To his immediate audience, Dmitri Prigov’s poetry was as likely to be experienced – not to mention written – on tin cans and lampposts as it was on paper. A member of the Moscow Conceptualists, Prigov was an astonishingly prolific performance and visual artist, as well as a writer. Performance was a crucial element of his poetry, and audio tapes of his readings were eagerly circulated during the samizdat era as well as copies of his texts.
Prigov (1940-2007) became an influential cult figure in intelligentsia circles in the mid-1970s, but because of the political situation, his first legally sanctioned book (Слёзы геральдической души, or Tears of a Heraldic Soul) was published only towards the end of perestroika, in 1990, by which time he had already written 15,000 poems. However, Prigov’s poetry is best grouped not by publication history but in thematic cycles, many of which – the “милицанер” cycle, the Reagan cycle, his азбуки (alphabets), his “mantric” readings of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – he discussed during his performance at U.C. Berkeley. By the time of his death in 2007, Prigov’s oeuvre had expanded into the novelistic genre, and even into film: he plays small but significant roles in the ‘90s cult movies Такси-блюз (Taxi Blues, 1990, dir. Pavel Lungin) and Хрусталёв, машину! (Khrustalyov, My Car! 1998, dir. Aleksei German).
The sensibility motivating Prigov’s work is ironic and postmodern. His formation as an artist and thinker was during the time in which irony became the privileged currency of Soviet intellectuals; this was a natural response to the stagnation of Brezhnev’s USSR, when the dramatic eras of Stalinist repression and the Thaw’s liberalization in the sixties had passed. Irony, rather than outright dissidence or critique, became a means through which one could simultaneously distance oneself from Soviet mythology and remain within its sphere, savoring the absurdities of Soviet discourse without declaring opposition. Also influential in Prigov’s development were the terms and theories of western post-structuralism: one can see its traces in his discussion, in our video, of the “strategies” used in his work.
Prigov’s preferred strategy was to put on the mask of some cultural discourse, and then to speak through that discourse, to push it to its logical and linguistic limits. The discourses he worked with had their origins both in high culture, the cherished literary language of the Russian tradition, and in the everyday, including journalistic language, the language of obituaries, and the speech of daily Soviet life. As Boris Groys has noted, Prigov has no interest in freeing language or art from external control; he is quite frank about the kinship between his poetry and the social order under which it was produced, and his aim is to give voice to cultural myths. This is not in order to deconstruct, criticize, or unmask them, but to articulate them as the essential forms of actually existing culture.
One of the few ideas to which Prigov did repeatedly declare opposition was the notion of Romantic authenticity, of the artist’s genius and of art as a means of genuine emotional expression. The multiplicity and chaotic nature of the codes that make up culture, for Prigov, render such authenticity impossible. Prigov’s devotion to poetic performance, then, should not be seen as an attempt to claim culturally privileged status for the Poet, but rather as an aspect of his exploration of what culture is and how it works. As he said in response to a question from the audience at his Berkeley performance: “Я себя поэтом не считаю. Я – деятель культуры, вообще.” (“I do not consider myself a poet. I am a cultural worker, in general.”)
PRIGOV IN AMERICA
Dmitri Prigov’s art made it to the United States before he ever visited. William Struve and his wife, Deborah traveled to Moscow in 1986, where they attended an exhibition at the Avant-Gardists’ art club. At the exhibition the Struves were particularly captivated by Prigov’s work. Struve sought to display Prigov’s art in the United States at his gallery, but was unable to secure permission from the Soviet authorities for export of what he considered the most exciting pieces—the Pravda newspaper prints. Three years later, the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland received permission to exhibit a number of works, and Struve arranged to bring some of them to Chicago for Prigov’s first solo exhibition. That same year his art was also displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in St. Louis.
In February 1989, Prigov made his first trip to the United States to be an artist in residence at Ohio Wesleyan University. During this time, he performed at major universities on the East and West coasts. This trip was the first of many to the United States over the next 15 years. He attended conferences at the University of Pittsburgh in 1994 and 2002 and performed at Stanford and UC Berkeley in 2001 (the recording of which is at the center of this website) and at Dickinson College in 2004.