Watch LINGVISTOV Interview with one of the founders of our project Landysh, who talks about beauty, women, growing old, what is art and what is not art, and having a no-poker face.
Asia: This is going to be a very spontaneous… Not even an interview, I wouldn’t call it an interview.
Landysh: It’s going to be like… just a talk, just a regular talk.
A: Do you think you could be good at acting?
L: No, I am absolutely rubbish at acting. Once when I was in the United Stated for the first time, in Ocean City in Maryland, there was this fantastic guy Nickolas. They had a student center, which was very helpful for students to find jobs, to find a place to live. So he talked to me. He liked my English. And he offered me a job in Annapolis, MD. We talked quite a lot during the trip to Annapolis. It was like… I don’t remember how long it was, maybe a forty minutes’ drive to Annapolis. And we talked for quite a long time and after that I even visited his mother. They have these houses where elderly people live. So his mother lived there. She was an incredible woman. Although I didn’t like the place. It was like a cemetery for old people. Though I do understand the whole point of these places. And he told me you would be rubbish at poker, because all your emotions, everything that is going through your mind right now is written all over your face. So I don’t think I would be good at acting.
A: I have this friend of mine. He’s not a regular smoker, a weed smoker. But once in a while he smokes weed. And he writes fantastic short stories under the influence of weed. I know his blog and I am a regular visitor of his blog and this is so incredible. Of course he keeps it a secret, nobody knows about it. But when I read it I really get fascinated, cos you’d never even imagine that such an ordinary guy could be so romantic and so imaginative. That’s why I find it sometimes great to express yourself, to let yourself go. But anyway what is the biggest misconception about you? I guess you already answered this question.
L: Hah, probably!
A: Because my biggest misconception about you was that that you have never ever tried anything!
L: It’s something special about a person, his face, his manner. Sometimes people are so fascinating. And there are those who don’t really pay attention to that, who can look through you and try to understand you by the way you talk, by your ideas. But I still… I get carried away by the charisma of a person, by not what he says, by not what he really is. He can be a bad person! But I still get hooked by his looks, by his sense of style. It’s still the first thing that I pay attention to.
L: I do believe that a woman has to look beautiful. That’s why when I draw people, it’s mostly women. Because I am fascinated by the woman’s beauty, by the lines, by the shapes, how everything is so harmonious about a woman. She doesn’t have to be anorexic…
A: A model, right?
L: Yes, any woman. Today I saw a fantastic girl. She was very young, maybe still at school. You can’t say that she’s thin. And I tried to imagine her in some modern looks. You know we have this gothic… But everything about her was so natural: this wavy hair, sunglasses and some kind of a blouse with flower patterns. Everything was so womanly. And you can understand that the only thing a woman has to be is to be more natural.
A: But you still like combining something that is thought to be not combinable. Like feminine beauty and something husky like, you know we were talking about this off-roader «Patriot» car that you wanted to drive. That is something you can’t combine: a woman, thin and beautiful and this huge tractor!
L: Yeah, I think that you have to work on a contrast. These are certain quirks which make you interesting, make life more interesting.
L: If we talk about old age, I think the most interesting part of my life will start when I grow old.
A: That’s when you will get to keep on going!
L: Yeah! With old people it’s so cool that you don’t really care what other people think about you.
A: You have to make a tattoo.
L: I will make a tattoo and it is not going to be a single tattoo. It is going to be like a whole… maybe not a whole body covered with tattoos. But I will get a tramp stamp, maybe I will cover one whole arm with tattoos…
A: A shoulder?
L: A shoulder. Maybe like a rose over here. A red rose. I’m gonna dye my hair.
A: What about piercing? It also looks good on old women.
L: Yeah, I agree. And I think I will be more stylish when I grow old. I like when old women look stylish.
A: So you’re developing backwards.
L: I hope so!
A: Right now you are quite strict when it comes to style. But then you’ll become more open to new ideas.
L: Cos you don’t really care! You don’t care about what people think about you.
L: We went to a shop for women of a certain age: from forty… it depends on a woman of course. But from forty and higher. And when we entered it, it was so sad. It was like… clothes for housewives. But not housewives of a sort that you see in other countries like in the United States, in Great Britain, in Europe. But here, local provincial Russian type of housewives. For them clothes have to be comfortable, because they have children to attend to, homes, they have to go to work. It just has to be comfortable. It has to be large maybe. And this provincial type of glamour: a lot of sparkly things…
A: Embroidery?
L: Embroidery, yeah. Flowers. And it looks like a concert dress actually. And I always remember my teachers at school, at my musical school, because that’s a king of thing they used to wear. And I felt that it was so sad that women of that age give up on themselves. They don’t want to look beautiful. They are no longer women actually. Maybe they don’t care about other men, they have their husbands. They have to be loyal to their husbands. But you still have a husband! And he cares about how the woman looks. You don’t have to let yourself go like that. You still have to be beautiful, it can be just for yourself, to feel good about yourself. And I think it’s an essential part of a woman’s life. To look beautiful and to think that you look beautiful. To feel comfort in how you look… not for other people! Who cares about other people?! But for yourself. That’s why I felt sad that women here in Russia — of course not all of them — they still lose this sense of style, the sense of their own beauty.
L: I don’t think that you have to fall in love with the person just because he inspires you at some kind of an artistic level. You gave me that link to an interview with Zemfira where she says that she falls in love with a person not for his looks but his talent. I think it’s quite bad. First, it is a lot of pressure for a person you fall in love with. He constantly feels that pressure to inspire you all the time.
A: To never let you down.
L: You have to love a person for who he is. And if you find that person, you have to stick with him or her. But living with a person just because he inspires you, I don’t think it is right. You have to feel comfortable around the person. You have to feel good around this person. Actually I have this student of mine, Alexander from Moscow. And we talk for two hours sometimes on different subjects: travel, relationships. And he gave me a pretty good advice about relationships. First of all there has to be what we call self-reflection, where you have to reflect on your own behaviour. You have to constantly be in control of yourself. Try to look at yourself from the eyes of that person. It’s my favourite subject of empathy. You have to try to put yourself into other person’s shoes. I think if all of us were able to be empathetic all the time it would be a key to everything bad which is happening in this world. Once you understand what the person feels, his suffering, when you can put yourself in his place, it would be no longer possible to have wars, conflicts…
A: Suicides.
L: Yeah. And maybe world would become less selfish. And we ARE selfish. So in a relationship… let’s return to the subject, his advice: you have to be more reflective and there has to be humour. In everything there has to be humour. Because humour, jokes, trying to find something humorous about the situation — it resolves a lot of conflicts.
A: Alright, coming back to art. I want to stick to this subject. Can you define the word «art»? Why something is art and something is not art? Where is this difference?
L: I remember that I wrote an article at the university for some kind of a conference. We had this brilliant «Philosophy club». And I wrote an article about what is art and what is not art. Of course my ideas changed a lot. But according to the dictionary art is something that a man creates with his own hands and it is something that has never existed before in the world. So it is something unique. This definition doesn’t say anything about the quality of this art. Who defines the quality of an art?
A: The artist himself. So you are a perfectionist?
L: Yeah, people blame me for being a perfectionist. Actually yesterday I had a conversation with our mutual friend Tatyana who is also pretty creative, pretty crazy about…
A: Pretty and creative!
L: Pretty and creative! Exactly. So we talked about art. Actually the best thing you create is when you again stop caring about how people will react to your art; when you take a pencil in your hand, take a piece of paper and just start drawing whatever you want. And this is the best thing. The best things come on a piece of paper, on canvas… Maybe you’re musician, you write a piece of music. When you don’t think about the reaction of people to that piece of music, visual art that you create, this is where the magic starts actually.
L: We are so conservative in art. When you go to Tretyakovskaya Gallery, the first room that you enter… what’s his name again? this artist… Borovikovskiy, Boro… something with Boro. And they are mostly absolutely similar portraits of some high…
A: It’s about the technique. There’s nothing creative.
L: Exactly. And they are all the same. Everything is the same. I hate Tratyakovskaya Gallery. I hate Hermitage in Saint-Petersburg. This naturalism, realism in art. And Russians know certain standards in art. And they do not accept anything which goes beyond these standards. I heard so many people who dislike the modern art. I love modern art. I am fascinated by it. When people take something and make something new, something very interesting. Some people would say there is no idea, there is no message in that thing…
A: Who cares as long as it’s attractive!
L: It’s creative. It’s something people make with their own hands. It’s interesting. That’s why when I was in the United States I tried to go to… And right now whenever I am outside Russia I try to go to modern galleries, exhibitions of modern artists. In the art scene everything modern fascinates me; it’s so exciting when you see people who really try to do something. And actually in the United States it is at the very height. The art scene there I think… the United States are right now an example for the rest of the world.
L: Russia lives in the very long past. As I always say in Russia and in Europe, maybe not in Europe, in Russia, let’s stick with Russia — In Russia everything that was interesting stopped at the end of the nineteenth century. Anything that was interesting stopped with Peredvizhniki. But after that it was mostly copying of what was happening in Europe and the USA. And people still copy. As Matthias said it’s because of the revolution, because of the Soviet Union. We were oppressed. And we still have this oppressed mind. They did not allow people to be creative. Communism was about people being all the same. Even in art you have a standard and you have to stick with the standard. You do not go beyond the standard. It was absolutely no-no. And it’s still like that. Maybe right now we start to have more creative people who want to make something new. But it’s still developing.
L: I do not pretend to be an aficionado of modern art. But I think in Europe they still live in the past. There was something interesting at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the United States — there everything started from the beginning of the twentieth century and it’s still going on and I adore everything that is happening right now there. And it’s very sad about Russia. But I hope we’re moving forward. And if we do not have a major brain leakage — it is always like that with Russia, but the government is to blame I think so, — everything is going to be good.
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