Cannon Fodder, Cannon Flesh

Dimitri Tsykalov has come a long way. From the birches of the immense forests of his native Russia he drew the raw material for his first installations in wood. Droll and tender tales recreated from objects taken out of their context, his first pieces draw up a glossary of a duplicated world which is vertiginously put in doubt. Plumped-up pillows left lying on a bed and a coat hanging from a peg (all in wood), a chicken cooking on a stove (made of wood), a television whose plywood screen reflects the bewitched reversal of the world, or a vase filled with carved tulips (for Tsykalov, the intimate nature of a flower is incarnated in wood), these vegetable sketches of a questioning life express a time-defying equation of inertia and movement. © Dimitri Tsykalov Dimitri Tsykalov then transformed his burgeoned branches into blossoms. This was the period of credit cards, either in the form of a planted flowerbed or hand-knitted with tangled wool, while a Porsche 911 carved out of wood on a 1:1 scale contains its own destiny within its boot: a perfect gardener's kit enables one to hasten the destruction of the piece in order to return it to its initial starting point: vegetable. The slow and mossy killing is carried out with a watering can, a hoe and spades full of earth. It goes without saying that this car is travelling at breakneck speed. As rough as it is subtle this parallel world invokes a metaphysical "tour de force". Each one of the Tsykalovian objects is blessed with a botanical magnetism whose beauty perishes before your very eyes. Cleared of their original thorns by the artist armed with a deceptively hasty saw and with crudely planted nails, his works evolve into obscure and proud representations: they are contemporary vanities. Dimitri Tsykalov's entire art expresses itself in the distortion of signs. Filled with the fantasy of ultra-modernity his objects see their function short-circuited; a car, a television and a computer offer to the world a perfect image drained of all substance. Then, all or in part, they return to nature, the supposed compost of the cosmos. © Dimitri Tsykalov After having come a long way and started with wood, Dimitri Tsykalov now leaves behind his favoured material and changes the movement of his die-cut world. Mutation. Thus the stag eventually abandons his antlers. After wood, Dimitri Tsykalov turns to flesh. He started with a hospital setting (still in wood) set up to receive a suffering body. He shaped the projectors, the operating table, the delicate pliers, scissors and sanitized clamps. Only missing was a body to be repaired; it soon arrived in the form of dismembered organs. One after the other, oversized, made of humus, roots and fine veins of wood, a heart, a liver, male genitals and a brain hung suspended, more alive than dead, over a totally anesthetised space. Our space. Our body. © Dimitri Tsykalov The work exhibited in 2008 at the MEP (Paris) is the culmination of this path, and the exposed bodies represent all the wounded waiting to be repaired in the operating theatre that I have just described, thorns and roots, splints and binds. Clearly Tsykalov's dark room is first and foremost an operating theatre. This is where the bodies are opened up before being examined. Yet each one of these bodies produces its own wounds and its own flesh. They spring up from tripe and blood like a flower will blossom and like wood will spread its branches. Destruction is always present within the object itself - here, the subject -, all the while reproducing skin by adding skin, just as blood feeds from blood directly off the epidermis and as the hybrid organs amplify their excrescences because animal and human flesh have been joined together for the time of the shot. With these pictures of flesh, Dimitri Tsykalov finally resolves photography's true intent when displaying its contact sheets. Each of these shots of individuals equipped by the artist with meaty weapons made of flesh and blood lights up a spark of violence, eroticism and fear that directly hits the brain. Each photographed subject makes direct contact and catches the mind and the eye. This series of shots of one or more subjects is nothing less than an artistic commando. A glance at this series will reveal an undamaged body displayed brandishing an open wound in a devastating optical outburst, while wielding a crime generating-weapon with which it will be able to blow itself up again and again smash the limits of representation. The internal seams, skin folds and joints of the subjects dismembered by the artist all end up leading, as if they were on a gigantic corporeal hub, to the cannon fodder that stares once more at those that observe them. Tonfa © Dimitri Tsykalov As in the little Fifer painted by Edouard Manet in 1866, Tsykalov imposes the restrained modesty of an adolescent plagued by the vulgarity of the guts and fringes of meat stuck to his waist and slapped against his salient shoulder blades, in a time-space perpetuation of himself. Under the spotlights, this cannon fodder will find in the cracks and folds of its body some crevices and orifices to creep into. Like a weirdly reified anamorphosis and blood oaths, each posture, each attitude, each body thus exposed imagines its own body being wounded. The shredded body that each of us carries within, that hangs around our neck and our waist, is undetectable. Tsykalov enables us to see the other body we carry within us. And it is terrifying. Hostage III © Dimitri Tsykalov The heart of the matter lies in the display of barbarity: the flesh that has been sliced will soon slice its fellow man. It is not a case of wanting to show the unshowable or of reaching the extreme borderline of what can be shown. Nobody is able to see death or even pain. Yet with his literally uncanny talent Dimitri Tsykalov bestows a plain piece of flesh with an extra touch of soul. The subjects captured by his lens have been wounded on the outside in a show of bewildering animal intimacy. These are bodies that are conscious of what they will one day become: scraps of nerve and muscle. They carry this knowledge like a totem on their chest, their back or their genitals. In an unsettling mating, the animal glorifies man and his death. In the place of the Raft of the Medusa, Dimitri Tsykalov shows meat-helmeted men holding at arms' length a flag made of connective tissue, of flesh sewn up into a bag of savaged civilisation, wounded, tender and violent... It is simply staggering. Commando IV © Dimitri Tsykalov Each of these contact visions requires an extreme frontality, where the outlines of the exhibited bodies twitch, side by side and naked, seamed together by the bare force of sight to this animal flesh - fibrous, plaited, sewn, stuck and tied. Rifles, machine guns and handguns carved out of pieced-up meat plug themselves into the manifold tattooed and life-scarred bodies. Faced with this offal, with these rags and leftovers, photography just surrenders. The pictural pigment shoots out from the bleak darkness of the background, from the powerful carmine of blood and from the iridescent alabaster of the meat. As if each and every picture was pissing, vomiting and excreting paint. The format of the exhibited flesh pictures is large but should be viewed right down to the minutest feature, to the swarming detail of the anatomies. On its visual block, our eye slices and cuts these heavily armed bodies like a butcher's block landscape: timeless and unfussy. All that remains are the leftovers and in their midst two looks cross each other, the look of the cannon and the look of Man holding it, united in their flesh for a photographic assault that breathes out a vision of tragic and overvulnerable beauty. Commando I © Dimitri Tsykalov Simultaneously violent and terribly tender, the Meat commandos are our mirror images as well as our contact sheets. Those mirrors that today's celebrity photography, too busy as it is with its stars and VIPs, has somewhat forgotten. Forgotten not in the identification process, but in the process of ultimate recognition - just as vanity gives us the first signs of the disintegration of our beautiful image, beautiful and smooth. In these pictures I recognize the murderess within me, I recognize love and death within me; in these pictures I recognize my flesh as the cannon fodder it is and will be for the rest of my life. In contrast the secondary meat in these shots - the one that rots and that kills, the animal meat that is used to create the fleshy weapons - seems unscathed, sanguine and elegiac. It is incredibly alive, it is cannon flesh and we are already mortal. Isabelle Rabineau Translation: Anna Maria Aicher L'article en français > Russian translation > Dimitri Tsykalov, Meat September 24 to October 26, 2008 Maison Européenne de la Photographie 5/7, rue de Fourcy - 75 004 Paris (France) Open from Wednesday to Sunday from 11 am to 7:45 pm Free entrance on Wednesday from 5 pm to 7:45 pm