Alexei Kuzmich’s Renaissance (2024) in art history context
‘Is this a real one?’ asked a young boy when he saw the Louvre mummy man. ‘Of course it is. It dates back to more than … two thousand years’, replied his father, after peering at the information board. ‘That’s so cool …’ the boy replied. ‘No, it’s gross’, interrupted a teenage girl, probably the boy’s elder sister.
I had been waiting in the mummy room hoping to get a proper reaction to the mummified body on display and, after thirty minutes or so, it was finally becoming interesting.
‘No. It’s an elaborate religious ritual that Egyptians practised for important people when they passed away’, explained the father. ‘Was he a king, dad?’ ‘This one was not a king but he was certainly a rich person.’
‘But look at it … it’s stained and it must smell bad. That’s gross — really. I don’t want to see that’, said the girl, turning away from the mummy and disappearing into the crowd. The rest of the family followed her with no complaints, throwing this attraction–repulsion debate back to a negligible detail of the story of a visit to the Louvre.
If I’m being honest, I never cared about mummy stuff. I still don’t. But the taboo surrounding dead bodies became interesting to me after Belarusian artist Alexei Kuzmich revealed his latest project, Renaissance (2024), which caused mixed reactions among viewers and commentators.
Renaissance was announced on 29th July with the publication of a video prologue that presents Kuzmich dressed up as a contemporary Pierrot, declaring that ‘once artists used to be visionaries, titans and shakers… but now artists are gone’. Kuzmich develops his thoughts to the sound of an alarm clock: ‘[Artists] were replaced by culture … Now a work of art is called ‘project’… No struggle, no searching. No love, no suffering. Everything is arranged in orderly pigeon-holes … There are no fanatics, no holy fools, no Diogenes, no Van Goghs…’ Fair enough. He concludes, a spade in hand, facing Vincent van Gogh’s grave: ‘Wake up, Artist! Come back…’
This statement was followed by another video that captures the performance per se. The alarm clock rings. Kuzmich makes his way to Van Gogh’s sunflowers’ embellished grave and starts digging it, shouting: ‘Van Gogh! Artist… Get up!’ The video ends with Kuzmich being arrested by policemen, with a voice-over quoting Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem: ‘Forgive me, Vincent. In the very end, I could not offer you a helping hand…’
It was later known that Kuzmich had been convicted for this performance and locked up in a detention centre to be expelled to Bielorussia, where his freedom is nevertheless threatened on account of the political dimension of his artistic practice. Since then, an unapologetic epilogue video has been published in which he calls to viewers: ‘I have unearthed my cornerstone. And what have you done for the world? … Get your spade and start digging!’
Did people start to dig for the spirit of great artists to awaken following the Renaissance work? Unfortunately, they did not. Media outlets that reported the performance did not even try to discuss Kuzmich’s statement or the importance of (re)valuing the place devoted to art and artists in our societies. Renaissance was treated as a fait-divers in the press with little artistic context. But Kuzmich is an artist. Legal and ethical analyses of such a gesture could be the main topic for lawyers, archaeologists, body snatchers, or graverobbers, but they should not prevail when it comes to explaining an art performance.
Renaissance belongs to a long tradition of artworks that deal with death, particularly memento mori. Standing for ‘remember you must die’, memento mori is a type of painting that developed during the modern period around the concept of mortality: the inevitability of death and the ephemeral nature of earthly existence. Some of Van Gogh’s paintings can, themselves, be considered as memento mori, notably his famous flower series Irises and Roses (1890), which picture both fresh and dead flowers together.
As in Vanitas Still Life (1630) by Pieter Claesz, momento mori paintings often include symbols such as skulls and timepieces, an allusion that Kuzmich seems to make obvious in Renaissance with the physical presence of an alarm clock and the idea of reaching Van Gogh’s remains.
In art history, death has not only been represented through still life memento mori or Vanitas. From Ancient Civilisation funerary art (prothesis scene on the Dipylon Krater (750 BCE) to modern depictions of realistic nature (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt) by way of Religious Art presenting countless Crucifixion and Lamentation scenes, artists have always pictured the physical dead body.
In contemporary times, the representation of the dead body has been refreshed by new mediums (photography with The Morgue (1992) series by Andres Serrano) and materials (Dead Dad (1996–97) by Ron Mueck; For the Love of God (2007) by Damian Hirst) and developed around ideas that often question social, political, or economic contexts (Tongue (2000) by Teresa Margolles).
One specificity of the Renaissance work is that skulls, bones, or decayed body parts are never shown during the performance, which supposedly revokes the ‘gross’ effect viewers can experience when facing corpses or their representation. At the same time, the visual absence of a dead body forces viewers to act as intellectual accomplices to Kuzmich’s idea. They are the ones who create a mental image of Van Gogh’s remains.
This involvement of the viewers through evocation, rather than explicit representation, and the guilt they may feel for their macabre complicity in picturing the ‘utmost adjection’ — ‘a corpse, seen without God and outside of science’ (Kriseva J., Powers of Horror, 1980), might explain some of the hostile reactions that Renaissance faced when it was revealed to the public.
The visual absence of a corpse also accentuates that Renaissance is not about a resurrection. Not picturing the dead body supports Kuzmich in taking distance from Christian creeds that stress the material dimension of the phenomenon (the Christ rose in flesh) and asserting an earthy critical standpoint about the society we live in — a society in which art is ‘cleaned…sterilised…and functional ’ — a ‘nothing burger’ for politicians and ideologues.
Like so many now-praised artists, Van Gogh’s talent was unappreciated during his lifetime. Yet, his devotion to art never failed. That’s one of the reasons why, to Kuzmich, Van Gogh seems to incarnate a certain ideal of the artist — the one ‘who stands entirely alone, [their] joyous vision corresponds to a vast Inner sorrow and even those, who are closest to [them], do not comprehend [them]… They may call [them] a knave or a fool’ (Kandinsky W., Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910) because of their persistence in affirming their nonconformist artistic vision. It is this incorruptible and passionate spirit that he calls for reawakening in Renaissance.
With this artwork, Kuzmich thus addresses a wake-up call to our society: obsequious project managers, greedy gallerists, versatile censors/promoters, lazy journalists, judgemental slobs and hating trolls — stop repeating the mistakes of the past and start giving art the respect it deserves.
