Ice cracking – Yuri Leiderman’s Kür The challenge for the spectator, the one writing as it were, will begin not later than after having noticed Yuri Leiderman’s statement on his art and on art in general: “From my point of view anyone can understand my art because there’s no-thing in it and ‘understanding’ doesn’t fit at all with art. We’d better off talking about perception and its therapy. Our field of vision is packed with contexts, ideologies, versions thrown down to us from on high; art is trying to direct us towards emptiness and spontaneity.“ What can one say then about the art of Leiderman? The interpreter (re)constructing mean- ing, someone, willing to understand what has been “expressed“ – by tradition art is meant to be expressive - falls according to Leiderman into the trap of meaning, respectively participating in its pure construction. In hermeneutics the understanding becomes, in differentiation of the explaining of the natural sciences, a methodology of the humanities. Under existentialist premises the understanding becomes exegesis of being revealing meaning. What if this meaning, at least beyond ideologies, does not exist at all? In 1990 Leiderman left the artist group Medical Hermeneutics, which he had cofounded with Sergei Anufriev and Pavel Pepperstein in 1987. Regarding the art of Yuri Leiderman, still today, the group’s name can be read as a program ironically intending to cure the hermeneutics of itself. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “showing the fly the way out of the flybottle“, in other words: to free philosophy from its problems with the aid of logopedia, comes to mind. If Leiderman wanted understanding to be substituted by the therapy of perception, one is reminded yet again of Wittgenstein insisting upon his theory of language games: don’t think, look. Like Wittgenstein, Leiderman rejects the naive realism of terms supposing that the name will carry the meaning. Just think of Leiderman’s work “Giving Names to Kefir Grains“. Caught in an excessive act of name-giving, Leiderman names the Kefir cultures, which he had incubated the same day, after individuals that have died the same day in Jerusalem, the place where he realized the work. The second part of the names results from abstracta, words ending with “tion“ and put in alphabetical order. The absurd name-giving plays on the system of scientific classification and simultaenously produces a poetical surplus in allusion to death and life continuing. Leiderman is counted among the Moscow Conceptualists. What does this mean? Leiderman was born in Odessa; he then went to Moscow, where he finished his studies of chemistry; already in Odessa he had participated in art exhibitions; Leiderman states Andrei Monastyrski, founder of the group Collective Actions, his mentor; today Leiderman lives in Berlin and Moscow, collaborating amongst other things with Monastyrksi and Vadim Zakharov in the Corbusier Group. What does Moscow Conceptualist mean? It is a construction similar to Wiener Schnitzel or Nürnberger Bratwurst (meat dishes; culinary specialties) raising the question, whether the cities’ names refer to the place of origin of the dish or to its recipe. In the case of the Nürnberger Bratwurst the place of origin was accentuated following commercial interests. Moscow Conceptualism, when considered as a recipe, can it be produced also in Munich? Or is provenance in the focus? What does provenance say about the art? Of Russian artists, usually, the Western art world expects to produce and show Russian art. Leiderman is aware of this. In his latest show “Die Ehre hüt von Jugend auf”, he had three women dressed up in folklore costumes reading aloud a Pushkin novel in Russian. The Essen piece is part of his concept of “geopoetics”, by which he accordingly undermines the construction of national identity as hyper-affirmation. Here, as he often does and especially also in his Munich exhibition, Leiderman builds a kind of metastructure, in which he inserts his work; which means that he does not content himself with reproducing the syntax of the White Cube with its white walls, but that he develops and evokes existing syntactic contexts. Regarding his “Kefir work” already mentioned, it is the system of scientific classification and finishing, reverting to diagrams, a few times; in Essen it was a ship that carried his photos. In Munich now, he has recourse to the tradition of Russian icons and places them in the context of Russian art so to speak or better: he places them into a rock scape, a stereotype deriving from the Russian Icon tradition. Whereas in the context of the Icon painting rocks refer to a “higher reality”, the moment, in which they are experimentally transferred into the reality of the actual space, they become self-caricature and construction. Leiderman uses the iconic mountain construction as a kind of personal kiosk of propaganda, on which he presents his own writings and post cards, in the tradition of the “samizdat”, most of which unpublished yet,. Publications appearing in very small self-editions have once been the reaction towards Soviet censorship. With the beginning of capitalist times, the question of who may publish what has been shifted to another level. Leiderman does not only work as artist, but also as writer, both fields pervading each other. As for his love of sports he also wrote sports reviews for magazines. Seemingly insignificant at first glance, this detail is revealing, as Leiderman, finds in sports a world realized, the interpretation of which necessarily remains on the surface and finally withdraws from every possible explanation. A goal is a goal, which has its meaning only in the context of the game rules, everything else is everything else. The art of Leiderman may be compared with the art of an ice skater, who runs across the ice to get to the point, at which the ice starts cracking. It is not about breaking into the ice and getting new certainty when falling into the water, it is about the moment, in which one can hear the ice crack. Dr. Heinz Schütz is an art critic/ publicist / curator living in Munich; amongst other things he is author of “Stadt.Kunst” and curator of the international exhibition and research project “Performing the City”; since 1985 he has been permanent correspondant of the art journal “Kunstforum International”.
