ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 136
ICUL CTION
C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
meets
R e v i e w
Leonid Dutov
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator
and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator
[email protected]
Artist Leonid Dutov's work explores a
wide variety of features that marks out
our media-driven lives: her works could
be considered as visual biographies of
the ubiquitous consequences of
contemporary technosphere and urge
the viewers to rethink about the
dichotomies between physical and
digital realms to go beyond such
dichotomy. One of the most convincing
aspect of Dutov' approach is the way it
accomplishes an effective inquiry into
the evolution of ideas and how they
engineer the reality to which we are
subjected: we are really pleased to
introduce our readers to his stimulating
artistic production.
Hello Leonid and welcome to
ARTiculAction: to start this interview,
would you like to tell us something
about your background? Are there any
experiences that have influenced your
evolution as an artist? In particular how
does your cultural substratum inform
the way you relate yourself to art
making and to the aesthetic problem in
general?
Thank you! I am very glad to be
participating in your amazing? project
and, of course, it would be my pleasure to
tell a little bit about my background.
When I was 11, my father enrolled me in
18
martial arts classes. This was towards the
end of the Soviet period, but
nevertheless there was still hardly any
information about schools and Eastern
methods and everyone who studied them
was actually moving forward in the dark.
There were manually re-typed books on
karate in English, there were Hong
Kongese films, fan translations of Carlos
Castaneda’s books, works by George
Gurdjieff and Helena Blavatsky and that’s
all. There was no living bearer of the
tradition. My Master taught not only
martial arts but also how to work with
mystic energies and astral bodies. He
taught two groups of students, who
almost never met. And while we, who
studied martial arts, were taught no more
than the techniques of touchless attacks
at most (he called us the outer circle),
those who studied chakras, their
balancing, out of body techniques and so
on gained significantly more. When I was
about 15 I asked him to allow me to
attend classes of the inner circle. He
refused, and added that one can practice
such things only after 21, otherwise they
are very harsh on the mind and one can
go mad.
However, he started delicately preparing
me and once, on the first day of classes
of a group studying the martial art of the
Yamabushi monks and warriors, he told
me to lay out a portable altar or mandala,
which was meant to harmonize and focus
the energy in the classroom. We had not