dmitrij prigov's iterative poetics

DMITRIJ PRIGOV’S ITERATIVE POETICS

JACOB EDMOND

Abstract What I term an iterative poetics characterizes much of Dmitrii Prigov’s practice, from his recycling of existing texts, hackneyed quotations, and clichés, to his per-formance and video art, to the serial or template structure of many of his written texts and visual works. By treating these diverse strategies as part of an iterative poetics, I address three problems raised by Prigov’s work and conceptual art and writing in general. First, rather than separating Prigov’s literary and artistic output, I show how his work operates as a single multimedia whole founded on the principle of intra and inter-media iteration. Second, I approach the problem of whether to treat the concept or its realization as primary in conceptual works by arguing that Pri-gov’s repetitions both stage the subordination of content to form, example to con-cept, and, like Gertrude Stein’s “insistences,” highlight the uniqueness of each appa-rent repetition within a conceptual structure, each iteration of a particular image, or each performance of a given text. Finally, I read the relationship of example to concept, text to performance, idea to instantiation in Prigov’s iterative practice as an allegory for the relation of the local and the particular to wider systems of power. In this sense, Prigov’s iterative poetics emphasizes both the unfreedom of endless repetition and the freedom of each gesture within the infinite possibilities of iteration. Keywords: D.A. Prigov; Iteration; ‘Evgenij Onegin’

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Лучше не сделаешь никогда, Чем Пушкин, Чайковский и Репин. You’ll never do better than Puškin, Čajkovskij, and Repin (Srednerusskaja vozvyšennost’)

The epigraph comes from a well-known piece of Russian avant-garde pop from the 1980s band Srednerusskaja vozvyšennost’ to which poet, sculptor, multi-media artist, and cultural icon Dmitrij Prigov at times contributed in his lesser-known role as a saxophonist and occasional vocalist. The lines exemplify the intertwined Prigovian preoccupations with repetition, multi-media art, and genius that I want to explore here. Through its profane pop beat and mantra-like refrain (“Puškin, Čajkovskij, i Repin”), the work play-fully negotiates a path between idolizing and blaspheming these icons of Russian literature, music, and art, and, by extension, the Soviet state that reinforced their canonization, trumping the holy triptych in the very act of repeatedly asserting their unrepeatable genius. Prigov similarly negotiates multiple art forms, cultural tradition, and nationalist ideology through repe-tition, or what I term an iterative poetics – from his recycling of existing texts, hackneyed quotations, and clichés, to his performance and video art, to the serial or template structure of many of his written texts and visual works. He combines thematic and serial repetition with inter-media iteration, as in his Azbuki series – which ranges from live musical and theatrical perfor-mance to text-based and sculptural work – his many engagements with Puš-kin and re-presentations of his masterpiece Evgenij Onegin (Evgenij Onegin), and his use of newspapers and related journalistic media. Anticipating and unifying elements of the iterative turn discernable in twenty-first-century literature, art, and music, Prigov’s diverse works consti-tute a single multimedia literary, performance, and artistic practice – a “гло-бальный проект” (Al’čuk 2008) – united by the principle of repetition. Pri-gov draws together the “iterative poetics” of the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Holbrook 1999: 752) and the iterative techniques of contempo-rary poetry such as sampling (McHale 2004: 254-256), performance, version-ing (Sherwood 2006), plagiarism (Johnson 2009), copying (Goldsmith 2002-2003; Perloff 2008), translation (Perloff 2008; Spahr 2004), and reiterations across multiple media (Perloff 2006). He equally builds on similar iterative strategies that have been widespread in the visual arts since the rise of pop and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s and that are increasingly used to respond to anxieties about copying and plagiarism (e.g., Qiu Zhijie 1990-1997; Straka 2010). Prigov uses iteration in a wide variety of ways including the recurring forms of serial structures (Janecek 2008a; 2008b); the re-presentation of

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existing texts and cultural material in a new context or with a new inflection; the repetition of existing works or forms across diverse media; and finally, the thematizing of iterative processes, including technologies of reproduction. In reproducing existing texts, discourses, and images, he adopts estranging regimes of organization based on what Craig Dworkin, referring to US conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith, calls “intervals”: “intervals tend to regulate one regime in a way that distorts others. With one variable held –perversely [...] constant, others are allowed to be set radically, reeling, free” (2005a: 16). Found amongst twentieth-century artists from Duchamp to Cage, systems of interval appear frequently in Prigov’s work, as for example, in his diverse alphabetically arranged Azbuki series, or in his exploitation of the regular spacing of the typewritten – as opposed to typeset – samizdat page. These systems allow him to re-present diverse discourses, ideologies, styles, genres, and media in unexpected forms. For example, in his much-loved “милицанер” (p’liceman) poems he adopts a figure of state power as his hero, combining Soviet ideology with a doggerel version of the Russian ro-mantic lyric. By linking diverse discourses, genres, and media, he allows them to articulate in new ways – a process he repeatedly describes as “пере-сечение” (“intersection”) (e.g., Prigov 1993: 7; 1996: 89; 1997a: 92; 1998a: 61; 2001: 46). Reading Prigov’s work as an iterative practice also enables me to address the controversy over whether to treat the concept – the system of repetition – or its realization as primary in his work and in conceptual writing as a whole (on the tension in Oulipo, for example, see Poucel 2006 and Le Tellier 2006) and the related challenge to conventional conceptions of media (Dworkin 2013: 27-33). Prigov’s iterative poetics unites his position as an “‘incorporeal’ concept artist” with his role as a “‘corporeal’ practitioner of performance art” (Degot’ 2008: 50) and with his “corporeal and material understanding of writing” (Lutzkanova-Vassileva 2005: 51; see also Kuricyn 2000: 91-124), combining the temporality of language and performance with the spatiality of sculpture, in which Prigov was first trained. Each instance of iteration – whether a performance, a text, or a physical object – remains a particular, embodied intersection of sources, media, and forms, and of spatial and temporal vectors, intertwined but in tension with the regularity of its intervals and the reproducibility of the texts, genres, and discourses on which it draws. His practice provides a prime example of how conceptualist writing embodies – as Dworkin (2003) notes without reference to the Russian context – “the tension [...] between the modernist emphasis on the material of art (in many cases here that means the materiality of language itself) and a post-modernist understanding of a theoretically based art that is independent of genre, so that a particular poem might have more in common with a parti-cular musical score, or film, or sculpture than with another lyric.” Prigov’s repetitions both stage the subordination of content to form, example to

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concept, and, like Gertrude Stein’s “insistences” (Stein 1998: 288), highlight the uniqueness of each apparent repetition within a conceptual structure, each iteration of a particular image, or each performance of a given text. To see this, we need to expand our appreciation of the ways in which “context is crucial” in conceptualist practice (Janecek 1992: 403). While as Dworkin (2003) reminds us, “the ‘dematerialization’ of the art object in the late 1960s and early 70s was accompanied by a rematerialization of language,” Prigov’s practice not only investigates the materiality of language, but also unsettles it, anticipating the increasing skepticism about the notion of “linguistic mate-riality” in an era of digital reproduction and post-conceptualist art (Perelman and Golston 2010). Demonstrating the insufficiency of accounts of iteration and agency that privilege the system of language over embodied gesture or articulation (Noland 2009; Bachtin 1986), he shows how what we consider materiality is context-dependent in ways that go beyond genre, medium, or even linguistic system to the specific “gesture” (Parščikov 2007) or act of enunciation at the intersection of these systems – the “instance or example”, or “point of singularity” in the conceptual work (Dworkin 2005b: 11). When read as an iterative poetic practice, Prigov’s multi- and inter-media art speaks to the urgent need to rethink originality and agency in an era in which such concepts seem threatened. By continually re-presenting and re-contextualizing texts, images, discourses, and media, he emphasizes the individual’s enmeshment in discursive systems including Soviet and post-Soviet ideology and the Russian romantic artistic tradition (Zorin 1997). His practice can be understood as one of “re-accentuation”, a term Michail Bachtin uses to describe the re-presentation or mixing of genres in ways that are “parodic-ironic” or that otherwise alter their conventional meanings (1986: 80) and the similar effects produced by the re-presentation of speech (Bachtin 1994: 143), and the re-reading of literary texts over time (Bachtin 1981: 419-422). Prigov’s work extends this process of re-accentuation along further vectors of reiteration and recombination, including citation, serial form, medium, and mode of reproduction. Recalling Bachtin’s description of the complex historical relation between sincere imitation and stylization and parody (1984: 181-204), Prigov combines “sincerity and sham” (Hirt and Wonders 2008: 141), uniting “burlesque and parody” with “intensity and seriousness” to call his own “parodic intent into question” (Janecek 2008a). He seems to adopt an ironic distancing strategy but also to insist on humanist and traditionalist notions of the individual artistic agency, provoking ongoing debate about how to read his work (Golynko-Vol’fson 2007). His practice re-veals the master text and master narrative, the system that governs individual acts. But by leaving open whether to take a concept or its realization as primary and where to locate agency, authority and genius in conceptual practice, he also emphasizes what Perloff (2008) calls the “unoriginal genius” of the manipulator. Responding to the “evolving nature of personhood” that


unoriginal genius marks, he recombines and re-accentuates existing dis-courses, media, texts, and structures – including such restrictive structures as gender (Ciepiela and Sandler 2009). Extending Bachtin’s view of the manipulation of genres as a form of agency (1986: 80), Prigov’s iterative poetics emphasizes both the unfreedom of endless repetition and the freedom of each gesture among the infinite possibilities of iteration. 1. Where the Stone Strikes

Да и, как всякое воспроизведение, оно обречено нести на себе черты неизгладимой вторичности, узнаваемости художествен-ного промысла. А хочется! Yes, and like any reproduction, it is fated to carry within itself the marks of indelible secondariness, the recognizability of its artistic craft. And I want it like that! (Prigov, Introduction to ‘Dva rasskaza’; 2007a)

In Prigov’s work, apparently distinct techniques – the use of found material, serial forms, working between media, and the highlighting of methods of reproduction – in fact constitute a unified iterative practice. On the one hand, Prigov uses existing texts (e.g., Evgenij Onegin) and text types (such as Soviet ideological discourse), re-presenting the material according to new non-utilitarian regularized structures or intervals (including systematic word-substitution, unusual vocal rendition, visual appearance, and structural layout). On the other hand, Prigov employs serial forms that accommodate diverse textual content, as for example in his Azbuki series of works united by their a to я alphabetical organization. In both cases, however, the strategy is iterative and signifies through the intersection of re-presented and re-contextualized content and reiterated formal structuring. Prigov unites these citational and serial iterative techniques with iterations across media – from samizdat text, to printed book, to performance – that highlight each medium’s mode of production and reproduction. Each work signifies through its own unique intersection of these iterative vectors. Prigov’s various iterative techniques and their intersections are exemplified by his many reiterations of Puškin’s Evgenij Onegin and the serial form of his Azbuki, into which he feeds multiple genres, discourses, materials, texts, and media, and by the way in which these two iterative series interact and overlap. Prigov repeats parts of Puškin’s masterpiece (most often the opening stanza or stanzas) in a wide range of his work across visual, performance, and textual media, including in the landscape-format samizdat book Prodolgovatyj sbornik (Oblong Collection; Prigov 2003: 755-756); his cardboard or paper sculptural “винт” (“screw”) rendition of the opening lines (1975a); his mock Puškin manuscript (n.d.a); his ‘Stichi dlja Džordžika’

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(‘Verses for George’; 2004b), in which protagonists from the opening lines of famous Russian poems are replaced by the word “динозавр” (“dinosaur”); his signature performance piece ‘Mantra vysokoj russkoj kul’tury’ (‘Mantra of Russian High Culture’), in which he renders the opening lines of Evgenij Onegin in various vocal styles (e.g. Prigov 1999a; Prigov 2005; Kiričenko et al. 2002); and two elliptical renditions of the opening two lines (Prigov 1981) or two stanzas (reproduced in Prigov 2008a: 233) of Puškin’s poem as a tele-gram in his Telegrammy series. Each of these works highlights its status as an iteration, since it would inevitably be read by Prigov’s Russian audience as an echo of Puškin’s text. Each work also employs a serial iterative form. In the Oblong Collection, Prigov cites Evgenij Onegin in the last in a series of pieces in which appropriated words from various authors break down into letters (2003: 756). Prigov’s screw poems share a repeated sculptural form, though only one uses text from Evgenij Onegin. In ‘Verses for George’, Pri-gov begins with the opening lines of Evgenij Onegin, but also reproduces the openings of a range of other canonical Russian lyrics with a dinosaur given the leading role in each. Even his performance of the opening lines of Evgenij Onegin is one of a series in which Prigov performs the same text but uses various vocal styles. Moreover, as a performance, each of these versions itself exists in as many iterations as there were performances, renditions reproduced in the multiple extant recordings of the piece. Prigov’s Onegin telegram is also one of a series that includes, amongst other works, extremely laconic renderings of Dostoevskij’s Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) and a Čajkovskij symphony (Prigov 1981). By highlighting both serial and citational vectors of iteration simultaneously, and by spreading these iterations across multiple media, including performance, visual art, sculpture, and the typed or printed page, Prigov produces unique works at the intersection of various repeated forms, texts, and media. Such intersections highlight the contingent relationship between content, form, and medium. For example, the Oblong Collection stages iteration not only through seriality and citationality but also through the tension between text and image. In his introduction to the book (2003: 747), Prigov compares the work with his visual poems or Stichogrammy (Prigov 1985c), on which he was also working in the late 1970s, and which explore the visual possibilities of a repeated text, usually a citation or a commonplace phrase from Soviet ideology or everyday life. In his Stichogrammy, Prigov uses a typewriter to reproduce these iterated texts in various arrangements, sometimes in columns, sometimes along shifting angles, and sometimes overlaying each other to the point of illegibility. Positioned at the crossroads between verbal and visual media, samizdat text and visual art, the criss-crossed texts of the Stichogrammy provide a visual instantiation of the unique intersections that characterize Prigov’s citational and serial iterations. While comparing these works to the Oblong Collection, Prigov contrasts the “de-


constructive” encounters between and transformations of existing texts in the Stichogrammy with his use of the “белый лист” (“blank page”) to achieve “молчание” (“silence”) – which he calls the “ideal state of poetry”. The final and longest piece and the only one with a title, ‘Evgenij Onegin’, comprises a rendering of the entire first stanza of Puškin’s work with lines intersecting and interpolating each other. Like the rest of the collection’s poems, it ends in an almost blank page and with the breakdown of the appropriated text into the serial form of alphabetically ordered letters:

Когда же черт Когда же Когда Ког Ко К Л М н о п р с т

In these final lines, the iteration of citation, further highlighted by repetition (“Когда же черт / Когда же”), gives way to the iteration of the alphabetical form’s regular intervals. Serial iteration here functions to restructure and so estrange citational iteration shifting the text from a primarily textual object to a primarily visual one, in which the vertical and horizontal flow of letters and the shift between upper and lowercase dominate over semantic apprehension, an effect further highlighted by the unusual landscape format of the samizdat book. The shift to the visual – where blank space overcomes a text reduced to letters – is marked semantically by the anagrammatic possibilities of the final line of letters, which suggest the roots прост and пуст (in anticipation of the next letter in the alphabet, у), so that semantic, textual, and visual simplicity and emptiness overlay one another. The line could also be read as literalizing Puškin’s original phrase – “when will the devil take you” – to the point where the words disappear, an example of how conceptualist works often reduce content to seemingly “pure signifiers” and associate this reduction with death, as for example in Prigov’s ‘Screaming Cantata: Who Killed Stalin’, in which the phrase “you killed” is continuously repeated and the space between the words eventually eliminated, or the 37-ja azbuka, in which the word “вымер-ли” (“they have died”) plays a similar role (Lutzkanova-Vassileva 2005: 45-46; Prigov 1992a; Prigov 2004a). Content gives way to form but by the same token form also yields to content. The pure absence of speech in the white space of the emptied out page and the reduction of language to letters are double-voiced and could also be read as a citation or parody of the Russian romantic and avant-garde –

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both historical and within Prigov’s milieu – obsession with the absolute and with emptiness, and of the modernist and avant-garde desire to overcome the arbitrariness of the signifier (for a recent example, see Epstein 2010). Here, the alphabet as arbitrary conceptual system for organizing intervals becomes a non-arbitrary meaningful signifier, but that signifier is ironically emptiness itself. Parodic content and serious form give way to serious content and parodic form at a point of multiple intersections between serial, citational, and inter-media vectors of iteration. Prigov further develops his exploration of the serial form of the alpha-bet and the possibilities of its conjunction with media and citational iteration in his Azbuki series. Spanning about a quarter of a century from 1980 to his final years, Prigov’s Azbuki illustrate almost the full range of his iterative techniques. They deploy an interval structure of alphabetically arranged units from a to я. Each work produces a unique intersection between the serial form and its content and medium of presentation. Some are written for performance, such as the 48-ja azbuka and the 37-ja azbuka, each of which relies on repeated sounds and a performance verging on singing, in some versions with musical accompaniment (e.g., Prigov and Tarasov 1986; Kiri-čenko et al. 2002). Others include a play – the 13-ja azbuka (p’esa) (13th Azbuka [A Play]; 1984b) – visual and even sculptural works, as well as works that lend themselves to textual presentation (while including most of the series on his website prigov.ru, Prigov omits those he terms “визуально-манипулятивная”). The diverse media and wide-ranging content of the Azbuki are aug-mented by the many connotations of the serial form itself. The alphabet suggests not only an arbitrary form imposed on a text but also comprehen-siveness and totality by association with such alphabetically ordered works as the dictionary and encyclopedia. At the same time, as a serial, numbered form, the Azbuki series was potentially infinite and so always incomplete. The Azbuki provide the perfect container for Prigov’s double-voiced re-arti-culations of poetic tradition, ideology, and everyday discourse as both com-pletely comprehensive and utterly empty. For example, the Azbuki iterate with double-voiced nostalgia and parody the traditions of zaum sound poetry and the visual effects of each letter, exploring the Russian avant-garde ob-session with the meaning of each phoneme, an idea most fully developed in Chlebnikov’s work, and displayed in Prigov’s riffing on various letters (for an extreme example, see the 69-ja azbuka [1992b], composed entirely of ite-rated single-syllable phonemes in alphabetical order, but such visual and aural effects at the level of the letter are common to many of the Azbuki). With a similar double-voiced sense of parody, the Azbuki exploit the child-like qualities of alphabet lessons and the propagandistic purposes to which they could be put, as in Majakovskij’s alphabet poem, alluded to in the first


Azbuka, which reproduces official Soviet positions on international relations (Janecek 2008a; Witte 1994: 49). Fig. 1. 7-ja azbuka Many of the Azbuki poems also intersect with other citation-based ite-rative series, further contributing to the particularity of each work. Just as the Oblong Collection could be read as a part of Prigov’s serial engagement with Puškin’s Evgenij Onegin and as an anticipation of his Azbuki series, so the 49-ja azbuka describes in extreme rapidity the plot of Evgenij Onegin, while musically citing from Čajkovskij (Prigov and Tarasov 1986; Janecek 2008a). Likewise, in the 7-ja azbuka (Fig. 1; Prigov 1984a), Prigov repeats the first line of Evgenij Onegin with either all the consonants or all vowels changing each time to reflect the letter of the alphabet, producing an a to я (a to z) of variations. The intersection of the Azbuki and Onegin series in the 7th Azbuka highlights the iterative modes of both series through its strict rules of repetition and variation and re-frames or re-accentuates both series. On the one hand, the 7th Azbuka suggests that the opening line of Evgenij Onegin contains an a to я of Russian literature that is complete in itself, alluding to

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the work’s unrivalled position in Russian culture and Vissarion Belinskij’s famous description of the work as “an encyclopedia of Russian life” (1953-1959, 7: 503). On the other hand, the arbitrarily applied rules of alphabetical order distort this sacred text of Russian literature and suggest that it too is merely a collection of ordered letters. Again, the intersection of iterative form and iterative content transforms form into content and content into form. As in his Stichogrammy, Prigov emphasizes the transformation of the lines into a form of regulated intervals by presenting the work as a series of visually arresting columns running down the page – a visual effect that depends on the “zero-kerning” or equal interval (Dworkin 2005a) given to each letter in a samizdat text produced on a typewriter rather than a standard word-processed or typeset text, which would give more space to wider letters and so ruin the visual impact. Prigov’s citation of Puškin’s text is not only a textual iteration and an iteration of a serial form but an intersection between verbal and visual media that moves the text toward the status of a concrete poem, as well as potentially a sound poem that might invite a further iteration utilizing the skills of Prigov as a performer. Fig. 2. 22-ja azbuka (vint)


Fig. 3. Evgenij Onegin In other Azbuki, Prigov extends the serial work into even more visually arresting and even three-dimensional, sculptural pieces, such as the 22-ja azbuka (vint) (22nd Azbuka [The Screw]; Fig. 2; 1985b), which is built of layers of paper or card beginning on a and ending on a large я in the small front and central piece. The work intersects with a series of pieces Prigov produced in a similar “screw” format (e.g., 1975b), including one that em-ploys the opening lines of Evgenij Onegin (Fig. 3; 1975a). In intersecting the Azbuki, screw, and Onegin series, Prigov combines iteration in serial form, content, and medium of presentation, while underscoring the contingency of each. The screw Azbuka consists entirely of its governing a to я letters, which help to determine the number of layers of paper to be stuck on top of one another to form the square screw sculptural form (although, in fact, as the

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form nears the center the number of letters included on each piece of paper increases). The iterated content of the Onegin screw, by contrast, seems determined by the screw form, which allows text along the four directions of the square pieces of paper from which it is made and so contains text from the first four stanzas, with the twist that one side remains blank, standing in for the missing third stanza. Both these screw works highlight how medium and iterative form produce unexpected intersections between texts, concepts, and media. The screw form materializes these intersections in the literal overlaying of texts and embodies the intervals of serial iteration in the tactile gaps between each sheet of paper. The screw works also overlay a fourth level of iteration onto the iterations of media, serial form, and citation, by foregrounding the materials of samizdat reproduction. For example, in the 22nd Azbuka, the staples – a typical feature of the samizdat book – mark out the final letter (also highlighted by its larger handwritten format) in the serial form and suggest a metal cage surrounding an entrapped “я” (“I”) at the center of language. Fig. 4. 18-ja Azbuka (Kamen’ i krugi na vode) The 18-ja Azbuka (Kamen’ i krugi na vode); (18th Alphabet [The Stone and Circles on the Water]; Fig. 4; Prigov 1985a) extends the thematic fore-grounding of the mode of reproduction as a fourth level of iteration, over-laying citation, serial form, and inter-media recurrence. The work connects


the intervals of the serial Azbuki form to the intervals produced by the medium and mode of reproduction – the samizdat typescript and carbon copy – and to the wave intervals of ripples on water. It uses the intersection of textual iteration, serial form, inter-media iteration, and iteration as a mode of reproduction to describe and depict a stone dropped into a pool. The book or work of art overlays five textual iterations, five carbon-copies – each with a circle of increasing diameter cut out – on top of the original typescript sheet, inverting their order so that the nearly illegible bottom layer precedes the others, while the original layer lies at the bottom and is visible only through the smallest hole at the center – the point where the stone hits the water. The Azbuka utilizes the samizdat mode of small-scale multi-copy reproduction as its mode of production, so that it at once emphasizes textual reproduction thematically and is constituted by overlaid iterations of a single text. The samizdat mode of reproduction necessitates thin paper which here allows the overlaid layers to show through each other, further adding to the smudged look of the text and so to the illusion of the blurring produced by a ripple passing over formerly smooth water. The Azbuka also iterates its description in linguistic and visual media. The stone’s trajectory is described by the ver-tical movement of the text down the page from a to я. The stone strikes the face of the water in the centre before touching the bottom, a movement emphasized by the columns of alphabetically ordered initial letters and the “это” that follows in most lines (an effect again made possible by the zero-kerning of the type-script medium). At the same time, the visual presentation describes the resultant movement of the water outwards from the point where the stone strikes. Just as the work gains power from the intersection of its inter-media iterations – at the point where the vertical axis of the text and the outward and circular axis of its visual appeal meet – so the moment of the stone’s impact becomes a metaphor for such intersections, a unique instant in time frozen between iterating movements and between the two-dimensional image and three-dimensional sculpture produced through the medium of the samizdat book. The impact of the stone on water also provides a metaphor for the inter-section of a work of art and its reproductions – where the frozen moment that the sculpture-book encapsulates in space meets the flux of its existence in time. Just as the effect of a work of art often depends on its reproductions, the 18th Azbuka is inseparable from its samizdat mode of carbon-copy repro-duction. The copies furnish the increasingly faint ripples that move outwards from the stone’s – and metaphorically, the work’s – point of impact, suggesting a movement that belies the apparent temporal arrest. The ripples in turn supply a metaphor for the expanding circle of readers or viewers that a work reaches as it is reproduced (a particularly apt metaphor in the case of samizdat works often produced initially for a small inner circle of associates from whence they filtered outward to a wider audience) and for the trans-

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formations and distortions that occur in reproduction and to which samizdat texts are particularly prone. The causal relation between the stone striking the water and the resultant ripples also provides a metaphor for the inseparability of production and distribution in Prigov’s oeuvre, as exemplified by the 18th Azbuka itself and by the live performances of which Prigov was so fond, in which production and distribution effectively merge. The Azbuka highlights the importance of the unique instantiation or performance – the clear impact of a stone on water – and reproduction – the infinitely expanding ripples – to Prigov’s practice, while emphasizing that such instantiations are the product of intersections of multiple modes of iteration, the singular point of inter-section between multiple waves of forms, texts, media, and reproductions. Prigov’s Azbuki demonstrate how iterations through serial form inter-twine in his work with citational iteration, iterations across media, and the iterations of reproduction, distribution, and performance. In each case, a set form, such as alphabetical ordering, allows the intersecting of various textual materials and media from sculpture to performance. By creating intervals and intersections, Prigov distorts expected relations between texts, conceptual or serial forms, and media, allowing them to intersect in new ways. In so doing, he also demonstrates the contingency and mutual interdependence of each instantiation, the text, concept, or iterative form that underlies it, and the medium in which it takes place. 2. Insanely Expanding Media

Humor is reason gone mad. (Attributed to Groucho Marx)

Shaped by medium, serial form, citation, and the mechanics of inscription and reproduction, Prigov’s practice addresses the relationship between the materiality of each work and the generality of systems, ideas, and concepts. He responds to and parodies the fetishization of both material objects and conceptual objects such as an idea or author. By producing unique material instantiations of an explicitly conceptual and iterative system, he criticizes and offers an alternative to the way a fetishized physical object, like the samizdat book, or author, like Puškin, comes to be reified as an overriding transcendent concept such as humanity or Russian culture, so eliding its parti-cularity. Ann Komaromi takes a different view, arguing that in satirizing the fetishization of the samizdat book, Prigov retains a commitment to authorial genius and to the samizdat mythology that “the more wretched the material manifestation, the more sublime the impulse behind it”, an idea she finds in Prigov’s assertion to her in an interview that the samizdat typescript’s “fra-gile and compromised material carries precious content, a metaphor for hu-


man life” (Komaromi 2004: 615). Yet Prigov’s metaphor cuts both ways. While envisioning the book as a symbol for the transcendent idea of “human life”, Prigov also reminds us of the danger of reading only for concept or idea rather than the unique material embodiment: to discard the book would be to eliminate the fragile body. Even if we were to copy out the book, we would miss the unrepeatable ripple left by each iteration. Prigov highlights the “impulse” or concept but he also underscores its enmeshment in a system of power, ideology, and “reason” that is inhuman and disabling if it is allowed to take precedence over the singular instantiation. Through iteration, Prigov insists on a dialectic between concept and instantiation, revealing how each inevitably invokes and threatens to subsume the other. Prigov unsettles the notion, partly propounded by himself, that Russian conceptualism addresses the fetishization of the idea while Western concept-ualism attacks the fetishization of the object by showing the mutual inter-dependence of materiality and concept and the way reification of one often leads to a reification of the other (Barabanov 1998: 31; Prigov 1989c: 12). In this respect, his work also negotiates a line between competing understand-ings of conceptual writing in the English-language world as either emphasi-zing linguistic materiality (e.g., Perloff 2004: 192; Dworkin 2003) or nega-ting its importance in favor of allegory (Golston 2010), performance (Schwartzburg 2005), or concept (conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith [2004] claims, “I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence”). Prigov negotiates the dialectic between material embodiment and concept, between instantiation and iterative form, between object and name in his Faksimil’noe vosproizvedenie samodel’noj knigi Dmitrija Aleksan-droviča Prigova ‘Evgenij Onegin Puškina’ s risunkami na poljach raboty Aleksandra Florenskogo (Facsimile Reproduction of Dmitrij Aleksandrovič Prigov’s Self-Made Book “Puškin’s Evgenij Onegin” with Drawings on the Margins of the Work by Aleksandr Florenskij; Prigov 1998b). In this work, Prigov retyped an entire section of Evgenij Onegin in a samizdat style book, replacing, he claims in the introduction, each adjective with either “безумный” (“insane”) or “неземной” (“unearthly”), although in fact he undertook further rewriting of many lines and retained some of the original adjectives. He then reproduced the book in a facsimile edition with a printed introduction and illustrations on the white margins framing the facsimile image on each page. The book is iterative in multiple ways and so suggests correspondingly various forms of materiality and their relation to concept, offering a holistic alternative to competing understandings of materiality in conceptualist writing as, variously, linguistic materiality (Dworkin 2003), Benjaminian historical materiality (as for example in Perloff’s reading of Goldsmith’s work as a “sociopoetic document”; Perloff 2004: 192), or “medium-specific”

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particularity (Perloff 2006; see also Hayles 2004 on “medium-specific analysis” in digital literature). First, the work is an act of citational iteration, an act of copying that emphasizes the materiality of Puškin’s text as object. Second, the book employs serial iteration, applying a substitution rule to a text to produce a new altered text. By replacing most adjectives with either “безумный” or “неземной”, Prigov emphasizes the materiality of language as a system, specifically a grammar, open to endless permutation, in particular along what Roman Jakobson terms language’s axis of “selection” and “substitution” (1956: 60). Third, the book also highlights the materiality of its modes of reproduction: the samizdat reproduction as re-typing, akin to the manuscript scribes and “monks” whom Prigov acknowledges as precursors in his introduction, and to the mechanical photographic facsimile and print reproduction. Both forms of reproduction are marked in the book, the samizdat by the smudged and error-ridden typed text, and the print by the glossy photographic reproductions, the print quality of the surrounding white frame, and by the drawings, cover, title page and introductory text. As a samizdat-style work, the book displays its material status as the product of hand-reproduction involving retyping and increasingly illegible carbon-copies on thin paper. The thinness of the paper – its materiality produced by conditions of state-imposed restraint – is highlighted in the facsimile by the reproduction of the reverse of each one-sided page of text with the typed text clearly showing through from the other side, an absurdist attention to fidelity that simultaneously emphasizes its status as a facsimile. Fourth, the book presents inter-media and inter-generic iterations, suggesting divergent approaches to the work that treat its materiality as primarily textual, linguistic, and literary, or as physical, visual, sculptural, and tactile. The latter visual or sculptural understanding of the book as object is suggested by what Prigov (n.d.b) called his “mini-book” style – a form of small-format (appro-ximately A5) samizdat publication that he presented as visual and sculptural as much as textual. The mini-book form suggests a reading that privileges the book as material object – “книга как способ нечитания” (“the book as a means of not reading”), as Prigov puts it elsewhere (1998a) – rather than as a poetic text to be read, as in other visual and sculptural works, such as the 18th Azbuka, that draw on the materials and techniques of samizdat production. Emphasizing the materiality of the book, Prigov’s Facsimile operates at the intersection between the work as a visual and sculptural piece and as a text to be read. Finally, combining these readings, the book suggests another understanding of materiality as the intersection of multiple iterative systems in a given instantiation or object. This object is inassimilable to any one conceptual, iterative system, but reliant on many such systems. Yet as a facsimile, the book also challenges the very notion of mate-riality. A copy of a copy, it either highlights the authenticity of the samizdat copy, which a conventional published book would fail to convey, or, con-


versely, parodies the fetishization of the samizdat original. Writing to the tamizdat journal A-JA about his mini-books, Prigov explains that the only proper way to reproduce them would be to retype them on the same quality paper on the same kind of typewriter (Prigov n.d.b; he makes a similar allusion to Tolstoj in Prigov 2007a). In producing a facsimile edition, then, Prigov fundamentally violates the embodied instantiation of the samizdat medium and comments on what happens when it shifts out of that medium and material context and into that of the published work. But he also emphasizes that the samizdat medium is itself a mode of reproduction rather than a fetishized original. At the same time, through its serial system – the replacement of adjectives with “insane” and “unearthly” – the book suggests that reading the text might be unnecessary and even a distraction from appreciating a concept or idea that is beyond the text, outside reason (“безумный”), and literally not of this world (“неземной”). Supporting this interpretation, the introduction claims that the book is only part of the entire project, so that its completion is implied to be less important than its con-ceptualization. Prigov surrounds a facsimile reproduction of each smudged page and even the reverse of each one-sided page with a clean white border, creating a literal frame through which the original is read. By framing the facsimile images, he highlights the specificities of the samizdat medium (including its fetishization as a container of “precious content”) and sub-ordinates them to the printed book, while also questioning whether we should read the work, take it as a framed picture or objet d’art, or interpret it as a pure concept – as in his Grobiki otrinutyсh stiсhov (Little Coffins of Rejected Verse; Prigov 1980s; Prigov 2008a: 216), which go so far as to seal their content entirely between their stapled covers. By iterating the work across media and so underscoring its uncertain materiality, Prigov oscillates the Facsimile between copy and original, between repeatable conceptual work and embodied instantiation, suggesting that the two are inseparable in pu-blishing, history, and literature, understood as continuous processes of re-framing, re-presentation, and re-accentuation. Prigov highlights the historical and literary reframings and re-accent-uations that took place in the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet culture, not only by the ridiculously late date of 1992 that he gives to his allegedly samizdat text but also by allowing technologies of mass-reproduction to intersect with the individual act of copying:

Данный сборник-книжечка является одной из 12 сходных (но, увы, не сохранившихся), куда полностью вместился великий пушкин-ский Онегин, выполненный мной в машинной перепечатке. Ассо-циации с самиздатской литературой (кто помнит таковую?) естест-венны, так как это и было одной из задач – ввести высокую огосу-дарствленную литературу в контекст некогда бурного и самозаб-

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венного подполья и интимного отношения с текстом. Но это так. В архивных раскопках именно подобные тонкие субстанции и моти-вы испаряются первыми. Но, конечно же, основным было мона-шески-смиренное переписывание сакрального текста (сакрального текста русской культуры). Естественно, что за спиной переписчика, как и за моей, стоит его время, которое прочитывает исторический документ с точки зрения собственной “заинтересованности” или же “невменяе-мости”, т. е. как текст непрозрачный даже в отрывках знаемых на-изусть. Так же и упомянутый пушкинский Онегин прочитан с точ-ки зрения победившей в русской литературной традиции – Лер-монтовской (при том, что все клялись и до сих пор клянутся именно именем Пушкина). Замена всех прилагательных на безум-ный и неземной, помимо того, что дико романтизирует текст, рез-ко сужает его информационное поле, однако же усугубляет ман-трическо-заклинательную суггестию, что в наше время безумного расширения средств и сфер информации вычитывается, прочиты-вается как основная и первичная суть поэзии. This collection-chapbook is one of 12 similar ones (but alas the re-mainder have not survived) in which the entirety of the great Push-kinian Onegin was contained, executed by me in a typewriter re-production. The associations with samizdat literature (who remembers such a thing?) are natural, since it was one of its tasks to import high state literature into the context of the sometimes stormy and wildly enthusiastic underground and of its intimate relationship with text. But that’s how it is. In archival excavations just such fine substances and motives are the first to evaporate. But of course, fundamental was the monastic-humble transcription of a sacred text (a sacred text of Russian culture). It is natural that behind the back of the transcriber, just as behind my back, stands his time, which reads the historical document from the point of view of its own “interest” or “irresponsibility”, that is, as a text that is opaque even in the extracts that are known by heart. So that the reference to the Pushkinian Onegin is read from the point of view of the tradition that was victorious in Russian literature – the Lermontovian tradition (though everyone has worshiped and continues to worship the name of Puškin). The replacement of all adjectives with “insane” and “unearthly”, apart from wildly romanticizing the text, sharply narrows its informational field, however it also deepens the mantric-incantatory suggestiveness, which in our time of the insane expansion of media and spheres of information is felt and read as the basic and original essence of poetry.

Recalling Bachtin’s notion of re-accentuation, Prigov here presents an under-standing of literary production and reading as a continual process of re-


framing whereby “fine substances and motives” of the samizdat era “evapo-rate” and what we read instead is simply a “mantric-incantatory” response to the “insane expansion of media and spheres of information”. But of course, the text only appeared in the post-samizdat period so that the belatedness here is redoubled, as are the possibilities for dialogic reading. As a faux archival facsimile, the text not only criticizes the romantic tradition of worshiping Puškin as a transcendent, “unearthly” being, but also the nostalgic romantic-izing of samizdat and the new technologies of reproduction all of which, we are told, are equally “безумный” (“insane”). Through this repeated adjective, Prigov connects the rise of new information technologies to samizdat repro-duction and to the “mantric” worshiping function of poetry (recalling his liturgical performances of the opening lines of Evgenij Onegin), suggesting that the fetishization of reproduction and iteration may infect these seemingly opposed approaches with a shared insanity. On the one hand, the act of repeating Puškin’s “sacred text” and the painstaking monk-like transcription that samizdat reproduction demands – but which is now, ironically, obsolete – are celebrated as the “essence of poetry” and opposed to mass reproduction. But on the other hand, samizdat is itself shown to be an albeit primitive form of reproduction, and its materiality is both nostalgically alluded to and undermined by the mass-produced “facsimile” edition, just as Prigov’s large-scale production of samizdat-style Little Coffins links Soviet censorship of the free word to the death of samizdat in the freedom of the post-Soviet era, while also presaging the samizdat text’s afterlife in the transformation of poems into packaged-for-export works of visual art (Edmond 2012: 151-154). Unsettling notions of medium, materiality and authenticity, Prigov questions the location of poetry in mantric, transcendent otherness and in-stead emphasizes the poetics of switching frames and historical perspectives – of iteration. Prigov implies that the moment of transition from the Soviet to post-Soviet eras hides perpetual sameness amidst apparent change, concluding the work by transforming Puškin’s final couplet from chapter 6, stanza XLV of Evgenij Onegin, “Пускаюсь ныне в новый путь / Oт жизни прошлой от-дохнуть” (“I start upon an untrod way / To take my rest from yesterday”; translation from Pushkin 1995: 153), into “Безумный ныне новый путь / От всех безумий отдохнуть” (“A now insane new way / To take my rest from all insanities”; Prigov 1998b: n.p.). The repetitive words signify the inescapable repetition of a romantic attitude, but, by combining Puškin’s text, romanticism, samizdat, and post-Soviet culture, they also leave open a “новый путь”, a “new way” that signifies not through a single transcendent leap but through these very moments of uncertain intersection. The drawings mentioned in the title also function iteratively to unsettle the framing and boundaries of the work, its medium, materiality, and historical position. The images are presented as marginalia printed on the

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white border surrounding the facsimile reproductions. They closely resemble each other, so that when the pages are flicked through at speed the pictures combine to produce a moving image of Puškin tipping his hat. The flip-book genre underscores the multiplicity of media and historical moments at play in that it stands between print and cinema historically as a kind of inter-media form with an association with zoetropes and other pre-cinema, nineteenth-century technologies. The images are done in a style reminiscent of Puškin’s well-known marginalia and so also allude to the manuscript fetish and associate it with the fetishization of the samizdat text. By iterating and so animating Puškin, Prigov identifies this fetishization with his related under-standing of Russia’s peculiarly non-historical, time-transcending relationship to its past: in Germany Goethe is “only an historical figure”, Prigov insists, but in Russia Puškin is “always alive” (2008c). Just as his Little Coffins breathe new life into the dead samizdat format, Prigov’s Facsimile brings alive Puškin and the samizdat text well after their deaths, giving them iterative, continuously re-accentuated material forms. But like the Little Coffins, Prigov’s Facsimile also frames both Puškin’s master-piece and the samizdat text as dead concepts – ghostly repetitions without substance – suggesting that each might be buried under its own idea. By ironically performing and undermining the idea of the samizdat text as a fi-gure for “fragile human life” and Puškin as the living heart of Russian culture, the book gives substance to each idea while simultaneously condem-ning both to the grave. 3. One Meaningless Phrase

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

(Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

On May 31, 1985 the group Kollektivnye dejstvija (Collective Actions) presented Bočka (Barrel), a multi-media piece comprising a slide show and audio recording in the apartment studio of Igor Makarevič (Kollektivnye dejstvija 1985a). In the discussion that followed (Kollektivnye dejstvija 1985b), Prigov distinguished between the use of repetition in the piece he had just witnessed and his own use of iteration, by appealing to Evgenij Onegin:

Ну, бывает длинно, например, Евгений Онегин длинно, читаешь, но ничего. Но говорить, что это эксперимент, кто выдержит, а кто нет [...]. А если кто выдержал, то добавлять там еще десять глав [...]?


Well, there are long things, for example, Eugene Onegin is long, you can read it for a long time and it’s nothing. But to say that this is an experiment, that some can bear it and some cannot […] And if someone bears it, then do you add another ten chapters [...]?

Contrasting the piece with Evgenij Onegin, Prigov attacked its use of repetition:

Мне представляется, что наблюдающаяся давно на западе и про-никающая, к сожалению, к нам тенденция дегуманизации искус-ства наиболее ярко, конечно, проявилась вот в этом опыте. Я не говорю о том, в какую ситуацию поставлен зритель просто как человек – думающий, волящий, хотящий человек, наделенный ка-кими-то моральными устоями, понятиями о жизни, о задачах, о будущем. Я себе просто пытаюсь мысленно представить образ ав-тора, который как бы скрыт за всей этой мишурой, которую он хочет, как лапшу, навесить на уши зрителям, представить себе этот голос, который говорит 110 раз. Он, собственно, пытается дока-зать, что человек, который мыслит и может ясно, чисто и зара-зительно артикулировать свои внутренние желания и сделать их достоянием всего человечества, на самом деле, повторяя эту одну бессмысленную фразу, он, собственно, уподобляется некоему ме-ханизму. It seems to me that the tendency towards the dehumanization of art – which has been observable for a long time in the West and which has, unfortunately, penetrated Russia much more strikingly of course – appears in this experiment. I am not talking about how in this situation a watcher is simply presented as a human being – a thinking, willing, desiring human being, sharing moral circumstances, understandings about life, about work, about the future. I am simply in thinking trying to imagine the image of the author who is as if hidden behind this trumpery, which he wants to hang, like noodles, on the ears of the watchers, to imagine this voice which speaks 110 times. He, actually, tries to demonstrate that the person who thinks and can clearly and purely and infectiously articulate his or her inner wishes and make these a goal of all humanity, in fact, actually resembles some kind of mechanism, repeating this one meaningless phrase. (Kollektivnye dejstvija 1985b)

Why did Prigov raise such objections to the use of repetition and multimedia effects when both are fundamental elements of his own practice and why and how did he distinguish his iterations of Puškin – his own addi-tion of “another ten chapters” or more to Evgenij Onegin – from the repe-titions of Bočka? I want to address this question by showing how Prigov’s iterative approach asserts the possibility of finding individuality, freedom,

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and agency amidst an overwhelming volume of existing texts, an acute sense of historical repetition, and self-perpetuating systems of media, discourse, and power. In his retyping of Onegin, as in his other iterations of Puškin’s masterpiece, Prigov addresses the relationship of artistic creation to conven-tions and discourses and of individual agency to system. He shows how a work can be read and re-read and also repeatedly rewritten, and that each iteration is actually an act of agency enabling the writer, reader, or viewer to re-interpret a work, a cultural commonplace, or an idea or concept in a new medium or historical context. Later in the Bočka discussion, Prigov insists:

Я за гуманистическое искусство, понимающее зрителя как парт-нера, собеседника, со полным уважением к нему как к личности, в конце концов просто как к человеку. I am for humanistic art that understands the viewer as a partner, con-verser, with full respect for him or her as an individual, in the end sim-ply as a person. (Kollektivnye dejstvija 1985b)

His approach resembles Bachtin’s understanding of re-accentuation and intonation as dialogic and potentially liberating negotiations of the limits of genre and language as codified systems, or Carrie Noland’s insistence on bodily gesture as a form of iteration irreducible to the systematic iterability of language or discourse as described by Derrida and Foucault (Noland 2009: 170-191). Through the intersection of various forms of iteration in individual instantiations, Prigov highlights not only the dialectic between form and in-sanitation, between concept and material embodiment, but also the human individuality and agency that he saw as under attack in Bočka. By reading Prigov’s iterative poetics as a model and instantiation of individual agency within a system, I propose to recognize the “spirit of free-dom and improvisation” or “gesture” that Parščikov identifies in his live per-formances – while also acknowledging his systematic “cataloguing all of the reality that surrounds him” (Nicholas 1996: 25). Strongly rejecting the notion of freedom without limits, Prigov does not rely solely on improvised gesture (2008b). But, refusing the “authorial position of totality” that he finds so abhorrent in Bočka, neither does he simply catalogue. Rather, he wants “to prove that no single language can encompass a person entirely” (1989a: 18). For Prigov, the person is not just a complex “mechanism” of intersecting dis-courses, genres, media, and texts, but an active manipulator and responder, capable of revealing the farce beneath history’s tragedy and the tragedy of its farce. Prigov’s newspaper works question the relation of individual agency to concept, ideology, and system, of the embodied person to the tragedy and farce of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. From the inception of Rus-


sian conceptualism in the early to mid-1970s, Prigov and other artists of his milieu targeted the newspaper as an ideological object by emphasizing and transforming its material manifestation, building on the approach taken by Vitalij Komar and Aleksandr Melamid in their performance and sculptural piece Sut’ Pravdy (Essence of Truth; 1975). In one of Russian conceptual-ism’s foundational works, Komar and Melamid translated conceptual artist John Latham’s 1966 dissolution of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture into the Soviet ideological system by pulping an issue of the leading state news-paper Pravda and transforming it into “burgers” (“котлеты”) (Bann 1999: 9). Prigov similarly re-materializes newspapers in works such as his early newspaper-covered Noga (1973; reproduced in Cholmogorova 1994, fig. 79), in which the newspaper used in creating the papier-mâché foot is visible be-neath splattered paint; his Banka gazety (Newspaper Can; Prigov 2008a: 155), from his extensive Banki (Tin Can) series; the later related Newspaper, comprising a wineglass filled with newspaper (Prigov 1999b: 33); and his 2000 to 2001 series Otryvki gazet (Newspaper Cuttings; Prigov 2008a: 221). During the glasnost period of the late 1980s and well into the 1990s, Prigov turned increasingly to newspapers as found texts and surfaces for drawing and inscription, producing a series of works with painted text in red and black on Pravda. Prigov’s newspaper works from this period recall ear-lier conceptualist works such as Essence of Truth but also engage with the problems of mass reproduction and individual, unique gesture as they play out in the increasing media freedom and competition of the late Soviet and post-Soviet situation. As in a variety of his other works, such as the cycle Ri-sunki na reprodukcijach (Drawings on Reproductions; Prigov 2008a: 82-93), these various newspaper pieces approach verbatim repetition or citation in that they make use of the newspaper as readymade or textual source. Many also alter their sources through word substitution, overwriting, and the shift from one medium to another. They are also iterative in that they generally follow a set pattern or serial form, as in Prigov’s late 1980s and early 1990s Gazety (Newspaper) series of writing and images on sheets of newspaper. When seen as a whole, these works combine serial iteration and textual itera-tion – through the use of the newspaper as readymade or source text – with a thematizing of mass-reproduction. They contrast the mass-media reproduc-tion of newspapers with the unique painting, drawing, or handwritten text that Prigov superimposes on them, but they also highlight the reproducibility of such apparently singular gestures. These drawings were accompanied by in-stallation and performance pieces that used newspapers, such as Krasnyj ugol (Red Corner, 1989; reproduced in Cholmogorova 1994, fig. 84) and the 1989 video performance with newspapers (1989b). In these latter works especially, newspapers function as a kind of modern object of worship, as in the Red Corner installation where the newspapers are presented in the place in the home traditionally reserved for an icon. Reinforcing the tension between the

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messy everyday reality of the material text and divine, ideological, or con-ceptual transcendence, Prigov frequently overlays his newspaper works with words such as “glasnost” and “freedom”. In each case, the intersection of genres and media, journalism and poetry, visual and verbal art allows for re-accentuation, reminding us that what is “news” one day is “nothing the next”, as Prigov writes in the introduction to his 1983 mini-book Liriko-informa-cionnye soobščenija (Lyric-Informational Communications). The graphic newspaper works from the late 1980s and early 1990s intersect with other later series, such as the 1997 88-ja azbuka, in which letters of the alphabet are circled on a copy of the newspaper Moskovskie novosti (1997; see Prigov 2008a: 198-199). Prigov’s large black felt-tip circles with red dots above recall his eyes and red drops in the series of drawings that illustrate his book Pjat’desjat kapelek krovi (Fifty Drops of Blood; Prigov 1993) and that appear in many of his graphic works (e.g., Inter’ery s kapljami krovi, 1994; repro-duced in Prigov 2008a: 82-87). Prigov also uses newspapers in a more tex-tually focused way in the 2000s, as in his Po materialam pressy (Sourced from the Press), which, begun just after September 11, 2001, presents a series of poems based on contemporary newspaper articles (Prigov 2006). Similarly, the rise of new forms of nationalist rhetoric in the news-papers in the late-Soviet era, marked in works such as Prigov’s 1989 news-paper performance piece (where he reads the incendiary comments from the Russian press about independence movements in the Baltic states in increas-ingly hysterical tones), returns as a theme in the last work Prigov published in his lifetime, Raznoobrazie vsego (The Variety of Everything; 2007b). The book concludes with his ‘ru.sofob (50x50)’, comprising 50 of his columns for polit.ru and 50 poems from Po materialam pressy with one poem integrated with each column and often one or both rewritten in the process. The work functions as a new form of self-iteration. Like Po materialam pressy, ‘ru.sofob (50x50)’ uses texts from the press, but here it iterates Prigov’s own words according to a strict structure. In this way, it intensifies the connection between Prigov and his statements, while also distancing each statement and questioning its relation to larger systems of ideology and historical repetition. Prigov’s text concerns the kinds of iterations that produce and repro-duce notions of nation and nationalism, highlighting the clichés and nostalgia that mark political and ideological continuity amidst the semblance of change. The work begins with a discussion of the extremism and lack of limits on Russian nationalism (this appears to be one of the polit.ru columns but is presented as a kind of introduction). The title similarly refers to Pri-gov’s engagement with phobia (“фоб”), suggesting both a phobia of Russia in the West and the xenophobia of Russian nationalism. The Russian URL country suffix “ru” in the title connects the work’s concern with the perpetua-tion of Russian nationalism to iteration through the Internet – a new textual, visual, and performance medium that has unsettled existing notions of me-


dium and materiality and greatly expanded the opportunities for, and ease of, reproduction, including the reproduction of nationalist discourse. The concluding poem and prose pieces underscore historical recurrence. Prigov ends the book with a column discussing the continuity be-tween present Russian nationalism and communist times and the extraordina-ry inequality in the country. The poem reinforces the message by suggesting that both Lenin and Solženicyn saw what they wanted to see in the Russian people. Underscoring historical repetition, the comparison comes from a poe-tic cycle written by Prigov well before the break-up of the Soviet Union, ‘Kto očen’ chočet – tot uvidit’ (Prigov 1997b: 155). Prigov, however, segues this older poem neatly into the last poem in his serial work Po materialam pressy (Prigov 2006), which ends with the image of a woman found with a stab wound in her chest and with a rhetorical question:

Господи, сколько их – Колото-резанных Разбросано По необъятным просторам России Lord, how many of them – Stabbed and cut Are strewn Over the boundless expanses of Russia

The accompanying prose text suggests that the only really enduring Russian idea is putting up with suffering, reproducing the very clichés about Russia and Russianness that Prigov takes to task. As he puts it in Fifty Drops of Blood, first published over a decade earlier, “Судьба поэта в России / Чудесные превращения ужаса в торжество и обратно / В ужас” (“The fate of the poet in Russia / The miraculous transformations from horror into triumph and back / To horror”; Prigov 2004c: 14-15). The lines describe the poet’s double bind and also the implicated relation of this clichéd, romantic view of the Russian poet to the very horrors to which he or she is supposed to stand witness. Indeed, the final poem in Fifty Drops of Blood echoes the “insane” (“безумное”) romantic vision of the poet that Prigov plays with and takes to task in his Evgenij Onegin facsimile: “Безумное количество рассы-паных по земле капелек крови / Сим победиши” (“An insane number of drops of blood strewn over the earth / With this you shall conquer”; Prigov 2004c: 94-95; modified translation). Prigov, here, links the romantic excess of “безумное” (“insane”) to the idea of suffering, through a vision of blood scattered across the land, as in the final lines of his last work. He reinforces the ideas of historical recurrence, martyrdom, and imperial scale through the quotation “Сим победиши” (“With this you shall conquer”), the Old Church

300 Jacob Edmond

Slavonic rendering of Constantine the Great’s vision of Christ on the cross prior to his decisive victory over Maxentius. The description of a blood-strewn land not only anticipates the con-cluding lines of his final work but could also apply to the astonishing number of drops of blood in various media spilt across Prigov’s oeuvre (Fifty Drops of Blood itself presents Prigov’s blood-filled poems alongside his equally blood-stained images). In their dot form, these drops also ironically blend markers of suffering with commerce, by resembling the conventional sign of sale in a gallery. The iterations of blood and suffering that appear also in Pri-gov’s final words represent a sincere condemnation of the way the individual is subordinated to systems of power in Russia. But they also question whether the figuring of the poet in Russia as an individual voice bearing witness to atrocity is not merely either, like the red dot, a token of trade in a commercial transaction, or a mechanical discursive function complicit in the same sys-tems of power that cause such atrocity in the first place. Prigov’s various iterations and re-accentuations leave us again with the question of how to frame the material, and the relation of instance to concept, of whether to recognize the bloody final image of his last work as an em-bodied and heartfelt question about the fate of the individual in Russia or to see in its multiple iterations and distancing the mark of a conceptualist who views it all as the play of signifiers and who in fact begins ‘ru.sofob (50x50)’ by noting that “any words” (“всякие слова”) can form a poem, including the “simple and direct extracts from the daily press” (“простые и прямые вы-держки из eжедневной прессы”) that he uses in the work (2007b: 122). While here, as so often in his work (Nicholas 1996: 26-27), Prigov appears to adopt a moral tone, he does so in part to parody and attack the figuring of the poet as moral voice and seer. As Lev Drozdov (2007) notes, “не поймешь сразу, что тут – насмешка или искренняя боль за Отечество. Видимо, и то, и другое. Пятьдесят на пятьдесят” (“you can’t understand at once what’s here – whether it is a joke or genuine pain for the Fatherland. It seems it’s one and the other. Fifty fifty”). The final poem and the work as a whole severely critique those who let an idea, a system, an iterative or conceptual form – including that of the poet as moral voice – override their visceral, em-bodied engagement with questions of life and death. By using the strict inter-vals of iterative forms to distance and transform materials, Prigov explores the intersections of texts and lives and the choices we make in negotiating them. Through acts such as turning Puškin’s opening lines into a mantra or rewriting Evgenij Onegin by replacing its adjectives with “insane” and “un-earthly”, or re-presenting his own journalistic columns in juxtaposition with similarly re-presented poems, Prigov highlights inexact repetition and in turn reflects on the reframing to which we continuously subject texts, images, and history. Occupying neither a transcendent nor ironic position, but equally


sensitive to history’s tragedy and farce, he explores those points where texts, systems, images, discourses, and histories intersect and unsettle each other. He envisions freedom as re-accentuation, in which repetition functions not as a monological, inhuman mechanism but as a dialogic, multilogical response to cultural reproduction and change. Prigov’s practice highlights the rise of iteration in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing, art, and cultural theory and offers a way to reconcile the frequently polarized responses to this iterative turn. Cultural theorists (e.g., Bhabha 1994; Butler 1993; Drichel 2008: 599-602), writers, and artists who invoke iterative models of culture are often criticized for manufacturing sameness and for failing to account for individual agency (e.g., Jameson 1991: 28-30; Noland 2009: 191-205), but are also championed for stressing difference and plurality (e.g., Perloff 2008; Phillips 2009). I sug-gest that such polarizing can be overcome by recognizing the shared iterative poetics informing parts of Prigov’s practice that seem to erase individuality, such as copying, and those that highlight it, such as performance. A reading of Prigov’s iterative poetics offers a dialectical alternative to the conflicting views of cultural theory – one that recognizes not just the challenges to agen-cy, originality, and cultural difference posed by globalization and technology but also the infinite possibilities of iteration and combination. I am conscious that in this essay I have walked a fine line between conceptual and theoretical analysis and attention to and re-accentuation of specific gestural acts. To do both is precisely the challenge that Prigov’s work continues to pose not simply to art and literature but to the human being in the twenty-first century. Prigov neither eliminates individuality nor sub-sumes it in a totalized form, but finds gesture within constraint, freedom in the intersecting of texts, forms, media, and discourse systems. Because histo-ry repeats but never in the same way, in iteration we can find agency and in life a recurring improvisation. ————————————— LITERATURE Al’čuk, Anna 2008 ‘Saund-poėzija Dmitrija Aleksandroviča Prigova v kontekste ego

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Degot’, Ekaterina 2008 ‘Prigov i “mjaso prostranstva”’. Graždane! Ne zabyvajtes’, poža-

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——————————————————————————————— Edmond, Jacob 2012 A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural

Encounter, Comparative Literature. New York. Epstein, Mikhail 2010 ‘ …’. Common Knowledge, 16.3, 367-403. Goldsmith, Kenneth 2002-2003 ‘Uncreativity as a Creative Practice’. Drunken Boat, 5. http://www.drunkenboat.com/db5/goldsmith/uncreativity.html. 2004 ‘Being Boring’. Electronic Poetry Center. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html. Golston, Michael 2010 ‘Conceptualism and Allegory’. Paper presented at the American

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NC. Janecek, Gerald 1992 ‘Minimalism in Contemporary Russian Poetry: Vsevolod Nekrasov

and Others’. Slavonic and East European Review, 70.3, 401-419. 2008a ‘Seriality in Prigov: The Alphabet Poems’. Unpublished MS. 2008b ‘Serijnost’ v tvorčestve D.A. Prigova’. Unpublished MS. Johnson, Kent 2009 Day. Buffalo, NY. Kiričenko, Arkadij, Letov, Sergej, Aleksandrov, Aleksandr, Prigov, Dmitrij 2002 Tri ‘O’ i odin D.A. Prigov. CD. Moskva. Kollektivnye dejstvija 1985a Description of Bočka. Opisatel’nye teksty akcii, tretij tom. http://conceptualism.letov.ru/KD-actions38.html.

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——————————————————————————————— 1985b Transcription of discussion of Bočka. Opisatel’nye teksty akcii, tretij

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Symposium, 59, 1, 43-55. McHale, Brian 2004 The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. Tuscaloosa, AL. Nicholas, Mary A. 1996 ‘Dmitrij Prigov and the Russian Avant-garde, Then and Now’.

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Cambridge, MA, 170-191. Parščikov, Aleksej 2007 ‘Žest bez konteksta’. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 87. http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2007/87/pa23.html. Perelman, Bob, Golston, Michael 2010 ‘Announcing the Columbia-Penn Poetics Initiative “Rethinking

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oulipo/curator/poucel/intro.html. Prigov, Dmitrij n.d.a Untitled [Puškin ‘Manuscript’]. N.p. [Copy in the A-JA papers,

Zimmerli, Rutgers Univ., NJ.] n.d.b ‘Preduvedomlenie avtora k publikacii cikla rabot’, MS, Dmitrij

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——————————————————————————————— 1975a Moj djadja samych čestnych pravil. Collage, typewritten text on

paperboard. Dodge Collection no. 25183. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. New Brunswick. Reproduction photo appearing in this article by Peter Jacobs. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov.

1975b Čto my zaščiščaem, čto my berežem, čto my otricaem of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov, čto my uničtožaem???? Dodge Collection no. 25184. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, Zimmerli. New Brunswick.

1977 Zakrytaja kniga. Samizdat artist’s book. Moskva. Reproduced in Graždane! Ne zabyvajtes’, požalujsta! Raboty na bumage, installja-cija, kniga, performans, opera i deklamacija. Ed. Ekaterina Degot’. Moskva, 217.

1980s Grobiki otrinutych stichov. Dodge Collection 20394.01-04. Zim-merli. New Brunswick.

1981 From the series Telegrammy. Artist’s book comprising three folded leaves held in the British Library. Moskva.

1983 Liriko-informacionnye soobščenija. Samizdat mini-book. Moskva. [Copy in the A-JA papers, Zimmerli, New Brunswick.] 1984a 7-ja azbuka (po metodu Prigova-Monastyrskogo). Samizdat mini-

book. Moskva. The page reproduced in this article comes from the copy in the A-Ya Archive, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, O-071.001.002. Reproduction photo by Peter Jacobs. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov.

1984b 13-ja azbuka (p’esa). Samizdat artist’s book. The image reproduced here comes from the copy in the Centre for Artists’ Publications. Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. Bremen. Reproduction photo by Bettina Brach. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitrij Progov. Moskva. [Copy in the A-JA papers, Zimmerli. New Brunswick.]

1985a 18-ja azbuka (Kamen’ i krugi na vode). Samizdat artist’s book. Moskva. The image reproduced here comes from the copy in the Centre for Artists’ Publications, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen. Reproduction photo by Bettina Brach. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov.

1985b 22-ja azbuka (Vint). Samizdat book/sculpture. Moskva. Photo repro-duced in this article courtesy of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov.

1985c Stichogrammy. Paris. 1989a ‘Iskusstvo predposlednich istin: Beseda s Dmitriem Prigovym’.

Interview with Petr Vajl and Aleksandr Genis, Al’manach Pano-rama, Feb., Los Angeles, 17-24.

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——————————————————————————————— 1989b Video-based Performance with Papers. http://vimeo.com/4356948

(posted by the gallery Video-Točka, Perm’). 1989c ‘Conceptualism and the West’. Interview with Alexei Alexeyev

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1980-1990s Grobiki otrinutych stichov. Dodge Collection 20394.01-04. Zim-merli. New Brunswick. Art Museum, Rutgers Univ., NJ. Moskva

1992a ‘Screaming Cantata: Who Killed Stalin’. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Blashova. Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor, 108-115.

1992b 69-ja azbuka (2-ja naiprostejšaja). http://prigov.ru/bukva/azbuka69.php. 1993 Pjat’desjat kapelek krovi. Moskva. 1996 Sbornik preduvedomlenij k raznoobraznym veščam. Moskva. 1997a Sovetskie teksty, 1979-84. Sankt-Peterburg. 1997b Napisannoe s 1975 po 1989. Moskva. 1998a ‘Kniga kak sposob nečitanija’. Točka zrenija: vizual’naja poėzija,

90-e gody. Kaliningrad, 61-62. 1998b Faksimil’noe vosproizvedenie samodel’noj knigi Dmitrija

Aleksandroviča Prigova ‘Evgenij Onegin Puškina’ s risunkami na poljach raboty Aleksandra Florenskogo. Sankt-Peterburg.

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teksty. Moskva. 2003 Sobranie stichov, tom četvertyj, 1978, Wiener Slawistischer Alma-

nach, Sonderband 58. Ed. Brigitte Obermayr. Wien. 2004a 37-ja azbuka (pochoronnaja). Video of performance at Dickinson College, PA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo59nY8Isn4. 2004b ‘Stichi dlja Džordžika’. PMP – Positive or Tangential Reconstruc-

tion. By the Prigov Family Group (Dmitry A. Prigov, Natalia Mali, and Andrei Prigov). Published in conjunction with the exhibition shown at the Gosudarstvennyj centr sovremennogo iskusstva, 27 May-6 June, Moskva, n.p.

2004c Fifty Drops of Blood in an Absorbent Medium. Bilingual edition. Trans. Christopher Mattison. New York.

2005 ‘Mantra vysokoj russkoj kul’tury’. Vtoraja Mežregional’naja konferencija v ramkach issledovatel’skogo proekta ‘Lokal’nye istorii’. 2-5 Nov. Noril’sk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2my8S_dwZA.


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liningrad. Date of interview unknown. Uploaded on Youtube in 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBwL-zq8rP8.

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——————————————————————————————— Zorin, Andrej 1997 ‘Čtoby žizn’ vnizu tekla: Dmitrij Aleksandrovič Prigov i sovetskaja

dejstvitel’nost’’. Sovetskie teksty, 1979-1984. By Dmitrij Prigov. Sankt- Peterburg, 10-17.

dmitrij prigov's iterative poetics

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