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