‘Tsoi was a true street artist’ A Viktor Tsoi ‘biopic’ exhibition is now on display in St. Petersburg. We spoke to its curator.
Viktor Tsoi: A Hero’s Path, the first major biographical exhibition about the co-founder and lead singer of the Soviet-era rock band Kino, opened at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg on January 15, 2022. It features Viktor Tsoi’s paintings and drawings, rare archival recordings, his favorite vinyl records, and video cassettes, as well as personal items, many of which have been stored by the musician’s loved ones for thirty years. The exhibition was due to close on April 15, but has been extended until June 21, which would have been Tsoi’s sixtieth birthday. Meduza spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Dmitry Mishenin.
This conversation took place before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was originally published in Russian on April 10, 2022.
Dmitry Mishenin
Journalist, artist, founder of artistic collective Doping-Pong, concept designer and curator of Viktor Tsoi: A Hero's Path.
How did you get into Viktor Tsoi’s music?
I grew up in Leningrad and got into Tsoi at about the same time as everyone else in the 1980s. It was just in the air. We used to go to festivals at the Leningrad Rock Club, listen to Blood Type [an album by Tsoi's band Kino]. Listening to Viktor Tsoi and Kino felt natural to us, like listening to Petya Samoilov, the bassist from Alisa, Boris Grebenshchikov and Akvarium.
It was only later that I got to know his work a lot better. In the 2000s, I was working at Rodionov Publishing House on various magazine projects with Natalia Razlogova. I didn’t connect her with Tsoi for a long time. Then I suddenly realized that her brother was my favorite film critic and cultural commentator Kirill Razlogov. Then the drummer from Kino, the artist Georgy Guryanov, who was also a friend of mine, kept asking me to say hi to Natalia, and she wanted me to say hi to him. I was so busy with my projects that I didn’t put two and two together for a long time, until I finally realized she was the Natalia Razlogova, Viktor Tsoi’s common-law wife. That’s how I unexpectedly found myself inside Kino history.
So you became friends with your idols.
It all happened quite naturally, because they were already my colleagues: we were fellow artists with Georgy, and publishers and journalists with Natalia. When the director Rashid Nugmanov, a friend of Tsoi, decided [in 2010] to re-release The Needle, which was a formative film for me, he asked me to be the art director and suggested my art collective Doping-Pong create comics and drawings for the extended cut. We became friends. It was easy for me to get along with Tsoi’s friends and family because I genuinely love his work.
What more did you learn about Tsoi from his friends and family?
It was Natalia who introduced me to Viktor the painter. I’d known his felt-tip marker drawings since the early 90s; I’d seen the illustrations in books and really loved them. He has this brilliant black humour and deft technique. But I had never seen Viktor’s paintings before that.
One day, I was telling Georgy Guryanov about how Natasha had Viktor’s paintings, and he said something like, “God, I would give anything to be able to see just one of them!” It surprised me, because Georgy is a really reserved guy and he suddenly got so excited. It brought it home for me that this collection has immense cultural value.
Natalia and I sorted though the first boxes of the archive and found oilcloths and canvases. I studied them and was fascinated. I hadn't realized how much Tsoi had influenced Leningrad’s artistic community. I saw in his works a reconsideration of Suprematism, the discovery of Neo-Academism, and the mosaic all came together. I suddenly understood why artists like Andrey Kursanov and Georgy Guryanov had been in his band, and why they had fashion designer Konstantin Goncharov, whose work is in the collections of the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, style them. Tsoi was seen as a leader not only in music circles, but in artistic ones, too.
His drawings just sat in boxes for 20 years and nobody looked at them?
Yes. I think that Natalia managed a kind of domestic triumph with his archive. She stored literally everything left behind by the man she loved. Not only documents, clothes, and paintings — things that have obvious value — but also tickets, scraps of paper with drawings for children, figures made out of modeling clay, paints, felt-tip pens, the palette of purple paint with which he painted his last picture, The Road, which he finished just a few months before his car accident. She even held onto an unfinished pack of cigarettes. Only someone who truly loved and valued another person could have done that.
Andy Warhol had a Time Capsule project. He packed various personal items, gifts, bits of paper with sketches on them, letters, and magazine clippings, up into boxes. There’s a lot of these boxes; the Warhol Foundation is still unpacking them. Without intending to, Natalia did something similar. And twenty years later [after Tsoi's death in 1990], she started opening up Viktor’s time capsules to find them to be filled with treasures.
It became obvious that, at the very least, there needed to be an art exhibition of Tsoi’s work. That was the stage at which I got involved.
How long did it take to prepare this exhibition?
We were negotiating with various institutions for a decade. We talked to [founder and director of the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow] Olga Sviblova and the curator of Erarta [the largest private museum of contemporary art in Russia, located in St. Petersburg], which hosted a two-story Doping-Pong retrospective in 2019. They all rejected the idea. Somehow none of them knew Viktor as a major artist or understood his significance. But Natalia and I remained convinced that one way or another, there needed to be a show.
When some of Tsoi’s work was shown at KGallery in 2020, I was surprised by people’s reactions. For me, Viktor’s roles as an artist, musician and film actor all had equal value, but to many visitors it was a revelation that he painted at all.
The small exhibition at KGallery ended up being a teaser for the big biopic show at Moscow’s Manege. How did you arrive at this large-scale project on Tsoi?
For a long time, people had been approaching Vitaly Kalgin with ideas for various projects about Viktor Tsoi’s life. Vitaly started telling people who wanted to work on this to talk to me, and with that, I unwittingly became responsible for Tsoi’s artistic legacy.
When Alexander Karmaev [who devised and produced the exhibition “A Hero’s Path”] and Agniya Sterligova from architecture studio Planet9 approached me, it felt like déjà vu: I kept thinking that I’d already met a production duo, a man and a woman, who’d also pitched a multimedia exhibition.
They told me how much they’d liked Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2017, and I recalled the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibition I saw in Stockholm in 2013, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk. I also loved that type of spectacular exhibition. Agniya and Alexander asked me to draft the concept. Although I worried that we wouldn’t be able to do everything we wanted to, I began imagining that I was making a film about the life and work of Tsoi with an unlimited budget.
Did the scale surprise them?
No, they said they wanted to do it. My concept gradually began to take shape and come alive. Two years later, though we hadn’t yet found any funding, my belief in our team was still solid. They didn't seem likely to abandon the idea, just as I had waited ten years for the first exhibition of his paintings [at KGallery] and never gave up.
Why is the show called A Hero’s Path?
Many years ago, on a TV show about Tsoi, I said that Viktor is like an ancient hero who came and conquered people’s hearts. Tsoi’s producer in France, Joel Bastener, agreed with me. The image stayed with me, and I remembered it when we started working on the show. Viktor also had a song called “The Last Hero,” which I really like.
How did you gather the various items related to Tsoi? As the curator, had you envisioned any specific kinds of things that you'd like to have shown?
The richest archives belong to Natalia Razlogova, Tsoi’s son Alexander Tsoi, and his father, Robert Maksimovich. I had to contact copyright holders and collectors for every photograph, every last artefact from the Kamchatka boiler room where Tsoi worked, and there were a lot of them. If I wanted to use footage from the filming of the television program Musical Ring, then I had to find the photographer who had worked on it at the time [in the 1980s]. Vitaly Kaligin, Tsoi’s biographer and our chief consultant for the exhibition, was able to put me in touch with a lot of people, which made it possible to show many of the items you see on display.
When I was putting on the first show of Viktor’s paintings at KGallery, I wanted to show his work with the inscription “I didn’t have time to paint” from Rinad Akhmetchin’s [personal] collection. One of them is at the Manege. There are serious conceptual artists and Tsoi is a fun conceptual artist. This painting captures his sense of humor.
The paintings even make Viktor’s lyrics sound different. Sometimes, you look at one of his paintings and you can see “The planes are flying,” “the house is standing,” a tree that might not “survive even another week.” You think to yourself that while he was painting, these words were probably also floating around in his head. And it’s hard to tell what came first for him, painting, music, or poetry.
It's amazing to see the kind of ephemera that usually doesn't even survive for a single day. For instance, the note from Auktyon director Konstantin Belyavsky asking Tsoi to switch off the right boiler in the morning written on a work schedule from the boiler room [where they worked].
Can you imagine that boiler room, where Viktor Tsoi worked alongside Alexander Bashlachev [poet and musician from the Leningrad Rock Club] and Slava Zadery, who founded the band Alisa? There they were, working in shifts, with movie producers coming in, asking to film them in there. In our time [in 2003], Sergey Firsov [music producer and head of the Kamchatka Club, who ran the record library at the Leningrad Rock Club] turned that boiler room into a miniature museum, a pilgrimage site for Kino fans.
You’ve written that you designed some elements of the exhibition space a long time ago. Which ones?
For example, the snow globes in the Needle Remix room. I came up with the idea for them back in 2010, with Rashid Nugmanov, the director of [the film] The Needle, as a great New Year’s present. Can you imagine Viktor Tsoi as Moro inside the globe with snow whirling around him? Doping-Pong even made some sketches. But no one was able to build them. Now they are finally in the Manege. Not as a toy, but a museum installation.
The Citadel of Death room is dedicated to Viktor’s last film project, which most people never heard of. That whole room came out of my [2020] book The Re-animator of Cult Cinema.
Looking at Tsoi’s notebooks in the exhibitions, the cassette tapes and movies that he loved when he was younger makes you think about his evolution as an artist. In one of the notebooks, he translated Duran Duran songs and wrote down unfamiliar English words, just like many others his age would have done. He collected LPs by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. What was it about his musical experience and environment that made him destined to become the central figure in Soviet rock?
I think he let himself be influenced by the people he liked. He could play brilliant acoustic guitar like Akvarium, dress up as a troubadour like early T.Rex, he could paint like Keith Haring and imitated Malevich, but he always remained completely himself.
A small child grows up in a world where World War III could break out at any moment, where the socialist and capitalist systems are in constant opposition. Who is going to take any notice of Viktor Tsoi in this world? No one, there were no opportunities for him. So he grows up and by the end of the ’80s, the media references major figures in Leningrad rock more frequently than any members of the Politburo. That’s a victory: people in the arts, and specifically the counter culture, have become part of the mainstream. And during Kino’s last performance [on June 24, 1990], the Olympic flame was lit in Luzhniki Stadium. That was a turning point for the country: people were allowed to do something beautiful, good, and eternal. And they did it.
In the The Discovery of America room, there is an interview with Joanna Stingray and Joel Bastener, the main people who introduced Tsoi to foreign art and pop culture. If he had been part of that world, who would Tsoi have resembled?
The Discovery of America room isn't about America, it's about discovering a new world. Viktor discovered it for himself when he left the USSR. At the Sundance Festival in 1990, he was approached by film producers, mostly American and Japanese, who wanted to work with him. In this room, there are sculptures based on Tsoi’s drawings, a kind of Tsoiland. We tried to imagine how Tsoi’s work might have developed in the capitalist world.
In 1986, the artist Keith Haring opened his Pop Shop in Manhattan where he sold souvenirs. At the same time, Viktor Tsoi, who was as famous in the USSR as Haring was in America, was painting polaroids, accessories and various household items with patterns, decorations, little men, and dogs. He couldn’t launch his own clothing brand or open up an amusement park, so we built a small Tsoiland in the exhibition space to imagine how Tsoi’s art might have developed.
Why do you think Stingray and Bastener became close to Tsoi?
What Viktor was doing at that time had significance abroad. They saw echoes of Haring in his paintings and of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were both at the peak of their fame in the West. And of course, his music, which was by then more pop than rock. I think they saw it as a cultural phenomenon that could have also existed in their country. They wanted to share these discoveries with people in America.
When we started working on the show, I was contacted by Ruslan Karablin, the fashion designer, artist and founder of the brand SSUR. He wanted to dedicate a capsule collection to Tsoi and to reissue the Save the World t-shirts that Joanna and Viktor wore at the Palace of Youth concert in 1986, where they spoke about friendship and peace, despite the failed negotiations in Reykjavik between the USA and USSR. Joanna herself had decided to sell the T-shirts as souvenirs at the exhibition. We still need to save the world, regularly. Viktor Tsoi and Joanna were doing it then and we need to be doing it now.
Our job was just gathering everything in one place then leaving the visitor alone with Tsoi. So that’s what we did. It is a real pop art Tsoi museum. It will be a shame to put everything back in the boxes. It would be wonderful if the exhibition could become a permanent museum, so that the characters from Tsoi’s drawings could live there forever.
Why did he make these strange little people with square heads?
I invented the term “cave realism.” He painted them on oilcloths, plastic bags, and anything he could find when he didn’t have a canvas. Tsoi was a true street artist, and I think he was influenced by American street artists too.
I noticed something unusual. Haring’s figures are very sparse, universal. But when you look at Viktor’s, you can tell if it’s a woman or a man. In that sense he was a traditional artist. The themes of family and love run through his work. The relationship between men and women in his paintings can be aggressive, romantic, or humorous, but clearly it was an issue that concerned him.
And do the relationships between the characters somehow develop?
There was a significant turning point in his work when he met Natalia [in 1987 on the set of Assa where Natalia was working as the second assistant to the director Viktor Trakhtenberg]. Violent scenes gave way to beautiful, idyllic ones. Figures that had been torturing and burning one another suddenly began playing badminton and sunbathing on the beach. The characters included American president John Kennedy and Arnold Schwarzenegger — icons of pop culture — but then, there started to be more and more regular people. I think this happened after Tsoi himself became a pop culture icon and movie star. His underground Leningrad life ended and his public Moscow life began.
The texts accompanying the exhibition offer almost no cultural analysis. For example, nothing is said about Tsoi’s role in world music of the 1980s, or his influence on the rock scene. Was that intentional?
I really wanted to use simple language similar to Tsoi’s lyrics and not overload visitors. Further art historical research can be done in books and documentary films, but the spirit of this required a Tsoiland, to immerse the viewer in Tsoi’s world. He wasn’t a man of highbrow terminology. He didn't care what the critics thought about him as a cultural phenomenon.
How long would you have to spend at the exhibition to read all the texts from beginning to end, listen to all the songs in the audio guide, and watch all the videos?
We haven’t worked it out exactly, but I think you would have to stay at the Manege like it was a hotel. I think any good museum project should make you feel that way. I remember Damien Hirst’s exhibition in Venice, Treasure from the Wreck of the Unbelievable [2017], where I spent three whole days and nights. I even searched for the hidden sculptures that could only be seen from the water.
Rashid Nugmanov and I talked a lot about what constitutes a film’s success. It’s probably people watching it multiple times, going back to the cinema. We called the exhibition a “biopic” because we wanted to create a kind of film in the museum space, which people could watch from start to finish. And then they would bring their friends to see it. When I learned that people spend on average three hours at the Manege, like the time spent watching a movie, and then they return, as a curator — and as the director of this film — I was really pleased.
Interview by Anna Ryzhova
Abridged translation by Helen Ferguson