The Other East
Alexey Ulko
18th June 2020
This article by Alexey Ulko draws attention to the very unusual path in the art history of the Central Asian region. Starting in the European part of Russia, he follows the anthroposophic wind from the West with first Russian and later Soviet migrants and Oriental scholars who later on arrived in Uzbekistan. Here, they encountered a rich spiritual tradition which stems from the mixture of religions and beliefs existed and experienced in the country for many centuries. How this tradition of esoteric art developed, blossomed, struggled and came to an apparent end - discover in the following text.
Although the exhibition We Treasure our Lucid Dreams is dedicated to Russian esoteric artists, their ethnic identity has been of no importance for my study. I was primarily interested in artists, poets, musicians and philosophers belonging to the broad European esoteric tradition who lived and worked in Central Asia in the 1900-1970s. Andrei Misiano, the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art GARAGE, kindly invited me to choose a topic for research, which should be linked to Russia. Tired of the traditional repertoire of contemporary art themes with its obsessive materialism, I decided to take a step in the opposite direction.
My interest in esoteric art is based on the conviction that the world is not confined to the physical matter spread across the 3-dimensional universe, which can be sufficiently and reliably perceived by the five human senses. I also hold the view that the ‘consciousness’ in one way or another extends beyond the human physical body and the 70 years of its material existence. Although I am personally inspired mostly by anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner’s understanding of art, this is more a matter of personal taste and not a dogmatic position.
Therefore, I did not want to reduce my research exclusively to formal work involving archives and documents. At this level, the research was greatly informed by A. L. Nikitin's work on the persecution of members of esoteric and occult communities in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s.There were several fruitful visits to the Russian archives. Yet the main focus of the research was on the whole system of relations and connections between different artists and meanings contained in their work that could be only partly examined by a mindful observer.
Obviously, I was interested in such things as Maximilian Voloshin’s impact on some heroes of our exhibition, who then directly influenced the formation of subsequent generations of creative intelligentsia. Nevertheless, I was more concerned about possible interpretation of this complex system of connections and meanings in the spirit of the Object-Oriented Ontology as a system of interaction between different objects in the context of implicit ‘dark matter.’ My recent research stemmed from an article I wrote for the Moscow Art Magazine in 2016.
One has to be careful when talking or writing about the supersensible or esoteric as it is such a broad field that it is difficult to speak about it outside of a particular personal experience. I can speak, of course, only about most rudimentary forms of this experience, but it can sometimes be sufficient to identify a certain concept or mental object in order to return to it and explore it in a calm atmosphere. As an example, I want to mention here Isaac Itkind, who is usually remembered only as a brilliant sculptor, tireless worker and a grotesque ‘archaic Jew’ (according to Voloshin). Nowhere was his name associated with esotericism, and he himself never talked about it.
Nevertheless, when I came across his personality and his works, I felt that there was something deeper behind all these descriptions and started looking at his art and friends’ testimonies more closely. Gradually it became apparent that Itkind deeply, though mostly unconsciously, immersed himself in the artistic experience of how the ethereal, vital body reveals itself in the physical, and worked with sculpture very much in the anthroposophical spirit.
It was evident from his sensual experience of wood (‘the quintessence of light’), the interpretation of the head, based on the inner experience (according to one of the testimonies, he carried with him a mirror to remind himself of the relative position of nose, lips, eyes etc. on the face), a particular feeling for the tragical (his more positive works are also more formal) and a specific vital force, which was not related to his physical development but was akin to the forces used by another initiated person, Johannes Wolfgang Goethe. To be such a sculptor, Itkind did not need to formulate his views in rational occult schemes. He drew material for his art directly from the supersensible experience of the artistic.
Inspired by my own experience of living in Samarkand and by the interesting information about Voloshin’s ‘second birth’ in the steppes of Turkestan, I initially looked forward to discovering the impact Central Asia made on the esoteric artists I was researching. In general, however, their attitude to the region fits into the global Orientalist narrative. Central Asia had the most profound impact on Voloshin, evoking in him metaphysical reflections on his own cultural identity and stimulating the awakening of his artistic and poetic talent. The Oriental scholars Schutsky and Rostopchin were lured by the distant and abstract ‘Asia’, and Vasilyeva, who visited Tashkent several times, felt more and more detached from her native Petersburg.
Of all the artists featured at the exhibition, Central Asia made the most visible impact on the artists of Daniil Stepanov’s circle, many of whom did not have anything to do with the spiritual and esoteric understanding of the environment they portrayed. This, however, is only a superficial observation. We can only guess about the deeper interaction of these artists with the Central Asian environment.
Now, given that in 2005 the Russian curator Victor Misiano famously called Central Asia ‘the only blind spot on the international map of contemporary culture’, one may wonder why the region so prominently featured in this research, not just as a geographical or even cultural space but as an entity, an object. One of the possible answers could be found in its fluidity and profound historical heritage. Central Asia is an ancient zone of human movement along the east-west axis, be it migration or military campaigns, as well as a zone of contact along the north-south axis between more nomadic and more sedentary peoples. Various forms of animism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, varieties of Christianity, Hellenism, Judaism, different currents of Islam and atheism have interacted with each other in the region for centuries.
All these forms of interaction have left their marks not only on the physical but also on more subtle plans of existence. When you stand on the ruins of the Samarkand citadel, you realise that you are surrounded by atoms, which once belonged to the bodies of Macedonians and Persians, soldiers of Kutayba and Genghis Khan’s armies, and that this active life ceased nine centuries ago. The Russian colonisation with its exiles, violence, torture chambers, deportations, camps and zones, has been just one episode in the long history of this land. This episode is interesting to us all only because we happen to live in its final phase, and that is why we are so sensitive to various contradictory assessments by our contemporaries.
Central Asia for several millennia was the scene of interaction of different peoples and religions, a territory where numerous mysteries and holy ceremonies took place. There were numerous esoteric groups long before Russian colonisation. However, early enough in the course of the study it was decided to limit it to the European esoteric tradition. The reasons included the immensity of "Eastern esotericism" and the ambiguity of its manifestation in art, and my unpreparedness for serious conversation, for example, about Sufism. It has become a common place to associate, for example, Usto Mumin with Sufism, attracting for this romantic poetry rumi and Khayam. But it is enough to ask: what tarikat included Usto Mumin? What evidence does there even have to say? And the whole story begins to crumble.
Of course, initially all the fine art produced in Central Asia in the late 19th to mid-20th century was to varying degrees colonial, as such were the means and language of painting and graphics, the methods of working en plein air and in the studio. This is most clearly exemplified by Vassil Vereshchagin’s paintings and the photographic Turkestan Album. In the paintings made in the 1910s-1920s, the close attention to exotic details of the local costume and everyday life that characterises Vereshchagin's painting is gone. At that time, artists are more concerned about their subjective perception of the East and particular forms of its exotisation that is closer to Paul Gaugin rather than Rudyard Kipling. This withdrawal of attention from the physicality of Central Asian life creates a beneficial stylistic environment for the manifestation of the artistic itself. The breath phase, the phase of attentive perception is followed by the phase of meditative exhalation, which is then rudely interrupted by the repressive impulse of the 1930s.
Another aspect of coloniality was the relations between the Russian artists and the local community, especially when you consider that different groups and individuals could be seen as ‘local’. For Voloshin, the Governor of Tashkent was ‘local,’ and the artists Alexander Volkov and Sergey Kalmykov, born in Fergana and Samarkand, were local by default. For Vasilyeva and Schutsky, Turkestan was a country of ‘yellow nomads’, which, however, should be understood metaphorically. It seems that their contacts in Tashkent and Samarkand in the 1920s were mostly confined to the local Russian colonial society. By the mid-1930s, the situation had changed. The Oriental scholar Fyodor Rostopchin, who worked at the Bukhara Museum of History in the mid-1930s and was arrested on charges of belonging to a ‘trotskyist-fascist hypnotic community,’ gave a detailed account of the persons mentioned in his notebook. These include Tajiks and Uzbeks, among whom the most prominent figure was Abdurauf Fitrat 1, the main ideologue of Jadidism, also shot by the Soviet authorities in 1938.
Most Anthroposophists suffered at the hands of the NKVD but why did Anthroposophical and other esoteric communities were seen as threatening the Soviet power? After the murder of Sergey Kirov in 1934, the wave of repression against the intelligentsia was completely thoughtless and chaotic. Soviet punitive bodies made up fictitious conspiracies, invented non-existent societies and forced people to admit being part of anti-Soviet plots. Once arrested and made to ‘confess’, many innocent people thereby committed themselves and others to death, accused of most shameful and ridiculous verdicts.
This massive violence had grave consequences for the Soviet government and the people alike. Whether these consequences are considered from the point of view of the criminal law, memory politics, social constructivism, so-called "genetic code" or collective karma, they are obvious. Today, looking at persecution of political opposition 2 in Russia and the hybrid war it is waging outside its borders, one can see that the oppressive methods combining lies and fabrication with coercion and violence have not gone anywhere. The seeds fell on fertile ground and have borne fruit in modern Russia.
Alexey Ulko was born in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) in 1969. After graduating form Samarkand University with a diploma in English he obtained an MEd TTELT degree from the University of St Mark and St John (UK). Since 2003 he has been working as a freelance consultant in English, Culture Studies and Art for various cultural organisations. Has been making experimental films since 2007 and is an active writer about Central Asian contemporary art. His current artistic interests: experimental cinema, photography, visual poetry. Member of the European Society for Central Asian Studies, the Association of Art Historians (UK) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society (USA).
Editors Tamara Khasanova and Ira Konyuhova