centre, artists like Malid Raad, Jean Khachitama, Khalil Jaresh, children during the civil war. They made media video essays where they discussed trauma. Post-conceptual art wanted to give trauma a speech. Lectures and performances. It was great art of the 90s and later. Reflecting on anti-war artists in Russia or artists of Ukraine, they are not speaking about the war. When you try to speak about it, you get stuck. Many come to weaving and manual drawings that help people.

Another concept is sound. We see many installations, but not sound art as before. It is about sound as wave, bodily production of body experience of sound. The 808 synthesiser made the jungle bass. Many musicians say 808 is not a musical instrument. It is pure bodily presence. You feel bass moving your body. That is why sound meditations and sound bathing are popular. Not about sound as cultural phenomenon, but the bass in your face. The same with colour, colour is a wave, vibration. Non-contemporary art is based on the politics of frequencies, how vibration in intensity or power, not conceptual, can foreclose the idea of conceptual art. The main thing in textile is that there is no emptiness, fullness of interconnectedness between elements.

Read Sadie Plante, Zero and Ones, about feminism. In patriarchal order the one who has penis is something, and gestation is nothing, emptiness, woman marked as emptiness or home for the baby. In algebra, nil and one, nil is not emptiness. In textile, emptiness is not emptiness, it is meaning. In a gallery, Clay said masculine sexuality is based on mediated devices, women’s sexuality on intimate contact. Computer technology moved from text to display. As the incel community appropriated the internet it became more visual, Macintosh introduced monitors. In ceramics, textile, and spiritual abstraction we move from visuality. It is not visual in the common sense. You see elements interwoven with materiality. You are not working with image. It is grasping visuality from the material side. In textile you cannot separate colour from material. You cannot make the philosophical split. That is the main thing.

Psychosis is baroque experience without kings, anarchist baroque. Klerambor, the psychiatrist who worked with the relative of Kandinsky, described the Kandinsky-Klerambor symptom, lucid hallucinations. He had psychosis himself and made tapestries, drawing folds all the time. There is something with the knot and the fold. Not only the fold is important, but mosaics, pieces moving with the same intensity as your body. I studied the psychosis of Adi Warburg. It feels like jewellery, like rings, folding of jewellery. Not pleasant, you cannot say if it is good or bad. You can feel the jewellery playing. Warburg was mad. The great doctor Binswanger was his doctor and noted that Warburg lost the idea completely and showed little details, throwing endless details.

We have not spoken enough about spiritual abstraction. The history of civilisation again. What exists is bodily impulses, pains, migraines, colours are essential. The brain is the dictator of the body. Someone took control, the brain, an impulse dominating other impulses. One impulse dominates until everything dies, addiction. Through evolution we keep our brain up, look with our eyes. The history of religion, Nietzsche said, is the projection of the suffering body with the brain as usurpator. The concept says consciousness is the main thing, usurpation of the body. Polytheism, gods are bodily impulses, extremes of intensity. Then one god came with Christianity and dominated all the gods. The Bible starts with the word. In the beginning there was word. The first word was lie. Christianity gives you identity, you are yourself and no one else. The demonic shows one body can have two souls, or one soul can have several bodies. In the 19th century, famously Hilmar Klint painted by ghosts, entities ruled her to paint. When you feel many entities and give them agency in art, you have spiritual abstraction. It is far from conceptual art, not about the fiction of identity, not about romanticism or narrative. Art before these decades was about narratology and concepts. Now it is shifting and colliding. It is a crisis of contemporary art, a psychosis of language.

When the invasion in Ukraine began I had a terrible mental situation. I walked in the street and lost the meaning of words in Russian. You see a restaurant sign and understand it is a restaurant, but I did not understand the signs. I lost the text. Russian propaganda said fascists, we are with fascists, they be fascist with fascists. The meaning of words shut down. You cannot speak. The language collided. Culture is experiencing this psychotic state with no language. You have no words. Friends from America say the same with Donald Trump, the vocabulary of liberal democracy bites itself like Uroboros and collides. We cannot use words anymore. Many of us start to speak with the unspeakable. That is why Aisha made this exhibition. If you were a conceptual artist from the old formation, you would be depressed with no idea. At the same time I lived through long processes with my body and now have problems with figurative reading, something like dyslexia. We should not pathologise it. We should explore what is happening.

I found myself in music. I started music again as therapy of sound. As an art historian I gave up analysing artworks and their ontology. I analyse frequencies, colour bursts, sound matter, as spirits. Spirit is breath. We need not language but semiotics of breath, seismology of work.