Medical Hermeneutics, Inspection

Grita Insam Gallery, Vienna, Austria
Walcheturm Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
Krings-Ernst Gallery, Cologne, Germany
R.Zvirner, Berlin, Germany

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Sergey Anufriev
1983 Exhibition at N. Alexeev’s apartment. APTART, Moscow
1991 “Sergey Anufriev – Alexander Gnilitsky”. Gallery 1.0, Moscow
1993 “Aqua Vita” (with O. Ziangirova and M. Chuikova). Museum of Contemporary Art, Odessa
1994 “Mentale Landschaften Russlands” (with O. Ziangirova and M. Chuikova). Galerie Parzival, Berlin, Germany
“Auf der Such nach neuen 'Nervi rerum'” (with O. Ziangirova and M. Chuikova). Sprinkenhof, Hamburg, Germany
1995 “The Problem of a Souvenir”. Blanka Gallery, Kiev
Pavel Pepperstein
1995 “Schema No. 3 and Freud's Dreams” (with A. Monastyrsky). Galerie Pastzi-Bott, Cologne, Germany
“Medical Hermeneutics” Inspection
1989 “Three Children”. Gallery Mladých, Prague, Czechoslovakia
1990 “Orthodoxe Ablutschungen-Umschläge und Abschlüsse. Zwei Installationen der Gruppe MH”. Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany
“Three Inspectors”. Gallery Mladých, Prague, Czech Republic
“Orthodoxe Ablutschungen – Umschläge und Abschlüsse”. Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany
1991 “Military Life of Small Paintings”. Krings-Ernst Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1992 “A Side View on Sacredness in the USSR” (“Blickwinkel – Das Sakrale in der UdSSR”). Grita Insam Gallery, Vienna, Austria
“Switzerland + Medicine”. Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland
“19 – 91”. Walcheturm Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
1993 “Switzerland + Medicine”. Swiss Institute, New York, USA
“Drawings in the Margins”. Country Museum of MANI, Moscow Region
“Empty Icons”. L Gallery, Moscow
“Golden Icons and the Black Line”. Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany
1994 “We are your Grandfather!”. Raum der Inspection Medizinische Hermeneutik festival “Europa 94”, Munich, Germany
“Illumination in the Tower”. Galerie Inge Baecker, Cologne, Germany
“Processions”. Human Space Art Center, Milan, Italy
“Paramen”. Grita Insam Gallery, Vienna, Austria
“White Window”. Villa Waldberta, Feldafing, Bavaria, Germany
1997 “Portrait of an Old Man”. Installation “MH” (with I. Dmitriev), XL Gallery, Russian State Museum, St Petersburg
MAIN GROUP EXHIBITIONS
[Extensive list of exhibitions from 1982–1997 displayed in Moscow, New York, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Munich, etc.]
PUBLICATIONS
“On Six Books” (“Auf dem Sech Buchern”). Düsseldorf, Germany, 1991
Inspection “Medical Hermeneutics” (“Inspektion ‘Medizinische Hermeneutik’. ‘Goldene Ikonen und eine Schwarze Linie’”). Hamburg, 1993
“Inspection ‘Medical Hermeneutics’. Idiotechnics and Recreation”. “Obscuri Viri”, 1996

No information available.

One of the most important art phenomena of the late 1980s was the emergence of the group ‘Inspection Medical Hermeneutics’ comprising S. Anufriev, Yu. Leiderman, and P. Pepperstein....

The main discursive studies by the group members comprise the following themes:

Children’s: This is the children’s poetics and stylistics of the child's consciousness, children’s desires and fears, which first appeared in Russian contemporary art in the late 1980s. Here one finds fairy-tale heroes from well-known children's books: Murzilka, Aibolit, Bear, Bunny, etc.; in installations, toys and objects from a child’s bedroom are used.

Pharmacy and Illness: The object of the artist’s analysis here is the situation of forced rest, lack of involvement in social life, passive contemplation. It is an aesthetic of unworldly purity; works use peculiar medical objects: stethoscopes, thermometers, eye glasses, and hot-water bottles. The main mythologemes here: sadist doctor, sedative as narcotics, illness as retreat.

Icon (images of the otherworldly): For the first time in Russian art, Orthodox folklore and kitsch take the place of experimental phenomena. The main drama comes from the initiated clash of orthodoxy and non-traditional, individual beliefs—this phenomenon is now widely observed within lay ideas of the ‘other world’. Here the conflict, drama, and cruelty in the battle of “the general” versus “the particular” become evident.

Burrow (private-intimate zones): The life of a private individual, manifest here, finds its aesthetic solution in creating special ‘zones’ in exhibition spaces—these are screens, partitions, installations in the form of a “room”, closed and protected from external influence. Thus, the very notion of a zone, a special space, is more important than the objects within it. The structure of the installation as a genre is inverted: space is primary, objects are secondary; priority is given to darkness, indistinctness of composition, the areas of joints and seams.

Animal alter ego: Painful personalism is interpreted in a spirit of self-parody. The ‘difference’ of oneself from the world is formulated in a title of a ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ work: “We are not human.” The pantheon of animal heroes arrives from the ‘child’s’ discourse, changing their features and becoming alarming; in the spirit of absurdism, children's book heroes gain adult traits, becoming proportionate to them, interpreted as the artist’s animalistic alter ego.

Secret conspiracy (crime and investigation): Another feature from the world of childhood—detectiveness, secrecy, conspiracy—is used by the artists of the 1990s as an important category defining the place and character of any artistic practice today in our country.
...
The strategy of the group ‘Inspection Medical Hermeneutics’ is aimed at psychoanalysis of human passions and phobias and the attempt to treat destructive tendencies in our culture. The authors, however, do not oppose themselves to ‘ordinary people’. The ‘medhermeneuts’ declare themselves both patients and doctors at the same time.
Andrei Erofeev, “Star of MH”.
The artistic practice of ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ cannot be described within the usual genre classification: it includes creating art objects, performances, writing texts, and just conducting friendly conversations, but essentially, it is neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, nor the sum of all these occupations. Above all, this practice challenges the main distinction constitutive for contemporary artistic process—namely, the distinction between art production and its interpretation. The group’s very name indicates its main concern with the definition and interpretation of certain symptoms, possibly with the aim of treating the ailment those symptoms attest to.

Understanding artworks as symptoms of a kind of ‘artistic illness’ that differentiates the artist from ordinary people is not new. The peculiarity of ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ lies in the fact that all objects and texts it produces belong to the realm of explanation, not of the explained: no ‘pure art’ is presented that exists prior to all interpretation. The artists of ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ identify themselves as artists and then, without offering any conventional proof thereof, immediately proceed to interpret their existence as artistic. In this respect, their position radicalizes that of Moscow artists of the previous generation, like Ilya Kabakov or Andrei Monastyrsky, who, although presenting an initial artistic gesture, minimize or trivialize it to virtually zero, shifting the entire weight to the diversity of its interpretations. Of course, it is exactly this diversity of interpretations that becomes aestheticized, i.e., the domain in which actual artistic practice unfolds, so that interpretations and their illustrations become the group’s principal artistic product. What was conceived as diagnosis and treatment of art by relating it to reality in turn becomes a kind of artistic illness.

In the Soviet Union, this entire contemporary artistic infrastructure was very poorly developed, and in independent, ‘unofficial’ art—the context to which, at least by cultural origin, ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ relates—it has generally been absent and in fact remains so. Independent artists were left entirely to themselves socially, and under these circumstances, the external context of their art appeared even more imaginary than what they could have created in their actual work. Many Soviet artists of the previous generation created for themselves quasi-religious myths, personal all-encompassing ideologies, to at least guarantee some objective value for their work. But when belief in such myths was ultimately lost, there remained only an endless field of mutually contradictory and equally non-binding interpretations, theories, stories, and mythologies.

This situation, familiar to anyone working with art today, led the artists of ‘Medical Hermeneutics’ not to depression from the loss of external reference but, on the contrary, to discovering this field of non-binding but witty and captivating theorizing as a new artistic material. Endless explications and reflections—whereby their ‘art objects’ serve as a kind of demonstrative visual material—use the language of structuralism and deconstruction, refer to dialectical materialism, Buddhist mysticism, contemporary anthropology, psychoanalysis, etc.

These reflections preserve the serious tone and the formal rhetoric of contemporary humanities and, in their substance, are abundant in precise observations and sound judgments. However, at the same time, they undermine from within the usual form of the humanities discourse by constantly shifting methodology, hopping from one subject to another, referencing facts and works unknown to the reader, seemingly arising out of nowhere and disappearing into nowhere. Essentially, they only somewhat exaggerate the familiar form of modern cultural essayism, but that suffices to reveal its playful and aestheticizing nature—its inner disbelief in the persuasive power and objective value of its own argumentation.
Boris Groys. From the article “Medical Hermeneutics, or Healing from Health”. Utopia and Exchange. Moscow, 1993.