Marina Koldobskaya

THEY HAD NO CHILDHOOD

“When Lenin was small, with curly hair…” – for some reason this little verse comes back to ones’ memory when seeing the porcelain dolls from Oleg Artyushkov’s project “The Childhood of the gods”. Any Thunderer was at some time touching and vulnerable, any monster white and fluffy.

In Artyushkov’s photographs, classically respectable, academically structured, everything is white and fluffy. The luxurious quality of printing, the fine play of light and shadow, the well thought out composition, the well judged proportions. Delightful little children frolic on the vaguely-cloudy background. What they are actually doing there is not completely clear: in the frame there are only intriguing fragments of figures, but the general impression is of something innocently-perverted, ambiguously-languid. It is that sort of art about which an antique author would have said: “about the pleasant pleasantly”.

But this pleasantness is deceiving. The time and place, to which the porcelain dolls belong, is 30s Germany. It is noted that: the more awful the epoch the more sickly-sweet are the everyday examples of its art. Peaceful average men need to find rest for their souls amongst the grand events. By the self-respecting bourgeois toys and trifles are needed, something charmingly-fragile, tenderly-miniature, soothingly-vulgar, but at the same time supported by a respectable cultural background.

The dolls of the totalitarian epoch originate, naturally, in Antiquity. We note that there they in no way possessed childish features. Little Cupid inspires passion, striking the target with his weapon. Hercules in his cradle suffocates snakes. He too monstrously squeezes the breast of his wet-nurse, creating the Milky Way. Passion and violence are the attributes of the divine infants of the Ancient World. (Myth leaves to human infants the role of the victim: they are either killed by their own mothers or abandoned in the forest to the mercy of wolves, or left to float downriver in baskets, or simply all slaughtered. If he managed to survive – that means, after all he is God).

In the Third Reich antique sculpture, sieved through the Baroque, the Rococo and Bidermeyer, became more banal and acquired features, if not exactly toy-like – then confectionery. A naked boy teases a little dog, naked boys mess around with a little ball, a naked boy plays with a little goat… A little bit of zoophilia, some paedophilia, and a small touch of sadomasochism and homoeroticism… Lips, eyelashes, fingers, cheeks, little plump buttocks, microscopic willies…

Size has significance.

Enlarging the photographic prints to superhuman sizes, Oleg Artyushkov returns to trifles of the totalitarian times the somewhat forgotten grandeur of the Big style, tempting and formidable. But we remember everything anyway, we, of course, remember everything…