impressed me about Mironov’s work was not only its range but its range of sincerity. Maybe intensity is a better word. His painted wooden figures of contemporary everyman and everywoman, often with right angles redesigning the human form and commenting perhaps on the angularity of big-city existence, struck me as the most deeply felt, followed by some very personal pieces in stone or wood, such as a torso of his wife when she was pregnant with their son, who was now three. But the same person could also commit an enormous plaster bust of Peter the Great, of the sort appropriate to a schoolroom long ago—not as one of his many lucrative commissions but totally self-assigned. The spectrum was so broad, East to West, contemporary to traditional, that it was almost a kind of doubt. Mironov couldn’t be more different from Harry Vinogradov, a true underground and decidedly unofficial artist who, for reasons that did not quite survive the translation process, signed himself Bicapo.
At 32 he was of the same generation as Mironov. His great-grandfather was a famous St. Petersburg mystic and faith healer, who was sent to Siberia where in 1937 he was killed. Vinogradov/Bicapo carried on some of the same fascination with the idea that madness was sometimes connected to saintliness, a proposition that runs deep in Russian culture. “All people have to do rituals,” he said, “to help them to re-establish relations with nature.” His head was shaven, like a penitent’s or a prisoner’s rather than like a skinhead’s, and he affected unusual modes of dress. One day, he recalled, he was wearing a scarf over his head with a hat jammed down over top of that, and a police officer took him to task, saying, “You’ll never be another Marc Chagall unless you have a proper smoking suit.” The cop didn’t know that at that moment Bicapo was naked under his coat.
He studied architecture, found work as a draughtsman, but gave it up “because it was an impossibility for one of my temperament—I prefer the status of a free artist.” A number of Soviet painters found the term free artist useful. It suggested people who were not direct descendants of the old avant-linegarde of 1910—30, of the Kandinskys, Komardenkovs, and Konstamntinovs who paralleled the modernists in the West, but rather of the artists whose work, in one especially notorious incident, was ordered destroyed by Khrushchev in 1962—an entire group show ground up by bulldozers.
The point was not necessarily that Bicapo worked in art forms that the state did not recognize. Nor that performance art was exactly a state priority, though the ministry of culture now bragged that, in contrast to “the period of stagnation from Stalin to Chernenko,” all disciplines might be recognized and rock and roll might even be perceived as an official export. Yet people like Bicapo didn’t receive aid from the cultural arm of the government. Some other apartment artists (so called because they were forced to show their work at open houses rather than in galleries) had become prosperous through overseas sales—part of the new vogue for Soviet art in the West, a by-product of Gorbamania. “Sometimes the neighbours would call the police when they saw a foreigner come up the steps,” Maria said. Bicapo, for his part, was in a group called the Kindergarten Artists, because for a time he and a few friends supported themselves as night guards at a day-care centre and school.
Like two million other Muscovites, Bicapo and his mother shared their apartment with another family, or they used to. One fellow tenant died, two others moved away. So now he had his studio space next to his living quarters, on the top floor of an apartment building that was built as recently as the 1930s but looked to be covered in at least a century’s worth of grime. The lobby smelled of urine and the lift was broken; the stairs were lighted only partway up.
The essence of his current work involved the intersection of fire, water, and music. To explain “Bicapo consciousness,” he first lit candies around the room and struck a series of chimes he had made by suspending different lengths of steel pipe from the ceiling; the sound lingered and then merged with that of a cassette tape he put on, one track of which consisted of the same chimes, while the others were strange sounds I could not identify, half human perhaps and half inorganic, climaxing in what might be screams. All this while two small beer kegs suspended from the ceiling were dripping water into a pair of shallow receptacles that looked like prospectors’ gold pans, only larger. Also hanging from above was a circular wire basket in which the artist had put six or eight fuel pellets and ignited them with a blowtorch. The heat rising from the basket caused a large aluminium printing plate, slung over a wire as a blanket might be slung over a clothes-line, to vibrate. A microphone connected to an amplifier was placed down a two-metre section of plastic flexi-pipe, the sort used for household plumbing, which pipe was dangled from a light chain and tilted, so that one end, the one with the mike, was close to the water pans, which continued to fill up, drip-drip-drip. Bicapo then passed the blowtorch along the length of the pipe, varying the size of the flame. The sounds picked up by the microphone varied accordingly. Clearly this was how he made the sounds that I heard on the tape; other tracks—of hammering and sawing, for example—had been mixed in later.
“I first did this with 10 metres of metal tubing at a construction site,” Bicapo explained. “I inserted one end of the tube into a fire while a woman sang opera.” This was not so much mere street theatre; he was quite earnest about musical structure and the mixing of created and found sound, but his high seriousness was more apparent from his conversation than from his writings on the theory of his art. He allowed me to look at a draft manifesto that described Bicapo as “radiant, equilibristic, superconducting super-rapid interaction momentary understanding.” But his English orthography slipped in a handbill that he let me take away with me, which declared: “The water is drip, the fire is burn. Losting primordial human natur is manifest when thousands of Bicapo and Dzoings are sound. I am mystacal artist through my madness I am penetrate heavens and listen musik of sky forest.”
I wasn’t able to determine what Dzoings were.
I struck gold on the midnight train to Leningrad.
Like all the other overnight trains, such as those to Helsinki, Vilnius, or other points north and west, this one, called the Red Arrow, had compartments with two berths each, side by side, and I found myself sharing with a woman in her seventies, dressed in a very middle-class manner but with a ratty old cardigan over her suit. On her left lapel she had affixed pins or medals, ones I had never seen in that country of military decorations—both cameos of someone (not Lenin), one black, the other red and black. I asked her what they were, and she told me that they showed her membership in the Soviet Academy of Science and its Italian equivalent. “I do not usually feel disposed to wear insignia but today was different,” she said. She was a retired mathematician, and the occasion was a gathering of the clan in Moscow, from which she was now returning home. She spoke the English of someone who had learned it before the Great Patriotic War—might almost have learned it before the Revolution, the last time Russia was part of Europe.
How long had she resided in Leningrad?
“It has been my home uninterruptedly since 1947.”
Then she had not been there during the war, during the Nazi siege lasting 900 days?
“But I was there, yes. I was a young student, and I took very ill. The German circle around the city was complete except for one small opening, and I was evacuated and taken back to Moscow. When I recovered, I continued my studies there.”
We talked for many kilometres. She sat perfectly upright; her eyes shone, and when she broke into a smile, as she did at every opportunity, the change in her expression took up the slack that the years had given her face, the lower part in particular.
I asked her how she had come to receive the pin from the Italian academy.
“It
