“Ėto odna kaša”: Word as Image in Work by Dmitrij Prigov

Moscow conceptualism was the most important Russian art movement of the late twentieth century, and Dmitrii Prigov is usually identified as one of its major proponents. Yet the most significant aspect of Russian conceptualism – its verbal texts – has received less attention from critics than merited. This is particularly noticeable in critical approaches to the work of Prigov, who objected to the term conceptualism, criticized the dominant literary model for unofficial pictorial art, and insisted on the equivalence of his visual and verbal works. Such assertions make clear the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to encompass both the visuality of Prigov's verbal creations and the textuality of his pictorial works. A critical approach that discusses Prigov's work in the more congenial context of postmodern art helps avoid the outdated model of the poet as a lonely artist defending an unassailable truth that Prigov himself rejected. Prigov emphasized the importance of the pictorial arts in his transition away from the reigning “archaic, frozen cultural atmosphere” that produced an artistic ideal more “typical of Russian literature from the 19th century” than appropriate to late-Soviet reality. To honour Prigov's recognition of that dilemma and to account for his assertion that in his work the visual and the verbal are “odna kasha”, we must focus first on his multivalent word and its collusion in an on-going conversation about art.