The Russians have for decades fashioned functional objects from such cast-off items as forks, plastic bottles and onion bags. Collector Vladimir Arkhipov sheds light on the artful labour of his brothers and sisters in invention
By Christopher Frey

Vladimir Arkhipov collects the art of everyday ingenuity: a power charger made from a recycled Polaroid cartridge; a barbell bracketed by elevator counterweights; a water boiler jerry-rigged from a pair of used razor blades, wire and an AC plug. These thingamajigs are mostly gathered from casual inventors in and around Moscow. Although the Russian curator is reluctant to refer to them as art while they’re still in use by their creators, he treas­ures their accidental poetry in the service of function.

Arkhipov’s archive of “material folklore” began in 1994, when he realized the conceptual art he’d been creating had little relevance amid the upheaval of the post-Soviet meltdown. While visiting a friend’s dacha, he noticed a coat hook that had been fashioned from a toothbrush warped over a flame. “It was so simple, but it struck me right away,” he says. “I knew it was important.” He also remembered his father’s inventions, among them a TV antenna made from a set of aluminum forks. “Things like these had been around me all my life but were invisible to the naked eye.” His criteria for the collection? “The objects must be functional, visually interesting, one of a kind and not for sale. They must also have an author, someone who can talk about their creation.”

Art critics and curators in Russia and beyond are taking notice of Arkhipov’s array, most of them keen to appreciate the homemade phenomenon as either a critique of consumer culture, or a sociological catalogue of the deprivations endured by Russians in the turbulent 1990s. While Arkhipov welcomes the attention, he’s ambivalent about how his collection has been construed. “It’s true that the more specialized a society becomes in its division of labour, the less ingenious it is. Societies oriented around consumption are losing their contact with the world of tactile things. If you have money and you need something, you can usually buy it. The poor or less specialized person is more attentive to the details of everyday life. For him, this attentiveness is the guarantee of survival.”

But Arkhipov rejects the notion that his collection is an exposé of Russian pov­erty, or that it makes a specific statement about the economic collapse of the ’90s. “When I look at these objects together, there’s no real difference between the communist and the post-communist times,” he says. “Yes, they can say something about the time and place in which they were made, but we should also be careful not to make too much of this.” What intrigues Arkhipov is how the culture of in­genu­ity he documents transcends class. “These things are traces of a person’s creative force. Creativity belongs to everyone, but everyone is different. Some people have a facility with words, others with sound or numbers. And there are others who still understand the world with their hands. Those are the people who interest me.”

 

Christopher Frey is currently researching his forthcoming non-fiction book, Broken Atlas: The Secret Life of Globalization (Random House). He also contributes to The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic and Unlimited.