Teodor Tezhik (Russia)
Teodor Tezhik is a painter, animator, and cinema designer, famous for legendary films such as Kin Dza Dza!, Accidental Happiness (Slave for Love), Til Ulenspiegel, and The Wife of the Kerosene Man. He has theatrelized film and built sets that could be the envy of realists and modernists. Tezhik associates the former with respect of the spirit of an age past, and the latter with the flourish of style that is becoming an independently valuable artistic reality.
During the years of malaise, when realism held a special position, Tezhik diplomatically balanced his work between the officially accepted style, which, by the way, he sects sincerely, and modernity and modernism.
Then came perestroika...and Teodor Tezhik gave voice to his hooliganism, humor and irony.
Now he not only doesn’t fear such characterizations as «artist-illusionist» or «trick- », but he even provokes such instincts within himself. Tezhik has been rested and captivated by a mania for the huge and has been experimenting with figures in exteriors.
In the beginning of perestroika, he put up a 4-meter high glass pyramid on the Arbat (it looked like a star from the front, and a pyramid from the side). Inside he made a strange socialist construction out of four grand pianos. It moved and made the straining sound of an approaching commuter train. At the bottom, a phrase appeared and disappeared: “The future is here”.
Another of Tezhik’s acts was the monument to Gogol on the boulevard. The artist surrounded the sculpture with dancing Gogols three times the size of a human being made from metal bars. The material had its effect: the clones looked like see through visions, like dissipating ghosts, vanishing into the air. The erection of a temporary monument is absurd in the same way an eternal flame can cease to flicker temporarily. The life of such monuments is meant to be short. The glass star broke into bits when hit by a car. The Gogol’s were removed as soon as they started to rust.
It’s worth remembering one other action of Teodor Tezhik that was perhaps more a civil than an artistic endeavor. When Russia was existing due in great part to material aid from America and Germany, he decided to help the Germans. The action he organized was called Russian Spiritual Aid for Germany. Tezhik gathered several church choirs and organized regular concerts of church music in prisons in southern Germany. He was the first Russian artist to portray a flying Mikhail Gorbachev being taken out of the Kremlin along with the trash on a Berlin state in 1989. Two years later, after Gorbachev’s resignation, German television journalists remembered Teodor Tezhik, the political prophet from Moscow.