When Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellow Dmitry Kaminker arrived at the AAR in September 2011 from St. Petersburg, he often introduced himself at dinner as a Russian sculptor who hadn’t brought any tools or materials along with him and who planned to spend his three-month long fellowship enjoying his first vacation in forty years. So much for initial intentions. By mid-October, his Rome Sustainable Tower Project had become the community’s conversation piece and a powerfully vivid example of the Academy’s potential to inspire beyond and across fields.
Ever-wry and self-deprecating, the puckish Kaminker gives a distinct impression of productivity even at rest. He arrived in Rome intending to relax and “perhaps do some drawings,” but instead began making small sculptures out of cardboard salvaged from the dumpster. He made so many at the outset that he had to fashion shelves out of cardboard to display the resulting figures. Once he ran out of space he made more shelves and stacked them together—the utilitarian and serendipitous act behind the work’s columnar shape. To embellish the empty spaces in the fantastically fanciful resulting frieze he began soliciting the work of other Fellows. “I specifically sought out the work of non–visual artists because I wanted to communicate with those who can create something that I can’t,” he explains. “What’s interesting is what’s on the border between disciplines.”
“The importance of sculpture is that it’s a meeting place and a source of conversation,” he adds, “which, as I understand it, is the idea of AAR. To meet with spirit and inspire each other from different fields and countries. So in essence it’s a communication tower.”
And one that generated a very distinctive buzz beyond his fourth-floor studio. Within a few weeks, Kaminker’s unanticipated cardboard creation had evolved into an arresting twelve-foot-high tour de force of narrative whimsy and political commentary inspired by the symbols and monuments of the Eternal City, undergirded by references to Mother Russia and spurred to new heights by Fellows’ contributions. His towering tableau features mythological subjects vivified in high relief, placed in anachronistic settings and imbued with playful irreverence—from the prostrate business man suckling on the She Wolf to the bull horn-wielding charioteer labelled “The Unknown Organizer.” It’s an ingenious iconographic mash-up shaped by a mordant wit and an X-Acto blade and held together with a decoupage of odes, musical scores and masking tape.
Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was a long tradition of Russian poets seeking inspiration and working in Rome (among them Gogol and Dostoyevsky), and from St. Petersburg in particular, which was culturally European. The poet Joseph Brodsky (1981 Resident) advocated for a Russian Academy in Rome modeled on AAR that would revive the tradition following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see his idea come to fruition. Following Brodsky’s death in 1996, a group of his friends established the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund to sustain the vision. Since then the fellowship has expanded to include nurturing composers, architects, and visual artists as well as writers. The 2011 Brodsky Fellowships are supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
In addition to Rome Prize Fellows, the Academy has long hosted recipients of fellowships and awards offered by educational and cultural organizations around the world. These Affiliated Fellows reside at the Academy for periods from four weeks to eleven months and, as demonstrated by Kaminker’s example, add significantly to the diversity of the artistic and scholarly community.
While Kaminker was unaware of the Brodsky fellowship before learning he was its most recent recipient, he’s known of the power of the Academy model since his first exposure to art—surprisingly, through his father’s work as the director of a nuclear physics research institute. “The KGB allowed scientists more intellectual freedom as a way to get intellectual ‘food’ from other fields for inspiration,” he explains. “My father used institute funds to create an academy of sorts and invited poets, musicians, and artists. He had to prove to the KGB that this time spent with no practical application to scientists’ jobs was worthwhile. He took coworkers outside their high-pressure work environments and provided them with lectures, art, meals. After three weeks they noticed these people were more creative and took risks—and it proved the practical results of ‘useless things.’ Now this principle is commonly accepted.”
After attending art school in St. Petersburg, Kaminker worked in the Russian art industry for many years as a realist. Today his preferred mediums are bronze, wood, and granite, and his yard is littered with examples of his prolific output. “I don’t have a particular style—mine is abstract, realistic, and humorous. Mainly I’m flexible.”
This is his first work in cardboard. “It’s light, cheap and easy to cut—it’s also not forever, which I like. It grew slowly over three months and the studio dictated its size. If I had had four months, it would be different.... It’s a pity I must destroy it before I leave, but it’s also good. If it’s a pity, then it means something and has value.” His favorite part of the column? “I like the furnace at the bottom because it’s a necessary part of a Russian house.”
Notwithstanding his prodigious creative talents (and the fact that he helped establish an “artists’ village” by squatting among some abandoned old homes outside St. Petersburg, where he still resides), Kaminker insists he’s not an artist. “Michelangelo was an artist, I’m a craftsman who invents and makes real things.” And he doesn’t mince words when it comes to defending his technique. “The lives of young people are increasingly informed by screens and they lack three-dimensional vision,” he asserts. “Even 3D modeling can’t provide a sense of volume, perspective, texture, and materiality,… There’s a war going on today between the real and the fake, and I’m among the last warriors of the real standing with a stone ax against the digital tanks.… Someone has to save traditional practices.”
For Kaminker, eating dinner with different people every evening was a distinct highlight of his Academy experience. “I’ve never seen so many happy people in one place since my days in youth pioneer camp. The difference being that we were all young and stupid and here everyone is clever and smart. In Russia if you get sixty-five people together the mood is sadness.” He also found his fellowship inspiring on another level. “If egocentrics like artists can live in a community and get along, then there’s hope for the world. It proves that peace is possible.”
What’s next for this irony-embracing craftsman warrior with Neolithic leanings and a website? “It’s time to go back home,” he opined on the eve of his pickled herring– and vodka-punctuated sendoff in December. “Being Russian is hard, but someone has to do it,” he noted pointing out that many of his artistic comrades emigrated following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Russia is funny like a Charlie Chaplin movie where cakes are being thrown in everyone’s face. But you have to be ready, because one’s coming for you too. If you can still laugh when the cake is on your face, then you can survive.”
Dmitry Kaminker’s Rome Sustainable Tower Project will be on display at the AAR Gallery for one day only on Wednesday, February 29, 2012.