Igor Kopystiansky
Igor Kopystiansky is an American artist, active in New York City since 1988. He has a multimedia practice, including painting, photography, film, and video, with an investigation of painting as his primary paradigm. On works in media of film and video, he collaborates with his wife Svetlana Kopystiansky. His independent works and their joint works are shown internationally and held in American, European and Australian museum collections. Archives of works by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are located at the Centre Pompidou, Kandinsky Library.
Work
From the late 70s until the late 80s Igor Kopystiansky was part of a second-generation of "Soviet non-conformist artists". In 1979, he turned to the avant-garde tradition. The initial inspiration for his works rooted in ideas of deconstruction and appropriation came from DADA and Marcel Duchamp. These works appropriated images by Western European painters. The new paintings were deliberately created in different sizes compared to the originals. This approach reflects the situation where a work of art functions in society more as a reproduction in a book, poster, or billboard, or when it is viewed on a screen at the cinema, with the size of the image being different from the original painting. The execution of the appropriated paintings was just the first stage in the production of the actual artwork.These painted copies were then used to create assemblages or environments referred to as Interiors, where images from various paintings interacted with one another. The final outcome of the entire work would always be revealed only at the last stage, upon completing the installation, remaining absolutely unpredictable beforehand.
Two installations Interiors were a part of an exhibition by Igor and Svetlana held in October 1988 in New York City. From this exhibition both these works were purchased by MAMC, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Etienne, France and Ludwig Forum for international art Aachen, Germany.
From this group of works in the collection MNAM Centre Pompidou Paris are represented Transformable Paintings. This work does consist from seven paintings based at works of Western-European artists including Titian, Diego Velazquez, Giorgione, Murillo, Tintoretto, Eugène Delacroix which were exhibited and can be exhibited as objects in several different ways.
Compact Paintings are in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. For each object from the set was produced an oil painted copy of the pre-existing painting. After that a painting was cut in stripes which were rolled and fixed bound with a rope. In this way a two dimensional painting was turned into a three dimensional compact object.
The work The Secret of the Lost which consists of 18 Compact Paintings is in the collection of Museum Folkwang Essen.
Igor Kopystiansky’ individual works produced in the media of painting and installation since the early eighties have rightfully been defined as a part of an international art movement known as Appropriation Art.
In 1988, he and his wife and collaborator Svetlana Kopystiansky left the Soviet Union and moved to New York City.
In 1990, Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky received a DAAD artists-in-residency grant that took them from New York to Berlin, Germany, and resulted in their solo museum exhibition with a catalogue curated by René Block for the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, in the Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 1991.
Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky pursue individual careers, but also regularly work together. His individual and joint practice were shown at museum venues, in important international presentations and are collected by major American, European and Australian museums.
In the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art Igor and Svetlana are represented with a two screen slide projection installation The Day Before Tomorrow photographed on streets of New York in 1999, the last year of the Millennium.
Film/Video works
Increasingly the Kopystianskys make video. Their 1996-7 video Incidents, filmed on streets of Chelsea Manhattan was first shown by curator Harald Szeemann in the Lyon Biennale in 1997,. meditates on the potential beauty and pathos of discarded objects, as they are balletically blown around by wind along a city street. The filming of Incidents was made during a period of two years 1996/1997 in Chelsea where has been located artists’ studio, what at that time was largely non-residential area. Artists made filming and editing instantly and continued to work in such way until the video was accomplished. A soundtrack of this work is based exclusively on original recording in the city, which consist from incidental sounds of street life: traffic, conversations, footsteps, etc. A fresh and very common wind from the Hudson River transformed streets into a kind of a stage with actors. Everyday objects: a cup, a newspaper, an umbrella, a cardboard box, plastic bags are blown across the sidewalk and street. Mass-produced discards become large sculptures always in their movement, with constant changes of their sculptural form. Hours of footage carefully collected on many windy days have been edited to capture these magical moments. The wind was playing with these objects, turning and twisting them, bringing them together, and then separating them once more. It looks that the wind was liberating them from a power of gravitation.Incidents were produced in a limited editions which were acquired and become a part of collections of MoMA, Metropolitan, Centre Pompidou, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TATE Modern London, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Germany, AGNSW Sydney and were exhibited as a part of collections by major museums and at important international exhibitions.
A complete exhibition history of the video work Incidents is published in a reference to a purchase at the web site of the MFAH, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas.
Later collaborations, such as 2005's Yellow Sound represented in the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum takes its title from a Wassily Kandinsky theater production, and its silent structure and running time from John Cage's famous composition 4'33", in which a piano player sits at the keyboard, lift the lid and stay motionless and silent for the next four minutes and thirty-three seconds. As a source for Yellow Sound, artists used a found silent film footage with an image of a vinyl record. The original very short film was slowed down to increase it’s duration to 4:33. During the whole presentation a viewer does see an image, which looks like a still and only dust, scratches and other original damages of the film, which appear and disappear slowly indicate that the time is flowing.
In the video Portrait, 2006, represented in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, Kopystiansky used a short excerpt from Masculin Feminin by Jean-Luc Godard. This selected clip has been played forward and backward at the same time. As the artists have described their process, "The effect is that most of the time the image is doubled, but in the middle of the program for 1/24th of a second the images merge in one single still. This moment has been determined by the movement of the film in the projection camera.”
In a 2006 film work, Pink and White-A Play in Two Time Directions, artists superimpose the same footage playing forward and in reverse. The suggestive quality of these pieces is enhanced as the time/action moves forward and rewinds, creating a sense of time as both a found event and a lost memory. Pink and White is emphasizing their interest in early cinema, and the surrealist graphic intensity of photographer Man Ray.
Pink and White is related to two other film/video works by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky: Double Fiction and Fiction Double. In both works the entire movie – respectively, The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock and the Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard – have been played in two directions: forward and backward. Their soundtracks, in contradistinction to Pink and White, were appropriated from the original movies. Both movies were created almost at the same time within only a three year difference: 1960 Breathless and 1963 The Birds, both have a dramatic intensity and a fictional film narrative built in a classical way: a narrative time moves straightforward in one direction only. Both films represent an “author’s” cinematography and for artists was important to use classical films which every viewer is keeping in a memory.
In Double Fiction and Fiction Double respectively, entire film footage of Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds and the entire film footage of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless are shown with sound, from beginning to end and over again in reverse, from the end to the beginning simultaneously and both flows of time are visible to the viewer in every moment of the presentation. In this way Kopystiansky’s incorporated the entire film as a found object and re-considered viewer’s reception of narrative time in the classical cinema. In a visual part early scenes are joined with later scenes. At the mid-point, each film becomes one as the superimposed films line up and become a single film. Both time flows heading in opposite directions join for a very brief moment which duration has been defined by a speed of a film presentation: 1/24th of the second. Deconstruction of an original narrative content worked at the same time as a constructive force by creating a new visual and audio quality of the work and producing a new visual object.
In that new work relations between characters have changed and simultaneously new relations have been built, new interactions between them. Characters also interact with themselves being present at the screen in two times at once. Every next image is an unpredictable visual combination. All the music, all noises and each spoken word in the film always have been played twice: in a regular direction and in a reverse. An important part of these works is a verbal language. The sound has been bound to the image and has been played equally either in a regular direction or reversed. In that second case spoken words have been changed to a not recognition and by loosing their communication means gained new qualities and have been turned into abstract Sounds. In respect to “Double Fiction” art historian John Hanhardt summarizes:
Video installation Crossroad was exhibited for the first time at the solo exhibition by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France in 2010. An unedited solid footage filmed at six different crossroads in the Lower Manhattan was a record of real time: of all events, which took place in a front of the camera with all sounds of an environment. From these 6 video records artists made 3 video programs using two footages for each screen by superimposing them and dissolving one of them very slowly into another one and back during the playback. In this way during a projection images slowly and gradually dissolve from a shot of one location to a shot of another location in the city. At the beginning of each program is only one single frame which represents a perfect image from one location and immediately after that begins a very long and graduate dissolve which ends up with a single frame of another “perfect image” from a second footage. After reaching that point begins equally slow dissolve back to the first footage again. In the rest of the time on each screen is projected a mixture of two different locations and two time pieces what creates a new fictional visual reality. The architecture becomes entirely unreal and a gradual transition between two different locations creates a dislocation of time and place.
A video work Speak when I have nothing to say, is represented in the collection of the Henry Art Gallery. To produce this work Igor and Svetlana used the cut as a main editing tool: have edited a scene shared by two characters in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic Italian film L’Eclisse played by Monica Vitti and Francisco Rabal. The Kopystianskys have removed the spoken dialogue and deconstructed the narrative of the original by cut and repetition of scenes which repeat and return. By that was created a kind of the surrealist effect, a play of time which recalls the function of the memory. The soundtrack of the video work does consist exclusively from original “sounds” which in the original movie filled a time between dialogues. As a result in the absence of spoken dialogue bodily gestures and visual imagery become the predominant language evoking a sense of existential solitude, the sense of distance and isolation in a dialogue with Antonioni’s original film and author’s technique characterized by extended duration.