Freeze, Die, Come to Life

by Konstantin Bogomolov, theater director, poet, actor, art director of the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya in Moscow

Opening

The world around us is undergoing a profound transformation, and people of art need to rediscover themselves and their work in the new historical and civilizational contexts. Without doing so, we will forever dabble in long-decayed discourses and terms that have exhausted themselves.

Art nouveau, avant-garde, and postmodernism, which reigned supreme in 20th century art, gave the world an incredible number of masterpieces and lots of formal breakthroughs. They expanded our understanding of what our brain and senses, as well as cognition and insight, are capable of. However, it is no longer possible to move forward using the fuel that propelled 20th century art. The approaches used by art historians of the past do not work today; the technology of creativity has worn itself out and is breaking down, giving rise to recurrent stories and spinning to no purpose, leading to glitches in the perception of art by viewers, readers, and listeners.

Art has lost its most essential quality: the sense of time. Losing it was a curse for an artist in any age in history. Losing a sense of time is like having a stroke. It can be described as numbness that is caused not by poverty, censorship, or self-censorship, but by an artist's confusion in the face of history, when the nerve connecting him with the public and society dies. In this essay, I will try to talk about restoring the connection between art and time, and art and civilization.

Inevitably, my essay will be structured around briefly outlined premises, time and again taking on the form of an emotion-driven manifesto. Perhaps, a manifesto is what we need today as we reframe the world and ourselves in this world. The manifesto is not an attempt to prove something scientifically or substantiate it with facts. It is not like defending a Ph.D. thesis. It is about intuitively articulating things and intuitively discovering a path, which is the only option you have left when your navigational instruments are broken and the stars are hidden by dark clouds.

An Attack on Life

The 20th century, and partly the 19th century as well, was a time when art, as if bitten by Dracula, shifted shape and an innocent angel morphed into a demon. It suddenly went ballistic. It threw a tantrum. And presented a claim to life, Christianity, and God.

We have no way of knowing what kind of forces and darkness are amassed in a person who regularly pays taxes, goes to church, raises children, and is overall a respectable and decent member of society, but then suddenly goes ahead and cuts human flesh into pieces and then wails in mourning, telling everyone that his wife and children are missing, that they went for a walk and didn’t come back... In a similar manner, having lived a long and dignified life, European art has − all of a sudden and what an onlooker might see as an unjustified move – bared its teeth in a sudden fit of hatred of humans and life and started tearing pieces out of human flesh, cutting it up, and rummaging through guts, thus destroying the structure of a complex and integrated religious reality.

The 20th century − the century of art nouveau, avant-garde, and postmodernism – has become a time of rebellion in art. A mass, spirited and violent rebellion. A time to attack God and life itself. Of course, it was revenge. Revenge for the world as something unknowable. Revenge for being doomed to feel pain and to eventually die. Revenge for the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Revenge for powerlessness. Revenge of a suicidal man who is unable to reach God and takes his own life instead. This revenge showed itself in discrediting the divine plan.

It takes one short step to go from Ivan Karamazov's notebook in which he made detailed notes of his crimes against children – by retelling them, he hoped to shake Alyosha's faith − to Trier’s Dogville. Both are works of genius in that they are ironically persuasive and deeply desperate. Both are a manipulation and an attack on integral consciousness. Both are a model and a way of the new art to impact humans.

Do you remember how Alyosha reacted to Ivan's long “speech?” “Shoot him.” In violation of his principles and faith and under the influence of an emotion brought about by a horrifying and manipulative concentrated horror, the monk Alyosha says under his breath, together with the reader, a word that is incompatible with the Christian idea.

Do you remember the emotions caused by the finale of Dogville? Of course, it is joy. It is identifying with the heroine in her anger and rage, and in her decision to wipe the people who hurt her off the face of the earth. As viewers, we experience catharsis at the moment of execution by firing squad, feeling a mixture of delight and triumph.

Both are an artistic attack on a 2,000-year-old person steeped in Christian culture. An attack on his soul. On his mind. On the pursuit of perfection. On the idea of ascending to heaven.

It is about bringing a human to a dead end.

Followed by an attempt to bring out everything that is the most primitive and beastly in humans.

That's right: ironically, the hyper-complex art of the new age addresses the most primitive thing in humans, their instincts.

Art has morphed into Trier’s The House That Jack Built A house made of the bodies of his victims. Jack morphed into a maniac driven by a passion for dismemberment, inspired by destruction, and pleasured by the pain experienced by his victims. It’s about revealing the base and bestial human nature. The human vices. The decay. The hopelessness. The lifelessness.

The smashing success of the new art with the public had a fairly simple explanation. On the one hand, the new art relied on the onlooker effect. After all, looky-loos come running not to marvel at sunrises or sunsets, but to see blood. They are lured by maiming injuries, ugliness, woe, and death. These “events” always bring out the crowds. There’s always a commotion around them and high rankings. There is invariably a sense of satisfaction that the world around them is inferior to them or at least not better than they are. On the other hand, the art of the avant-garde and art nouveau addressed the deep, dark, nerve-wracking, and plain exciting attraction to death every person feels. It legitimized, dramatized, and poeticized this deadly libido, which acquired a language and forms of its own and won the right to come into the light of day.

However, the death drive is just a smart word to describe fear. The plain fear of death.

In this sense, the fear of death is like the fear of heights. Do you know what the fear of heights is all about? It is, in fact, a dizzying pull towards the abyss, when you lose balance and control and are literally drawn into the abyss. Like any fear, it can be overcome, or you can yield to it. However, yielding to the fear of heights means certain death when the body hits the bottom, but yielding to the fear of death is about losing your mind and humanity. By the same token, if you can step back from the edge of the cliff, the existential abyss is always there under your feet. And it calls for a person to have courage, integrity, and faith.

Christianity gave man the strength to look into this abyss and not fall. But man is weak, especially the artist. Moreover, the artist is always a battlefield for good and evil. In a sense, this comes with special demands made of him. And when the artist could no longer endure the horror, the incomprehensibility, and inevitability of death, he gave himself up to the abyss. He decided to embrace death; to submit to evil. He chose to fall. Tired of being scared of hell, the artist chose to love hell. Tired of looking for meaning, he threw himself into the chaos of meaninglessness.

And to him, it seemed as though he was flying. Because the abyss he chose to fall into – that abyss was insidious. It had no boundaries or limits. But not quite: the limit of that abyss had to be set by the man himself. But once he started falling, he had no courage to set a limit – because he would hit the bottom and break. And so he continued to fall, plunging deeper and deeper into evil. He continued to fall while believing he was flying. And the flight was breathtaking. And he felt omnipotent.

Having slid into this abyss, art pulled society along.

Art, which had struggled through the pain of life with a sense of purpose, sacrifice, and future resurrection, became overstrained. And it said to Caiaphas: I reject God. And climbed down from the cross. And art began to preach a new covenant: The Gospel of the Disappointed. It began to look for inspiration in the confirmation that life was meaningless and aimless. It began to deconstruct wholeness and harmony with abandon – in sound, in word, in painting and sculpture, and in the techniques of building a narrative. It began showing society a picture of the world that was disintegrating, disjointed, as if cut up by a forensic pathologist’s scalpel.

Dissecting living reality as dead tissue, modern art offered society the concept of a person as a living corpse. Man is a monster, and you must love that monster. Not physically ugly, but a moral monster. And Christian forgiveness, formerly a feat, turned into a seemly cover for a vicious attraction to scum.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian Faust who lived in the 19th century but became the most influential author in the 20th century, turned out to be an endless battlefield not only for good and evil, but also for old and new concepts. Torn apart by internal contradictions, he seemed equally fascinated by both evil and good, evoking sympathy for Myshkin and Stavrogin alike.

The list of examples is endless. I am not attempting to give a scientific substantiation; I am here to formulate a message. An intuitive idea that has become a conviction.

I have no doubt that the art of the new age, which I love and which has always inspired me, has exhausted its potential and energy.

When I began my career, to be successful, one had to find darkness inside oneself or in the world and, shamelessly pulling it out into the light, make the viewer or reader inhale the smell of decay and death. The smell of rot. Force them to look at disharmony.

It was an exciting thing to do, in its own way. You are the darkness, and your eyes must get used to darkness, you must start seeing in the dark, for there is no light, said the art of the new time. Or – you are the darkness, and that is beautiful.

Tearing reality apart, refusing to see its wholeness, we could put complexity aside and reassemble reality at our own discretion. After all, to reassemble the world, you must first tear it apart. This, by the way, has made a significant contribution to the new Western ethics. Reassembling reality and man underpinned both social practices and art. They supported each other in their effort to declare the 2,000-year-old society a “failed project.” To desacralize the human body and humiliate and bankrupt the soul.

In this sense, artificial intelligence is not the pinnacle of development, but an external control procedure.

Desanctification of the Body

Desanctification of the body. This is how I describe the processes that are taking place in the West today. They have largely been provoked by Art Moderne.

These are the processes as a result of which a person has assumed the right – legally and with the approval of society and the state – to rectify the Divine purpose by turning men into women, and vice versa, creating monstrous Frankensteins and poisoning the mentality of children who are growing up in a strange zoo – a reserve of non-binary mutants.

Do we realize that these processes are rooted in Nazism and the experiments of Dr. Mengele, for whom humans were no more than lab animals? They were inspired by the art and philosophy of Moderne. Nazism was the first to comprehend a human at the level of state policy, not as a Divine mystery, but as a construction set.

The product of the 20th century, industrial revolution, a century of technology, utilization and optimization, Nazism became an amalgamation of religious ecstasy in form and technological practicality in essence. Of Goebbels and Krupp. It elevated eugenics to the rank of a gospel by creating a new religion and proclaiming a conscious and consistent renunciation of the idea that the Divine purpose embodied in man is incomprehensible.

Having survived and denounced Nazism, Anglo-Saxon Europe, like a prudent houseowner, decided to use its technology both materially and spiritually. A dazzling somersault was performed – Nazi elitism was the elitism of the sound and strong (in reality – of the mentally ill – but this is what it was declared to be). On the other hand, postwar Europe officially became an advocate of the elitism of the sick – the morally and mentally sick.

Indeed, what’s the difference? The main point is that the idea of casteism and exclusivity of certain individuals was preserved, and this idea has been used to subjugate people in these countries and in the countries colonized by the Western empire over many centuries.

Now a deviation of any kind has been proclaimed to be the stigmata and, in essence, deified.

The former Christ has been taken down. He had suffered for the faith and people rather than for his “deviations.” He had suffered on his own free will; he had chosen the path of pain himself. There was too much will and meaning in this pain and a willingness to die for the idea and for the truth. The new Europe did not need such a “dangerous” Christ who “rebelled” against the establishment. And at that point, Christ was replaced with a gay/non-binary person/lesbian (no doubt, Viktor Pelevin’s forecast in iPhuck will soon come true and pedophilia will be identified as a dramatic “irregularity” that is, by virtue of a ban, bringing suffering not to a victim of abuse, but to the abuser himself, who has to conceal his passion.

The rest has become a matter of ideological technique.

It seems Dostoyevsky, who named his despicable scumbag Stavrogin Christ (“stauros” means “cross” in Greek), not only understood the past, but also predicted the future – deviance as a cross. Now societies should pray for the new stigmatized, admire them, bring them presents and give up seats for them not only in public transport, but also in the office, at competitions, and film festivals.

In the meantime, all “normal” people have been found guilty before the new stigmatized, who had to conceal their deviations from society for many years. This is how the Old Testament idea of intrinsic guilt has been transformed.

In turn, the Nazis’ desanctification of the body and related technology of “improving” human nature have begun to serve the new stigmatized, who wish from time to time to either cut off their sexual organs or to sow them on. And it no longer matters who these wretched people are – adults or children, psychopaths or simply idiots, miserable or jaded – the bottom line is that there is no God and a body is just a sack of meat, organs, and bones.

Thus, a new brotherhood has emerged which is made up of man-made “entitled” mutants. To make things worse, mutation has begun to consistently be labeled as normality.

The trick was simple. Just watch the hands: those who free their inner self from secret and previously forbidden desires are normal. However, if someone fails to discover any previously forbidden desires in themselves, the thing is not that they don’t have any, but that that they just don’t have enough freedom to discover them, and they cannot be called free individuals until they do so. It’s an unsophisticated seduction trick blown up to the size of societal ideology where deviation is normal, and normal and customary are labeled as something rudimentary that has run its course.

Let's think about it: no one is wondering why the fierce battle waged by the environmentalists for nature and their attempts to keep it pristine or to bring mother nature to its original state is not projected onto humans in any way.

The body is something that not only can, but must be mangled and reshaped. Because the body has been turned into a material. Thus goes upgraded Nazi civilization.

It did not proceed to rape or to persuade anyone to do anything. It pulled a brilliant psychological trick by giving people the most important right − the right to feel like masters of their own bodies, their sexual orientations, and their sexual deviations and insecurities as well. The right to see deviations and complexes as stigmata. It allowed its citizens to ignore their mother, who tells them not to touch themselves down there, and the Europeans decided that sexual and moral freedom is true freedom, and the right to choose a model of sexual behavior is the very human rights that allegedly need to be fought for and to which one can devote their lives.

The pre-war Catholic looked humbly at the ground, afraid to raise his eyes. The pre-war Protestant stared intently at the ground waiting for the seeds to sprout. The Western individuals of today are not looking far ahead of themselves, either. They are looking down as well, but not humbly, and not at the ground, but they joyfully look at their private parts. A person like that can be led anywhere. Their horizon ends at their pubic area.

For hundreds of years, neither humans nor art knew of a devastating crisis like the one we are seeing today. Today, the artist's thought is dead. It feeds on science and nothing but science. New scientific achievements make it possible for artists to make “breakthroughs.” However, these breakthroughs have nothing to do with spiritual feats. Sh*t dumps have been cleaned out. Holiness is discredited. Innovative technology is the only thing that is left. If art wants to live rather than decay, it must find new inspiration. New strength. And a new passionate fury.

However, it is impossible to move forward without understanding the meaning, the structure or the method of dead art. Without dissecting its lifeless corpse in the same way the latter dissected living reality.

Without understanding how religious art was melted into a secular parable, the parable melted into realism, realism into naturalism, and naturalism into shamelessness. Without recognizing that shamelessness first became a path, and then the gist and the only commodity. That shamelessness has replaced sincerity, pretending to be a confession. And if there is strength to see it and admit it, then the strength will come and put a limit on the “flight,” fly into the ground, and be resurrected. There was once a wonderful film directed by Kanevsky. Freeze Die Come to Life. A modern artist must keep saying these words as a mantra. These words are the key to a new breath and a new life.