Van Gogh’s selfportrait with a cuted ear in the form of a birdhouse and a bird feeder

The “Portrait of Van Gogh with a Cut-Off Ear in the Form of a Birdhouse and Bird Feeder” is made of plywood, a poor material for visual propaganda and home crafts. This portrait is reminiscent of both cubist models and the action of Pyotr Pavlensky “Separation” (2014), who cut off his earlobe in protest against the use of psychiatry in politics. The artist touchingly cares about the utilitarian nature of his works. In the large-scale plywood “Landscape with the Permanence of Time by Salvador Dali and the Skull of the Horse Prophetic Oleg,” the skull can serve as a house for amphibians. A wooden stool chained to the landscape includes the viewer in the work, not allowing him to go beyond its visibility. A change in the point of view on art is what the contemporary artist inherited from previous eras. He can pray to the "Road Suprematist Triptych", transform "Morning in a Pine Forest" into a lamp, electrify "Black Square", freeze "Boyce's Rubber Fat Chair" with a refrigerator light bulb, realizing that "Everything has its time". This is the name of a series of vanitas, played out with plastic skeletons on the theme of unmistakable works of art, be it "The Horrors of War" by Goya, "Girl on a Ball" by Picasso or "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" by Mukhina.

The artist is a viewfinder, his goal is to direct the point of view. The portable "Viewfinders" that Kozin has been making since the time of "The New Stupid" offer to see the artist's dream of great and pure art through the prism of visual images and the point of intersection of coordinates. This dream is shattered and argues with the famous statement of Theophile Gautier, who defended the ideal of pure art: “Only that which is absolutely good for nothing is truly beautiful; everything useful is ugly, because it serves to satisfy some need, and all human needs are disgusting and vile, just like his feeble, wretched nature. The most useful place in the house is the outhouse.” It was Kozin’s rubber toilet that recently ended up in the collection of the Russian Museum, which houses the works of his heroes - the artists of the Russian avant-garde.

Text: Olesya Turkina