DARK VAT: A CENTRE WITHOUT PERIPHERY — OLEG DEETZ

Editorial Introduction:

Oleg Deetz was one of twelve artists in residence at Dark Vat, the programme established by Alexander James Hamilton in a disused Soviet photographic paper factory in Krasnoyarsk in 2019. This is his account of what happened there.

The dust settled slowly. Or was it not dust? The finest suspension in the air. The veil of a cataract. Now it is gone, and the world opens to the eye. The altered world of the empty workshop became a model of our world, exactly as art is a model of our life and of the concepts that fill it. Photography, sculpture, painting, architecture, video, actionism. Works of Art.

All of it is the work of twelve people who moved into an empty space. The trajectories of their bodies ruled lines across the plane. Muscular and mental effort filled empty canvases with life. Most of the work made during the residency was built from materials found in the workshop itself, paints and ironmongery aside.

* * *

In its own way, Dark Vat illustrates and directly embodies a very simple conception of how artistic practice accomplishes its tasks.

When an artist begins to move lines, volumes or objects across a plane or through space, they begin to form structures: patterns, further lines. Edges begin to act upon edges. To touch, to complement, to conflict. And this exchange of information is already a dialogue. Or at least its first form.

One of the tasks before the artist is to hear this dialogue, or its beginning, and to allow it to reach completion. The dialogue may take many forms. The conversation can occur between artist and space; between artist and event, or time; between artist and artist; with oneself; between artist and another person.

In theory this brings us to the need to reconsider the very notion of dialogue. One might propose, for instance, that it is an exchange of texts.

An exchange of texts between culture and artist. Artist and culture. Culture transmits some textual impulse to the artist; it acts upon him, provokes convulsions, reactions, irritation, a tickling, a prickling, to which the artist inevitably answers with a text of his own, sets it into the culture, adds it to the sum, and from that disturbance the culture stirs like the surface of water. The ripple displaces former meanings and rearranges them, and by this the culture arrives at a new state.

Dialogue is in the artist's blood. Or rather, it is his blood. This is so, unavoidably and inescapably.

The act of creation is a letting of blood. A sacrifice of part of one's life and vital force, in payment for the transformation of the world, for its creation.

* * *

For Krasnoyarsk the residency was an experience of unprecedented concentration and fruitfulness in the conception of dialogue described above. Twelve artists, wholly unlike one another, came together and began to talk. Twelve different techniques and approaches found themselves in the melting vat of Dark Vat, and fermented. The resulting compound intoxicates and sobers at once.

Dark Vat hosting an open day with tours of the space, artists and works

The result cannot be looked at through the prism of parochial psychology, or the doctrine of provincial art. Today we are all, as Marshall McLuhan bequeathed to us, a centre without a periphery. The joining of twelve local, individual, intimate strategies of making at a single point in space and time produces, in sum, a vector of unprecedented force. The media vortex will carry its vibrations to the furthest corners of the planet.

* * *

Genius is often ascribed to the artist. Otherness. By this the artist is turned into a kind of outcast, an outsider, a marginal figure, and at the same time this position outside caste exalts him, raises him on buskins, sets him on a plinth, a pedestal.

And exactly the same happens to his works. To the viewer they seem a kind of revelation, divine providence, ventriloquism, a mystical act or a narcotic rush.

This is strange. Yes, artists think differently, but no more differently than any other people differ from one another in the mechanics of their thinking. It is not a special, "other" otherness, but an entirely common human one.

Art in itself ceased long ago to be anything special. But the myth is still actively cultivated. Over the course of the residency it became clear that artists are exactly as naive, as open and as spontaneous as everyone else. And the results of their work, the text they produce, differ little in essence from the text of everyday life produced by everyone else.

Designing a circular future workshop, hosted at Dark Vat

This has become especially plain now, in our digital time of McLuhan's global village. The all-pervading interconnection of acts, thoughts and phenomena has become something that can be felt at the fingertips. Not merely felt, but responded to, vividly and in earnest, and not with a comment or a tap on a heart. No. To respond means to make a critical text: a photograph, a track, a video, a poem, something. And to publish it at once, with full responsibility and awareness.

That answer becomes the first link in a chain of movements the viewer will make to reach the source. Alone, unassisted, simply by links and hyperlinks. In this way the viewer learns to function in new informational conditions, and carries that experience into daily life, into the household, into education.

Today the artist is not simply a maker, not a member of an elite and not an augur. Today the artist is each of us.

* * *

Art gives us the chance to practise this, to learn the handling of the instruments of critical analysis, planning, interaction, response, dialogue. Art is neither prophecy nor amusement, though at times that component comes to the front and deceptively eclipses the substance. Art is a model of life. A miniature, fully functioning copy. And the terms on which you stand with art repeat exactly your terms with life itself. Because there is no objective reason for it to be otherwise. The instruments for analysing art differ in no way from the methodology of analysis applicable to everything else, to anything at all.

Inside the Dark Vat holographic projection installation

A residency is a dwelling. A house. Arriving as a guest, you enter the world of art. Turning to art, you arrive as a guest. The study of the visual properties of one's surroundings, the reading of the space around you, is a process of every minute and every second. You are in the world of art without interruption. For the world consists entirely of artefacts, and of other formal consequences of somebody's decisions. Only air, fire, water and earth were here before.

You could say that we are always guests in our own house.

* * *

We come home and everything there has already changed. We have to deal with it. Art gives us the skills to hone our speed of response, to find a methodology of our own.

The dwellers change along with the dwelling. More than that, they differ from one another to begin with. Twelve artists are twelve persons, twelve sets of individual techniques, approaches, characteristics and particularities. Twelve Others. And through acquaintance, through interaction, you come to know not so much the Other as yourself.

In the space of the residency the twelve became one. And this is not a shapeless lump of plasticine, nor Frankenstein's monster stitched together from different bodies. The union lies in the joint forming of an Image made up of many clearly definable components. Those components differ in their essence, their structure and their form, as do the people who made them.

Such is life. Difference between people makes no one good or bad; ranking leads nowhere. The infinity of variation under discussion is what makes people, and humanity, strong. We are different, and in that difference lies an unprecedented power. We need only recognise this and learn to use it for good, as happened over the course of the residency, rather than to sustain the discord and tension it so often serves.

The Dark Vat residency is a model, and an experience outside time. An experience of making and of looking. A collision and a gentle touch. A catastrophe and the fragile shoot of new achievement. A forge and a maternity hospital.

Dark Vat happens everywhere, and every second. There are no exceptions. It is time to understand this. Time to begin acting accordingly. Responsibly, and with awareness.

Dark Vat, Newscast on Kultura 24