The Heroes and Nonentities, or Television versus sculpture. Yerbossyn Meldibekov’s visual anthropology

Abstract

In 2001 Meldibekov created the work called Pastan – a video-performance in which the author is being methodically beaten and insulted in the process. Pastan is the first in the series that show four different scenarios involving a humiliated and suffering subject. That character represents regression to some kind of a primary state, assimilation with other living creatures and even inanimate objects. This anthropological and psychological ascesis is in line with the formal treatment of the video-performances, going back to the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The main medium here is also the body of the artist, almost free of any trappings of sociocultural identity. However, unlike the “classics”, Meldibekov is interested not so much in the boundaries of art as in the boundaries of humanity. In general, his works form a visual anthropology based on two poles. On the one hand, one can see monumental and triumphant forms in which political power is expressing itself, using esthetic mechanisms to rise vainly above the perishable human nature. But ironically, it is these monuments that Meldibekov sees as a symbol of the ephemeral. On the opposite pole one can see something over which power rises, but which inevitably forms its substrate, its perishable flesh, the expendable of history. The character in those video-performances is an antipode to the hero of a monument: he is miserable and unmonumental. But he is much sturdier; he persistently faces the strikes of destiny and is not so easy to break.