From hay to glass: artist Alla Urban told how to gain inner vision

HELP “MK”

Alla Urban was born in the city of Armavir, Krasnodar Territory. Graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts of Moscow State Technical University. A.N. Kosygin, the School of Film, Television and Advertising (workshop of Yuri Grymov) and the School of Design in London. Lives in Moscow. Art historian Vitaly Patsyukov wrote about her work that it “relies on the traditions of Russian avant-garde culture, directing our memory to the architectons of Kazimir Malevich and the tower of the Third International of Vladimir Tatlin.” Urban’s installations are alive, not only because they sound, shine and move, it seems that each of them has a soul.

Alla Urban meets at the entrance to the industrial zone, where there is everything – from electronics repair to a taxidermist workshop. The artist got just the last ones as neighbors, so on the way to her personal world you can find concrete blanks for stuffed camels and horses. After passing these “guards”, you find yourself from a shabby Soviet corridor into another universe – a room with high ceilings and huge windows, filled with space installations made of metal rods and tin sheets, dotted with holes. If you run your hand over the bars, they begin to sing, and the planes of holes form unknown galactic systems – the light pouring from the gaps resembles stars. But Alla leads by – to a distant room, where a new job awaits. On the table is a huge blue eye.

– I collect it from medical glasses, which are used when taking blood from a finger. The glasses are cut into strips and folded into a three-dimensional triangle, each of which is pasted over with medical gauze, painted in blue light. It turns out such a kaleidoscope, which decomposes everything into its component parts and then reassembles it into a new picture of the world. Any video can be broadcast to this object, even directly from the TV, and it will be reassembled into another image, where everything is floating, as if we are looking at the blue planet from space. It is the view from above that transforms all our foolishness and villainy.

– Science in the last century has been following the path of refinement – it is looking for the smallest element, we have reached quarks, but this is not the end. For some reason, scientists are sure that they will reach the smallest point, and philosophers – that the microcosm is as infinite as the macrocosm. How do these ideas intersect with your new project?

— Absolutely. Everything starts with an element, and then the world grows. I had such a project – “Mr. Mark’s Three Quarks”. The title of the installation is a slightly modified quote from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. “Three quarks for Mr. Mark” – this phrase is shouted out by seagulls in the dream of the protagonist. It is from this quote that the physicist Murray Gell-Man took the name for the new elementary particle, the quark. True, at first he could not remember where this strange word came from. My installation is about how the world is infinitely huge. How to understand it – its emptiness and integrity? How to understand the words that are present in the prayer: “You fill everything, you are present everywhere, not in part, but everywhere suddenly, entirely”? What is the cause of human suffering? The fact that at some point you, the same smallest particle as a quark, begins to break away from the whole. This pain – separation, separation, loneliness – crushes. But the sky, the stars, the field are mine, and I am part of them. If you understand and feel this wholeness, then the pain goes away. This is what Vvedensky is close to me. He has a poem “Guest on a horse”, where he feels himself to be everything. When you think that you are so small in this huge world, and it presses, you need to understand that the whole world is in you. Then he will sound and stop pressing. This feeling is realized in this series and grows out of gauze and glasses.

— You work with different materials, but mostly with metal, and now you have switched to fragile glass. Why? When did the “eye period” begin?

– Two years ago. I work with hay, and with corrugated cardboard, and with slate, and with wood. It seems to me that the art critic Alexander Borovsky rightly noted that the material is not what I am attached to. What is important for me is the state that is transformed into thoughts, and they are already taking shape in some kind of material. Here is an object from a metal base and rods (we approach it). Flexible warm threads are wound on rigid cold hairpins with spiral cutting, forming a kind of strings or DNA. I like to combine materials that are opposite in quality. Here the poles are connected – both male and female. The whole world is built on conflict. Like in the movies, there is drama. Collision. I do not describe my texts, there is little literature in them, but there is a lively visual language. Here is the work “Crossroads” – all of the collisions, intersections of vertical and horizontal. It is a transition that connects the outside with the inside.

— That is, you show the conflict inherent in human nature. There is no positivity without negativity. This is the only way to move forward. Is this your message?

– How would we realize our happiness if misfortunes did not fall upon us? Dostoevsky wrote something about this: “there is no happiness in comfort”, “happiness is bought by suffering”. You won’t feel the joy of a burning fire until you’re cold. Therefore, many of my works are related to the transition. Sometimes I do work and then find new meanings in them that I didn’t think about at the moment when I did it. In “Transition”, for example, there is a moment of borderline – the transition from life to death.

– What about after death?

I think it’s life. This work shows it. All my works are some schemes of important events. The “Crossroads” has a built-in light moving module that shines through it. The light moves and reflects on the outside – on the walls, people. And when it is about in the middle, at the level of your eyes, the brightest flash occurs. And you understand that the cross underlying the object is transformed into huge wings. This object is a large crossroads, which consists of dozens of small crosshairs. So life consists of daily, every second crosshairs.

Is there any specific event that led to these thoughts and feelings?

— There were many events. It seems that one event becomes the starting point, and then you realize that every day something adds and changes. Fate is made up of invisible tiny bricks. Although there was one event that became an outbreak. I stood on the verge of life and death: I had to go through two very difficult operations. The day after the first one, I woke up and saw a streak of sun on the floor. And she cried with happiness … I had another operation in six months – no less difficult. And that moment, the proximity of death, gave me a vivid sense of life. It is this contrast that causes an irresistible excitement in me, which calms down when I look at the work already done and understand that it is alive.

– You graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts of the Kosygin Textile University. How did you move from decorative to large-scale installations?

– When I entered, I thought that I would become a stylist. But a couple of years after graduating from the university and after those operations, she began to make installations. This was in 1993. I had a feeling of accumulation. All my anxiety, something unspoken suddenly poured out. From what is now in my workshop, the earliest works are made from self-tapping screws. I screwed old rusted self-tapping screws into a metal panel with holes …

– Looks like an old pattern transferred to a hard texture. Here, too, one can feel the contrast, the combination of hardness and softness, the connection with the Russian tradition and its revision. What is encrypted in them?

— Archaic types. This bird is a powerful character, it has a crown, wings, a tail. And here are small birds with short wings. They cannot fly. Each of us has our own screws with which we fasten ourselves to the ground. Thus I speak of the spirality of time and events. From time immemorial, it is human nature to step on the same rake, to face the same problems. Everyone has their own self-tapping screws that prevent them from realizing their potential. There are limits to our form. We only fly in our dreams. We gain wings at the crossroads—in a transitional state.

– How to rid yourself of self-tapping screws?

Everything is not meaningless. These installations (pointing to blue eyes made of medical glass) are filled with a kaleidoscope of events. They seem to see the rising or setting sun – the beginning and the end in a metaphorical sense, which are in any story. When you fall asleep and close your eyes, you find yourself inside yourself, you feel yourself. I catch the moment when our inner vision opens, when we find ourselves in ourselves and see and hear everything in ourselves. I want to call this series – “And I am in this warm body.” This is a slightly altered first line from a poem by Alexander Vvedensky. “And I in my warm body / cherished deaf laziness. / The weeks ring drowsily, / eternity passes into the shadows. / The bald head of the moon / is covered with a smoky cloak, / with the music of sleepy time / I will crown my house. / The ear of the street is deaf, / the carousel is spinning. / Stars are evil old women / shake the cradle of days … ”For some reason I remembered the first line in my own way. The body is just the clothes of your “I”.

What does “I” mean to you?

– What you are at this moment. With all your luggage. What you threw away is no longer you. What you left behind is you. This is your experience, even if it is negative. It happens that a person has sinned and repented, and this repentance is now part of him, but the previous experience is not. But repentance is sincere only when you feel disgust for the perfect. These eyes are a kind of optics that allows you to look into yourself and see the integrity of the world, to recognize yourself as part of the cosmos. Art, in my opinion, should always raise up, despite the drama and conflicts. My desire is to connect the wounding fragments so that they form, play, as in a kaleidoscope, explaining the wholeness of everything that happens.

Art should give impetus to movement. I confess that I cannot go to some exhibitions, because, despite the excellent form, there is art that crushes you.

– And which of the artists – past or present – is yours? Who are you looking at?

— Bill Viola. When I first saw his “Journey of the Soul”, this ascent and immersion of a person, it made a strong impression on me. Like the feeling of the first or last breath. I also do what grows out of me. It is difficult for me with my works: they take up a lot of space and are difficult to execute. But my art is a spiritual and physical need for me. I can’t help it.