| NEDKO SOLAKOV: Marginalia
By Kim Levin
As the official participant from Bulgaria in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Nedko Solakov chose to produce only a simple postcard. The tricolor card, the colors of the Bulgarian flag, bore the following message in Bulgarian, Italian, and English:
"Very Important Announcement."
After nearly 30 years of absence from the officially participating countries at the Venice Biennial, The Republic of Bulgaria is proud to announce that it is prepared to properly participate in the next Venice Biennale in the year 2001."
This gently sarcastic work, which side stepped with sly humor the dilemma of a nonexistant Bulgarian pavilion and a belated decision by the bureaucrats, may be the most elusive and insubstantial work that Nedko Solakov has made during the past decade. And yet it neatly sums up his esthetic stance, which is not so much conceptual as mental, with equal parts criticality and humor, reason and lunacy, silliness and sense. His art is composed of an idiosyncratic mixture of anxiety, humor, compulsion, and social critique. Even if his narratives address us directly in an intimate voice, his art remains nevertheless oblique.
His installations can take the form of elusive interventions. Or they can comment on their own improbable presence. A painted shadow, a coffee cup, and a spotlight on a blank wall were among his 13 nearly invisible interventions lurking among the historical exhibits in a 1998 project in a history museum in the heart of Europe. As an artist from Bulgaria, a country marginalized even within the Soviet system and remaining on the periphery not only in the new post- Soviet Europe but also in the international art world, he has firsthand experience with the absurdities and indignities and the advantages of a marginal position. „Always we're waiting to be accepted somewhere" he says. His stance is, first and foremost, this position of marginality. Solakov's work takes ironic pleasure in the absurdities of presence and absence, and never quite fitting into the system, whatever the system is.
In terms of art systems, he takes the most basic premise of Conceptualism and turns it inside out. The early Conceptualists proposed the notion that the artist's idea was all that mattered. It didn't need to be embodied in an object. Solakov personalizes, interiorizes, and updates this old Conceptualist dictum. He uses his imagination, he dreams up improbable stories, he lets his tall tales spin out of control to ludicrous (and preposterously logical) conclusions. Wildly inventive, rambling yet pointed, innocent but sly, full of eccentricities and absolutely personal, his narratives materialize as fragmentary installations, fabulist stage-sets, annotated pieces of documentary evidence brimming with implausible ideas.
Writing about Nedko Solakov in connection with "The Absent Minded Man," a narrative installation he created in Montpelier, a French critic commented that the subject of Solakov's art works is the art world. And so it might seem, considering the apparent content of a number of his projects over the past several years: "Market (the artist as Curator)" at Shedhalle Zurich in 1992-93; "The Collector of Art" at Ludwig Museum Budapest in 1994; "Mr. Curator, Please," at Kunstlerhaus Betthanian in Berlin in 1995; „The Thief of Art" at Arken Museum in Copenhagen in1996. But his work encompasses more than the are world. Solakov's art is about the abnormal psychology of social systems. His tales and their materializations hone in on the dysfunctionality of cultural codes and stereotypes, and the psychodrama of collective neurosis. Central to his work is the predicament of an inhabitant of a vanished work, or a collapsed value system, who has been abruptly thrust into a strange and unfamiliar universe.
In this sense, Nedko Solakov's art. has something in common with the narrative installations of Ilya Kabakov. One crucial difference is that Solakov hails from a former satellite state rather than the collapsed empire's center. Another is that he is of a younger generation. And so, instead of recreating a vanished world, as Kabakov does, with touches of bitter nostalgia for the bad old days, Solakov's work resonates with the liberating energies and confusions of colliding systems. His careening narratives exult in exhilarating freedom and improbable possibilities. They loose touch with reality, as if to question what reality may be.
Kabakov, inventing the eccentric inhabitants of a communal apartment as aspects of himself, furnished their rooms, scripted their conversations, and made their art. as if to trap his vision within an extinct system. Solakov, like the man who catapulted himself through the roof in one of Kabakov's fictions, has been liberated from practicalities and limitations. He is free to turn himself into a snowflake, and to remark on his astonishment at himself, a 105 kilo snowflake dressed all in white like a child for a school pageant. He can imagine what it might be like to live on a flat earth or in a miniaturized society under the roots of an old tree. He can escape into a two- dimensional civilization that lurks in the floral wallpaper. He can toy with being an amnesiac. "Fragment by fragment, bits of stories accumulate as derisory signs of freedom, of action," concludes Melissent. "Nedko Solakov's absurd narratives and installations evoke a deconstructed world that has lost its faith and ideals."
Solakov's tools, with which he dismantles actuality and art., are the preposterous, the ludicrous, the sublimely ridiculous, the comically absurd, and the intimacies of a slyly naive narrative voice. Fragments of historical and current events and bits of religious iconography migrate into his installations, along with the debris of dysfunctional social structures, deranged psychological processes, and discredited belief systems, all detached from their former realities. His allegories are intimately personal psychodramas. And simultaneously, they are political parables of a world that unexpectedly dissolved in the blink of an eye, leaving a chaotic residue in which former realities echo and persist. Think of Solakov as a survivor of the most bizarre province of an extinct universe, trying to make sense of new and alien, and equally incomprehensible-life forms in a world in which everything and nothing has changed.
"So, imagine..." begins a curving line of hand-written script on the announcement folder for "Mr. Curator, Please," an installation in which he endowed the Old Masters with unworthy childish sentiments: jealousy, petty envy, rivalry. And then ... and then ... And then the ghosts of Bosch, Breugel, Dürer, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens, and J. Van Eyck start an enormous incredible campaign against him. „ As an alien form of Conceptualism gone berserk, Solakov's narratives are predicated on a creative misunderstanding, as it were, in which the artist's idea - which is all that supposedly mattered - isn't nearly as earnest or puritanical as it once was in works by first-generation Conceptualists such as Lawrence Weiner or Joseph Kosuth, from what used to be called „the first world." After all, if you live in a place that was for decades beyond the margins of the art world, as Solakov does, it makes perfect sense to work in the margins, making use of everything that marginality has to offer. It may be the smartest strategy.
In the tales that generate and propel his wildly narrative installations, there is always a great deal of energy at the margins, as if the essential impetus has filtered outwards to lurk in the peripheries. There is always the hint of another story entering from the beyond the farthest edge. It may be an arrow that points to „a little ghost (from another story)."
Or, in a textual intervention on the wings of six Boeing airplanes, realized with the collaboration of LUXAIR between July and October, 1999, it may be a message printed on the wing of an airplane, to be discovered by the stray passenger who happens to gaze through the plane's window.
It might also be a book that resembles an impressive catalogue for a museum retrospective, in which Solakov retells and embellishes his own stories, annotating photographic reproductions of his past works, excusing his English grammar, and providing commentaries, asides, self-criticisms, and revelations that are intimate in tone but Byzantine in their attention to minutiae. At the very end of the book the artist scribbles one last marginal note: he confides that he's at the end of something „ which is not a catalogue not an artist's book- I don't know what it is." And as an afterthought he adds, „Frankly it doesn't matter if you are not bored." Solakov's work is not only maverick Conceptualism from a looking glass world. It is Process Art of a peculiar sort: he follows his mental processes wherever they may lead, luring us to accompany him on a journey into the logic of the improbable.
A castle is the perfect fairytale venue for Nedko Solakov's phantasmagorical art and social commentary. For his exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, He may tell the story of Saint Pipo, who takes away Christmas presents instead of giving them. He may offer Good News Bad News, with ten islands of light on the floor and ten small scenarios of good and bad news in the spotlights. For example, he says, describing the piece, „You have a dice which is a 6 and a hand-written text on the floor: 'The good news: it was 6. The bad news: deeply inside, invisible for the time being, it was 1.'" He may injure up an exhausted ghost in the Castle's tower. Or he may create a large white furry object with a peephole that lures the viewer into a childlike and ludicrous position. In order to peer through the peephole to discover whatever wondrously silly bit of beauty hides inside, you may have to kneel or lie flat on the floor. Do so. And think of it as a physical extension of his own willingness to put himself in the most preposterous imaginative and conceptual positions.
Always generous and ever aware of the context within he works as well as the contextlessness of his own position, Solakov invites us to enter not only his narrative tales but his mental process. He cajoles us into entering the private recesses of the artist's vacillations and indecisions as well as his wildest fantasies. He shares with us the embarrassing secrets of artistic creation. He tempts us to join him in utter freedom.
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