“The poet’s inimitable breath”: The word in the practice of creating an artist’s book by Mikhail Pogarsky

Abstract

In contemporary Russian book culture, a special place belongs to such a phenomenon as the artist’s book. Having a long history of development, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is often correlated with the idea of overcoming the postmodernist mentality. The most characteristic example of this kind is the theoretical and practical study of the artist’s book by Mikhail Pogarsky. In the Phenomenon of Artist's Book (2013, 2014) and the Artist's Book [+] (2015), Pogarsky makes an attempt to fit the artist’s book into the modern cultural paradigm. He thinks of the artist’s book as a manifestation of a new artistic worldview, “artlibria”, which is characterized by a complex multilevel perception and transformation of reality. The artist’s book by Pogarsky corresponds to the idea of “total synthesis”: it integrates the old and the new, the verbal and the visual, the virtual and the real, fulfilling the main goal of the worldview - overcoming chaos and “assembling the world”. By connecting word and image, the artist opens up limitless opportunities for creative self-expression and includes the viewer-reader in the active process of unraveling and creating meanings. The artist’s book is characterized by a change in the status of the text, a rethinking of the correlation between the verbal and the visual. The text becomes a source of creative metamorphosis, predetermines the selection of visual objects. The idea of the artist’s book is embodied by both literary means and signs of culture. Important is its visual solution; spaces selected for the demonstration of such a book can also actualize additional meanings. Pogarsky’s works demonstrate different ways of incorporating text into the artist’s book, allowing us to speak about the principal absence of a correlation, set once and for all, between the verbal and the visual. The book The Element and the Wind (1996) embodies the principle of superposition of meanings, the correlation of different sides of artistic reception, which is characteristic of the artist’s book. In Pogarsky’s practice, the principle of the so-called “moment-form” becomes a notable method of including text in the artist’s book. This principle is realized in the book Labyrinths of Dreams (2000) and is reduced to a refusal of the set sequence of fragments of the text, and for the reader-viewer the sequence will also be casual. This open nature of the artist’s book makes it a way of an autonomous statement, offering a special artistic optics, combining verbal and object-visual planes. The viewer-reader is included not only in the process of unraveling the artist’s book, but also in the wide semantic field of culture. The author declares no conflicts of interests.