Artist Alexander Savko “crossed” Russian fairy tales with cyborgs

HELP “MK”

Alexander Savko (born in 1957) is a prominent figure in modern Moscow artistic life of the last 20–30 years. Savko creates a kind of visual oxymoron in which incompatible images collide. Heroes of popular animated series – Mickey Mouse, Shrek, The Simpsons – invade the compositions of famous paintings. Only at first glance, a paradoxical comedy is played out in front of the viewer; in fact, everything is very serious – Savko’s paintings expose the diseases of the information society and the aggressiveness of mass culture, the prohibitive eclecticism of modern consciousness.

Alexander Savko looks more like a math teacher than a modern artist. There is no pathos in his appearance. Classic haircut, mustache, gray T-shirt, jeans. He is greeted with a serious look on the threshold of his studio on Chistye Prudy and taken to the basement, which he shares with another artist. In the far corner, with a window through which you can, as in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” watch the shoes of passersby, is his personal space. Communication pipes run along the perimeter. Furniture includes a small table and a couple of chairs. There are a couple of mounts under the ceiling that hold packages of graphics. The receiver plays Shostakovich. A kettle slowly boils in the corner. On the easel is the last, 13th, painting from the just completed cycle – “Tales of Buyan Island”. On canvas in a picturesque frame, Bilibin modernist patterns intertwine with Slavic-Scandinavian motifs with pistols from blockbuster science fiction. The plot is also a collage: Koschey drools and stretches his bony hands towards the metal beauty, but the cyborg girl in a kokoshnik is indifferent to his gold and silver. She turns out to be colder than the dead hero of an old fairy tale.

Fairy tales added fuel to the fire

— They say it’s all from childhood. What fairy tales did you grow up with?

– Mom read to me Russian, Moldavian, and Kalmyk. The impression they give is incomparable to what you see on the screen: the imagination worked like a powerful apparatus. Any fairy tale of any people and time is to some extent a reflection on what is happening and the education of the next generation. Since my youth, I looked with admiration at the fabulous illustrations of Ivan Bilibin, at the way he works with myth-making. And I decided to try it myself. This happened back in the late 1980s. Since then, I have made several cycles in Bilibin’s style. For some reason I keep coming back to it, and now I’m doing it again.

— You were born in Transnistria and graduated from the Odessa Art School. How did you end up in Moscow?

— During my studies, I made many friends in Odessa. A new wave of contemporary artists was forming there, not the least of which was Leonid Voitsekhov, with whom we became friends then. In the late 1980s they settled in a Moscow art squat on Furmanny Lane. And I waved to them.

— What were you doing as an artist then?

— I practiced using new materials, for example, making lithographs on metal. Officially he worked at an experimental metallithography plant, where he made sketches of cans for canned vegetables. I used this base for my creative purposes.

— Did you study at the scenography department in Odessa?

– Yes, but I didn’t work a day in the theater, although we had a strong school.

– Why? Didn’t work out or didn’t last?

— The theatrical backstage turned out to be not interesting to me. But the school was strong. There was a big competition there – 26 people per place. I got it right the first time.

— At what point did you realize yourself as an artist?

– In childhood. There was a small circle of guys around me who were interested in drawing, and we competed. I wanted to draw better than my friend at all costs. He could pore over a picture all night in order to outdo his peer’s masterpiece and delight everyone around him. I don’t know where this passion comes from; there were no artists in the family.

— Your small homeland, the city of Bendery, is the capital of Transnistria, an unrecognized state. What was your childhood like there and how did it affect you?

— My childhood was wonderful. This is a patriarchal city in a wonderful place – at a crossroads, near Odessa, Chisinau, borders, the sea. There was no desire to leave there. Many people went there from Moscow, especially older people – they dreamed of moving and watering roses. Until 1992 it was very cozy and calm there. In Bendery, the majority of the population is Russian-speaking. A visible influx of Moldovans began in the 1970s. In the 1990s, things became more complicated there. Now – even more. In the spring I flew there – to Tiraspol. I have relatives and children there, now adults.

— In recent years, Transnistria has been restless. Uncertain status. What do you think will happen to this territory?

— Yes, the status is up in the air. The future depends on how external events unfold now, and who will break who. Small forces will then adjust. Stanley Kubrick once said: “Big countries behave like gangsters, and small countries act like prostitutes.” But ordinary people there want the same thing as everywhere else: peace. Those on top are speculating on national feelings. Just like the novelists in the 19th century, who believed that no matter how much blood was shed, it was worth it so that the former greatness of the new Motherland, which they themselves had invented, would shine again. Romanticism ultimately became one of the founders of fascism.

— Is what you are doing today somehow connected with your small homeland?

— I’m not a very rooted person. I love the whole round Earth.

— Your fairy tales about the whole round Earth? How long did it take you to get to the new cycle?

— A little more than six months. I am interested in the process itself – the republication of old fairy tales in a new guise and modernized realities. Fairy tales, even the most dense and a la folk ones, have at all times throughout the world been subject to metamorphosis, altered up and down. Therefore, I did not take an extraordinary step in my illustrations, but made temporary adjustments.

Take, for example, the end of the 17th century: Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm remade existing myths to suit current politics – then truly national states began to be created in Europe. Fairy tales added fuel to the fire, emphasizing belonging to a nation and creating a new national spirit. And now the reverse process is underway, which is accompanied by a savage admiration for new technologies.

— Do you use new technologies, neural networks? Looking at your work, one might think that this collage was created by an artificial algorithm.

— A neural network is a tool. I’m not working with it yet, maybe it would simplify some tasks. I create sketches and collages using old well-known programs that I used to do manually. Many people at a primitive level begin to animate new technologies as if they were fairy-tale creatures. Treat it not like a hammer, an ax or a washing machine, but like something living. I touch on this topic in my works. I remember how 30 years ago they shouted that the end of fine art had come, but it didn’t. It’s just that new forms and tools have appeared in art, as now another one has appeared – the neural network.

— We can say that your compilations anticipated AI algorithms.

– You can say so. A neural network can produce a successful result, but not always. I have my own algorithm, I use tools moderately, without fanaticism. I create a sketch and then make a pictorial version. Nothing can replace natural.

This beautiful soulless world

— This is what the illustration of the fairy tale about Koshchei the Immortal and the Cyborg Princess is about – about the soullessness of artificial intelligence?

– Take it wider. A soulless world is described here. Koschey is dead, the princess is iron. At the same time, he seems more alive: he has desires, he lusts after the beauty in the kokoshnik, tries to surprise her with gold, but she doesn’t need anything. For her, gold is trash. She is a representative of another, artificial world. This is a meeting of two soulless creatures. The text for this, as well as other fairy tales, was provided to me by my friends, artists Yuri Khorovsky and Konstantin Zvezdochetov – their work is comparable to the work of Afanasyev and Dahl. The fairy tales they recorded are dressed up in the tinsel of modern times, many from the years of perestroika. A fairy tale is an ever-updating material.

— Returning to the tales of perestroika today, what do you want to say?

– Everything comes back – in a new form.

– Let’s go through some of the “Tales of Buyan Island.” For example, “The Enchanted Swamp”.

– Here the third son shot an arrow, it flew into the swamp where the frog princess lives. But in the swamp, the prince finds mutants instead of a beautiful girl and frogs with wings that will never turn into a beauty. The prospects are so-so: either live with the monster, or return to your friend on your light ball, which is used as a unicycle.

— And then the Mistress of the Copper Mountain turns into a character from a painting by Salvador Dali with empty boxes. Can they be filled in?

– Unless it’s tinsel, which is identical to emptiness.

— “The Fly Agaric Kingdom.” What is this fairy tale about?

“The royal daughters are relaxing and indulging in fun, and then extraordinary riders on fabulous gray wolves invade their boring, relaxed life. On one there is a thousand-eyed villain, on the other there is a fearless prince seeking to kill the first. They were waiting for a handsome prince, and then this crowd rushes past.

— Which fairy tale is special for you out of the 13?

— “The Bear Wedding” took longer. Bears and a black jazzman dance for young racketeers. Although these guys are in Russian ancient costumes, their way of life is completely modern – bourgeois. The summer cafe is their permanent habitat.

— This is probably the only fairy tale where an American character appears, although before you constantly included Western cartoon characters in your works. Why are you now moving away from this confrontation, although in reality it has just intensified?

— Despite the absence of Mickey Mouse, it is there.

– What is the moral of this story? Both there and there are the same vices?

– In many ways. Now there is a struggle going on within the people who grew up during the years of perestroika. Some have more Western culture, others have less, but everyone is already so infected with Western culture that it cannot be eradicated in one generation even with aggressive influence. In the old series, I combined the incompatible, for example, Russian classical painting with Mickey Mouse or The Simpsons. And now I’m looking for what is less known, but I’m looking more into the past, and not at what’s on the surface, premature. I left the characters from Western cartoons also because they don’t have new good ones, and it’s not interesting to play the old ones over and over again. I don’t like clumsy moves. What’s important to me is the game, the interconnection of the contrasting characters that I weave together.

— How do you feel about today’s time, when there is a demand for traditional values, understandable art, when socialist realism is being revived, and contemporary art is moving forward?

– This is all far-fetched. Nobody needs socialist realism. We live in a world of capitalism. Other people call the tune.

— Does the viewer always understand you?

– He understands, yes. I notice how people catch familiar images, and then begin to peer deeper into the essence. Once, at an exhibition, a boy saw a picture of the Simpsons from a distance and pulled his phlegmatic fat dad towards it with all his might. And then he saw that the characters he knew were “pasted” into the context of the classical picture. I think that this boy became interested in the “surroundings” and then took his father to the museum to get acquainted with the primary sources. This is how a chain reaction occurs that leads from images of mass culture to museum art.