(E-E) Ev.g.e.n.i.j ..K.o.z.l.o.v Berlin |
|
home // E-E // biographie // art // eros // Leningrad 80s // Valentin Kozlov // 2 x 3m // events // sitemap // kontakt /
 / |
(E-E) Ev.g.e.n.i.j ..K.o.z.l.o.v Berlin |
|
home // E-E // biographie // art // eros // Leningrad 80s // Valentin Kozlov // 2 x 3m // events // sitemap // kontakt /
/ |
(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Mail Art Mail art is a topic that might have suggested itself from the very beginning, but the preceding research topics help to examine it more comprehensively. What is the specific role of Kozlov’s artworks in the correspondence? Two thirds of all works at the Davis Center, 34 pieces out of 50, are an integral part of a letter – for instance, as a composition placed or painted on the top of a folded card, like a book cover, with the other three pages being used for text.
 Should such a work be considered as mail art? And if so, should the text that goes with it also be defined mail art? And what about those seven (or, perhaps, twelve[1]) works sent as inserts? It isn’t even clear whether Kozlov created these specifically for a letter or whether he selected them among those he had achieved earlier.[2] In this respect, Harvard’s classification seems to be clear: it distinguishes between mail art (any art attached to a letter), other – “loose” – art (mixed media, pastel, drawing, statue), and photographs. The latter category includes Mannick’s and Kozlov’s photographs, more precisely, the paper prints, but not the digitised images. However, in the case of Kozlov’s vintage prints, the situation isn’t unambiguous at all. Harvard classifies some of them as mail art, too, namely those six from Letter L (1987) which display the text of the letter on the reverse (KMFP_0016). If we follow this – intuitive – classification, it augments the number of original artworks to 57 (see Table of Harvard Accession Numbers and Other Data). What is more, since most of the vintage prints have at least some text information on the reverse, this rule would allow these to be labelled as mail art, too.
 Obviously, how we assign a particular artefact to a particular category depends on what conceptual criteria we choose to apply to mail art. The following discussion will not consider unpainted vintage prints, thereby sticking to the more traditional category of “art” as a work displaying some degree of transformation of the medium. But first of all, the question of art as mail art must be set in the larger context of gift exchanges. Since Mannick and Kozlov weren’t able to meet very often, the gifts they made each other were an important aspect of their friendship. The introductory text Sending Art and Other Gifts gives an overview about the presents and how they reached the recipient in one of four ways. They could be part of a letter (Kozlov’s drawings and vintage prints, and Mannick’s art postcards and pictures) or sent as parcels (books and records). To avoid customs regulations, larger or more unusual gifts were handed over to a personal messenger – a friend or acquaintance travelling between the two countries. Among Kozlov’s art, this concerned three works: the “new wave” T-shirt Napravlenie (Letter G), the drawing Women on the Sand (Letter M), and the large painting The River of Forgetfulness, the latter now being in the collection of the Wende Museum. Last but not least, presents were exchanged when Mannick and Kozlov met personally, as in 1982, when Kozlov gave his friend a hand-carved wooden statuette of a Halloween wizard (Letter D) and the painting The Mystical Light of America (Letter E). In other words, four works in the Davis Center Special Collection were handed over personally. From here it follows that for Kozlov, mailing art in an envelope was by far not the only possibility to send it across the ocean, although it was the common way when it fitted into an envelope. According to Kozlov’s scheme in his diary, the largest envelope accepted by the post office was 22.9 x 32.4 cm (see Sending Art and Other Gifts), which permitted enclosures in an A4 format, but most works are smaller, many even small enough for the 11.4 x 16.2 cm standard airmail envelope. It goes without saying that when sent in an envelope, the medium was paper (including vintage prints), but techniques varied. Kozlov used gouache, watercolour, pastel, pencil, lithographic crayon, ink, and spray. There are essentially two criteria that distinguish these works from “classic” mail art. The first is that in Kozlov’s body of works, they do not constitute a genre of their own. Rather, they reflect the styles the artist used for creating his other works. The periodisation below sets them into context of a particular style. A composition with a colourful harlequin (Letter C, 1980/1981) illustrates this approach: it interprets a fragment of gouache painting from 1980. It is also the only painting applied directly onto an envelope; interestingly, it is the reverse of the envelope that displays the fluxus concept of mail art. Because the composition extends to the very borders of the envelope, just leaving some empty space for the address, Kozlov used the reverse for the stamps.
Here, he arranged four stamps in a geometrical pattern, like the zigzagging silhouette of a pyramid or skyscraper – a typical mail art pictogram. Given the fact that that among Kozlov’s artist friends, the first examples of envelope mail art are documented for 1987/1988, when perestroika was already having an impact on what was tolerated publicly, it is remarkable that he sent it much earlier, during the Brezhnev period.[3] In 2023, Kozlov remarked:
The importance of verbal communication is yet another feature that distinguishes Kozlov’s letters from mail art as it is emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Typical mail art focuses on communication via images, and when the sender generates text – often included as a short note – it is likely to be a playful cipher to be decoded by the receiver. Kozlov’s letters served a different purpose: regular text was no less important than the message transferred by the images, and his texts are often quite long and elaborate. This said, when considering Kozlov’s correspondence, one doesn't have to stick to the “anti-art” Dadaist / Fluxus concept of mail art. After all, the images fulfil the essential criteria of mail art: they are art, and they were mailed. Kozlov clearly didn’t choose his images at random – as in traditional mail art, pictorial and textual messages relate to each other in a variety of ways, intriguing the researcher with their semantical ambiguity. Their specific characteristics should, however, not be ignored.
E-E Style – Periodisation for the 1980s. In the decade of the 1980s, Kozlov’s art followed a developmental process that led to a new style emerging about every two years, without, however, completely replacing the previous one. By the end of the 1980s, it fuses, among others, elements of Russian folk art, classical academic drawing, graffiti and comic art, and avant-garde art from the early 20th century. Combining figurative with abstract features, Evgenij Kozlov realised his own innovative style to portray a metamorphosis of reality, often using his own photos for the task, and creating new symbols – the “E-E” style. Kozlov’s art gifts in the Davis Center Special Collection, predominantly from the years up to 1986, as well as numerous photographic reproductions of his works – Kozlov’s and Mannick’s prints and slides – mirror this process. Together, they demonstrate his artistic versatility and thus reflect the task the artist set himself: “I can, I want, I have to express myself!” (Letter L, 1986). The following list suggests a periodisation with links to examples provided by the theme chapters and introductory texts to the letters. • 1979 – 1982 The Russian period Letters A, B, C, D and Pictures 1981 – Flat Exhibitions / Letopis ("Chronicle”) show samples of the more traditional style of his “Russian period”, absorbing features of folk art and the Russian Avant-garde. • 1982/1983 The language of the future Soon there is a transition to a universal, yet highly individual style the artist was defining for himself as “the language of the future” (Slides 1980-1983). • 1983 Portraiture. Starting in 1983, his photographs inspire his portraits – paintings (Letter F), collages (Letter G), and drawings (Introduction, Letter F) that often depart from the original source to a considerable degree. Portraiture remains a distinguishing feature of Kozlov’s predominantly figurative art. • 1984 Collages Kozlov starts experimenting with collage techniques for both small format and large format works, making his vintages prints part of the compositions (Letter G, Alexander Boyko’s colour reproductions of works by five New Artists, 1984).
• 1984/1985 New Wave Zigzagging lines and a geometric design of volume characterises Kozlov’s refined New Wave style from 1984/1985 (Letter G). A shining example is his T-shirt “Napravlenie” (Chapter 2, Letter G). A second inscription on the T-shirt, BACK ART, leads to Kozlov’s next style. • 1985/1986 B(L)ack art The year 1985 sees the emergence of Kozlov’s B(L)ack art style, his personal interpretation of Western graffiti and comic art. He overpaints selected vintage prints and writes “the audience considers my works special, extreme in style, new” (Letter H). Letter I from 1986 contains several reproductions of B(L)ack art paintings, and Letter L from the same year includes numerous B(L)ack art portraits of his fellow artists, one of which carries the inscription “ПоПс из ССССР” – PoPs from the USSSR. • 1986 USA-CCCP For the first major work dedicated to the relationship between America and the Soviet Union, USA-CCCP, Kozlov harks back to his B(L)ack art style. He discusses the painting in Letter J and Letter K. • 1987 CCCP-CHINA In 1987, he continues his quest of creating new symbols for Soviet art and extends the USA-CCCP concept to China. His Halloween (birthday) greetings from 1987 are written on the reverse of a vintage print that sees him wearing his T-shirt CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCP while standing in front of his painting China-USSR (Letter N, part 1). • 1988 large multi-figure paintings Kozlov’s created his largest present to his friend, The River of Forgetfulness from 1988 (Wende Museum, California), with a new technical approach based on controlled-uncontrolled liquid painting. The composition is an outstanding example of the artist’s interest in mythological subject matters, first elaborated in depth in his Peterhof Book of Hours cycle from 1982 (Slides 1980-1983). The same year, he painted several multi-figure works based on his photographs of New Artists performances (Chapter 2). • 1989/1990 New Classicals In 1987, Kozlov began a process of revitalising the language of constructivism. In 1989, when he opened his studio “The Russian Field” in the centre of Leningrad (Letter Q), he created his monumental New Classicals cycle, part of which is today in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and Tate Gallery (Letter R). Hannelore Fobo, 15 November 2024 [1] See Introduction, footnote 7. [2] When it comes to the works sent as loose inserts, one notices an interesting detail: some of these works have marks of adhesive tape on the reverse. To emphasise a composition, Kozlov often fixed it to a slightly larger piece of coloured paper or cut a frame he placed onto the drawing like a mat. Thus, the pastel drawing from 1980 displays eight rectangular marks verso, evenly distributed around the borders. Presumably, Kozlov removed the additional piece of paper before he sent the drawing, which would speak in favour of him selecting it from those available at the moment.
[3] The New Artists exhibition catalogue from 2012 shows several examples of Vadim Ovchinnikov’s mail art from 1987/1988, sent to his Leningrad art companions Marta Volkova and Vyacheslav Shevelenko. (The New Artists. Ed. by Ekaterina Andreeva and Nelly Podgorskaya. Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2012, pp. 72-75.) Ovchinnikov’s mail art messages were subtle. He used standard envelopes, which were provided with a printed pattern to fill in the addresses of receiver and sender, and, sometimes, with an additional image dedicated to a specific place or date. He then created ironic references between the sender’s purported name and the image or the stamps. For instance, the sender of an envelope with an image dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the newspaper Pravda is called gibel’ Titanik[a], Sinking of the Titanic, which may also be an allusion to Karl Bryullov’s monumental painting in the collection of the State Russian Museum, Gibel’ Pompeii, The Last Day of Pompeii. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University >> Published 15 November 2024 Last updated 29 January 2025 |
|
home // E-E // biographie // art // eros // Leningrad 80s // Valentin Kozlov // 2 x 3m // events // sitemap // kontakt /
|
