I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only 
We think of the key, each in his prison 
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

                     T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The Underground

28.07.2007

On a hot July day, when the outlines of the intricately refracted contours of ideas emerging from my subconscious were still melting in the haze of hot air, I suddenly found myself in the most unceremonious way knocked out of my state of intellectual bliss, which had blissfully opened up in the halls of the generously rewarding muses – a sphere reserved from encroachments from outside and extremely vulnerable due to the ephemeral nature of the aura of easily elusive reality.

The destroyer of magical auricity turned out to be a piercingly treacherous call from a certain employee of HR from a distant and, rather, brutally assertive world that did not even exist for me at that moment; – from the very first sounds in the receiver, its inhabitant appeared as an absolute derivative of its lively dynamism and, it seemed, knew everything about her mission. Invading imperiously into the silence, the voice in a peremptory tone informed (without any doubt at the same time in the annunciation of its own intonations) about the final success of my passing a series of various tests (in the same place, apparently, completely forgotten), ridiculous interviews and other manipulations in the genre of absurdism on the way to the cherished goal of the suffering army of applicants for an open-end contract to work in the world abode of transnational business – bp corporation. Having pathetically ended the broadcast, the voice in the receiver smiled inaudibly, – apparently in anticipation of the reaction of the happy chosen one. The reaction didn’t come. Perplexed by my involvement in the suddenly lined up prospect, and depersonalized by the imperativeness of the consequences that followed from here, I silently thought, more and more imbued with the realization of the inevitability of the end of the serenity. Thus, my underground epic began with reflections on the inequivalence of exchange and an anxious feeling of impending changes.

Conceived as an experiment exploring the world of closed communities, the Project suddenly began to take on the now clearly visible outlines, and the forms of its goal-setting, along with the access to the factual base of materials, rapidly emerged as an invaluable nutrient environment in the configuration of future achievements.

Absurdity for the uninitiated is only the end product of unknown phenomena. Manifestations of utilitarian absurdity are a phenomenon of cautiously welcomed possibilities. For insiders, however, it seems to be a quite obvious consequence of the specific decisions and relevant materials laid in its basis. There is always a womb of input somewhere. I stood at its threshold.

Before the horn blew for the last time, I politely asked the voice if I could think more before visiting the office for the final signing of a priceless labor-market-fetish contract. (The presupposition of the metamorphoses associated with formal changes and the endless foreignness of the sphere of communion that awaited me oppressively weighed in favor of refusing to immerse myself in one of the fantastic art projects, the sacrificial price of which I would have to pay with my own freedom; Mephistopheles took to the maximum and sophisticatedly – in a devilish way.) Judging by the pause on the other end, the question caused a pattern break. The scenario of the answers did not suggest such a thing, and I intuitively felt that if I got involved in the matter, the density of the material would be phenomenal. The instinct of a paratrooper, developed in my youth, did not disappoint this time either – having taken a step, in my soul I was already flying into the abyss.

01.08.2007

Having signed open-end contract, I found myself in the core of a mass of regulations and models of their theoretical incarnations freely circulating in the space limited to the outside world. How it works in practice is still unknown, but judging by the content, it’s already doubtful.

Welcome to the underground – the atmosphere of specific reflections.

05.09.2007

Central Department of the Region. Barrel prices are rapidly approaching a hundred. Obviously speculative. The situation in the office is close to enchanting. On the sites, they work as hard as they do. Incomparably different worlds embodying the unevenness of efforts, if they are somewhere in the office still made – coffee, clothes, conversations, spa, intrigue, fitness room … Higher oil prices, more clearly the feeling of the relaxed working days in bp regional head office.

12.10.2007

The abundance of printed materials supporting a persistent sense of broadcast absurdity is off scale. Whether anyone needs this at all, no one here really knows.

04.11.2007

The visit of one more arrived vp from London was marked by a meeting in the banquet hall of Hyatt hotel with breaks for viands, framing the leisurely conversations in an atmosphere of idle pastime – coffee, croissants, lunches, dessert … Only vodka did not flow in a stream – drug and alcohol policy terrifyingly stood guard over formal corporate morals, provoking gradually planing a snack to a ‘stack’ (filled nearby glass) next to traces of spilled drops on an oppressively sly text (embodying at the same time by the logic of broken prohibitions the cherished dream of latent recusants).

Purring, chirping, he licked his lips at the prospects (oil prices have been indecently creeping up) he outlined for half a day and, having finally mentioned the importance of the work done by everyone, traditionally imbued with the sanctity of honoring the rules of safety – hackneyed parable of universal corporate happiness, as well as the conditions for the fabulous enrichment of shareholders of greedy ideas. Looking at the importance attached to faces, I thought how opportune it would be to stand up here, say something indecent about oil and gas, pull the tablecloth off the table and, jumping on it, chop off a dashing escapade … If even at that time the doors of the hall would have flung open and drunken hussars, whores and a bear would have tumbled under the daring songs of the gypsies, then the scene of an imaginary extravaganza would have miraculously converged in vital counterpoint with the stuffy atmosphere of fuming careerism, hard plunged the listening audience into a sweetly intoxicating dream inspired by enchanting tales of Foggy Albion.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

27.12.2007

By the end of 2007, only five works were done, three of which were destroyed. With such productivity, even a few years of imprisonment – an oxymoron – is not enough to implement all conceived ideas. Really, to bury my years here ..?

14.03.2008

Once I noticed among my colleagues that if the department was disbanded, no one would even notice its absence in the Company. And it will not affect the quality of the oil produced either. (Prices for it are already, by the way, over a hundred.) Judging by the reaction, the idea was not quite liked. Someone casually mentioned something about jobs, usual salaries, comfort zone and the well-established rhythm of life. According to the logic adopted here, it is not so important what you do. The main thing is timely paid good money. People are like people … 

17.04.2008

To the artwork Projectiles

When I got to STEP five years ago – Sangachal Terminal Expansion Programme (the project of bp to build a grandiose terminal in the desert), – I was impressed, I remember, not even by an anthill of thousands of workers and office specialists dressed in overalls (all of them were fussing over something in their own way), but by a visual a row of slenderly towering flagpoles with the flags of companies fluttering on them, having gathered all this people, containers and equipment into a tightly whipped claw, which then stirred up the once quiet virgin steppe, which exuded aromas of wild herbs in the spring. The high iron formation of the flagpoles uncompromisingly personified the rapacity of the fangs, the monster mercilessly thrust into the ground – the equipment, helmets, overalls, everything involved in the total destruction of the environment were smeared with logos of brand signs fluttering in the sky. The earth savagely crushed under the swarming mess of people, iron and concrete. Above the flickering of their crowd, the all-devastating energy of absorbing the landscape hovered, day by day disappearing into the outlines of gradually growing structures, labyrinths of pipes and huge oil storage tanks the size of an amphitheater for gladiator fights, for which, in fact, this arena was unfolded, but with the only difference that the victim was now not so much a man as his own cradle – the earth itself. A semblance of progress over two thousand years has taken on an ugly lateral direction, indistinctly justified by intellectuals with a knocked-down coordinate system. If in the Roman Empire, for fun, they killed people, in the era of empires of transnational corporations, the surface itself is erased from the face of the earth, based on superficial ideas about the long journey made to humanistic ideas, but, coupled with the impact on vital areas in matters of existential survival of human being itself. For business sake.

Meanwhile, energy, as is known, does not disappear without a trace. The evolution of views on accidents has transformed the anthropogenic nature of industrial aggression into the corresponding risks formally assessed for each of the actions, documented as dangers in bureaucratically clumsy “permits to works” – an employer’s indulgence in the event of a fatal outcome of workers going to work. Dangers were afraid of, known about and conjured with the help of office heralds to be protected from them in every possible way. The rituals took place at field ‘five-minute’ meetings called ‘TBT’ (contemptuously ignored in the absence of formal bosses on the site; – the working people have always been very sensitive to the bureaucratic falsity of ideas coming down from above).

In such an atmosphere, the flags hoisted in the sky were especially symbolic due to the fact that they fluttered against the backdrop of a huge sandblasting shop, in the womb of which the main danger included in the risk assessment was lethal particles ricocheting under enormous pressure – projectiles. Visually fluttering against the background of a potentially deadly workshop, the logos obviously personified vivid images of monstrous projectiles mercilessly piercing the virgin steppe.

02.12.2008

To the artwork Naudiz

The beginning of the fall in oil prices markedly changed the theme of all meetings in the office. When the downward turned into a collapse, all conversations acquired a total minority in the voice, turning into an undisguised fear of the prospect of curtailing evidently pretentious benefits, followed by the main phobia and the worst dream of bp people who got used to a measured life – stuff reduction. The disturbing atmosphere frankly grew into an unhealthy one. Agitated by the coming selection, the people hide from the pointing finger hovering over them with a feverish demonstration of the justification of their positions, starting the morning with an irresistible craving for news about oil prices. The feeling that the spirit of shamanised barrel is hung in the heavy air and, not letting go, keeps at bay. But Naudiz, who warned in antiquity, had already risen from the ashes of Anglo-Saxon legends – Nied biþ nearu on bréstan; weorþeþ híe þeah oft níþa bearnum tó helpe ond tó hælu gehwhæþre, gif híe hlystaþ æror. (The need is tight on the chest, but it often becomes for the sons of men both in help and salvation, if it is heard in advance.)

BP is a place of easy loss of a sense of reality outside the window, a sudden return to which is akin to others being expelled from paradise. Doubtful paradise. A happy dwelling in which is possible only as a tamed slave.

17.08.2009

Fairy tales of office eden are exhausted – heard, read, seen … In some places – to the heart’s content. The absurdity of the amusing looking-glass can hardly be endured for long. Even – not in toxic doses. The research material, meanwhile, is not whole, scattered, many-sided, therefore, for a picture of integrity, need to go to site. The company encourages such transitions – for practice in the labor masses and other nonsense (formally necessary for individual protégés as a step in their corporate biography – other intruders from abroad to the local sites are curiously found a couple of years later in leading positions in Sunbury or St. James; not for everyone, of course, the stage in the offshore proceeded so fleetingly and ricocheted straight to Landon, but the zealous careerists were so impressed by the trajectory of the dizzying rally that the intimate nuance of secret patronage in the mechanism of intra-corporate ups took on an almost sacred meaning for them and ornately led them into a deep search for an influential mentor, giving at the same time a piquant color to their inconsolable ambitions). The site in the company was perceived as a springboard. For some it springs, for others it buries. The latter were in the natural majority. And now I consciously plunged into this friendly serpentarium. Deep dive, as they would say here under other circumstances.

Obviously, the objectivity of study of the material is possible only in the study of all its levels and interconnections. But one question still stands out as a special intrigue: how adequately is the absurdity, descending into the depths from well-arranged office heights, perceived? And do the recipients who have passed the stage of its formation at the heights in their careers even suspect this?

31.08.2009

When I opted for offshore platforms out of all the options offered, the head of the department stared at me with a stupefied look, as if he had suddenly collapsed from an oak tree to the ground, – it was clear from the nervously moving pupils that the answer did not fit into the logic of the expected answers. Careers in the company were made in the corridors, meeting rooms and locations of coffee machines. Once on the sites, people disappeared there forever. Lucky, if for years … Offshore is the darkest of the distant holes.

25.01.2010

The offshore installation. Immense smooth surface of the sea.

The huge flare is above me. I am among the eaters of heaven.

10.02.2010

The noon. Impenetrable darkness in the depths of the steel interior of the labyrinths of the annulus of the humming platform. In the gaps – dull grayness. Gray is, in fact, the whole platform itself. Like the whole sky above us. And the sea around us. Between the sea and the sky – a dank wind; – so much so that it seems ruthlessly steel. Other shades, sometimes, simply do not exist here. The platform is in the total power of gray of anything and everything.

Nearby, coach Peter (an inconspicuous kind fellow) who is telling something is diligently trying to utter some utter dregs, that are constantly torn off by the wind, about the storage of chemical materials and the danger of lifting operations at sea, the meaning of which barely reaches through tightly fitting bulky headphones protecting from the constant hum.

Around – literally and figuratively – total grayness reigned, – so much so that even the yellow-green logo fluttering on the flagpole, as if absorbing it, exudes the very essence of the joylessness spilled around, overwhelming any feeling of life in this environment unnatural to man. A total installation of all-consuming dullness as an eschatological foreboding of an impending inevitable catastrophe.

Standing in a gray, impossible for a life environment, blown by a chillingly piercing wind, one suddenly find that Bach unexpectedly saves. His eternally clear Air.

28.03.2010

There is work that you don’t just finish as desired or with haste, in order to put an end to it and forget it, but after completing it, you feel empty to the point of stupefaction. It is with this feeling that I have just completed the hse report, – statistical nonsense, deafening in its absurdity, justifying the existence of superior positions. It’s not even that they don’t need them there, but that their content, generated locally, is unjustified and unreliable – such are the circumstances of reality. From such figures and pictures, an inadequate and, rather, desired idea at the top about what is happening on reporting sites is molded – a presentational idyll interspersed with working assumptions. The power and function of a self-feeding bureaucracy is inexhaustible. Accordingly, the degrees of its rootedness are identical and the illusions regarding the adequacy of the material perceived by it.

It is also amazing how others sacrifice precious years for the sake of building a career in such an environment, devoting themselves to the boredom of the functioning of the labor safety system, the audit of foul-smelling substances and the thoughtless brainwashing of personnel by the postulates of schizoid behavioristics descended from above. It is easier to put stones on stones, which sometimes makes more sense than to overcome violence against own consciousness, painfully justifying the stricken intellect by compensating for the bonuses received. If being determines consciousness, it is difficult to imagine its content after several years of such a life. A terrible concoction thickly mixed with years of mind-numbing toxicity.

Half an hour later, one of the most idiotic spectacles that I have ever seen begins – management hse meeting – where one must observe the ideology and not slide into radical slyness. It is customary to talk about issues of survival in the potentially dangerous conditions of the operating installation (which is natural in itself, but their existence in principle is not normal) at such gatherings with almost fanatical (at least outwardly) faith in the primacy of the importance of discussing these problems (any dissent subject to immediate suppression). The reasons for the existence of such conditions do not occur to anyone to discuss.  The predetermined expectations of management hse meetings a priori dooms them to discussing only the functionality and further arrangement of the system itself – the apotheosis of one of the most unsuccessful manifestations of thought in relation to the structure of human communities.

Each time, getting to their gatherings, consciousness, without stopping the rebellion, feverishly asks only about the time that I can still have before creating all the planned artworks in the “here and now” mode. For everything, I suspect, it may not be enough.

But at the same time, there is a significant bonus – it is at such gatherings that creative ideas mature and their therapeutic correlation with the episodes taking place around, – process that can be reveled in tirelessly. However, this is only a side effect, stopping my identity in the midst of an autistic masquerade. In any case, the project must be completed. Preferably, not self-exposing. After all, I’m here almost like an illegal intelligence agent, conditionally surviving behind ideological enemy’s lines. And I must admit, a worthless illegal immigrant, – my dissident views have long been alarming my colleagues who are suspiciously squint sometimes at me. However, offshore has always been distinguished by demonstrative devotion to the ideology of corporate-wide happiness.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

19.04.2010

There are no bad professions as such. As well as good ones. Whether a gardener, a military man, an engineer or an actor – it does not matter in relation to the spiritual harmony of their carriers generated by professions. If a person is happy with what he is doing, is equal to himself in the field of activity he is staying, and he is okay with the knowledge and skills that are required for daily professional implementation, then this is the most wonderful profession in the world. There are no single criteria for everyone. And the level of material reward here is not the most important measure. Moreover, it is because of it that sometimes a person is involved in an unloved job.

21.04.2010

Tragedy was to be expected.

After the sinking of the Titanic, Blok wrote: “There is still an ocean.” Cynically. But that was the Silver Age and almost mystical spirituality, ringing loudly over the dullness of being. Here – a sense of regularity and no decadence. Victims of pure miserliness and banal careerism.

08.05.2010

I met in ЖЗЛ about Kafka an unexpectedly precise definition of a situation that is strikingly close to me: “In the life of a person who perceives his profession as a painful torment to bear, it is not difficult to imagine the enormous importance of vacations.” Kafka worked for an industrial accident insurance agency – something that mirrors the current version of Safety. If you add that at the time of reading I was on an oil-producing platform, then the relevance of the statement crystallizes to the maximum acuteness of self-awareness.

23.05.2010

The world has reached the point where art is able to return to its former role of the early 20th century – the focus on transforming the world, rethinking and influencing its possible reorganization. It seems to me that it’s able to take on the formation of original ideologemes of a different world order that is urgently needed today, based on traditionally imperishable values. This could well be facilitated by the new meanings revealed by contemporary art, – including those that may already exist, but hide themselves from a human being who is carried away by the material.

27.05.2010

Six months of life on an oil-production offshore installation is an appropriate reason to think about its suitability for its purpose. And – about myself as the subject of its axiological justification.

With each shift around me, the gloom of administrative and technical dullness thickens more and more. But I don’t get any closer to it. Taking it on faith, you can get lost in it forever.

When things that are distant and alien to me are discussed at daily meetings, I invisibly leave them, plunging into a state of internal absenteeism, turning what is happening around me into a nonconformist model of sterilely reflected reality. At such moments, there is no more valuable property than the impenetrable abode of the speculative images I contemplate. Its inexhaustible vitality, nourished by the fertile ether of inexhaustible ideas, gives unshakable confidence in the superiority of my secretly possessed freedom over the doomedly recognized by all vulnerability to the dictates of an all-consuming system. Thus, the concealed licentia maintains the ease of fearlessness to any adversity that is playing out around me, and my cherished skete reliably keeps in me faith in its invincibility as the last frontier in the disproportionate confrontation of a person with the total machinery of the absurd, drowning in the scenery of sterile simulacra.

Upon returning to the reality inhabited by the shadows, – a scenario that repeats itself from time to time with recognizable accuracy, – the depth of the insurmountable abyss of my alienation from the decoration reigning around of the career-worshippers occult temple and the silhouettes of its vain servants emerging from there, reverently performing the rituals of the enslaving cult. The fettered atmosphere of purposeful subordination of consciousness does not leave a single chance of regeneration of the sobering air of freedom ousted from the space, but, stored inside me, like a faithful amulet, it cleanses the stench of smoky rituals diligently performed by the devoted flock of the temple defiled by my neglect – an act that desacralizes the latent psychosis of the mass self-sacrifice in the name of gaining dignity in the corporate pantheon of impersonal shadows. The phenomenon of personal suicide in favor of the formally approved significance of the imposed positions is the most mysterious inclination of a person to admit his insolvency, exposing his fear of his own nakedness and his weakness outside the presence of the system that controls him. A man strives to become its slave because he is afraid to remain outside of it.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

10.08.2010

During the years of cultivating phobias regarding environmental challenges and the possibility of human casualties in the Production (which in some cases, perhaps, was determined not only by the values ​​prevailing in the social consciousness, but also by the frank unwillingness of the industry owners to lose profits on millions of compensations, – both direct and indirect) in bp, who has raised safety issues to the point of paranoia, a cult of behavior has developed, according to which participants in the meetings to discuss incidents deliberately give their faces a sympathetic expression of restrained indignation (at least), heartfelt sorrow at the mistakes made (on average), and almost paranoid schizophrenia (maximum). At the same time, on offshore platforms they are sometimes so carried away (unless, of course, they are initially imbued with a fanatical belief in the content verified by the presentation format, in fact – the stage performances), that in the end they are an impeccable model of the final product of brainwashing by the propaganda machine of a giant corporation. In the existing realities, multi-level organizations of hazardous production are doomed to create specific ideologemes and imperative attitudes, demonstrating by their categorical advancement an ideal example of modulating the human material that comes to them. First, the attitudes of consciousness change, then – the mode of behavior. It does not matter that individuality is ground in the millstones of the disciplinary-ideological grinder. The main thing is that there should be no failure in the well-functioning mechanism of the final production of money.

07.10.2010

October. The first gusts of cold wind. Looking at the inhospitable gray waves and clouds floating anxiously across the sky above the island that invaded hell, you understand inside, that life on the platform is not the most comfortable place on Earth.

08.10.2010

Truly bp people is a product created from a variety of ingredients. The people who come here are the most diverse. And brainwashing – at first glance, mild, but uncompromising – awaits absolutely everyone. In offices – smaller, on sites – tougher. The ultimate goal is the adaptation of individual behavior to the needs of the Company for the final formation of a collective standard. With the interest of incoming personnel in the maximum extension of the contract, the material being processed is extremely adaptive to the modulation of consciousness. Passing through the entire chain of human resource formation, the strength of the material is reduced to zero. Revolt is an exception. The machine either chews it up or throws it away. More often, not mutually excluding one another.

22.10.2010

Today they announced to me that they are transferring me from East to Central Azeri. CA is the largest twin platform among the sky-eaters, always sticking out somewhere near the horizon.

Slowly but surely, the study of dystopia goes on in due course.

06.11.2010

The fourth day is like on a new platform – dual, with the invariance of a constant, establishing a norm of dubious existence fraught with aberrations. Gloomy austerity is the genius loci of oil platforms, regardless of volumes, forms and locations in the world space. The little that happens by accident either makes life easier or makes it worse. A colleague who shared with me the tediousness of gray everyday life is adequate, ironic and moderately cynical life lover. In a word, a completely different character than his neurotic b2b and our paranoid team lead. The colleague mercifully sympathizes with them. I morally agree with him. We are both empaths.

Lucky, I must say, with OIM (Offshore Installation Manager). As, however, with OOE (Offshore Operations Engineer). Framed in light humor, the discreet elegance of their chiselled manners, with inconspicuous splashes of artistry, creates the weightlessness of the atmosphere of a discharged exchange of opinions between scottishized Englishman and anglicized Scotsman – the directors of a dull series of daily meetings, where I usually enweave my own – with augmented reality – plot. Thus, the happening, observed in a stranger, separated in form from the essence of the content, like a blissful reality, gently muffles the last flashes of semi-semantic noises alienated by me, disintegrating still on the approaches to the sophisticated consciousness leisurely exploring their variations.

07.11.2010

To the artwork Inferno

Whatever documents would not be accepted before well drilling, – technical calculations, dozens of certificates, hazards identifications, risks assessments – a meeting with the hell is inevitable.

28.12.2010

Evening before the departure to the platform. In the New Year. Not a happy prospect. But that’s not the only thing that’s depressing. The most difficult thing is the combination of two incompatible paradigms. Before each departure for shift, it’s understood that absolutely incredible effort has to be made to immerse yourself in a completely different format, in order to start thinking about completely alien things, in order to somehow begin to perceive them in general – distant, gray, uninteresting, which disgusts the very understanding of who to be in the next two weeks. In this forced bifurcation between the two worlds lies the pain of the anguish, as a consequence of the inevitability of intellectual and aesthetic violence against oneself. Art requires sacrifice. But not eternal.

31.12.2010

I went out ten minutes before midnight on the terrace. Below me – waves, darkness, an all-consuming windy night. New Year among the waves in the center of the Caspian Sea is a rather unusual feeling. Even a Christmas tree decorated in the recroom is not able to dispel the atmosphere of infringement of the festive evening hovering in the premises, understanding the impossibility of the aura of “magic”. For those who work internity offshore, they say, over the years, the sharpness of the usual expectation of holidays on earth is dulled. Some time passes and this condition becomes the norm. Ten years and you’re an alien.

Night, ice waves of the sea. No streets, no windows, no lights. Only the luminescent contours of a platform buzzing in the dark and a huge hellish flame roaring somewhere above. Passing it through itself, the iron island with a roar spews it into the night sky, where hell merges with blackness.

03.01.2011

The bottom line is mirthless. The result is natural. The present compensated by banknotes is doubtful by definition. These are the boundary milestones, intertwined into the Gordian knot of the transience of the offshore life, torn into shifts.

05.01.2011

It’s normal not to sleep in offshore. Although weak, but incessant, coupled with a constant hum, a light vibration is interspersed with periodic shudders of a huge installation, – like a weary, but still restless monster, heavily sighing and heavily twitching with old bones. If we add to this the thoughts of the night, then there is no better place in the world for the inferiority of sleep. The next morning I want only one thing – early evacuation from the zone of total aberrations.

Having poured morning coffee after a brief meeting, I rushed up the stairs to the upper terrace of the 5th floor (where usually no one is ever there) towards the deserted expanse of the sea that opened from there. Enchanted by the winter calm, I silently looked at the ruby ​​disk of the cold January sun slowly rising above the gray horizon. It flooded the icy sky with pure light, highlighting the whimsical ink-gray clouds that stretched over the leaden smooth surface. Standing before the grandeur of this embodiment of beauty, only one thought involuntarily pierced the consciousness – the unsalvability of the world of pasture objecthood, mired in squabbles of petty fuss.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

02.02.2011

Systematizing each step, the Company fosters from a normal person (with a once free worldview) a machine subordinate only to prescriptions, requiring to perform even the simplest work at times, filling in a lot of ridiculously insignificant papers and documents. Each action is regulated according to the previously required rules. As a result, such an absurd complexity plunges into a heap of waste paper, in the pile of which the style, scills, knowledge and the final outlook of an obedient cog man in the cumbersome mechanism of a huge corporation are gradually formed, everything in which, implicitly or explicitly, is subordinated to a single goal – to smoothly pump out from the bowels of the earth as much as possible more hydrocarbons to turn them into trivial money. Greed called civilized business.

07.02.2011

BP, like any giant corporation of this kind, is a wonderful hotbed of careerists of all stripes: from honest workaholics to gray mediocrity and spineless snitches. Those uninfected with a morbid virus of their own importance are imperatively involved in the process of formal demonstration of career ambitions by means of a chronically half-dead tool that periodically emerges from the depths of hr called the ‘pdp’ – personal development program. After the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the new president, distraught in a feverish search for the salvation of everything and everyone and in urgent renewal of systemic failures (which at the same time exposed all the obviousness of bureaucratic ulcers), completely turned this useless scrap of paper into an even more sophisticated program of actions for formal mimicking of the staff striving for growth. In general, this manifesto of intentions welcomed by the management about the indispensable striving upwards to the penthouse of corporate whatnots, of course, creates the illusion of a working elevator, the serviceability of which, however, can only be believed in a fit of naively placed hopes, or even quite cynically – exercising in notorious hypocrisy.

But, this elevator does not go above the mezzanine, and its function is completely different. Not flashy, but essential – not every society so effectively channels the neuroses of unfulfilled ambitions. There are many self-conceit, but few positions. The most unscrupulous crawl to the vice-presidents.

20.02.2011

Amusing, but even those who assure that they would not want to work anywhere else, except on an offshore platform and, they say, they absolutely found themselves here offshore and everything else, on the shift they think only about one thing – to get to the shore as soon as possible. Days are counted, as in the army until demobilization.

23.03.2011

Vlaminck was right – grey is damn hard. Two works have been dragging on since the summer of last year. Already on the verge…

02.04.2011

Tomorrow I am going to Shah Deniz Alfa – a platform on the gas field. Two weeks of precious time erased from life. Unless – for obtaining materials.

28.04.2011

When the militiamen came for Brodsky, he thought of only one thing: to have time to finish writing his poems. The conditions are different, the figures are incomparable. But situation is generally similar – to have time to complete everything conceived here before, when finally, my organic rejection of dystopia occurs – whether it’s realized by me in a timely manner, or provoked by outside circumstances, but it is desirable to leave this “temple” closer to the completion of the project. The quality of the productivity of the “here and now” mode is invaluable in terms of its energy and reliability, both in terms of the material and the comprehension of the works.

02.05.2011

What the company is doing is absolutely evil. For its veiled execution, it needs a mass of corny motivated people. The triviality of their words and deeds, which daily rotate cogs of huge mechanism of the machine, reveals the obviousness of the non-substance of evil. It just fills the voids.

17.07.2011

Looking at the self-forgetfulness with which they indulge in career building strategies (while sacrificing something, at times, human in themselves), one involuntarily wonders if these people are aware of the slaves of Huxley’s dystopia, who were glad that they were slaves.

19.11.2011

The end of offshore marked the long-awaited completion of the most painful rhapsody in the absurdist composition of the industrial underground, which lasted for two impressive with abundance of the materials years on a rattling, ever-damp island of iron cages, foul-smelling cisterns and labyrinths of curved pipes. During these two years, I have witnessed firsthand how what is proudly called a technological civilization, brutally rapes the earth, incarnating itself in a veiled likeness of a greedy monster, operating with decent assurances about the inevitable prosperity of those into whose bowels it deeply and tenaciously launched its strong claws, passing off complexly organized rapacity for involvement in the coming good. For those who are directly involved in the process of its financial and hydrocarbon alchemy, the monster rewards in the mode of very real monthly achievements of the very well-being, which it broadcasts to the rest in a much more general tone, but on a large scale, while reminding “its own” of the importance of intra-corporate labor and the exclusivity of the access available to it. BP people is fantastic team, the high priest periodically writes in epistles to the heedful flock, who, over the years of nourishment, have come to believe in the exclusivity of the status of the elect.

But fortunately, in a stupefying sequence of monotonous everyday life, there were also glimpses that redeem the darkness of a habitat lost among irons – dawns striking in beauty over the majestically emerging from the night horizon. Looking at its unhurried illumination that occurred in any weather, under any colors of the sky, one unwittingly recognized the superiority of a different order, bewitching with the grandeur of transcendental beauty. So it happened for millennia, so it happened now, and in this crossing of the two intangible foundations of the universe, illuminating the present that was happening before the eyes, the inextricable connection with the impenetrable depth of the original beginnings was confirmed – that common thing that, being characteristic of millions of past days, was repeated over and over again, flowing out of each other. Behind every darkness there was always a dawn.

Looking at the majesty of such an action, one involuntarily comes to understand how miserably short human life is against the backdrop of millennia lasting – it’s not even a moment, but a miserable glimpse of a barely subtle jiffy. But even in this amazingly short period of time, people still manage to complicate it, introducing a lot of absurdities into it, up to those bordering on self-destruction. With the continuity of suicidal efforts, the running of moments is doomed to stop. Unless, the silently looking at all beauty intervenes. It is she who, according to the assumptions of one of the darkest classics of literature, is given the mysterious role of the savior of a collectively demented humanity. Introspectively, it enthusiastically entered this role.

In bp, meanwhile, its priorities. The Company honors procedures – the Corporate Scripture and its local apocrypha. Their content does not distract from the process and methodically forms a team of “fantastic people”.

Underground exhibition

Remaining a connoisseur of the beautiful, as a saving instance of a fragile world, I still managed to hold on the platform – in the very belly of the gravedigger of a controversial maxim – a very limited in format absolutely underground exhibition (as far as it can be held here at all), – not just as a phenomenon, ideologically shaded non-conformism, but in the truest sense of the word – underground, under conditions of strict secrecy. Otherwise, on a totally structured island, where any more or less noticeable action is doomed to the attention of involuntary witnesses loyal to the demands of the “authorities”, it is impossible to implement such an action in principle. It took place in my cabin, which turned into a kind of offshore “apt-art” with an extremely small number of participants in critical discourse. Such atypical (even by the standards of the underground) paucity gave a fair amount of food for thought about the nature of the phenomenon of art exhibitions as such – what, in fact, forms their essence and purpose: the fact of their alignment (with all their semantic content) in a certain space (or in a space correlated with their content), or the imperativeness of their contemplation by a certain community of people? One way or another, but the quantitative component of its participants was more than offset by the correlation of the narrative with the emotional feeling of what had been done.

Now, when, after a change of scenery and a return to a five-day working week, life began to flow in a measured sequence, it’s unwittingly thought about the long-awaited end of the Project itself, but with regret one realizes that far from all the works have even begun, and that the valuable charm of the finished ones lies in the author’s insider, penetrating into the ins and outs of the studied phenomena, which allowed the artist to create in the literal sense of the words “here and now” – in real time inside a system closed on itself. And just the thought of the need to continue to stay in it with an indefinitely blurred perspective of temporal boundaries kills any desire to make efforts on oneself to remain in it at least a little more. It is easier when there is at least light at the end of the tunnel. The 12th is already looming on the horizon, while half of the work has not even begun yet …

There is always an emergency parachute – to leave without waiting for the end, and reminiscently finish depicting in silence. How much the sharpness of a living nerve will be present in them, will only be possible to understand when I find myself in that longed-for and wonderful state of the post-underground future, which – the farther, the more – is drawn from here in the most ghostly tones of the still-unfulfilled distant dream.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

04.12.2011

Despite the fact that the sphere of art has not escaped the fate of the subject of commercial relations, one of its specific features in the system of coordinates of economic realities remains a certain extraterritoriality of art against the background of laws applicable to business. The prevalence of the most complex mechanisms that determine the process of creating art over the simplest ones that regulate business is determined by the incomparability of the nature of two worlds that form the foundations of both phenomena. Business often penetrates the derivative arts, but no further. Use it, but no more. Competing with the finest spheres of an often obscure phenomenon for a business accustomed to predictability is an unacceptable (and unattainable) luxury, and as a result, an irrational waste of energy and money. The higher forms of being, although vulnerable, are inaccessible to the absolute penetration of lower forms that easily adapt to life, and therefore – to complete subordination and control in order to completely re-arrange the higher worlds to meet the needs of the lower. Fortunately, there must still remain places in this world reserved from total business calculation, as the most significant criterion that justifies the institutional existence of forms.

Meanwhile, some penetration still takes place, and the question of such permeability is only in the degree of such.

If some artworks of art cannot avoid the natural fate of the object of commerce (which in itself is not a vice in the presence of initially non-commercial intentions underlying their creation), and only the end result of this process becomes the property of the owner acquiring the rights to it, – which does not exclude the creation of possible copies, – then specific images (as a result of the creative process), fixed in color and shape, and reduced (only by external signs) to the level of some kind of logo, are untenable in terms of their binding to the status of business communities appropriated property. It should be clear that this is about visual images, and not about the physical form of their individual author’s incarnations, made for a specific order – that is only a matter of belonging to physical objects, but not the images depicted on them (and not replicated for commercial purposes). With regard to the artistic aspects of any image, the principle of freedom of the creative process based on the unlimited intellectual comprehension, aesthetic searches and freedom of their expression comes out. Hence the origins of the original “extraterritoriality” of the sphere of art, which means, above of all, the freedom of the creative process.

Thus, any thoughts of the prohibition of creative thinking on any images are seem fundamentally absurd. The self-expression of the artist, as a result of such a process, is an integral part of this process, the importance of which in the social dimension is incomparable and much more significant than the possibility of restrictions on creative actions regarding already created and existing images. At the same time, it should also be understood that from the point of view of research value, any copy can become much more significant than the original, if the narrative to which it belongs acquires a much more important meaning than the original’s narrative, what ultimately transforms the image of the copy into an independent work of art in its own right. That – given the new meanings that are created – should not even raise the question of the admissibility of creating copies that are not, in fact, such.

As far as the moral part of the question is concerned, any attempt to extend property rights to color and form (as fundamental elements of visual art, expressed in a specific performance of reduced images) encroaches on the very basis of freedom of creativity in the field of visual art, vulgarizing the untouchability of this value by the acquisitive spirit of prudent respectability, the ultimate goal of which is only the unconditional possession of the most accessible mechanisms for generating money. The image that forms the brand logo is one of those most complex derivatives of the creative thought process that a priori has extraterritoriality from the artificially created business sphere, and the spread of the regulations of the simplest forms of being to it, is a banal thoughtlessness and misunderstanding of the ontological foundations of existence. Only the same, for example, a brand logo, singly presented in a specific performance material for a specific case, can be considered as absolute private property. Its absolute copy can also be protected. But the image – a relatively identical configuration of forms filled with the appropriate colors – is not alienated from the world of freedom of artistic manifestations in the process of its comprehension, like everything that fills the world around the artist. The territory of intercorporate business, based on clearly regulated functionality, and the sphere of art, based on freedom of expression, revolve in very little overlapping orbits, formed around sources of goal-setting that differ in nature. Business is aimed solely at making money by outwardly friendly, but essentially not friendly to each other participants in this process, while art, and in particular contemporary art, poses questions and seeks answers this world clarifying, and sometimes even anticipating (answering questions not even staged yet). At the same time, the participants in the artistic process, although they do not always seem to be friendly enough to each other outwardly, perceive the manifestations of their colleagues with deep sensitivity, sincerely supporting their impulses that reveal this world.

19.01.2012

The world is extremely absurd, and not reacting to it accordingly would be unproductive or outright slyness. There is also a variant of unfussy wisdom. But, most often a banal laziness is covered by it.

09.02.2012

To the artwork From Global Warming to Ice Age

Yesterday the sea froze – all along the Apsheron coast. For the first time. At least, since anyone can even remember such a thing. In Baku – minus 11, in Iceland – plus 10. In the rest of Europe, the winter is fierce. To what extent the oil and gas industry is to blame for the current chain of cause-and-effect relationships of the ongoing cataclysms, no one can answer now. But it is obvious that bp turned out to be one of the significant donors of the campaign to kill the former climatic conditions. The feeling that a boomerang launched in the Gulf of Mexico turned into severe frosts on the other side of the ocean – hundreds of people frozen to death all over Europe. And even the southern Caspian, which has never been frozen, froze, having forced its restless waves into ice.

22.03.2012

What is more important: to be “here and now” in order to create in involvement with the researched, while remaining outside the involvement in public artistic processes, or leaving the underground, to work “hot on the heels”, joining public processes? The final stage is inevitable in any case. The only question is the time and sequence of the stage of re-integration with artistic sphere.

09.04.2012

Paradoxically, the idea begins to acquire features not so much, or rather, not only of an artistic project – as it was originally conceived – but also of a gradually emerging existential choice of freedom in its philosophical understanding. Being in harsh conditions of hidden forms of totalitarianism (as well as domestic pressure) generates (motivated by the eternal desire for freedom) an understanding of the need for a temporary extension of these factors that tightly restrain creativity. But, at the same time, there is also a clear feeling that in the case of fiasco, self- withering of the creative process that is under the colossal pressure, an inevitable slavery awaits me with all the ensuing problems of the abyss, veiled by materially expressed well-being. Then the only question will be how to relate to such a state – through the prism of conscious conformism or through the passive comprehension of the acquired experience. The experience of a person wiser by his own weakness.

30.05.2012

To the artwork From Global Warming to Ice Age

Stretching the canvas on a stretcher is a ritual akin to a sacred ceremony. On the round one – the sacred action is doubly. It captures the rituals of the astral order, anticipating the global motive awaiting birth. Despite the inaccessibility of the heights of the finest matters, their implementation is preceded by quite earthly skills and a certain diligence in obtaining the desired state of the sacredness of the canvas – empty white, through the whiteness of which the microcosm of the conceived worlds, visible only to one Artist, already appears. From there, from the already stretched whiteness of the canvas, the state of transition “from glacial cold to global warming” that had not yet taken on its outlines looked at me. And vice versa – depending on the reading of the visible, determined by the perception of color metaphors sewn into the visual language of compositional integrity. The ability to read codes is an essential skill for understanding contemporary art.

The artwork was conceived long ago, as a transition from warm colors to other color states symbolizing cold. But the circle, at the same time, allows the reverse process. The possibility, apparently, of entropy, towards which civilization is steadily moving, is due not least to the activity of fuel monsters, the logo of one of which appears as a color field in the circumference of the canvas.

05.07.2012

To the artwork Oedipus Complex

Once again, looking at what is happening, I am convinced that oil and gas production is a manifestation of the Oedipus complex of man in relation to the Earth. From unbridled brutality to cynical hypocrisy.

15.07.2012

Immersion in the underground, as a specific format of creative research, involuntarily leads to understanding the underground itself as a phenomenon that still retains its relevance in a world where, after the collapse of Soviet Union, it seemed that totalitarian societies were gradually coming to an end. Cuba and North Korea were allotted a few years in the 90s: when exactly – was no longer important. The main thing is that in historical terms these systems seemed doomed. And with the fall of the last bastions of totalitarianism, in theory, the underground should have died out as well. In its former incarnation, it already seemed impossible.   

But, a holy place is never empty, and some totalitarian systems were replaced by others – in other forms, veiled and even, perhaps, existed before, but in parallel, being shaded by more obvious, politically public classical versions. Their functioning, as in any organism, inevitably gives rise to an internal reaction of resistant forms – non-conformity, dissent and, as a result, the final formation of the underground, where a conscious process of understanding the realities different from views established about it.   

BP, as a business-type empire that went to form its own system of ideology, was also doomed to form an underground environment, provided that in the ranks of the so-called bp people would have turned out to be people with a threshold of freedom-loving and priority of critical thinking inaccessible to ideological instruments.

09.09.2012 – Art & Signs

For many years now, I have been studying the intra-corporate world of a transnational oil and gas corporation, its intra-organizational features, its place in the external world system of interdependence of the goods it creates, raw materials and consumer demand for them, as well as their impact on the psychology of consumption that is changing in the world due to both direct and indirect involvement in this business of a huge number of people earning money on it, and most importantly – a catastrophic impact on the global ecology as a result, one involuntarily comes to understanding of the potential, semiotic depth, power of a conventional sign, which in the light of the topic under study is a logo designed to personify, at least, beneficence of the activities of such institutions in the socio-economic arrangement of the world, in which a positive image is a priority condition for a painless existence in it.

Under the convention of such a sign, one should, of course, understand an outwardly implicit, ambiguously represented entity. That is, writing out, for example, the silhouette of a person, we definitely understand by this image exactly a person who existed and exists in these parameters all the history known to us about him. In other words, the depicted person is a person and nothing else. With the same certainty, without inclining to the possibilities of a distorted consciousness, one could say about other obvious objects of reality – about the sea, a horse, a tree, books, etc. But when dealing with complex social phenomena, institutions of modernity, or at least physically tangible objects in their heterogeneity, but not subjecting to any precise ideas about the immutability of their physical outlines, it’s turned on in the human mind a certain associativity, figurativeness of their perception, fidelity of interpretation which are made dependent on certain knowledge in a particular area, or awareness of previous decisions regarding such objects, for example, the designation of iron ore with a black triangle on a geographic map of minerals, or a black and yellow symbol of radiation hazard. Situations of lack of information, unawareness about them are characterized, at times, by purely intuitive guessing by external attributes of the meanings behind such a sign (with varying degrees of proximity to their real qualities embedded in them). I would classify such signs as conditional, including logos. In each of them – in their elements, shapes and colors of these elements – in the original there is a certain meaning given to them, a message expected to be perceived. It seems that depending on the change in such forms and colors, the original meaning coming from the sign, its metaphysical essence gradually formed by these elements, also change, and the potential for such translatability can be extremely high, because the range of the language that the sign can speak in due to its conventionality is unpredictably wide. The effect, at the same time, of semantic metamorphoses is due to the degree of development of gradual changes in the original image, in which the sign managed to get used to, organically and steadily absorb the content originally embedded in it, having created a stable stereotype, a recognizable symbol, a certain brand through the visual representation of the stable forms and colors embedded in it.

Changing colors within recognizable forms can expose and turn the foundations of the usual worldview, thus opening access to understanding something hidden behind stable, familiar images. Fortunately, such metamorphoses are possible mainly only in the format of artistic experience, which is not always welcomed by the keepers of opaque systems. But art is what allows us to look beyond the established conventions in order to find out the truth hidden in them.

08.11.2012

To the artwork British Petrowealth

Deeper I plunge into the essence of the events and processes taking place in bp, more I comprehend the spirit and logic of decisions made in its depths, the more clearly I understand that this corporation is one of the continuation of British empire that has never disappeared anywhere, but only smoothly transformed into a commercialized hypostasis … However, it was commercial interests that ultimately always stood behind all manifestations of the Empire that successfully promoted them on the political map of the world. 

As in former times, the sun still never sets over its vast domains.

28.03.2013

Careerism has always existed. But the post-Soviet generation turned out to be much weaker in spirit in relation to the principles of indifference to career benefits and social dishes. This observation lies outside the plane of the traditionally topical intergenerational problems that have already set their teeth on edge. It naturally follows from the difference between the two worlds in which both generations were formed. The first – during the Soviet Union, where, for example, they grew up on the songs of Vysotsky (“If a friend suddenly turned out to be ..”) and Pasternak’s poems (“Being famous is ugly ..”), and they also remembered trials that only the strong in spirit could adequately survive, and professed a code completely different from the one that the generation was guided by, which was already formed on the ruins of the USSR in an atmosphere of indiscriminate recognition of the priority of commodity-consumer relations and not the best trends of the West, which, in fact, helped to destroy the Union. It is clear that the latter would not have collapsed if it had been economically justified, and had not been terribly involved in blood from the very beginning. But decades, almost a century, have passed since the days of his bloody conception, and by the middle of its existence, it, gradually overcoming the trauma of a difficult birth, began to acquire its own humanized face – not the most beautiful in the noble family of surviving youths of the early 20th century, but not the most ugly in the global freak show and the ongoing evolution of experimental designs. There were many minuses, there were disgusting manifestations of a closed system. But the warmth and immediacy of interpersonal relationships at the everyday level sometimes reached the fantastic; the created masterpieces of cinematography have remained unsurpassed to this day, and in the course of confrontation between two systems (one of which collapsed), for example, the cartoons of the collapsed one turned out to be the kindest in the world. Side effects brought unexpected, at times, results.

The cultural and value connection of generations was interrupted by the hard times of the 90s during a couple of damned years – a crazy minute against the backdrop of a century-old experiment – a utopia, although not justified, but which yielded unexpectedly positive results in the human dimension. As it turned out, not very necessary outside the environment that gave birth to them. The generations separated by the 1990s found themselves on opposite sides of the mental and value barricades. Painlessly for them, the West accepted only one – the one that immaculately adopted the rules of its intricate Sunset, without heeding the whole integrity of Spengler’s ideas, who announced them a crazy century ago.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

15.01.2014

What is primary in recognizing the images of sustainable structures? Color or shape?

29.06.2014

To what extent do color and shape prevail in the semiosis of a stable image? If this is a form, how much is it independent of color, and how much does it need it in the light of conveying the semantic content of the symbol it represents? For example, the emotional depths of this symbol.

And, if this is a color, then to what extent does the prevalence of this element in the recognition of an image depend on the stable number of colors contained in this category, their sequence or ratio?

02.07.2014 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs

A brand sign (or a logo, as it is also called) is a unique artistic object that visually describes an image that does not exist in the real world; a kind of simulacrum. It is an absolutely artistic symbol, originated in the territory of visual art, endowed with stability and invariability of proportions of shapes and colors. Regardless of the semantic ambitions put into it by the creator (or customer), the brand is doomed by itself to eventually become a complete artistic unit – not attached to any physical functionality, a visually materialized thought about the nonexistent in the objective world forms and colors that justified by the naturalness of their existence. The brand is absolutely fictional in the natural world of realistic objects; artistic materialization of things that do not exist in the world.

All that creates the completeness of this simulacrum is only color and shape.

The question: in case of disappearance (not important, for what reason) or withdrawal from the brand, represented by it, will the brand remain so? In such a case, will this visual image continue its post-brand existence in the already established, in its own way self-sufficient, quality? Or is it possible only if it is tied to the creator-intention? Is it due only to the doubtful conditional presence of the meaning embedded in it? Do such artistic elements (fundamental artistic components) as color and form have freedom from the content artificially filled in them? Can an artificially created shell exist freely when content is rejected from it? To what extent are the basic artistic elements – color and form – free from the conventions that they are endowed with in a certain construction and combination with each other; – are they free from the extremely conditional introducing into them of something that is not there?

31.08.2014

I wonder in which country of the world today it’s possible to exhibit works without being censored – in Germany, Denmark, UK, States ..? Is there a degree of freedom at all that allows art community to feel outside the scope of government regulation of a measure that is permitted in relation to the interests of the officialdom or any other conjunctural considerations lobbied, for example, by government agencies or corporations? Obviously, this is not only a question of freedom of creativity, but also of freedom of expression as such, as well as a test of the establishment of advanced countries for the truth of the declared freedoms.

05.09.2014 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs

In the event of the disappearance of the root causes, the source of the emergence of the brand, does the brand itself remain to continue with the same acquired degree of its significance and fame, but at the same time – as an independent object? In what form will it continue to exist as an object independent of its entire previous history of existence and its practical past functioning? And can a branded sign even exist in its post-brand existence? If so, what will it carry in itself, by itself, being in such a status? What will be its semiotic message, or are these just some associations with the history of the former referentiality? What is the place (perhaps absolutely new in the gallery of historical or archival memory of humanity) of the object of post-brand existence if this sign no longer carries a practical expression of its former meaning? And what is the nature of such place, its significancy, if the post-brand existence of the sign still has a place to be?

Along with this, such a situation also implies another existential side of the process – that abandoned past that was once a brand; and another form, bearing in its present traces of the presence in it of the content that has left it.

18.09.2014

It is noteworthy that the less desire and urge to stay further in the Company, accumulating material, the deeper the understanding of the hypothetical effectiveness of staying in it for the full implementation of the Project – nothing gives the effectiveness more authenticity than being in the epicenter of the studied world. This is the only way to create live – in the ‘here and now’ mode. And then the withdrawal itself (to achieve maximum efficiency of the concept) must coincide with the completion of the Project, or at least take place before its end. So everything will work out organically, in time with the still alive, pulsating nerve. But how difficult it is to come to terms with the dullness of the resulting everyday life – months and, possibly, years …

20.09.2014

Давно заметил, что андеграунд в корпоративных застенках сродни уделу разведчика-нелегала на территории изучаемой чужбины. Коллеги откровенно удивляются уже нескрываемой мной чуждости насаждаемым Компанией идеологемам и мягко промывающим мозги идеологическим установкам. Императивность трейнингов (уровень среднеспециального образования) проходит приоритетной статьей. Главный сертификат я благо по-тихому уже завалил. На кону теперь более весомый диплом, за который Компания отвалила уже кучу фунтов стерлингов, – мертворожденное дитя, по которому я заведомо ношу двойной траур. Относимость такого диплома к заявленной ею категории – сама по себе дискредитация образования в его классическом понимании. Для гуманитарного сознания – не подлежащая реабилитации. nebosh – обсценность, которую приличные храмы науки не пускают за порог. Подобной гетеротопией же промышляют подвизавшиеся в индустриальной сфере юркие организаторы всевозможных услуг. В том числе, псевдообразовательных. Защищать его диплом – вызов интеллекту; не замараться этой стряпней – вопрос интеллектуальной гигиены; соответственно, из разряда бескомпромиссных. Тот случай, когда красных линий не следует переходить. Успешно саботированный процесс сдачи экзаменов растянут на все возможные для этого пять лет – срок, за который в bp начисто сменяются начальство и их приоритеты. Судорожные же призывы идеологов Компании к чуткому отношению к спускаемым сверху обязательствам давно девальвированы забавным пантеоном руководителей на местах. Visibility – тот витальный постулат, без оглядки на который был бы не мыслим каждый шаг их крестного пути к карьерной голгофе. Отсутствие этой нормы в значимости действий – присная фобия местных вице-князьков и вьющихся вокруг них усердствующих пажей. Потому дела, не содержащие ингредиентов перспективных для личного роста, обречены на забвение как внешне непривлекательные и бонусы не сулящие. Чужой диплом, оплаченный не под личную ответственность руководителя (к тому же давно сменившегося), а из бюджета отдела (к тому времени, скорее, уже расформированного) новому начальству малоинтересен в принципе и оттеняем косвенным риском тщательно оберегаемому реноме. Ни одна судорога в нервной системе бипишного истеблишмента не содрогнется без учета вездесущего visibility, умелое манипулирование коим способствует отворению врат к иерархиям верхних этажерок. Visibility – лакомый транквилизатор в истории карьерной терапии носителей не обласканного эго.

17.10.2014 – Art & Signs

A style consciously devoid of pictorial abundance can detect and reveal, at times, the depth of meanings that, under other circumstances, would remain under the impenetrable familiarity of a stable order of things. Scilicet, this is about the discovery of hidden, shadow meanings behind both the most complex phenomena that do not imply an unambiguous understanding, and the simplest ones – so often that, due to their well-established familiarity, they do not even raise questions about their origin as such; – while in such situations, phenomena or objects, meanings can be hidden that reveal the true starting links in the cause-and-effect relationships of an extremely complex world order.

01.12.2014 – Art & Signs

The direction of visual art, where a “pure” sign acts as a central element to convey meaning, could well be called semioart, – a direction where the sign, dominating, not only comes to the fore, but compositionally forms a new code of previously hidden meanings, – or so imperceptible according to the present form of their existence, that was barely guessed under the conditional, superficial knowledge about them.

08.12.2014 – Signometaphors

The signs that have entered our life – both simulacra and naturally functioning ones – have become so firmly established in our consciousness that those depicted in different or modified forms still demonstrate the stability of their original configurative-color formula, that is, the primary form-color construction, from which subsequent experimental meanings transformations come – signometaphors.

This entirely relate to the obvious artistic phenomenon – the role of form and color in the formation of the signaling of semiotic signs, their recognition.

22.04.2015

Every time returning to the shift in ST, with a mixed feeling of detached doom I realize that I must again, making colossal efforts over myself, fill my head with the contents of emails accumulated over weeks, regular barren innovations and other corporate junk, knowingly realizing what intellectual squalor it is; for me – it is also doubly from the point of view of their non-contact with the aesthetics of the artistic world, so unattainably remote from the dullness of the industrial bustle, carried out by the procedural standards of BP and its adepts who believed in their importance. However, in any doom, they always have chances for enlightenment. Another thing is that they do not always remain for evacuation.

30.04.2015

ST – one of the world’s largest oil and gas terminals; colossal volumes of hydrocarbons; one of the most complex mechanisms of technological interdependence; high degree of responsibility of operating personnel; scrupulous calculation and control of risks of all stripes – from safety & operations to social & security; transparent involvement of the management in all aspects of administration (whether bad or good, but kept under control); periodic implementation of various programs of ‘ideological’ connotations that support the staff both in a tone of unremitting vigilance over the process entrusted to them, and in an atmosphere of ideological involvement in a bunch of formal ‘bp values’, – hence the behavioral component, code of conduct and other ephemerality of various degree of frame conventions. And all this compote is heavily seasoned with a spicy shiver of incredible bureaucracy. Perhaps this is the retribution for the scale and interconnectedness of countless processes that still do not fit perfectly into each other. Of course, the purposeful brainwashing, tightly tightened by the material component, multiplied by the sparingly viewed, but patiently expected career opportunities and its almost hopelessness outside the company within local limits, did its job. The theme is as old as the world: the degree of vulnerability of a weak point is equivalent to the effectiveness of a short leash.

The matter, in a word, is adjusted, and the mechanism, although with a creak, but puffs. So far. One way or another, from a technical and managerial point of view, a grandiose organism took place. But wondering why, in the end, it arose and exists in the unsuitable for life desert the less suitable for normal human existence the closed world of specific anti-utopia – like its many analogues in the sea – you involuntarily realize all the frightening depth of that gray vanity, in the swamp of which the failure of the system of wasted efforts is slowly fading, which, moreover, is on the eve of rapidly changing paradigms, from which it has long been a premonition of universal recognition of the perniciousness of the brutal corruption of the Earth. Day and night, the frantic Heaven Eaters spewing hellish flames rage fiercely over the Sangachal Terminal – hell requires sacrifice. Man sacrifices the sky. Heaven looks down. Gloomy and silent. So far. Somewhere accumulates thunder ..

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

25.05.2015

The very act of drilling the Earth in order to extract combustible deposits from it is one of the most brutal, ugly and greedy, humanity has generated in relation to its own cradle. It is in this state – at the moment of a barbaric breakthrough to the underground energy under colossal pressure, and extracting it breathing heat and ready to blaze in response to the treacherous intrusion into the underground world of the resting element – oil and gas companies that have created an image of caring goodness in aurа of visually positive brand signs, most of all, correspond to the antipode of these signs, a fair transformation of which would be to bring them into line with the embodiment of the actions of their representators. The readable codes of the brand signs of hydrocarbon corporations would have to be comparable to the degree of evil done under their shadow over the Earth, as well as to the transformations in human mind about what is happening.

30.05.2015 – Art & Signs

The brand mark itself is already an artistic unit, outwardly complete and self-sufficient, and most often contains the potential for the development and generation of new meanings. In this given, the most interesting is hidden, which is inherent in its nature as a source of comparison of lines, colors and shapes. Therefore, it would probably be the height of absurdity to perceive a sign as something reserved and taboo by the conventions of formal rules in order to protect the interests of market players. Color and lines, forms of their artistic expression existed long before the formation of the system of current economic relations that formed the basis of the suicidal nature of current civilization. But they largely dictate, alas, the conditions for the distribution of material wealth. Such rules are not absolute and are often questionable from ethical point of view; and, of course, they are far from perfect in the light of the harmonious formation of both interpersonal relations, relations between man and society, and the establishment of culture as the basis of a conflict-free world.

25.06.2015

The underground is a blessed environment for the Artist. Socially hidden form of realization of artistic free-thinking. Its forced secrecy under the veil of various shelters is sometimes in some way related to the work of an illegal intelligence officer in the camp of an ideological enemy.

Although I was already a couple of times on the verge of a failed self-exposure, on the whole, the feeling of my foreignness among colleagues is generally stable.

19.07.2015 – Underground & Therapeutic Role of Art

It is obvious that the creation of further works, the generation of new ideas are, unfortunately, conditioned by the continuation of work in bp – being in this environment, to see what’s being studied from the inside, and, in continuity with the process, transform what is reflected into artistic material. It seems that this is the only way to achieve the most genuine result, – not embellished according to the memories left in the memory. But in the meantime, how burdensome it is to endure the essence of the visible while being in its environment, to be a part of this sometimes frank delirium, feeling the daily impact of gray and alien everyday life.

In order to endure, not to go crazy, two things help – the awareness of the temporality of what is happening and the unexpectedly revealed therapeutic component of the works I create myself. To create them, you need to be there. To survive there, you need to create them. Thus, the therapeutic role of Art was suddenly revealed. Rather, it has always been, but its evidence is revealed only in a certain state of factors that have come down together with each other at the edge of intolerable conditions. According to the recollections of former political prisoners, poetry saved some of them in the GULAG. Times are different, circumstances are different. But dystopia always has one thing in common. It’s impossible to survive in such environments without ideological position and solid motives.

28.07.2015

The degree of the dictatorship of signs in the Corporation is simply off scale. They are total.

05.08.2015 – ‘Breaking Containment’ as the new genre of Artist’s book

oms-smgo and values turned out to be some kind of breaking containment, revealing the tightness of the book form, which they had been originally set and conceived in the form of their combined integrity, in which they were designed to serve the set goals of forming the attitude required by the Corporation towards its priorities through the prism of the established by it appropriate worldview. When building the original, all visual details were scrupulously taken into account – from textual content to color and location of page elements. This is how their original form was created – absolutely complete in its tightness.

The unsealing of the form and content reveals the profane imperfection of semantic intentions that were initially laid in the original, which presuppose the truth of the meanings, skillfully concealed under the hermetically compiled form.

Thus, artistic revision acts as a decoder of distorted realities.

14.08.2015

Returning periodically to the same idea, each time I find in it an increasingly obvious pattern: the continuation of work in bp is directly proportional to the quality of the works created, and inversely proportional to the speed of their implementation. Time, meanwhile, flies …

Physical withdrawal from the territory that feeds in real time the nerve of the project itself would serve as a powerful impetus to a more rapid implementation of everything that was conceived, including those works that could come along the tracks that were still cooling, fueled by still fresh memories. But, will not the feeling of their re-living in a viviparous environment suffer from this, the loss of connection with which is disastrous for the genuineness of the atmosphere that forms and creates them? Not to mention the accessibility to the material itself, certain details for which are sometimes irreplaceable.

There have been so many precedents when an artist, a poet, a writer, leaving the soil that nourished creativity, lost along with it the realism of its description. It is wild, of course, to call the oil and gas monster a culture medium (I can hardly endure, waiting for the final touch to be delivered to finally part with it), but such is the paradox of reality that it’s it who feeds this project, that flows in conditions of absolute underground.

The bitter irony of this situation is that I myself became a hostage to such conditions – the author of the idea of the legalized in bp “illegal” who studies an internally alien environment of behavior patterns, paradoxes, absurdities and the eternal human desire for almost unattainable freedom.

17.08.2015

Relatively protected in the raging world of crises, the personnel of a huge transnational corporation resignedly accepted and, to one degree or another, absorbed the intracorporate sign language artificially created and released from above, permanently in a state of fluctuating changes (however, like everything in bp). Such frequent modifications – by and large, purely external ones – have led to a situation bordering on the obvious absurdity. Realized under the slogan of simplification, the paradoxically final complexity was perhaps taken into account somewhere on the periphery of the author’s consciousness, but only informally, as an inevitable evil or the overhead of changes, recognizably perceived by the included in the process army of employees, accustomed to internal corporate cases, as the implied conditions of the never-ending burden of their routine labor – if only there was work. This leitmotif of the staff involved in the theater of absurdity makes them swallow everything. On exhalation – it turns out bp spirit.

18.08.2015

Sometimes you doubt whether this is a private company. And is only oil and gas its ultimate goal? Or an accompanying one?

10.09.2015 – Art & Signs

No matter how clear and recognizable the sign may be, often a question vaguely emerges through it, – guessingly present, barely looming. The only tone in which the work ‘The Sign’ could have been done is gray on gray. No frills and no embellishments.

13.09.2015

The rules by which one usually has to live in society are balanced and necessary. But often boring. The society in which people live by these rules is doubly boring. The question is how, having lived it is not trivial, not to unbalance the society itself. Though, sometimes it needs it.

14.09.2015 – Art & Signs

There is no doubt that the flag itself is a very rich, strong sign that contains a powerful potential for further development, coming both from within (being determined by purely artistic aspects, the characteristics of its own visuality), and demanded by external factors, by its semiotic component. Being so meaningfully valuable in relation to actual and hidden meanings, the flag as a sign creates a wide field for semantic discoveries and their subsequent interpretations.

But, in addition to interpretive and visual-expansive possibilities, its uniqueness among other iconic signs is sometimes also determined by a special aura, – hardly perceptible, but allowing one to feel other semantic vectors emanating from its compositional-spatial integrity, previously not recognized in it. In this magic of semiosis lies the key to understanding many, at first glance, irrational processes, which, most likely, constitute the highest plan for its generation. In this segment of the transfer of knowledge from the sign to the interpreter reading it, which is not subject to any of the known measurements, the most unexpected possibilities of revealing in it – in the sign – previously unknown beginnings are laid.

19.09.2015 – The Theory of Reverse Influence of the Sign

Most likely, the connection of the sign with the referent (body) that artificially brought it to life – in addition to the semantic one – also exists at a much more subtle level – as a supposed dialogue, and – as an energy channel of reverse impact. And it is surprising at the same time that if the body is perishable in its obvious temporality, then the sign brought to life by it can theoretically be eternal, being doomed (due to the artistry of its nature) to an endless existence within the framework of the civilizational time that gave rise to it – post-brand existence, for example, after the disappearance of the body into oblivion. But, during the life of this body, the connection, at times, is quite mystical. The content of the energy channel of the reverse impact of the Sign on the Body, its effect, is determined by the content of its individual elements, colors and overall shape, which form visually stable signs of the Sign. The brand sign brought to life, invisibly and gradually begins to influence its creator. Colors, shapes, their correlation and general architectonics, which form an integral image and the energy emanating from it, determine the nature of this influence, and the nature of the feedback at first glance seems very irrational and mystical, which is a purely superficial perception of its manifestations. Gradually developing, it builds up into a kind of dependence of the Body on its own creation, which not only invisibly influences it, but also at certain moments in history – perhaps the most fateful ones – can demonstrate an unexpected independence of the return communication with it. In such unpredictability, it seems, a certain fatality of their relationship manifests itself, a kind of destiny involuntarily embedded in the Sign, which works both with the outside world and with its creator, up to determining, perhaps, its fate. In such a phenomenon, the effect of underestimation of the forces that give rise to works of Art, nourishing the energy of their creation, is also unexpectedly revealed. Endowed with a certain magic of the animate, they bring it, at times, to the works of Art – the dominant of the spiritual / aesthetic / intellectual through the created physical.

12.10.2015

To the artwork Déjà vu

Of course, empires such as bp and the former Soviet Union are in many respects not directly comparable – they are too different forms. But, these are only they, and then – if you compare directly. At close acquaintance with both from a certain point of view, their paradoxical commonality is observed – these are the spheres of categorically and historically resonating points of contact; their hypothetically built common fields, within the framework of which a possible juxtaposition of only superficially seeming completely alien spheres is created. And sometimes analyzing some processes, one involuntarily asks the question: what, where and how was and is, nevertheless, better or worse, less absurd or logical – in an empire of a state formation or of a private type? For all the complexity and multi-layeredness of the subject of research, the evidence of some points looks indisputable, – with regard to, first of all, those areas where the main destroyer of myths on which many empires were held is banal falsehood, which is characteristic of any human society, which contrasts with officially communicated messages for the sake of reputation priorities; sly design in a beautiful shell of unsightly reality. Some Soviet ideologemes turn out to be quite comparable with demagogic, for example, safety first or strained KPIs, with the only difference that, if at the end of Soviet reality, few people believed at least in some realism of the declared slogans and, by and large, no one did not follow them, then in bp far from all the personnel have finally seen clearly insignificant and meaningfully questionable tools of ideological control – BOSS or SOC, for example, are partial or complete, sometimes, simulacra. About their qualitative saturation, as well as about the attitude towards them in bp, not without sarcasm, anecdotes circulate in an absurdist style. At the same time, it is obvious that no number of them, masterfully transformed into KPIs for reporting to leadership teams or shareholders (a kind of politburo), in no way prevents hypothetically impending accidents and disasters with the ensuing consequences – humanitarian, environmental, financial and, in fact, reputational for the company itself. But hardly any of the high-ranking careerists will dare to cancel the discredited bureaucratic tool generated by beautiful reporting. The company has long had a shortage of executives capable of proposing unpopular solutions and taking responsibility without regard to the possible consequences for their own career. Shareholders need positive indicators and upbeat, beautiful presentations to keep the business going and feel successful. And they get them. Show must go on. As a result, new programs, new slogans, new improvement mechanisms, new milestones and barely guessed alarming notes in the president’s rainbow messages to all staff are born – with optimism, while looking into the future.

The permanence of temporary difficulties was a component of the entire history of the Land of Soviets on the way to achieving a bright communist future, to which it never came. And the dangers (in bp the hazards would say) that it generated on the path to it, hewn with slogans, accompanied its incessantly. The latter did not help it, the dangers ruined it.

Is it possible to avoid empires as organizational forms of society, that in fact never made their inhabitants truly happy? Undoubtedly. And there are enough examples of this. The essence of empires nests in the very nature of human society – alas, also very far from perfect. Another thing is that they are not total, and there should always be places in the world free from their most diverse variations. Places of power of intellectual freedom.

07.11.2015

It is obvious that in the content of underground research, in which I am immersed, there are two naturally evolving main directions: the phenomenology of unfreedom in the totally regulated world of the transnational oil and gas corporation, and the aesthetic and semiotic study of the brand sign against the backdrop of artistic comprehension of the social, environmental and cultural aspects of the functioning of the community under study.

02.01.2016

It is obvious that modern civilization is largely mechanistic. The system, sharpened mainly on the material arrangement of a person’s life and requiring an adequate strategy from him, in a sense, objectifies him himself, making him a part of this system. At the same time, a person is driven by mechanisms that he often no longer controls. As a result, society obeys the laws, which it ceases to influence. The once wound mechanism moves by its own inertia. Can it be stopped in the absence of a consolidated position of society?

A possible way out in opposing the pernicious system is the search for meanings within the person himself, in the essence of human existence itself. Right now, it seems, is the time when the need for a turn towards the dominance of humanistic ideas over the prevailing world processes is especially acutely felt; the time when the humanists, philosophers must answer the question of how to combine the accumulated (and not in the best way determined the existing model of civilization) technical knowledge with the freedom and dignity of man.

27.01.2016

Nothing sometimes helps in conveying meaning more than turning to the mysterious spheres of abstract painting. But, in extremely rare cases. I would even say – absolutely exceptional.

28.01.2016

The reason for the mysticism that sometimes seems to us and is actually sometimes contained in the sign is, rather, that the sign initially carries a meaning that is unknown completely to us. And even if it is revealed in the end, it does not appear all at once. The paradox is that, being conventionally outlined, taken out, sometimes, from the depths of the subconscious, it was a priori not created by us, but already existed before us. We gave him only his final visual image. Not only is the life of signs pre-event with this moment unknown to us, their essence from the moment of co-existence with our ideas about them is also unknown to the end. The mystery of the world of signs is permeable only where there is still a visible trace of their origin that goes into the past. Unless it is created as an absolutely new product of the generation of modern times.

The statement about the abstract nature of other signs would also be a big mistake – erroneous due to the initial lack of knowledge about the true essence of the sign and what it means, which does not at all imply the appropriateness of referring to abstract painting for a more complete transfer of meaning. But, as a complementary tool. Abstract painting and the apparent abstractness of a sign are far from being identical.

01.02.2016 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs

What is a brand mark? An iconic sign is created, in which the implied meaning is embedded, and a stable association of this meaning with the symbol created for it, is worked out. But, what if over time the meaning disappears – its value, semantic expectations, the content itself? A question from the category attributed to the post-brand existence of the sign – one of the most mystical, most hidden aspects of its existentiality.

02.02.2016

All empires, regardless of ideology and internal content structure, are, by and large, identical in their attributes, forms and goal setting.

08.02.2016

And again – in the desert amid a noisy cluster of fetid pipes, cisterns, and obliquely sticking out innumerable nozzles. Dullness is around, dullness is in the brain. A paradoxical cohesion of mutually repulsive comparisons, if we recognize the value of the higher mission of other format of the application of the brain.

12.02.2016

What is sometimes observed at the Terminal evokes persistent associations with shots of Fellini’s films. There is no one just to realize them.

Closed communities are good for their owners in that, the probability of permeability from the outside is low, respectively – their deep research.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

17.02.2016 – Art & Signs. The Peripherality of Meanings-Controlling Signs

The significance of the gray-colored pro-semantic zone is determined by the “peripheral” placement of the semantic-control signs in it. As if illuminated by the flickering of the background backstage, they precede the intermediate inviolability of the situationally expressed state of the represented microcosm. Retaining the effect of seeming “secondary”, these signs control the “main” meaning, which is formed, as a rule, in the center, described in chromatic colors. Thus, an object placed in the pre-conceptual “dynamism” of gray acts as a visual concentration of a new meaning, reinforced or developed by the signs of the background forerunner that control it.

In this intuitively discovered innovation, the possibilities attributed to the sphere of purely formal facets of visual art are manifested – in the shades of gray color of peripheral meanings-controlling signs, the dynamics of the development of meaning is revealed, although formally residing in the static nature of what is depicted, but containing the infinity of what is possible in the research of the hidden.

22.02.2016 – Art & Meanings-Controlling Signs

The symbols placed in the four corners of the canvas symbolize the relevance to the four dimensions (and not the cardinal points), meaning the state of the totality of the meaning-controlling signs and the depth of the outgoing source of meaning. Geometrically, the angle is always deeper and farther than the side, representing a more complex construct, including the possible accessibility of the still sought fourth, metaphysical dimension.

23.03.2016

I remember that in a social science textbook – one of the translators of the ideology of a once tightly structured totalitarian country – an interesting fact was cited that stated that by the 70s of the last century a new historical community had emerged – the Soviet people. Even earlier, Khrushchev proclaimed the good news, having made the world happy from the rostrum of the Congress with the historical innovation expected soon – the construction of long-awaited communism by this very community. Expectations, however, did not come true. But, like everything that has been proclaimed.

How realistic the presented phenomenon was in terms of correspondence to that reality can only be guessed now, manipulating the conventions of the history that has settled in the whirlpool of the past. But one thing is clear – one had to close one’s eyes tightly in order to find a historically determined similarity in the mental appearance of an Evenk with a Latvian, and a Buryat with a Moldovan.

With all this, the mass of artificially regulated criteria still drove a motley two hundred million under a single red banner within the tightly guarded borders of the Iron Curtain. It was in such a laboratory that a social experiment was going on at that time to create a community mixed with the totalitarian ideology and phantasms of the Kremlin’s dreamers – tragifarce that slowly preceded the catastrophe.

But, that was in the empire of the state formation; whether you like it or not, you must be a citizen. And the formation of a community in business-type empires – transnational corporations stretched along the shores of various seas and oceans – is motivated, perceived and stated in a completely different way. And it would be curious, of course, to know those wizards from the “BP Central Committee”, its ideological department, who periodically develop the gently promoted into the minds of thousands of personnel concepts and ideologemes that unite the end users of an ephemeral product into a single whole on different continents. At the same time, the fact remains that into the motley diversity of the collective consciousness long ago and imperceptibly penetrated and firmly settled there, such amusing concepts as bp people, bp culture, bp values, and even bp language – axiological characteristics that are identically operated in completely different corners of the globe in commercially territorial formations of the empire of a new type, – partly intrastate, clearly structured and aimed at the open and, possibly, hidden goals of its supreme leadership. No wonder that, for their achievements, it was launched the process of fostering mentally the same type of inhabitants of its vast possessions – bp people – with their internal subculture, their values, their recognizable language – bp language, – a semiotic code easily readable by quasi-people, trained on its symbols. Let it be far from the most, at times, interesting, but by no means always untalented. And although the skillful development of bp language, coupled with bp culture, creates (due to the lack of elements of natural selection) the conditions for the prosperity of a fruitful breeding ground for career swindlers and unprincipled trimmers, one should not forget, for the sake of objectivity, that the vector of included orientation is just a search as such. … As in any community, in bp trimmers and careerists are inevitably opposed by bearers of the eternal universal human morality, of which there have always been many in all formations. Against the background of their antagonists, they establish guidelines for moral hygiene and ethical purity; – due to which, in fact, this process – not without difficulties and losses – is doomed to non-repression.

Meanwhile, the mechanisms for cutting off aggression and adhering to the declared values still do their job, effectively guarding the atmosphere which is the same for the many globally scattered islands of the Empire fighting for its survival, – an atmosphere that is somehow attractive for the cult of the prosperity of conformism, the spicy aroma of which intoxicates by the imaginary stability of guaranteed prosperity among the raging expanses of freedom, – though frightening, but still so alluring from time to time.

27.03.2016

Color is pure energy. Form is its given direction. More intense the color, more energetic the action.

28.03.2016 – Art & Signs

If color is pure energy, then after the sign breaks with the referent, closed exclusively on itself, it accumulates this energy only in itself, imbued with the former reference to history that has gone into the past. But, as a given, nevertheless, the sign continues to exist – abstracted from the referent, it is. After breaking with it, its existence does not stop. It continues to be.

Is the energy of color able to find a new meaning in it? And – vice versa.

30.03.2016

BP HSE – institutionalized bullshit in the trash of the corporate bureaucracy. Supported largely from within by its leaders to justify their positions, it is an ideal habitat for careerists who masterfully juggle the conceptual apparatus of unjustified ideas, by hook or by crook are attracted to the needs of operational realities. The virtuosity of such jugglers is based on an incessantly ebullient and presentably furnished activity – essentially needless and somewhat flawed (against the background of other industry participants demanded by the internal logic of the process), but providing stable employment for a sufficient number of people – a serious argument in light of the reputation justification of socially responsible company illustrating not the most inglorious effect against the background of periodically feverish world overproduction crises.

However, at the same time, one must understand that the hse phenomenon in the form of its semi-absurd self-torture in bp is also from the field of socio-mental nuances of the British behind the scenes, flavored with the results of the spicy discourse of European civilization about social obligations and reputational risks in the community of large players, but how- then specifically overlapping in intracorporate environments on the originality of the local refraction of ideas. It is no wonder that their implementation sometimes acquires the very tragicomic farce, when it is hse that turns out to be a sphere accessible to frankly poorly educated crooks who flourish on paranoid postulated theses that form the final absurdity. Funnily enough, in critical situations called operational needs, the formally dominant hse postulates hang helplessly in spite of the otherwise prevailing ‘safety first’ and ‘hse must not be compromised’ statements. The sad irony of the situation lies in the fact that the essence of the revealed realities manifests itself precisely at moments of truth, easily rejecting a foreign surrogate for hopelessness.

As the experience of other companies shows, Operations could fully ensure its safety itself – without the hypocritical antics on the catturns, illuminated by the dosed rays of the periodic complacency of the arbiters of the corporate show.

29.04.2016

Kossuth was one hundred percent right: the main question is “why” does the artist create meanings?

17.05.2016

There is no slavery more unbearable than intellectual unfreedom.

21.05.2016

Art without rebellion is like an obedient mess in a corporate policy trend (an ideal environment for plankton masses). Rebellion, as the nerve nourishing art, is predetermined by its very nature – revealing the truth of what is observed, freely broadcasting the discovery of meanings. The freedom to create them is an achievement won by rebellion.

12.07.2016

An exciting feeling in this whole story also arises because some works are literally created in the “here and now” format, directly “at the workplace”, which brings to the atmosphere of the underground a heightened sense of its element, a special discharge, – as well as partly the meaning of the creation of the works themselves about what is happening at the point of occurrence of the events under study. What is it, if not the quintessence of the underground, enhanced by the sharpness of the reality of the “here and now”?

09.08.2016

It is obvious that the mystical relation between the brand mark and the object of its representation still exists. The architectonics of the lines, the direction of the colors and the integral image of the sign, which they eventually compose, form in it a kind of metaphysical new, a state independent of anyone’s intentions; the generation of a unique, unique energy gradually generated in his image. The metaphysical substance thus formed in an iconic sign is sometimes the source of an intangible, almost mystical relationship between the sign and the signified.

10.08.2016 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs

There is a strong feeling that over time, the brand sign acquires the signs of a metaphysical image – a canonized object of visual correlation. Perhaps this is directly related to the metaphysics of his own energy gradually concentrated in him, generated independently of someone’s original intentions. 

At the same time, it has long been known that some commercial corporations intend to use the sigil as logos – a kind of magical tool to achieve their goals through concentrated impact. In those cases, when the logo of the company is not such, then the representing it iconic brand sign is in itself able to acquire over time its own, formulating by its visuality a specific code of evoked sensations, signaling ideas about the represented image. The accumulation of energy is only a matter of time, and, accordingly, the degree of the effect, the consequences of which cannot be fully calculated at first. It is even more difficult to answer the question about the post-brand condition of a sign, when formally the referent breaks with it, but it has already found its place in this world and the energy accumulated in it continues to exude.

14.08.2016

A correctly constructed composition of the sought and found symbols creates much deeper meanings than their direct – whether visual or verbal – transmission. Moreover, visualization of meanings through the compositioning of interrelated signs sometimes reveals a completely new semantic layer beneath it, emerging unexpectedly from under the “main” one. And the cases of semantic layering are completely disarming – unexpected, unpredictable and not immediately revealing themselves. Only having understood at some point what happened, you gradually begin to penetrate the essence of the manifested revelations of the artwork that spoke to you.

The process and especially the result of the search and creation of new or the discovery of hidden meanings in contemporary art is interesting in that it is unpredictable. The objectification of signs in art is transcendental and intersemiotic. In theory, this process can be limitless. Accordingly, the search for meanings itself is boundless, what makes art eternal.

05.09.2016 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Politics is a Concentrated Expression of Economy

Compositioning of sign symbols in a comparably-transformable way reveals the sign with all its immanent evidence. By transferring it into the format of the revealed meanings, it is released from the former staticity, which is critical for the preservation of the immutability of established ideas. The disclosure of the sign leads to the identification of those entities that, for a variety of reasons, may or were previously preferred “not to appear – not to be indicated,” what in the light of the disclosure of the sign does not at all mean the process of anticipating the signified by the sign. The semantic potential of most signs is so significant that in the disclosed state it often reveals a two-layer, and sometimes even a multi-layer, meanings formed by it, that are formed for perception on the basis of a priori existing prerequisites, but not out of nothingness.

For example, the British flag is one sign with a definite meaning and a generally obvious semiosis. The bp logo is also. And even placed against the background of the British flag, both of them do not represent any particularly new meaning, but only reinforce the relevance to a certain genesis; their semantic content and other references remain the same. With such a background combination of them, it just arises the sign concentration of individual facets of remaining essentially unchanged the partly common meaning for the both, what perhaps represents one of the intermediate states of the sign in its development towards disclosure.

But, if you change their colors with each other – the flag with the logo – while maintaining all the other parameters of the second against the background of the first, then a different, completely new and common meaning for both signs arises, herewith – revealing them, forming much more distant horizons while maintaining previous references. This is how the work Politics is a Concentrated Expression of Economy appeared, in which an attempt is also made to answer the questions concerning the basics of visual perception of an image: what is primary in the recognition of an image – color or form? And does one always prevail over the other? If color is pure energy, and the shape and lines are the direction of this energy, then with the interchange of the color components of two signs that have to each other, not only a new – perhaps sometimes much more significant – meaning arises, but also the energy of their completely new perception, which generates a completely different understanding of what comes from them – the essence, hidden in the depths of their complex nature. Not to mention how impenetrable is the depth of the interpenetration of politics with the economy, the invisibility of the many interconnections of their complex and carefully hidden, at times, merger and interaction.   

Another work, which turned out to be a convenient abode of the sign that unfolds in it, is ‘Oilfield’ (in Russian version it sounds as ‘place of birth’), where a number of brand signs undergo metamorphosis, giving them the energy of dynamism of intentions, the threshold of action, while maintaining obvious recognition and referentialism to a static original.

If in the first case the colors change when the shape is saved, then in the second case the shape changes when the colors are saved.

Thus, we can talk about both the static character of an iconic sign, when it demonstrates the immutability of the form originally embedded in it and corresponds to the generally accepted meaning initially behind such a form, and about the revealed sign, which allows to look beyond the initially permissible, into the sphere of the previously hidden, when the revealed sign presents completely new meanings lurking at greater depths than when the sign is in a state of its primary staticity. Revealing the multi-layered meanings by means of artistic visualization of the disclosed sign makes it possible to ascertain its fundamental ability to be dynamic; – to talk about its “living” nature, thus bringing the sign into full conformity with the essence of the process of semiosis itself, – as two energetically equal elements of semiotics. The criteria for the plasticity of a sign in the process of manifestation of its dynamism can be both in itself and outside the limits of its very form – in external compositional possibilities.

If a sign in its transformation evolves to new meanings, then having reached the final goal, having designated them, it opens up and, revealing the potential inherent in itself, clearly demonstrates, contrary to the accepted ideas about its staticity, its dynamism, that is – the relevance to the nature of living things.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

08.09.2016

Nevertheless, the word ‘sign’ in other cases lacks the postscript ‘- symbol’. This is the only way to most fully and accurately – both semiotically and phonetically – express the meaning invested in it in certain cases.

11.10.2016

To the artwork The Sign of a Sign

The word as a sign, highlighting the signified from the gray field of obscurity, means, in fact, the “sign” itself. Sign of a sign. The circle, in a sense, closes. And the sign meets its infinity.

31.10.2016 – Art & Signs

To the artwork oms-smgo

If we proceed from the fact that transcendental objectification is built from intersemiotic relations, and an artistic object is able to set in motion several signs or sign systems that are correlated with each other, then in the work ‘oms – smgo’ one of them acts as a prototext – the text of corporate regulations, the second one – artistically interpreting them (partially geometric at times) abstraction.

01.11.2016

To the artwork oms-smgo

If Bataille’s transgression is overcoming certain social prohibitions, cultural traditions or moral regulations in the experience of “absolute negativity” (death, ecstasy, madness), then in the artistic field of oms-smgo, transgression is realized through overcoming corporate regulations in the underground experience of artistic comprehension, as a result, the concept of transgression turns out to be partially removed from the category of moral negativity into the category of intellectual resistance, and above all – the erosion of the personality in a system that unifies space.

29.11.2016 – Art & Peripheral Meanings-Controlling Signs

Gray color is the absolute background of a target-expression, on which the peripheral meaning-controlling sign determines the dynamics and, at times, the entire metaphysics of the central object.

08.12.2016 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Invisible Totality of Signs

In pre-conceptual terms, the word ‘sign’ appears invisibly and crowned as a unifying dominant for all existing and still possible words.

Meaning the determinable of everything and everyone, it is sacred in the essence of its intra-linguistic purpose – the word as the essence of what is uttered and determined. Being such, but remaining in the shadows and for the most part not voiced, comprehension begins with it, and it stands behind comprehension. Hidden as a word, but ubiquitous as an essence, the sign is everywhere. The sign is the linguistic Grail of the worldview.

03.01.2017

To the artwork Inferno

One of the apotheoses of the absurdity generated by the Corporation are statements about the priority of combating environmental challenges. Just think about it – the fight against challenges, the causes of which it itself creates. Pharisaism, as an effect accompanying such an absurdity, lies in the fact that, realizing to one degree or another the inevitability of causing damage, but being content with assurances about reducing them to a conditional minimum at best, bp people (and not only) are imbued with the idea of ​​the mission of fighters for clean environment – fighters-imitators in idle mode. The process against which such struggles are declared is irreversible and cannot be overcome. The responsible work of the Corporation in the field of the environment is just a beautifully publicized shell of slogans and procedural imperatives, the implementation of which, under the current system of the world order and the ongoing operational activities of the Company, is initially doomed to failure.

The breaking of the earth’s surface a priori cannot proceed without violence over the earth. Squeezing out the colossal inferno energy from the Underworld and thus giving birth to its raging flame, the Corporation itself personifies the phenomenon of the infernal order. In the iconic sign that symbolizes its brand, whether the creators wanted it or not, the veiled symbols of demonic flame nevertheless appear.

24.01.2017

The simplicity of the formula for the approved adequacy in corporate environments is determined by the long-revealed essence of human desires, which easily allow them to be manipulated in favor of the beneficiaries of hired labor: career + money, regardless of often the area of ​​direct application of efforts. The main thing is that they pay in accordance with the imaginary prestige of the next stage of “growth” in the hierarchical ladder of wage slavery – gray, concrete, mind-numbing. If you do not, of course, look at the theater of devalued human passions with the eyes of an enchanted spectator. Outwardly, it is decorated attractively.

14.02.2017- Art & Signs

To the artwork In the Beginning Was the Word

If a sign is a semantic designation of objects of the universe, then in a sense, it is also an external shadow cast by the contours of the world outlook. The very word “sign” appears to be the lingual forerunner of this process. In the beginning was the word.

20.02.2017 – Art & Signs

To the artwork In the Beginning Was the Word

The linguistic expression of the sign itself is, in fact, the word that was in the beginning.

21.02.2017- Art & Signs

To the artwork The Invisible Totality of Signs

The sign is total. The sign is ubiquitous. The sign is merged with reality, creating and representing it. In fact, it is infinite. Total and infinite.

22.02.2017- Art & Signs

To the artwork The Sign of a Sign

The sign of the sign is endless.

23.02.2017 – Art & Signs

To the artwork The Sign of a Sign

“The sign of a sign” means both the symbol itself of the semantic expression of the word “sign” and the very understanding of the sign in its semiotic expression, that is, as a categorical concept of semiotics. If the “the sign of a sign” is its clear identification, then the sign itself is both the known and the signified. Accordingly, the “the sign of sign” in a certain sense is an iconic designation of the beginning of the beginnings of intellectual cognition.

17.05.2017 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs & Post-Simulacra

If a brand sign is initially a kind of convention, endowed in the course of its development, and later – as it actively couples with the signified – with certain associative qualities, then over time it acquires a full-fledged iconic designation of a referent, that is, a state of associative inalienability from it.

But unlike many other semiotic signs around us, the specificity of brand iconic signs lies in their initial artificiality. If, for example, the word ‘running’ is a sign that means a process or a fact of running, and it has always been, is and will always be (as long as a person will exist in his current capacity), then a brand mark at the preliminary initial stage of its existence is rather, a simulacrum that has to remain as such for a short, initial, but definite period of time, until its final connection with the referent takes place, merging with a representative image – that is, until a socially recognized semantic ovary of artificially created iconic sign with the signified occurs. Only some time later, after certain formal processes and the implementation of the required scale of the attachment – in the consciousness of society – to the newly created sign of the meaning given to it, it, which initially remained for a short period of time as a simulacrum, acquires the status of an iconic sign assigned to the signified.

This, in turn, affects the concept of universality, the naturalness of the sign as such. If, for example, the process of running was, is and will always be, and the word ‘running’ itself has been and will always be from time immemorial, and the balance of this sign with the concept it signifies will be as obvious as the immensity of the future of the present civilization seems to be, then the situation with the brand mark as an iconic symbol of the signified is very unstable and not so definite in the foreseeable future.

Initially appearing as an order, although the newly-made sign acquires the final characteristics of an iconic sign with a specific and clear connection to the referent, but it can exist as such as long as the signified itself, the existence duration of which, in turn, seems to be relatively short-lived. It is absolutely certain that not a single commercial, non-profit or any other structure exists as much as objects, concepts that naturally reside in time and, accordingly, their designations. Thus, the question involuntarily arises about the nature of the post-brand existence of a sign – about its essence at a disappearing referent: what happens to artificial sign after the disappearance of the signified? Can a sign mean anything at all without a referent? Does it provoke memories of him, fulfilling the mission of some kind of historical reference, a visual artifact, or is it just a product of an obsolete reality, meaning the remaining something? This is how post-simulacra come to our world. Not comprehended yet.

07.07.2017

If the world is absurd, then it is possible and necessary to relate to it from the standpoint of its own foundations – showing a certain absurdity in relation to it. (Not to be confused with absurdity.) Treating it adequately to the generally accepted perception of the world, we ourselves become part of its absurd world order. What Kharms called nonsense is, by and large, a normal sometimes attitude to the world mired in its absurdity.

08.08.2017 – Art & Signs

To the artwork The Sign Identity Provocation

Taking into account the congestion of the artificial component of the sign world, provoking the alienation of reality itself, Baudrillard’s assertion about the established dictatorship of signs acquires another no less valuable dimension that reveals the mechanism of a totally established perception of reality – the phenomenon of the illusory perception of its content is revealed. The original is largely, if not lost, then far from always available. If it ever existed at all.

12.08.2017 – Art & Signs

Through symbols – whether conventional or metaphorical – it is possible to convey much deeper meanings than through the writing of realistic images that form their direct meaning.

07.09.2017

To the artwork oms-smgo

By transforming the absurdity of systems created by corporations into the beauty of artistic expression, the artist reclaims space from time lost in opposition to the absurdity of the world order.

15.09.2017

Walking is able to bring peace, if not overshadowed by the noise emanating from the surrounding people. On the alleys and terraces, along the picturesque shores, where evenings are especially conducive to unhurried walks, human bustle, or even worse – the lack of culture shown by it, in principle, there is no place. This is how cultural ghettos speculatively arise, and I see nothing wrong with their existence. In the end, to combine spaces that are little intersected with each other is tantamount to violence against the patterns of behavior established in them, not to mention the souls of the people living there. In the midst of such intrusions, it is difficult to maintain the hermetic serenity of the inner laboratory, where, perhaps, in those very minutes, plans for future artworks are ripening.

12.10.2017

To the artwork Chevron Arctic Projects

Oil well, broken ice and the defeated purity of a deserted cold.

30.12.2017

10 years have passed since the beginning of the project. Who would have said then that it would drag on for a whole decade. And even now, after so much time, it seems that this is not the end ..

Over the years, only (!) 17 works have been created – about only half of what was planned – and almost the same number in the book art genre. True, such a modest result against the background of impressive terms should be considered taking into account three corrective factors. First, initially it was supposed to be much smaller number of works than late ideas that came up. Each of them emerged with overcoming the next depth of immersion in the experience of the phenomenon under study – the deeper, the more. Secondly, some of the already completed ones were simply destroyed by me – I abandoned some, others were repainted again. Thirdly, from the 13th to the 15th year there was a long forced pause, when it was simply impossible to create due to circumstances beyond my control. And all this – against the background of continuous time pressure. Working “at the bottom” (although in my case bp – these very “bottom” – is the essence that feeds the very idea of ​​​​the project), there is disproportionately little time left for creative work. Not to mention the purely objective failures that accompany the process of any creativity; – when in 2015, two and a half years later, all the temporary problems that had arisen were eliminated, and I finally got the opportunity to return to the project, the very first work, from the idea of ​​which I decided to continue, dragged on for three more long years. Each time, something prevented from finishing it, taking also into account the fact that, in search of the shade necessary for it, more than a dozen of the thinnest layers of gray were laid on it, creating that only necessary effect, acceptable only in the integrity of all the finally prescribed details. In this sense, ‘Oilfield’ turned out to be the most difficult of all; – so much so that even today, on December of 2017, it is still far from completion, and its final finishing has been postponed until the next spring, when a clear daylight hours will last at least seven hours, to which an additional, at least, preliminary an hour is needed to prepare the desired gray for an accurate match to the tone. It happens. Something is given easily and immediately, something is not easy and long, through thorns to the stars ..

Fortunately, in the past year I also managed to start a second parallel work – Chevron Arctic Projects (the idea of ​​which visited me during one of the stupidly idiotic meeting). It was given relatively quickly, releasing after a couple of months. The very case when it is easy and clear. Each work has its own destiny – both at birth and later in life. 

So I approached a decade far from completion of the project. It is not clear whether this is a failure of the initial ideas about it or an indicator of its complexity, depth, unprecedentedness in relation to both the idea itself and the conditions for implementation. One thing is clear – even if everything goes smoothly, it will take another two or three years at best for the final completion. This is, if not to make efforts on yourself that abstract from being outside the zone of normal life (which, in general, does not seem quite real), – efforts that undermine the inside, cause illness and wither the soul, but are necessary for staying in an environment that gives the project an essential state of authenticity. Suffice it to say that the best ideas that have been implemented over the years visited me precisely while I was in the critically revealing zones of absurdity of the studied schizodystopia. The rejection of such situations each time gave rise to a visual series of oppositional images, revealing the nerve that feeds the abnormality of the observed reality. Thus art dooms itself to the mission of a refuge for the fronde.

Returning to the interim results of the decade, it is impossible not to think about the depressing perpetuity of a background alien to me, against which the semantic tie of the final outcome has yet to be made. Towards the end, it is very important not to miss the usefulness of the logical outcome.

30.01.2018

The idea of the new signature came by itself – or rather, after a 3-year pause as a new feeling of its transcendent naturalness on the back of the canvas.

Purely superficially, the compositional forms of Chevron Arctic Projects are close to geometric abstraction. The letters of the caption, correlated in colors, continue the general logic of its formal side, turning the final touch into a general compositional element of the narrative, expanding the conditional space of the picture, taken out to the reverse side (which, of course, is hardly important for the semantic content of the artwork itself).

Intuitively coming to a similar conclusion, I received a kind of formal compositional postscript, a kind of artistic afterword. Will it take root? Don’t know. If the signature at all as such is needed from an artistic point of view. Unless, as an element of a general stylistic plot.

02.03.2018 – Art & Signs

To the artwork The Intra-Sign Infinity

Limited externally, a sign can have an unlimited depth of internal content. Its metaphysical essence is contained in the intra-sign infinity. Perhaps this is the very sought-for, but still not found fourth dimension, which stores, among other things, the energy of as yet unknown depths, hidden in the sign.

It’s doubtful that we are able to discover this dimension with our sensory experience. But, in the case of a hypothetical penetration into it, the development of an intra-sign space, it could open up completely new, hitherto unseen opportunities for us, – including in relation to access to the energies of forms hidden from us.

15.05.2018

By virtue of the very theme of the Project, its content related to research carried out at the intersection of the Anglo-American business culture and the post-Soviet socio-mental field, a gallery operating in the field of Anglo-Russian linguistics could become an ideal platform for representation. The naturalness of such a binding is justified, first of all, by the bilingual performance of a number of the works themselves and materials of the Project – English and Russian. At this intersection, a number of questions that seem to have different vectors at first glance, but in general are inseparable from each other, are explored, among which there are both purely formal aspects of artistic processes (related to the issues of juxtaposing form and color, the role of color in identifying stable images, color dynamics, etc.), as well as works that explore the nature of the phenomenon of lack of freedom, the dictatorship of signs, the harmfulness of the hydrocarbon environment for human life, and, accordingly – the political, ideological, environmental and social components in the field of transnational business in the era of confused capitalism.

17.05.2018

It is inevitable for an exhibition of such a project to have a biography fueled by the secret history of more than a decade of the underground.

28.05.2018

It has long been obvious that the initial hope for a short stay in bp turned out to be nothing more than an illusion, dispelled at the first meeting with a sobering reality. To work daily “at the bottom” and in parallel to conduct the Project is a hopelessly long and even somewhat dubious undertaking. Everything in this world is subject to decay and change. Prolonged expectations are dangerous because they are fraught with the prospect of imperceptible metamorphoses. Reality, especially the one in which temptations are hidden, is capable of gradually changing and insidiously absorbing, and considerable strength is needed to steadfastly resist it.

Transformed into a state of painful flow amid the remains of idealistic ideas about the alienation of time in exile for hire, the original scenario has grown tritely into something that, apparently, now all that remains is to wait out or just survive – as one waits out a hurricane, temporarily overwhelmed infirmity, or forced waiting a ship stuck somewhere in the high latitudes – in general, as a kind of natural disaster that occurs in parallel with an internally rich life that does not cancel the stated goals. The forces, meanwhile, to resist such a disaster are fed only by the awareness, albeit slowly, but still somehow moving forward on the idea of ​​​​a difficult Project that turned out to be almost exorbitant in such conditions – canvases, papers, books, all that variety of ideas, the number of which each time, getting ahead of the embodiment of the previous ones, only grows. This process, in fact, is the most important thing for which I found myself in this dystopia; – the root cause of the fact that I once effortlessly plunged into an infinitely distant and alien sphere that nourishes the subject of my research, the adequacy of reflection of which is possible only by being directly with it, inside it, in the “here and now” mode. Beyond the temporal distance, only reconstruction is feasible, permeated with the inevitable subjectivity of a thin layer of interconnected memories, set off by gloomy flashes of gradually fading impressions of the past, leaving each time less and less sense of its connection with the present. Involvement in the very process of the situation under study allows to operate with the absolute objectivity of its artistically transformable credibility. The temptation is great and equals efforts.

So I involuntarily found myself involved in a continuous happening with a barely visible prospect of a quick end, flashing every now and then behind the whirlwind of a merry-go-round of stupidly intricate absurdity, making it seem as if to understand that the outcome still exists somewhere. Others, in order to stay in it, invent roles for themselves, enthusiastically justifying the terry decor. Against a similar background, statements about the desire to leave the stage sound suspicious blasphemy desacralizing their buffoonery vale – social incest that undermines the foundations of a non-alternative system of survival, where the coveted career growth rises as a redeeming brace. Non-systemicity is unthinkable in principle. Exceptions are in dreams.

Reflecting in such conditions on the completion of the Project, which is within my reach, I involuntarily admit that the point, of course, is not that what was started in something, perhaps, is unique. It is difficult to imagine how many artists there were, are and will be convinced of the uniqueness of their own works, or, even more symptomatic, of the genius of them (it is clear that these are the costs of the phenomenon of the artist-creator, without which his personality would be tritely uninteresting; the main thing is not to be covered irrevocably). Another thing is important – that the point is not only in the semantic content of the artworks themselves, but also in the unprecedented conditions of the narrative in which they are formed. Accordingly, in the form of the implementation of the Project itself. I don’t see this as standard, there is a second bottom in this, the horizon line of which has not yet been passed.

In the history of art, by and large, every worthwhile work is unique. In my case, the matter is not only in the unprecedented semantic content, but also in the category of their relevance: what do they represent in general, taking into account the conditions in which they were created (sometimes, directly at the workplace of the very environment that is essentially a pure underground); what they studied under these conditions; what kind of atmosphere of insider information they, as gradually developing material, were involved in; and how many facets generally affect the entire Project as a result. Not to mention innovations related to the formal aspects of art and genre novelty.

08.06.2018

One of the unexpectedly revealed facets of the Project turned out to be the completely new light on the role of the Artist as an accomplice in the possible formation of an alternative world order to the current one, – full of absurdity and dehumanizing processes in society. Based on this premise, the outcome of the Project seems to be a kind of test for the ability of the Artist to influence the so-called “the powers that be” – those whom the decision-making to change the current landscape of socio-economic, energy and environmental ulcers in the system of their current interdependence may largely depend on; the allowed course of their controlled evolution for the benefit of a different, more humanistic model of the world.

Does an artist have the required potential for this? Does he have the right tools for this? What should be the language of dialogue with insiders of a complex (and rather closed) process? What should be the strategies, the nature of artworks, the channels of communication with them? And can an Artist influence this at all, or at least form an understanding of long overdue changes?

The cost of finding these answers can be very high. All the available time, for example, – long enough since the beginning of the Project, respectively – is invaluable to me. There are few things in this world that are more valuable than time.

Will it be possible to change something? Or at least signify a change? Perhaps … To make them think in detail, to direct the course of thoughts in the right direction is already the beginning. But much more is needed. After all, it was too late yesterday.

The questions asked are not original. They have come up to some extent before. And by and large, they were not removed from the agenda. But the hole has since opened much wider. And now it’s need to enter from a different angle – unexpectedly, targeted and new, conducting a dialogue directly with the architects of the de facto existing model in the language of new signs, for which they are most likely not ready yet. Then the dialogue is possible on an equal footing. Truly, in order to speak with the Empire ‘on first name’, you need to be Artist.

09.06.2018

By offering to exchange the artworks for the closing of the Corporation – a phenomenon already unprecedented in itself, in a certain sense semi-fantastic – it will become possible to understand how this Project is utopia or reality; at what point on the path from its primary utopianism to hypothetical realism we are – ideological consciousness, the state of humanistic thought, our readiness to fundamentally change something towards axiologically oriented evolution as opposed to the all-eating fever of business success, the imaginary stability of permanent crisis economies, eternally greedy consumerism and completely depleted ecology. In short, at what point of readiness for dialogue is the social consciousness in favor of abandoning the usual and so illusory model of ideas about the desired well-being.

14.06.2018

If to proceed from the provisions postulated by Beuys that an artist is anyone who transforms the world through art, and the purpose of art is to make a person free, then fundamentally included in the essence of my views, they completely underlie the goal-setting of the Project – by changing reality, to make a person freer. This is a Project about freedom that can change reality.

19.07.2018

Sometimes it seems that there are worlds around us that conceal meanings that are able to reveal everything that we did not understand in the surrounding reality, which for some reason always eluded or did not want to open. The search for such meanings is perhaps one of the missions of the Artist, who only has to discover these worlds and reveal them.

20.08.2018

Each time, faced with another confirmation of past observations, persistently provoked by the behavior of a certain part of the inhabitants of XC, involuntarily recalls the artwork values, which reflected, among other things, three stages of metamorphosis of the image of an average employee of the monastery of the world religion of consumerism. However, this relevancy is true for the most part to persons of the fair sex, rather than to their gender counterparts who are in the ranks of the Corporation. Although, the situation with them, if not catchy, then sporadically turns out to be more neglected than women’s. Well, this is not a vice, but the vicious trends of the times …

The first, earliest stage for beginners is a delight on the verge of eroticism with suddenly opened consumer prospects, illuminated by the atmosphere of a glossy head office entourage. The second is a full-fledged image of an accomplished bearer of the ideology of consumerism, a mature person-barcode; it does not matter, by and large, what to do in this company; everything is a game. If only they paid. The main thing is that every time – more. This is what determines the prospects for opening opportunities for subsequent career grades.  

The third stage is the collapse of the primary integrity, as a result of the successfully nurtured image of bp people; bearer of the entire spectrum of the Company ideology finally introduced into the consciousness. Whether it is bad or good – the categories are not relevant. For some it’s only acceptable or not. Another thing is that such a phenomenon has its own flip side of the coin – it comes an understanding of the value of the person himself, in which self-sufficiency turns out to be a more important feature, as opposed to everything superficial, which is overgrown as a result of a deal with internal consent to success in wage slavery. Against the background of such a dissonance with the general corporate noise of targeted all-absorption, those rare exceptions of the observed distancing of other employees, whose way of thinking and areas of interest are not immediately obvious due to the fact that their axiological landmarks are in an area other than the endlessly fussy rally of career-consumer growth, seem especially encouraging. They are, albeit rare, but retained the bearers of values ​​and views, the presence of which shines with proximity to the strata of a genuinely humanistic consciousness.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

05.09.2018

The most important condition for the perfection of compositional constructions is to find a balance of asymmetric forms.

02.10.2018

Still, the main thing in the artist is his belief in the possible perfection of the studied forms, reflecting the sought truth of the images he creates; that is, belief in the very idea of what is sought. Only then his works emit light and can carry an eternal charge of the truth of what was found.

10.11.2018

The transition from the Terminal to the Pipeline revealed the unexpected presence of hidden bonuses, which more than compensated for the desolate wilderness of distant bp sites (however, one cannot speak of their joyfulness anywhere at all). The specificity of the local permit-to-work meetings is such, that due to the scattered sites along the pipe, they are held by means of telecoms (microphone, screen, headphones), – expanse to simulate presence in the rest of the time from participation in the looking glass, freed up for mercilessly resisting the absurd of the intellect as a long-awaited sip of life-giving elements, returning consciousness to normal reality. Any non-fiction in such a pause is a preventive balm with a touch of aesthetic delights. Contrast, sweeping away dullness with the irreplaceable value of the word.

Today, while nonsense was flying on the air, I enthusiastically read the memoirs of Anna Latsis – the girl for whom Walter Benjamin spent two winter months of 26 in cold dangerous Moscow. His interest in the Soviet experiment and the adventures that followed ended with the imprisonment of the young lady in a distant Kazakh exile, which separated her from her family for many decades.

Such reading against the background of information partially comprehended in headphones gives everything that happens a feeling of almost enchanting surrealism, and in some ways, oddly enough, it is related to the atmosphere of a gloomy situation of distant years read in Latsis’s memoirs – the breath of tragedy of arrests and exiles penetrates through the centuries; the phenomenon comes to life in the most unexpected variations. My position, which is very conditional in terms of internal criteria, is externally decorated no less effectively than the classical motifs of bygone times, which involuntarily gives the empathic a spirit of kinship of lined up parallels – barbed wire, a reinforced concrete fence and machine gunners in black guarding its perimeter. The voluntariness of such imprisonment, although it has the character of the now familiar everyday life, but in the permanent surroundings of the epochs, the shadows of the gloomy genre unwittingly appear.

07.12.2018

How I can understand sometimes Kafka, experiencing an irresistible desire sometimes to limit any contacts with the outside world. Especially after two weeks of freedom, falling back into a bp madhouse.

12.12.2018

As is known, search for freedom leads to rebellion. The intra-corporate revolt of Individual is just as natural as the manifestations of the provocative role of the Corporation itself due to the provocativeness of the gene of unnatural existence built into its nature.

22.12.2018

For almost two years I have been making a triptych about the nature of sign – about the foundations of the lingualism of being, its invisible totality and the sign of a sign itself. The same story is repeated as with the ‘Oilfield’ – from year to year we all move together into the next coming new.

17.01.2019 – Multifaceted Role of Color

Color is capable of expressing much more than its aesthetic and emotional components. With certain factors added together, it is able to create and carry such a semantic load, which makes its given invaluable precisely in the intellectual knowledge of the world. And this changes the idea of the phenomenon of color in art, as a bearer of an exclusively emotional component.

18.01.2019 – Art & Signs

The artistic language of iconic signs, in fact, lays out the formula of encoded meanings, exposing and revealing them.

21.01.2019 – Art & Iconography of Brand Signs

The iconography of brand signs is, in fact, a new language, the alphabet of which consists of shapes and colors that are correlated with already well-established symbols, the variations and compositional expressiveness of which form the semantic content of the final narrative; a language in which color in the system of its correlation with the line of forms symbolizes the meaning that is initial for subsequent development. 

The entire iconography of brand signs – in the context of this language – is implemented as part of a broader art-lingual system of relevant abstract symbols, that is, related to explicit referents. But their visual conventionality is much more correlated with abstractness (not with abstractionism) than with a system of traditional signs and images.

28.01.2019

The immersion in the operational-bureaucratic environment of bp after a direct reading of Kharms seems to be especially refined sadism. In this short and painfully lasting (seemingly eternity) interval of time and space, the genius of literary absurdism intersects with the embodied absurdity of reality.

12.02.2019 – Underground & The Brand Sign

Although the resistance seems to be almost the leitmotif of the entire Project, in fact it is only a natural and inevitable background against which a much more significant semantic essence, the sign, is scrupulously studied. It is clear that the resistance is a consequence of a difficult desire for freedom, the overhead of its eternal search. But, the central theme against the backdrop of the protest was and remains no less profound in its attractiveness a phenomenon of a different order – the sign – a high philosophical symbol, capacious and meaningful, absorbing everything, and simultaneously dominating at a distance over the interaction of the studied meanings and processes. In the observed dichotomy of the system and signs (including the system itself, those representing), the first appears as a respectably decorated dystopia, a vain space of interdependencies bordering, at times, on absurdity, turning into a frankly circus tent in places; the second is an artistic symbol, an aesthetic icon bearing the semiotic burden of the signified.

15.02.2019

All discoveries in art – small and large – happen by chance rather than expected and purposefully. The evidence of such a conclusion is evident, among other things, from the work oms-smgo: a plurality of abstract forms, each of which individually a priori is insignificant at first glance, in their unity unexpectedly compose into a common artistic series, colorfully forming as a result an integral meaning.

18.02.2019

Such is the essence of the eternal quest in art that color fields, new lines and forms, their compositions, existing in parallel somewhere else in the sphere of the unknown, suddenly appear in an amazing way with new bewitching meanings in the world created by us.

22.02.2019 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Intra-Sign Infinity

An iconic sign can hide sometimes in itself much more meanings, energy of influence and potential for development than we see only on the surface and within the boundaries of the forms by which they are outlined. If to discover and develop the shapes logic vector in relation to colors (which are assigned the role not only of an emotional nature, but also of logical content), then there are chances to reveal incredible depths of meanings they carry. So I came to understanding the living nature of the sign – if they contain energy (condition for any impact is always the presence of energy), then they already contain a living principle that we have not yet fully understood; and if a sign carries the potential of internal development for a further formation of new meanings, then it cannot be something completed and dead once and for all.

01.03.2019 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Intra-Sign Infinity

Any semiotic text, like any sign, is unlimited in interpretation. It can be limited only in each specific case by various subjective factors associated with the interpreter. But theoretically, any text, like a sign, is unlimited. Hence – the infinity of culture. Hence – and the infinity of the search for meanings. And if a sign initially cannot exist without a referent, then penetrating into the secrets of intra-sign infinity we may also have a chance to reach the primary source of meanings through the metaphysics of reverse channel from the sign to the referent, what in turn can open up completely different horizons for us in understanding the original meanings, proto-meanings, perhaps long lost.

15.03.2019

Can abstract concepts have color? Do conditional categories have a form? Not subjectively abstract ideas about it, but a form adequate to the meaning, reflecting its essence. If the question is posed, then the answer is already sensed. There is already somewhere its forerunner.

17.04.2019

The feeling that the management is simply exhausted from attempts to somehow create or maintain the illusion of vigorous activity in the work of HSE, justifying its existence in Ops and in front of the management. At the same time its own one.

09.05.2019

Unwittingly, one gets the impression that the leadership has paranoid fear suddenly stop in the once-launched carousel of uninterrupted inventions and semi-delusional ideas – ridiculous piling-up on previous ones that did not have time to really materialize in their own hyped system of incessant and stupid changes. The terms they introduce with the aim of denoting the supposedly improved awareness by the staff of the working state that, according to their ‘new way of work’, employees should be imbued with – agile, chronic unease, etc. – exactly reflect the essence of the atmosphere of the madhouse fostered by the tailors, in which chronic unease is rather a chronic diagnosis of the inhabitant of the model they are building, rather than at least some semblance of a state of a person inclined to self-giving at the job he desires. Doing what you love does not involve abnormal injections for a normal person.

04.06.2019

A long stay in a totalitarian system that strives to regulate everything and everyone in order to eliminate any obstacles to business (even the most common ones, which one can’t even call obstacles, without which life is implausible, artificial, sterile and faded) dulls the naturalness of the worldview as a form of normal existence, as the system itself is outside the sphere of normal humanitarian interdependencies, relationships and other components integral to ordinary life, the presence of which allows a person to maintain the entire spectrum of his natural contradictions, without which society is anemic as such and emasculated in essence. One can partly understand the ideologists of the system – a business based on the continuity of oil and gas production needs precisely the personnel working for it, who would not be distracted by anything that could somehow interfere with its successful and unimpeded functioning. Hence the striving of the organizationally self-contained corporate system to create an atmosphere of functional sterility from inconsistency with the goal-setting of the ideology it implants, which is called upon to help with a whole set of ideological stimulants and levers that are unnatural to human nature – chronic unease, agile, visibility, new way of work, etc. The whirlpool of this Alchemy gave rise to its own chimeras – agile advisors – creatures obscure in the oil and gas business system, and therefore even more amusing in the whirlwind of constant misunderstandings of bp innovations. A kind of staff creatures of the product of the final fermentation of the brew of ideologues bp.

07.06.2019

The fact that the space of a totalitarian quasi-state is permeated with the dictates of ideology is still half the trouble. It is worse when the people, the so-called bp people, understanding falsehood, in many ways plays along with it, gradually undergoing a modification of consciousness, which is eventually absorbed by the system. This phenomenon, unfortunately, is not without an element of some predetermination. A person is weak due to a natural inclination towards material well-being. And this forced dependence on a source of well-being makes them inmates of a prison – outwardly attractive and voluntarily accepted, imprisonment in which implies the inevitability of further stay in absolutely individual, solitary cells of penetration by their own degree of imprisonment. Everyone – consciously or not – has personal motives that justify the correctness of such a choice, coupled with subsequent compliance with the implanted ideologemes – to be agile, chronic unease, speak-up, visibility and other near-social heresy. The threshold of resistance to poisonous enzymes is also individual. As Beigbeder aptly puts it, the system wins in the moment when she manages to make people love their prison. But in this statement, there is also a certain gap that allows to delay indefinitely the onset of a critical point of no return, while maintaining a hypothetical chance of a winner from confrontation with her. The only problem is that even this chance, being in addition hypothetical, is fantastically small.

10.08.2019

Due to objective circumstances that cause all sorts of risks and dangers in the production, as well as the scale of operation, coupled with office structures, bp is forced to generate masses of internal corporate norms that prevent, among other things, at least external manifestations of “bestiality” in interpersonal relations, the possibility of which periodically glimmers on the horizon of many intricacies of any work involving the involvement of a large number of people, the accompanying stresses and commitment to career growth. No matter how bad it is, but the Company – one must pay tribute – manages to some kind of leveling them. Its depth or intransparency depends on the specific people in whose hands is the requiring it implementation of the formal norms. Or – manipulation of them. Or their imitation. Diversity in bp has been prevalent in everything lately.

09.09.2019 – Corporation & Simulacra

The poster-procedural fabric has become so accustomed to the flesh of bp against the background of the isolation of the depicted from reality that in their striving for the ultimate formulated imperativeness, they break with their referents and interact more with each other than contribute to the management of the reality burdened by them. BP is the embodied alienation of signs from reality.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

18.12.2019

The artwork let go. Unexpectedly. With that unexpected final find, that was not thought at all during all the work on it. This can only happen on its own. And suddenly. 

That’s what makes art attractive, that the process is unique, and the end can be unpredictable. You assume, you are moving towards the goal, you are looking for … and suddenly you find something that was impossible to even imagine at first. Any chance or instantaneous insight, or some other obscure flashes of distant images that need only be understood, can change everything. For the sake of this alone, it is worth succumbing to the all-redeeming temptation of freedom of spirit and thought, freedom of creativity – independent of anything in the world except faith, intuition and the energies of wonderful secrets inaccessible to understanding.  

With ‘Oilfield’, something more came about than the state of a virgin deposit awaiting its predetermined fate. Here is the tragedy of inevitable absorption, and the brutality of forced penetration, and the drama of the tension of standing before the next act of the Oedipus complex of man in relation to the Earth, and the bestial essence of finely decorated, but insatiable grins of greedy oil and gas monsters.

The work lasted five long years. More than 20 layers in search of the right gray. On it, on its back, is most likely the last final touch from a series of those that, by their being taken out of the picture’s format, are its continuation outside.

10.01.2020

Having thickened, the paints harden with the energy of those thoughts of the Artist, which they absorb while his working on the canvas. This is how the energy of the creator is transferred to the picture, his invisible presence in it remains. So his face freezes in it. Is it worth leaving a signature as the final touch, completing something more than just the visible side of the idea?

18.01.2020 – Art & Signs

To the artworks Trendkeeper

A brand sign is just an abstract symbol, often a simulacrum. One of the motives of the artistic process over the comprehension of such symbols is the creation of the compositional environment in which the abstract sign acquires a clear meaning, and the simulacrum – its connection with the reality that justifies its existence.

08.02.2020

To the artworks Infernal Temptation as the Shadow Side of Green Non-Existence

What kind of solution to the issue through the transition to green energy sources without global systemic changes can we talk about if investments in the production of hydrocarbons are determined for years to come? As long as long-term oil contracts are in effect, as long as the funds invested in oil are not repaid, as long as there are technology, production and business tied to oil, as long as humanity has not abandoned wars as a radical means of solving aggressive foreign policy goals and internally supported business, demand for oil will be maintained, wars will be waged, crises will be aggravated, and further devaluation of ruined values ​​will gain more and more momentum.

09.02.2020

Oil is an industrially polluted landscape. Oil is the wasted belly of the earth. Oil is air poisoned by processing. Oil is the engine of war. Oil is the backbone of today’s perverted economic system. What other arguments should there be in order for a civilization, lost in the darkness of its own consciousness, to abandon one of its main vices?

As long as the current world order exists, wars will also exist. As long as there are wars, oil will also be produced. As long as oil is being produced, wars will be fought. Breaking the vicious circle is possible only with an absolutely fundamental change in the entire economic model based on the dominance of humanistic priorities and the possible restoration of increasingly lost values.

12.02.2020

To the artworks Infernal Temptation as the Shadow Side of Green Non-Existence

What an exquisite craftiness to announce the historic reformatting of the oil and gas company into net zero against the background of widespread decisions and everywhere sounding demands for the urgency of taking measures to save the dying environment … by 2050 – by the date, when in the hydrocarbon business, perhaps, there will be nothing to do. Even more so with ecology. By that time, as it’s said in the East, either a donkey will die, or a padishah. In our case, rather, both.

Meanwhile, this announcement was made almost as an act of generosity, the triumph of humanism and the lofty idea of ​​self-sacrifice for the good of all mankind, while unobtrusively leading to the idea of ​​the unprecedented timeliness of this decision being in tune with the world’s most acute discourse about catastrophic environmental challenges for the planet. Taking into account the traditional nature of the subject of business, it looked like a feat worthy of planetary acclamation. Particularly touched the ending – in order to help the world achieve its goal. We are setting out to be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner, and to help the world get to net zero. True, after 30 years. In the meantime, as we smoked this world, we will continue to smoke it.

Of course, it would be completely indecent to declare this in plain text (even to keep silent now is bad manners that threaten ostracism), but impenetrable setting deadlines against the background of a pretentious desire for net zero is the very thing, while stretching the pleasure of earning billions into oppressive third of century.

In this grandiose pharisaism, the main thing, of course, was not the time. It was important to just turn on. And bring clarity. Albeit in a distant, but still – perspective. Lagging behind the trend in step with the time of the companies is like losing the market. Therefore, it was important to voice at least the intention – to stop energy barbarism. Of course – in a beautiful shell, illuminated by the halo of reimagining energy. When? The tenth case. The earthly people are accustomed to soot.

The announced reimagining energy for people is the masterly PR masquerade, pompously veiling the business dominant at any apologia from interested circles and philippics of the enlightened community. How this oil has been pumped and burned for the past hundred years, oil owners know better than any eco-activists and intellectual futurists, and make it clear that there will be no changes in the coming years, and perhaps decades, in relation to oil production. There are still not fully depleted deposits, there are investments in the portfolio, there is a market, there is demand, big money and competitors. And business, in the end, has not been canceled either. And what about non-hydrocarbon energy will continue to develop – it’s still all up in the air. So, the maximum that is now permissible is a pragmatic statement in a beautiful package, and even then – taking into account the immersion in the opportunistic moment of the current time, well matched with the receipt of PR dividends – a new president with advanced views at the forefront of current changes.

But by and large, no matter how it may sound, the sad irony is that for all the pathos of the announcement, the expectations of the effect and the paradoxical progressiveness of this decision, it does not entail getting into history, which clearly flickered on the periphery of the primary idea. They do not acquire a place in history on credit for thirty years. It itself presents sometimes the bill without asking. Moreover, immediate execution. And to be ready to cover it a lot of wisdom, courage and a bit of sound adventurism without which historical breaks cannot be taken, are required. Unfortunately, people who diligently climb the corporate business ladder are rarely, if not completely alien, traits like that.

The declared decision of February 12, 2020 is not based on an understanding of the historicism of time, and hence the readiness for a certain sacrifice of business (a billion more, a billion less – the shareholders would not be the poorer from this), but a trivial desire for profit, driven by strict compliance with the changes already occurring and predicted in a rapidly changing world. So, pompous ‘by 2050’ is just a banal pragmatism of business calculation. Taking into account the forecasts that the peak of the oil industry will be about the 30th, then at its end it will still be possible to squeeze out something serious, and then you see, the 50th will arrive in time, after which there will be nothing most likely to do in the oil industry. The topic worked out at the very bottom can be closed with the dignity of a gentleman who honestly kept his word, passing with a sense of accomplishment to the shareholders of crazy ideas to the new green technologies ennobling their owners. This will partially rehabilitate the history of the infernal business. At the same time, the last remnants of the former ecological well-being, when, by and large, there may already be nothing to preserve.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

15.02.2020

All internal corporate life is an endless show bordering on the theater of the absurd.

04.03.2020

To the artworks Transgression of the Sign

The transgression is possible only through the awareness and recognition of the entire vertical of cause-and-effect relationships that determine the possibility of a potential breakthrough.

14.04.2020

Oil prices are on their last legs. Or rather, they are convulsing, powerlessly sliding down the scale of the illusory well-being of oil worshipers of St. Barrel. The bottom, the flock whispers in confusion, is not yet visible; bp people are preparing for the worst..

During crises, the company shakes on all floors. Not all are kept on them. And it always shakes according to the same scenario – cost cutting, penetrating all spheres of the usual benefits, driving the inhabitants into their worst nightmare – layoffs, as the inevitable item in the program for dumping unnecessary ballast. The people tremblingly pray to Barrel.

18.04.2020

To the artwork Sociological Survey

In the history of sociological surveys, there was no, perhaps, such long story as the one that gradually took shape over the years, in the natural setting of unhurried conversations about the detrimental impact of the oil and gas company with a green logo and a whole staff of HSE on the environment in the areas it operates; – a question with an answer that is obviously predictable in the vast majority of cases – just as obvious to a private circle of colleagues as the divergence from the officially approved position of the leadership, bravura replicated from all its catchy booklets, commercials and bright posters depicting faces happily glowing from under the helmets who radiate the significance of their involvement in the impeccable righteousness of the work carried out by the company. The poster, as is known, is the quintessence of the desired reality in an imaginary world of unattainable ideals.

The ‘survey’, meanwhile, which arose impromptu in the form of a natural exchange of opinions of the directly involved actors in the process, could at any moment just as naturally cease, resuming a long time later in another place, with other people and under other circumstances, but – already formed in the immutability of its goal-setting. At some point, I realized that all these sporadic and random, not related by time and subject of discussion of the same issue, are scattered parts of a complex compound that itself develops. All what remained was to record the answers of the most valuable respondents who were in the high profile target zone – a naturally formed army of insiders with characteristics of all stripes. Neither erudite theorists, nor gently brainwashed readers & viewers, but the employees of the oil monster itself, directly or indirectly involved in the multifaceted process of the violence against the earth. From a sociological point of view, the value of this focus group cannot be overestimated. Such knowledge of the subject is the ultimate dream of any sociologist. The overwhelming majority (some, shaking their heads, some without batting an eyelid) of those with whom I had a chance to communicate on a question that was not raised by me (what’s the need for initiative when the topic steadily popped up by itself, and in this – the whole charm of the underground, providing the artist with undistorted material in the situation “here and now”) unambiguously expressed the conviction that no matter what preventive measures were taken, approved by a pile of papers, checked and rechecked by inspection raids by employees of our own Company, oil and gas production without environmental damage is possible only in the myth-making tales of PR- blathers and their crafty ideologues.

Such sincere unanimity in the polyphony of harsh oil workers can only be heard by becoming one of them, one of your own in an environment impenetrable to outsiders. The price is high. But it is worth it – to have the authenticity of information unfiltered by censors.

30.04.2020

To the artwork Déjà vu

Judging by the webcast (one of the main trends in the conditions of self-isolation), the new president is clearly not without a penchant for ideological looking-glass in the style of the late Brezhnev Politburo. The reveling in praises in support of the “pursued course of the party” leads to sad parallels with the discharged atmosphere of slyness and inconsistent thoughts of the meekly listening masses of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses of the 80s of the last century. The verbal salutes of the webcast participants, sounding against the backdrop of a severe crisis, cut bonuses and a declared series of expected layoffs, only confirm long-standing observations about the fear of those in power inherent in reptiles: “I really want to thank and acknowledge bp leadership for they being true for their employees and communities. A moment where I feel so proud to have been associated with this company for 10 years!” – write in the comments the participants of the virtual rally who are sensitive to the presence of the leadership. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes under own name. Shamelessly, slyly, openly … “Thank you, dear Leonid Ilyich, for the paternal care of the native Party for the Soviet working people!” – pops up a quote from the unforgettable dull times.

The nauseating déjà vu of those successfully vaccinated by history is easily retouched by the antidote of Dovlatov’s paraphrase that we are not at all better than the Americans, and certainly not smarter than them, – we just visited the final stop of a departing trolley bus. Meanwhile, over the past 30 years, the outsider generation of non-Dovlatov literature has quite succeeded in shaping the completely different values ​​they honor, re-establishing the eternity of the accusatory pearls of the brilliant master of short phrases. Those who remember and honor him are granted the dainty privilege of those who once visited “this world in its fatal moments” – a reflection of the universal parallels that permeate times, goodness and morals.

04.05.2020

All colors end up being reduced to grey. Neither black nor white. To no other. Absolutely everything merges in grey – reality, mystery, and the versatility of semantic tints. As well as that which sometimes remains unknown and unsolved, hiding on the eve of the hour of manifestations. Grey is everything.

05.07.2020

The sign contains much more meanings unknown to us than it seems, looking often at its well-established habitual image.

14.07.2020

To the artwork The Unread Codes

One of the most mind-bogglingly inappropriate questions touched me in particular: if you plan to change roles within the next two years, what roles would you like to be considered for? – the author cynically scoffs at the whole army of «fantastic BP people» waiting for some kind of promotion for years.

I entered a few key lines in My Profile – a wonderful document from the bowels of hr, imposed by the management to be sure to complete it in detail. Contrary to the ‘is not mandatory’ imprinted in it, once again someone bruises his forehead at the top in a zealous impulse to follow instructions. To breathe at least some sense into a document obviously stillborn in the darkness of bureaucracy is an undertaking from the category of very specific efforts and requiring sometimes enchanting insanity.

How could I resist …

And I entered – a message from the underground, as an intention to radically change the future of the Corporation, encoded in the system of corporate documents. Narrative code for the upcoming Project. If they bother and can, of course, still decode it. Inscribed as a message in the official document of the Corporation, the main purpose of which, in fact, is to identify the intentions of its inhabitants in relation to the such, it is also highlighted in bold in it. It remains only to read. I think, will not be ..

P.S. 30.11.2020. The experiment was a success as expected. The charm of files lies in their role as silent witnesses, keeping all traces. What is their use in such environments, if they do not serve their original purpose – a question from the category of annoying file-holders. Perhaps the meaning is to confirm the meaninglessness that does not justify the existence of unwieldy corporate systems. Corporations, like empires, are very inefficient forms of managing people. And people from staying in them, as a rule, are not very happy.

*Please note, that the English version is merely a direct translation of the Russian.

20.07.2020

The main question that arises when studying the nature of the relationship between an employee and an employer (or management representing the employer) is whether a person can materially secure a decent existence for himself, bypassing the logic of the boss-subordinate relationship? That is, we are talking about the phenomenon of relations dependent on the employer as a condition for access to the material well-being of a person in society. Doesn’t endless adjustment (often in conditions of the most severe competition) to the requirements of the strong side lead to the refinement of the person himself as an individual? The emasculation of his true self? Is there a way out of this, in fact, very ugly paradigm that determines the “normality” of human existence?

26.08.2020

Art devoid of a protest component must be either brilliant in its execution (if you like, bewitch with itself), or unprecedented in its novelty, or contain the uniqueness of the intellectual component. So it reveals the invisible side of the reality familiar to us, which our blurred gaze and established perception are unable to distinguish. Everything else is either trite, or vulgar, or anemic.

The protest one is always relevant. At least through the prism of barely held historicism. It is only important that it be art itself and not vulgarized by an unsuccessful form of performance.

11.09.2020

With a light touch of a button, the email was finally sent about the long-awaited decision to leave the Company – one movement of the finger, leaving behind 13 years of ambiguous work and difficult reflections. The solemnity of the moment is illuminated by the rays of the September sun playfully sparkling from the window.

Colleagues are amazed. Someone understandably glad. Someone is genuinely confused. But one thing in their reaction unites everyone – a situation reminiscent of the release of a cellmate on parole. White envy, eloquently speaking for itself.

25.09.2020 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Intra-Sign Infinity

There can be much more semantic layers and meanings in a sign (especially in simulacra) than the formal designation originally embedded in it. With a deeper immersion in the sign, it is sometimes found that its inner space is much deeper and wider than outlined by its formal limits. So a word sometimes has a much deeper meaning than its semantic meaning.

08.10.2020 – Art & Signs

An iconic brand mark is not only a simulacrum, a copy that does not have an original, but often has nothing in common with the declared one; – sometimes, even the complete opposite of what is formally declared. A brand sign is a brilliant example of the alienation of a sign from reality.

09.10.2020 – Art & Signs

To the artwork The Sign Identity Provocation. Reverse Alienation of Reality

Taking into account the congestion of the artificial component of the sign world, provoking the alienation of reality itself, Baudrillard’s assertion about the established dictatorship of signs acquires another no less valuable dimension that reveals the mechanism of a totally established perception of reality – the phenomenon of the illusory perception of its content is revealed. The original is largely, if not lost, then far from always available. If it ever existed at all.

10.10.2020 – Art & Signs

To the artwork The Sign Identity Provocation. Reverse Alienation of Reality

Having overloaded the world with themselves, brand signs imperceptibly created their own parallel reality, which formed a rather distorted idea of the real world. The conditional reality created in this way, which the brand sign, having previously changed, absorbed and declares to the world, does not correspond to reality, what creates a unique opportunity for Artist investigating it to reverse extrapolate the reality alienated by the signs, thus exposing the provocation of the sign identity.

12.10.2020 – Post-Brand Existence of the Signs & Post-Simulacra

What happens to the sign when the signified disappears? And what happens to the sign when the connection with the signified disappears? There is a thin but very significant line between these two states.

The iconic brand sign, as an unconditionally completed artistic miniature, which ceases to represent the entity that caused it to exist, due to the cessation of the existence of the entity itself, passes from the state of a simulacrum to a post-simulacrum. The iconic brand sign, which ceases to represent a certain entity due to the replacement of this sign by another (rebranding), nevertheless leaves behind the post-simulacrum a state of meta-energy in relation to the previously (formally) signified, accumulated during the time of connection with the signified.

If a branded sign is a simulacrum, a copy of a non-existent original, then what does the simulacrum turn into when “non-existent one” ceases to exist? Accordingly, it should be recognized that a brand sign is not just a simulacrum, but an illusion, deliberately conceived to create an illusory world that has nothing in common with the signified it represents. Accordingly, as a unit of the image, meaningfully not tied to the formally signified, the illusion, which in the past was called a brand mark, is able to continue its independent stay in the visual world after the disappearance of the signified. So, the simulacrum goes into the category of post-simulacrum, a free iconic sign that is able to carry informational memory about the past, about the fragility of the world of past illusions, its fragile ties. The post-simulacrum is the bearer of the memory of past illusions and the fragility of their connections with the conventionally signified.

14.10.2020 – Art & Signs

All brand signs are doomed to eventually find their post-brand existence. Unlike the others, their referent is more than fleeting.

20.11.2020 – Art & Meta-Abstract Symbols

Meta-abstract symbols are signs bordering with a state of transition to other, more specific symbols; relevant in their borderline to obvious concepts and meanings. Hence their natural second definition – relevant abstract symbols.

30.11.2020

Immersion in Underground is an artist’s feat. State of Underground is an artist’s revolt. The way out of Underground is the triumph of art.

21.12.2020 – Art & Signs

To the artwork Color Equivalent of the Brand Value, Determined by the Dialectic of Unity and Struggle of Opposites and Post-Trend Void

With a very relative abstractness of the symbols used (relevant-abstract, or as I also call them – meta-abstract), the semantic load generated by them is more than obvious and evident by itself. With a certain compositional structure, they create an absolute given of the semantic field, sometimes allowing for a second semantic layer hidden underneath, minimized as much as possible from everything superfluous and superficial.

Compositional combination and juxtaposition of relevant abstract symbols can convey the essence of much more complex phenomena than those that can only be described through traditionally used visual languages; – for example, the visual expression of the essence of completely abstract concepts, in particular, the economic concept of value that does not exist in the visual designation (contextually in the work The Color Equivalent of the Brand Value, Determined by the Dialectic of Unity and Struggle of Opposites), or the absence of a trend in the post-market state (as in Post-Trend Void). Thus, we find ourselves in an unusually paradoxical situation, when the artistic language of generally non-abstract (meta-abstract) symbols describes visually abstract concepts, while the well-known historical heritage of artistic experience has so far used only abstraction as the only possible language for describing any abstract phenomena and concepts.

Slowly and reluctantly, the secrets of the terra incognita of fine art are being revealed.

07.01.2021 – Meta-Abstract Minimalism

In the transfer of maximum semantic completeness by minimal visual means, there is an internal focus on revealing the quintessence of meaning, finding its very essence. In the complex search for irreplaceable truth, everything superfluous is cut off. The composition is reduced to the limit; spared from senseless excesses, superficial skill and unjustified burden of forms for the sake of the effect of external attractiveness.

Such minimalism of expressive means can be achieved through the meta-abstractness of the symbols used, shortening the path to finding the desired images by excluding meaningless stages from it, burdened with a heap of unnecessary forms and slyly distracting conventions. The permanently observed result of this process produces a stable pattern, defined as meta-abstract minimalism. It could be assumed that minimalism is the essence of the expressive language that creates images so complete in terms of meaning. But it is rather a form of their transmission, a background method of semiosis. It was not thanks to minimalism that they were possible, but only in its very appropriate format for their expression.

05.04.2021 – Art & Signs

From the point of view of materiality, a brand as such is a dubious and hardly tangible phenomenon in itself. What’s behind it is often extremely difficult to understand clearly, no matter what intentions and meanings are invested in its visualization by the customer. Considering that it is also a sign, sometimes iconic, meaning the presence of the things and concepts it implies very scattered in reality, then another and rather more adequate form of visual expression of the brand would be an abstraction, rather than a clearly defined iconic sign. Abstraction, therefore, may be the only language that is able to convey the adequacy of the presence of the brand in reality, logically completing the visual essence of the signified convention. Thus, an adequately visualized brand may turn out to be the point of intersection of the semantic vectors of reality, in which abstractionism logically completes the stage of development of ‘realism’ forms.

Although, I would be careful with the term abstractionism, and draw some line between it and abstraction.