Igor Tishin, Avant-Garde in the Nineties
Werner van den Belt

Igor Tishin is one of the most surprising artists in Belarus at the moment. In a country whose approach to art is still strongly focused on Socialist Realism and for the past few decades on French Modernism, his paintings and installations certainly do catch the eye. Tishin’s art is not always in one and the same style, and is difficult to classify under any specific school. Perhaps it can best be described as an investigation into the depiction of a contemporary Belorussian identity. This identity is not unambiguous. It is a combination of fragments from the country’s cultural history: nineteenth-century folklore, Chagall and the Russian avant-garde, Socialist Realism and the Belorussian self-image in the twentieth century. Igor Tishin is first and foremost a painter, but there is also a provocative element to his work. With the themes he broaches in his art, he is trying to launch a conversation with his audience about the cultural and political position of man in Belarus.

Igor Tishin was born in 1958 in Vasilpolye, a little village in the region of Gomel. Even as a child, he knew he wanted to be an artist. At a young age, he attended an art class for children to learn how to draw and paint. In 1981 he went to the art academy in Minsk, where he stayed for more than ten years, first for four years as a student and then until 1991 as a teacher. At the academy, Tishin tried to dissociate himself from the culture of Socialist Realism that was still largely shaping Belorussian art. In pursuit of a visual language more in keeping with his own ideas, he soon arrived at major twentieth-century styles of art like Expressionism and Suprematism. Other Belorussian artists such as Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall and El Lissitsky and artists who worked there like Kazimir Malevich had been instrumental in developing these styles. This kind of art was rejected at the art academy as being too formalist.

In his first years as a professional artist and teacher at the art academy, Tishin was looking for a style or method that suited his idea of history and of his own era. This search for a culture that could rightly be called “Belorussian” is evident in Vitebsk Tangle (1987), where Tishin combines various art styles to create one image. The painting clearly alludes to the town of Vitebsk where Chagall, Lissitsky and Malevich taught at the local art academy around 1920, but attention is also focused on the decorative way colour and form are used in the naive art of Belarus. The art of the modern classics mentioned above and the artistic freedom Tishin aspired to at the art academy did not coincide with the policy of the authorities. This led to friction.

At the beginning of the nineties, Tishin seemed to have the spirit of the times on his side. The Soviet Union had fallen apart and Belarus had regained its independence. The new openness did not however lead to the desired liberalization of Belorussian art politics. The paintings Tishin made in the years 1990 - 1992 exhibit a wide stylistic and thematic diversity. In addition to his interest in early twentieth-century art, there are any number of themes, from feelings evoked by old photographs and postcards to folk art motifs such as decorative tattoo drawings. There is a striking absence of any clear stylistic development. This is not necessarily a shortcoming though. It can be viewed instead as a deliberate stance on art in general. Tishin tried to develop a visual language that was not predetermined by external stylistic features, but was shaped by an original and simple visual language he knew from the folk art of Belarus and children’s drawings. In this sense, his work seems closer to the Western European art we know from Jean Dubuffet and Karel Appel than to the ideas about art in his own country. This is manifested in Tishin’s work in a colorful collection of people, figure and things including rabbits, zebras and little airplanes painted in simple colours and outlined shapes. The academic technique and methods of Socialist Realism are carefully avoided in the paintings.

Tishin’s interest in the artists of the Russian avant-garde once again emerged in the mid-nineties in a series of paintings combining fragments of the writings of historical authors such as Janka Kupula, Alexei Krutchonykh and Daniil Charms with historical images and childhood memories (the Raya Futurist series). In a few cases this led to a clear politico- cultural stance, as can be seen in the series Rodchenko’s Formulae. Tishin used photographs from Rodchenko’s Pioneer series for it and combined them with texts by Rodchenko proclaiming how superior photography is to painting. The photographs were not randomly selected. They played a major role in the depiction of Socialism in society and went down in history as one of the most effective and powerful visualizations of political idealism in the twentieth century. Rodchenko took the photographs in 1930 when he abandoned painting and was pressured by the Party to take a series of monumental photographs of boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 14 who, if they behaved well, would be able to join Kosmopol and the Party. In much the same way, Tishin used a photograph from the famous 0.10 exhibition (1915), where Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings went on exhibit for the first time. As commentary, instead of using texts, this time Tishin painted tiny naive landscapes that he placed arbitrarily on the canvas. By combining the photograph of the “absolute” art of Malevich with “primitive” forms of folklorist art, he unites various approaches to art. The paintings are a tangible illustration of the debate about art that was going on at the time.

In today’s paintings, Tishin alternates naive works with cultural historical ones. For the past few years, he has also regularly painted self-portraits, allowing his mood to decide the style he chooses.

When he was a student at the end of the eighties, it was clear that Tishin had no desire to restrict his role in art to making pretty paintings. To him, art was also a means of communication. He took part in numerous exhibitions or organized them himself. At the art academy, he and his fellow students addressed questions that hit a nerve with the authorities, such as the position of Socialist Realism and the state monopoly on art with regard to the art academies, the art market, the subsidies, material, studios and exhibition facilities. In 1992 this led to the exhibition Lessons of Bad Art, which Tishin organized with his wife-to-be, artist Natalya Zaloznaya. He wanted the exhibition to focus attention on the ideas of ten young artists who had been expelled from the academy because of their progressive ideas.

Lessons of Bad Art was followed two years later by the exhibition Liebschaft, where it was largely the same artists who showed their work. The aim of the exhibition was to present an alternative approach to official art to a large audience. Tishin’s work was represented at the exhibition by a number of paintings of rabbits (the Cabinet series) and a sizeable installation. Within the exhibition space, he created a room of his own and filled it with domestic furnishings. The walls were covered from top to bottom with paintings that served as a kind of wallpaper. Tishin wanted the installation to focus attention on the meaning of the work of art and the place it could occupy in society.

In the cultural and political vacuum in Belarus after 1991, questions about the function of art were suddenly very relevant. After a lengthy period of Russian domination when the cultural differences between the Soviet republics were minimized, artists were looking for a way to give a new interpretation to the art of their own country. As an alternative for Socialist Realism, French Modernism was rejected by most of the artists as being too noncommittal.

They expected more from an integration of art in daily life. They wanted to build a new world, just as artists wanted to support the changes in society with their art at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1997 Tishin took the Belorussian identity as the subject for an art installation in The Pleasure and Pain of Psychic Theatre. He focused special attention on the effects of the Second World War on Belarus, and how they still play a role in the present-day cultural perception. With paintings, texts and photographs, he explored the issue of why fascist ideas were now so widely held by precisely the same people who used to be so against them in the past. Due to its controversial nature the installation, which was to consist of three successive exhibitions, was outside the regular art circuit. The first exhibition, Phallic Frau, consisted of painted women’s legs mounted in frames and exhibited as portraits on a piece of material on the wall of a private home. The installation was dominated by an oval portrait of Hitler. In an adjacent hall, photographs were on exhibit of a nude female figure cut up into more and more pieces. The second exhibition, Light Partisan Movement, was about the historical Belorussian myth that partisans had made an important contribution to Stalin’s victory over Hitler. In reality, most of the warfare took place on Belorussian soil, resulting in the total destruction of the country and its population. Photographs at the exhibition alluded to the heroic partisan past. The last part of the trilogy has not been completed yet. Tishin made an accompanying statement about The Pleasure and Pain of Psychic Theatre in its entirety. He stated that one should not search for answers to historical questions in this installation, since he is neither a psychoanalyst nor a historian. In artistic images, he is simply opening a debate on the myths about the country’s glorious past.

Igor Tishin should be viewed as an artist who wants to communicate about art and ideology in a cultural political way via images. He does not have a fixed style, but opts for whatever method suits the theme he is working on at the moment. This striking multiformity has nothing to do with the stylelessness of Western post-modernism and the contemporary visual culture. It is a way to remain outside the commonplace structures of art. The space that Tishin creates for himself makes the work difficult to interpret. It evokes more questions than it answers, but it does do a great deal to sustain the present-day discussion on the cultural history of Belarus.

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