Freeze Beuys’ rubber Fat Chair

The artist translates everyday objects from the realm of low to the realm of high, creating monuments to a teapot, a skate, and a razor out of rubber... This tradition originates in the ready-made works of Marcel Duchamp, and Kozin repeatedly refers to this artist, as well as to Picasso, Malevich, Tatlin.…

"High and low. Picasso's guitar with a fly swatter and a mousetrap" demonstrates the principle of alogism, discovered by Malevich in his "Cow and Violin" (1913), when incompatible things combine in one work, and the artist abandons ordinary logic. The mousetrap of Matyushin, Malevich, Filonov, and the Tatlin Trap is a homage to the main characters of the early twentieth century and at the same time a dispute with the avant–garde, which declared war on art. Kozin is a pacifist who disables traps and mousetraps as murder weapons. So, for the "Mousetrap Museum of Modern Art", founded by him in 2000, he bought mousetraps and distributed them to his artist friends to create works, thus transforming the art of the war declared by man to the animal world into art history. Unlike the Mouse Museum (1965-77) by Klas Oldenburg, it is not a heroic Disney mouse that is symbolized, but an instrument of destruction of its living prototype.

"Reconstruction: A Mouse Trap" is a conceptual work and a protest against murder, just like "The Little Pacifist" is a children's shirt made of a car tire, crucified by the sleeves with two mousetraps. The traps and mousetraps placed in the artist's path continue a theme that is end–to-end for Kozin - awareness of his place in the history of art.

Text: Olesya Turkina