Gioconda's Smile
Dmitri Gutov
Preface to the publication of M. Lifshits article "Gioconda' s smile".
"It's time to say
"good-bye" to petty intrigues of reflection" M. Lifshits
I think that this text should be published as it belongs to the classical tradition
of the attitude towards an object or object depletion, which is already lost.
When a person is interested not only in himself, his pose or his ideas about,
but the essence. Mikhail Lifshits shows the potential possibility of the straight
attitude towards the world. That is for me the most important, the most valuable
and the newest. Today it is absolutely new, unbelievably new, because the experience
of contemporary art is an experience of the rejection of a clear and ingenious
vision, it is an experience of double meaning, ciphers, shift of the world and
placing oneself on its place. Approach any picture, any work of art. What do
you see? An artist. His pose. He is demonstrating, that he is independent, that
he is above any links, any sympathies - he is above everything. He can't fuse
with anything and say: "It's me". Pure speech, expressing a thought
is lost. There only exists a result of sweet and sour discussions about the
idea that any image isn't adequate to the reality, that it's conditional. An
artist plays with conditionalities, demonstrates and stresses them. Art lacks
any power to objective. This morbid event is what Goethe called: reactionary
epoch. Unproductive.
Mikhail Lifshits was very consistent in overcoming this constant subjectivity.
More than twenty years ago he said that the time could come when the followers
of the classical tradition would need to epatage somebody, it's high time to
remind this tradition to the art, which has turned from the life and has gone
deeply inside its own small problems, looped on itself and appeared to be in
the absolutely uninteresting sphere.
Demonstration of person's signs, multiplication of consciousness, radical fraud,
all these things are so boring because they lack, according to Belinsky's words,
pathos, i.e. life content. The artist is not interested in what he depicts,
and the result of all his attempts lacks reality. In other words it lacks the
independence of existence without any basis. A criminal came to Chernenko and
shot. Directly. Locking lug fall. Chernenko also fall. AH these lugs, lugs of
contemporary art are quite expensive pleasures. An art phenomenon can't defend
itself. Take them from museums, put them in the streets, and, according to Ter-Oganian,
nobody will take them.
All modern system of art functioning - financial, museum, art-historical - serve
as such lugs. Too expensive for the society. Everything is very fragrant. God
knows how it is kept. On nothing. It has strictly ephemeral character. It has
no inner confidence. According to M. Lifshits, inner confidence is given to
art by the life it depicts. Here is the world Giaconda was smiling to. Look
at M. Lifshits' photo in the third volume of his collected works - it's the
same smile. It lives in all his books being the witness of the private existence's
open order.
He wrote "Gioconda's Smile" in 1976 as an answer to the article sent
to him for the review. This article belonged to two doctors who investigated
"Gioconda" from the medical point of view. They explained her smile
as a reflection of the inner state of her body, shallow bio-chemical processes.
It is very close to what's happening to the culture, with its inner petty intrigues
without any desire to see the reality. M. Lifshits has proved that regarding
"Gioconda" scientists were wrong. If they had written about contemporary
art, they would have been right three times.
The desire of the scientists of 70-s to intrude into the humanitarian field
had its own logic. They wanted to correct it. Mostly, professional humanitarians
were just rascals. They have compromised their science to the degree anything
can be ever compromised by what M. Lifshits had called rascals. And the intensity
of the rising noise was so high that it was nearly impossible to distinguish
a calm and low voice, in that case M. Lifshits' voice. How could one guess that
under the cover of the book "Karl Marx. Art and Social Ideal" there
was hidden not just a usual stupidity but wonderful and clever things?
Nowadays people are granted by the historical fortune the possibility to distinguish
the possibility closed before. M. Lifshits was not scared to be banal while
choosing Dobroliubov, Tchernishevsky, Lunacharsky as the topics for his works.
He was not interested in the way his position looked like from outside. Yesterday
it wasn't original, today it is the top of extravagance. But is it so important?
Everybody who wanted to be loyal, was worried of their non-conformism, and was
not thinking of the main thing. Some day they had demonstrated everything possible,
and later showed their falseness, stupidity, total emptiness. They have disappeared,
and Mikhail Lifshits is more and more heard.
The article "Gioconda's Smile" is necessary for the contemporary artist,
who has gone to the second floor of the consciousness, locked the door and moved
a ladder. Why does he need it? Let's answer with M. Lifshits' words "We
do not know when and under what conditions our thought could become useful,
but if it is right, it won't be lost".
Moscow Art Magazine, 1993, N1, p. 22-23