Sign and Symbol in Afrika's Crimania
by Amy Bryzgel

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the St. Petersburg artist Afrika (Sergei Anatolevich Bugaev, b. 1966) complained of depression resulting from his loss of identity as a Soviet citizen, and mentioned a desire to have his friend, Felix Guattari, psychoanalyze him to relieve his suffering.[1] In February 1993, Afrika had himself committed to a mental hospital in Simferopol in Crimea, where he remained for three weeks. His choice of location was not arbitrary; it was exactly fifty years earlier that Joseph Beuys’ plane is said to have crashed on that same peninsula,[2] his rescue by Tatars a turning point in his life and the moment of his rebirth. Although Afrika’s stay at the hospital was voluntary, only five staff members knew that this was an artistic performance. His experiences there were preparation for his one-man show Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka, which took place in 1995, two years after the hospital performance, at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna. This exhibition, which was about the “obsession of creating an exhibition”,[3] according to Afrika, consisted of installations and displays of his collection of Soviet memorabilia, such as busts of Lenin, flags, banners and medals – items that normally filled the walls and shelves of Afrika’s St. Petersburg studio.

This paper will examine Crimania as Afrika’s attempt to come to terms with the period of political and social uncertainty after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which he labeled the time of “Great Aphasia.” This performance and the MAK exhibition are significant both because of the historical moment in which they occurred, and also because Crimania brings together a number of elements that recur throughout Afrika’s work: his interest in sign systems, language, psychoanalysis and the layering of history. I will explore how the performance and the subsequent exhibition function, as the artist negotiates the transitions taking place around him. I will also consider whether Afrika’s personal experiences during Crimania can be translated into a universal message for his audience, similar to Joseph Beuys’ aim to translate his own personal awakening into a universal experience for mankind.

The Location

In February of 1993, Afrika made the long train journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea; from St. Petersburg, his artistic home, to Crimea, near the region of his birth[4]; from present-day Russia to newly independent Ukraine. At the time, Russia and Ukraine were still arguing over which country would maintain control of the Crimean peninsula, a once-independent republic of the USSR that had been ‘returned’ to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954. As Afrika noted, “the people living there…were then unable to fully understand where they are situated, which currency system exists around them and what citizenship they have because, although the area was acknowledged to be part of the Ukraine, Soviet passports were still valid and were actually the only ones that existed.”[5] Thus the artist, who also complained of “a feeling of uncertainty, confusion about ‘which country I live in,’”[6] journeyed further into the mire, in order to find his way out.

Afrika’s ultimate destination was the Crimean Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, in Simferopol. The psychiatric hospital, as the artist maintained, although different from the outside world, “actually is its copy and immediate continuation…The hospital is a mimetic system of the social structure within which it exists.”[7] As Michael Ryklin has observed, a hierarchy existed in the hospital in Simferopol. The weaker patients, those who were chronically ill, such as the schizophrenics, were oppressed by the more conscious patients suffering from neurotic disorders. Through oppression, the stronger patients tried to “secure for themselves the status of the healthy within a society composed of the ill.”[8] The social hierarchy both emerged from and was sustained by existing circumstances, and functioned only within the walls of the hospital.

Afrika is aware not only of the socio-historical significance of the Crimean peninsula to recent Russian history (it was the location of the Yalta Conference in 1945, and also where Gorbachev was held under house arrest in 1991, for example) but also the art historical tradition linked to the region. It was in Crimea that Afrika’s avant-garde precursor, Joseph Beuys, claimed to have experienced his artistic birth. Although we still seek the facts behind the mythology of Beuys’ plane crash, curator Peter Noever, when he visited Simferopol, observed that inhabitants of Crimea still spoke of Beuys with reverence, even those not necessarily interested in art. They “‘breathed his spirit,’ regarded him as ‘their son,’ guarded his secret (‘only pathologically interested art historians would attempt to find the ‘truth’, claims Noever).”[9] In choosing this location for his performance, Afrika both participates in and sustains the Beuys myth. Viktor Mazin has also noted the parallels between Afrika’s three-week stay in a mental hospital and Beuys’ 1974 performance at the Rene Block Gallery, I Like America and America Likes Me, when Beuys spent two weeks coexisting with a wild coyote. According to Mazin, “both rituals involve placing oneself alongside the ‘inhuman’ and the ‘wild’ (animal/insane). The wildness of Beuys is homologous with the nature of Afrika who instantly establishes “hypnotic” contact with members of the animal kingdom.”[10]

The Goals

The project used a scientific method to seek answers about art and artistic expression. It was officially conducted by the S. A. Bugaev Group, which consisted of Afrika, the patient; Vitkor Mazin, Afrika’s friend who acted as his relative during the project; and Professor Samokhvalov, the head doctor at the hospital. Mazin outlined the goals of the Group, the primary task being to examine Afrika’s psychological state in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In order to do this, the Group saw it necessary to determine the connection between the artist’s emotional state and “the representation of things which act as objects of power, i.e., which actually represent representation.”[11] This was because in addition to being an artist, Afrika is also a collector. He collects many things: artifacts of Russian folklore, such as old wooden painted trunks (as seen in his 2002 installation at the Whitney Museum); relics of the Soviet Empire, such as busts of Lenin, banners, and medals; and vestiges of the first avant-garde, in the form of rare editions of Kazimir Malevich.

A collection, as an entity, seeks to preserve a phenomenon or object as a piece of history, yet in doing so abstracts the object from its original context, placing borders around it as something separate, yet unified. In this sense, the collection identifies a particular thing as belonging to a group, as having a common identity – a quality that Afrika seems to have regretted losing when he lost his collective identity as a Soviet citizen. Consequently, the Group sought to discover the motivation behind Afrika’s collecting and exhibiting these icons of the former Soviet Empire[12] and to answer the question: “Does the representation of Former Institutions of power in their metonymical manifestations constitute a representation of representation directed towards the healing of a socio-psychological trauma?”[13] In other words, is Afrika’s collecting a pathology, or a process of healing?

Additionally, Afrika and Professor Samokhvalov were interested in an explanation of both the creation and evolution of new sign systems. Afrika has labeled the period after the breakup of the Soviet Union the time of “Great Aphasia,”[14] or a “pseudo-aphasia.”[15] Technically, aphasia is a mental condition that involves the loss of one’s ability to use words, which means an inability to connect signifier (the word) and signified (the concept). Afrika has described aphasia as “the powerful vacation of language structures.”[16] While clinical aphasia is usually the result of an injury to the brain, aphasia can also appear metaphorically, when a structure that keeps a sign system intact is disrupted.

The catalyst for the time of Great Aphasia, then, was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By December of 1991, after individual nations had declared their independence one by one, Gorbachev was forced to resign as President of the USSR, having become a leader without a country. Other symbols that had also ceased to have meaning were removed, such as the statue of Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (precursor to the KGB), which was knocked down from its pedestal in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow. The hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin; it had become a national flag without a nation. In time, street names changed, and acronyms were replaced; for example, the KGB (Committee of State Security) became the FSB (Federal Security Service). Once the totalitarian structure had been dismantled, the sign systems that it held in place ceased to function.

These circumstances force the artist, as a user and manipulator of signs and sign systems, into “the difficult situation of a system of images in which the sign, on the one hand, ceases to be a sign and, on the other, witnesses the emergence of a new sign.”[17] Afrika’s avant-garde predecessors from the revolutionary period found themselves working in similar conditions. According to Afrika, it was Vladimir Mayakovskii who was, “in some sense, the creator of the sign system on whose grandiose ruins we are currently standing.”[18] During the second and third decades of the 20th century, many avant-garde artists like Mayakovskii, including Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and especially the Constructivists, were striving to create a new sign system, one that would be completely transparent and whose form would clearly and efficiently convey the ideals of the burgeoning communist state. If, for instance, Mayakovskii managed to create the language of Soviet socialism, who, then, would produce its equivalent for the new Russian Federation? Or might such a task, as Crimania suggests, prove futile with the abolition of a monolith in favor of a pluralistic society?

If Afrika does not, as did his avant garde predecessors, seek to create a new language for Post-Soviet Russia, what he does do, in a variety of different ways throughout his œuvre, is foreground sign systems as systems in order to call attention both to their beauty, as well as their weaknesses and lack of universality. Two elements of the Crimania exhibition at MAK make this clear: the flags (or banners) and the rebuses. The artist has taken old Soviet-era banners inspiring the “proletariat of the world to unite,” and superimposed on them symbols from different cultures and religions, from different periods and different parts of the world. With these flags we see a layering of cultural codes from different social orders. This decontextualization disables the Soviet symbols, reducing them to simply another layer of the palimpsest of human culture. These symbols from different eras lose their original meaning but do not acquire a logical new one within the flag, resulting in the glossolalia, or nonsense language, of aphasia.

The rebuses also present incomprehensible systems that can be examined, but not necessarily deciphered. The walls of Afrika’s Museum Aphasia are covered with symbols appropriated from Soviet rebuses of the 1950s combined with other signs, letters and symbols added by the artist. The additions complicate the rebus, leaving its original message corrupted. Furthermore, these rebuses were meant to be viewed by different audiences, both Russian and non-Russian. Because the Cyrillic alphabet is made up of letters that look and sound the same as those in the Roman alphabet (Cyrillic M = Roman M), letters that look the same but are pronounced differently (Cyrillic H = Roman N), and letters which look nothing like Roman letters (_, _), only some of the letters can be read by a non-Russian speaking audience. Others are misread, and still others only appear as symbols.[19] Thus a reading of the already illegible rebuses is further frustrated for those who do not read Cyrillic. Ironically, these rebuses are literally transparent – they can be seen from both inside and outside the Museum Aphasia building. Unfortunately, however, the translucent paper on which they are printed offers little in the way of illumination. Much like the utopia promised by the leaders of the Revolution, these images offer promises, but never results.

The Conclusions

The exhibition catalogue for Crimania provides thoroughly detailed notes of the experiment from all three participants: Afrika, Professor Samokhvalov and Viktor Mazin. While the notes propose and speculate, only Professor Samokhvalov, the scientist of the Group, offers conclusions. Viktor Mazin, for example, poses only questions, such as: “Can we consider that answers have been found to any of these questions? Do the questions need to be answered? Is the answer not contained in the question, making the question superfluous? Is the question satisfactory once it has been translated into the illusion of an answer? Is there a teleological desire to receive an answer at all?”[20]

One way to understand the function of questioning in the project is to refer to Viktor Tupitsyn’s categorization of Afrika’s work as “goblinry.” The wood-goblin, a well-known Russian folk character, lives in the forest and knows every inch of it by heart; but instead of helping those lost in the woods, he purposely misguides them. According to Tupitsyn, he “knows what not to know.”[21] The purpose of the wood-goblin, in literature, is “to lead the way and lead astray but never arrive anywhere.”[22] In some ways, Afrika does resemble the wood-goblin, in that he leads us down a circuitous path that constantly causes us to wonder where, in fact, we are headed. Unlike the wood-goblin, however, Afrika seems to join us in our uncertainty, his artistic meanderings meant to inspire, rather than to harm. Because the wood-goblin already knows, and knows well enough to “know what not to know,” he has no use for searching. While the wood-goblin poses no questions, Afrika puts them forth ceaselessly. His work sets questioning into motion, while knowing or finding the answers becomes of secondary importance.

The tangible results of Afrika’s stay in Simferopol were two-fold. At the end of the three-week-long performance, the artist held an exhibition in the least likely of spaces: in the room for the chronically ill patients in the psychiatric hospital. This exhibition coincided with both Afrika’s release from the hospital and Soviet Army and Navy Day, which, although no longer an official holiday, was still acknowledged by many. Two years later, Afrika staged a second exhibition in a more conventional venue, the MAK Gallery in Vienna.[23] Less definitive, however, was the reconciliation Afrika came to about his own personal psyche, both with regard to the loss of his Soviet identity, and also with regard to his avant-garde precursors and also Joseph Beuys, the precursor to Afrika’s Crimean experience.

What Crimania does make clear is how Afrika truly differs from his artistic forefathers whom he so revered, including Malevich, Mayakovskii and Rodchenko, who proposed, theorized and created prototypes of a new language appropriate to the new socialist lifestyle. Afrika does not offer a new language, but rather exposes existing language systems for what they are – systems that, although functioning, are inherently flawed. Like the muddled rebuses, whose logic is contained within their borders, and the social order that exists only within the mental hospital, the Soviet language of socialism only functioned within the socialist system. Once the infrastructure that supported the system was destroyed, the language also collapsed. In the same way, once the symbols of the system, such as the busts of Lenin, were removed and placed in a collection, their original meanings were displaced. Afrika has labeled the period just after their removal the “Time of Great Aphasia” both because of the fact that old symbols were awaiting new meanings, and because everyone was awaiting the development of new symbols. But as we will learn from Professor Samokhvalov, the new language system would have to develop of its own accord from within the new order, rather than being created from without.

From his observations of Afrika during Crimania, Professor Samokhvalov concluded that, “art develops because the behavior (language) of its creators develops.”[24] One of the ways this occurs is through the emergence of new symbols, which can only take place through endospection,[25] or observation of phenomena from within, which accurately describes what took place during the Crimania performance. If Afrika’s stay in a mental hospital is to contribute to the construction of a new language, it will occur as a result of the reciprocity between artist and sign system. It is only with the perspective of time that we will be able to witness this change, as it was concluded from the experiment that the conscious creation of a new sign system, and of new signs, is simply not possible.

Although Samokhvalov’s analysis of Afrika’s personality revealed a desire on the part of the artist to “grow from an adolescent into a Hero,”[26] I do not believe that Crimania was an attempt to heal the wounds of his former Soviet compatriots, but simply to understand his own affliction. This brings us back to both Beuys and Guattari, who were mentioned at the beginning of the paper. Whereas the artist-shaman Joseph Beuys was looking to heal the soul of mankind, it seems clear that with Crimania, Afrika had merely hoped to understand the temporary schizophrenia caused by a sudden trauma, the collapse of a nation, the loss of a national identity and a common language. Like Guattari, the artist recognizes the chaos and schizophrenia of contemporary society, and, instead of fighting it, attempts to negotiate it as best he can.[27] Afrika seems to understand that by manipulating the signs and symbols of society, past and present, the artist can play a role in the generation of new sign systems. But these systems cannot be forced on society from without, as we have learned from the failed projects of Malevich, Lissitzky and the Constructivists. The artist can contribute to the development of the new systems as they evolve only according to the needs and experiences of the culture in question. In this sense Crimania presents us not with the dystopia that we may expect; the conclusions of the participant, or lack thereof, keep us open to the possibility of the creation of a new language, without yet presenting one in its completion.

Endnotes

[1] Mikhail Ryklin, “The Artist in the Collection and the World,” in Peter Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika: Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka (Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1995), 16.
[2] The plane crash is said to have occurred outside Sevastopol, which lays southwest of Simferopol, on the Crimean coast. Although many dispute the veracity of the story (such as Benjamin Buchloh in his 1980 article in Artforum, “The Twilight of an Idol – Preliminary Notes for a Critique”), Afrika nevertheless appears to engage with it as if it were true, as evinced by his choices in both the performance and exhibition.
[3] As stated with the artist in a phone conversation with the artist, October 14, 2004.
[4] The artist was born in Novorossijsk.
[5] Sergei Bugaev Afrika, “Ethics and Ethology of the Artist,” in Noever, 62-3.
[6] Viktor Pavlovich Samokhvalov, “The Conception of a Fundamentally New Symbol: The Artist as an Object of Science and Art,” in Noever, 55.
[7] Afrika, “Ethics and Ethology of the Artist,” in Noever, 62.
[8] Ryklin, “The Artist in the Collection and the World,” in Noever, 19.
[9] Peter Noever, “Between Two Worlds: and Act of Self-Assertion,” in Noever, 5.
[10] Mazin, in Noever, 41.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Afrika, Ibid., 18. The reference is most likely either to Kandinsky’s essay “On the Great Utopia” or to Josef Weber’s 1950 text, “The Great Utopia.”
[15] Afrika, “Ethics and Ethology of the Artist,” in Noever, 64.
[16] Sergei Bugaev Afrika and Viktor Mazin, “The Reflection of the Rebus and Stochastic Oscillations,” in Sergei Bugaev Afrika – Rebus (New York: Paul Judelson Arts, 1994), 19.
[17] Afrika, “Ethics and Ethology of the Artist,” in Noever, 64.
[18] Sergei Bugaev Afrika and Viktor Mazin, “Within the Spheres of Interimagery,” in Sergei Bugaev Afrika – Rebus, 9.
[19] Dan Cameron has also noted this complication, cf. “Making the Pieces Fit,” in Sergei Bugaev – Rebus, 44.
[20] Mazin, “Afrasia,” in Noever, 42.
[21] Tupitsyn, in Afrika. (Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, 1991) 36.
[22] Ibid.
[23] The location of this exhibition was significant for the artist, owing to the association of Vienna with Freud, the father of modern psychology.
[24] Samokhvalov, in Noever, 60.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid, 57.
[27] Guattari’s concept of “schizo-analysis” presents a postmodern alternative to Freud in that it rejects the totalizing theory of psychoanalysis.