Playing Against the Rules

Released in 2009, James Cameron's Avatar used psychedelic iconography to engage the challenging themes of man-machine symbiosis and mixed reality. In this film, Cameron shifted emphasis from the interaction of real and virtual worlds to the contemplation of the splendor of imaginary universes. The unfathomable solidity and totality of the Cameronian effect of immersion into an alternate dimension by means of machines that resemble MRI scanners put an end to the cyberpunk era of The Matrix where even the Nebuchadnezzar ship was 'a marriage between man and machine'1. In the pre-Avatar age, the ripped-up belly of reality, studded with sockets and braided with wires, symbolized the fragility of existence — be it the palace of the human mind or a bodily form of its creation running amok. Moreover, the reality of Homo sapiens itself, compromised by the literary traditions of sci-fi and dystopia (and the development of reciprocal surveillance technologies) ceased to have its own visual value. The tapering of value-based perception of (thus far) tangible reality is comparable to the original art tradition declining as it yielded to the fact of overwhelming reproduction, especially the digital culture that devalues uniqueness as the main criterion of the original.

Against this cultural backdrop, ten years after the inception of the Avatar era, the Petersburg artist Gregori Maiofis has created his photographic project [Mixed Reality]. For the uninitiated, this artwork may appear as a Rabelaisian feast, an apophatic carnival—a rebellion against the plastic iconography of symbiosis between creation and construction сonstituting a beautiful legend for the future, with the rebel artist as hero. However, a retrospective look at the artist's path reveals his engagement of various subjects before [Mixed Reality] was brought to the forefront.

The style of Gregori Maiofis — rightfully described as 'a brilliant story-teller’2 — formed gradually and is based on the contrast between profane subject and highbrow art. Bears appear prominently in Maiofis's oeuvre and Russian lubok3 would be a more conventional way to represent them than academic history painting or even realistic genre painting (see prints of the 17th–19th centuries: The Bear and the Goat, The Hard-Working Bear, The Hunter Stabs the Bear). Son of an artist, grandson of architects, Gregori Maiofis was brought up in his father's engraving studio and the life-drawing classes of the Academy of Arts in Saint-Petersburg4. In view of this, the dance between the bear and the academic tradition is not unnatural, but, on the contrary, follows from the visual school embraced by Maiofis (Maiofis's stories about the bear and the ballet dancer that first spring to mind are rather lubok—A Taste for Russian Ballet, In Time a Bear May Even Be Taught to Dance etc.).

The artist's approach to painting and video-art was connected with deconstruction of the realistic school through denial of its form. However, when Maiofis turned to photography twenty years ago, he accepted its hyper-realism as expressed the capacity to resist identification with a depicted object and become an apparently realistic self-sufficient entity. The likeness is doubled and thus translated into awareness of the gap between object and artwork (between the original and its reflection), which results in the recognition of hypothetically existing new meanings built into the image by the artist. This effect, exaggerated and slow-moving like contredanse, underpins Maiofis’ success. His photographs are not “taken,” but rather printed in a sensual and dense manner — the surface of a print draws the viewer’s attention and prolongs their interaction with the fable. This breathing hand-craftedness of the artwork can even outshine the story line and become the subject of aesthetic experience itself, as in abstraction. As with the telling of jokes in an enlightened society, the fable is valued not only for itself but for the intonation, artistry, and capacity to be both concise and expressive.

In his new series Gregori Maiofis turns to the modern history of mixed reality headsets symbolizing comfort and escape from the real world. Like the suits of armor of mythological times, the modern helmet becomes a conductor of the dream world, more sensual and welcome than physical contacts of the first order. While they may be disquieting, such gadgets have become objects of desire for masses of people. [Mixed Reality] plays with the paradoxical intrusion of computer games and lexicon into our lives.

This project—a mix of 19th century style and high-tech objects that are futuristic even now — was born via the interface of photography’s technical detachment and the delicacy of the picturesque print surface. Gregori Maiofis plays with Victorian staged photography (his didactic piece No Headset—No Reality is reminiscent of Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson (1858) as well as sketches of the elderly reminiscent of When the Day’s Work is Done (1877) by the same British artist), but, contrary to photographic artists of the mid-19th century, Maiofis succeeds using single-frame productions. And yet, the undoubted resemblance to staged photography of the golden age permits this contemporary artist to wrap his work the refined silks of the past while presenting a powerful criticism of today's world.

[Mixed Reality] leads Maiofis as a self-evolving story leads a writer. He sees potential scenes for the projects in his immediate environment, hears phrases suggestive of [Mixed Reality], holds castings among friends and random people, checks that they are a fit for his staged mini-performances, and chooses successful mise-en-scenes for the future works. Paradoxical as it may seem, artists in images staged by Maiofis play-act themselves, models are models, and even the elderly shooters, with and without AR-goggles, are fans of firearms and shooting. The staging of some compositions seems complex beyond belief: who on earth would get a rider dressed in a suit of armor and where does this maiden with an arrow come from? In the world of virtual substitutions it would be easy to imagine that we see nothing but a simulacrum drawn by an unknown artist and appropriated by a photographer. But this is not the case. As in his previous works with bears—the artist used live animals which subtly deepened the dual impression of the absurdity/reality of every scene— every characters in these new, complex images are authentic. For how long, though? For as long as their authenticity grimly drags a viewer into the artwork's inconceivable space.

Some of the stories in [Mixed Reality] refer to Russian history of the 20th century. Thus, the work Waiting for October Wind is a reference to the social realism artist Mikhail Devyatov and his painting October Wind, one of the most metaphorical images of the revolution, showing Lenin walking alone along the granite parapet. For Soviet viewers contemporary to the artist, the meaning of the image was self-explanatory, because both artist and audience were on the same semantic and historical continuum. October is the month of the Petrograd5 uprising led by Lenin; the place is identified by the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in the background, and the wind over Neva is an allegory of revolution. For a modern viewer familiar with Russian history, a man in an AR headset in the work by Maiofis represents doubt, a challenge to the known historical interpretations of October 1917, and — supposedly — a contemplation of the revolution which invisibly takes place in the here and now. For a modern viewer unaware of the Russian context, Waiting for October Wind is a paradox of withdrawal against a backdrop of the splendid old city of St. Petersburg.

One of the narratives represented by Gregori Maiofis refers to the Russian folklore — a tale of the Frog Princess. (In this folktale, a prince shoots an arrow and sets out on a journey to find it; however, the arrow is returned by a frog which is to become his wife; after the wedding it turns out that the frog is a bewitched princess.) Although this tale is classified in catalogs of folktale types6 as an animal bride theme, the story involving an arrow, a beauty, and a rider is well-known to Russian viewers from childhood, it requires interpretation for others. Following Maiofis’s work, the Russian viewer, like a child, enjoys the archetypal patterns set within the plot of modern computer games. (Thus, one of the variations of the work inspired by the Frog Princess is titled We Met at Previous Level.)

The title In the Populist Mode: Nobody Has More Respect for Ants Then I Do! brings to mind the bombast of a remark by President Trump, while the giant anthill in the forest reminds one of the globe scene from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In the past, only a few Maiofis's works of 2010–2011 were sharp satires on global politics. In most cases the artist directs his irony towards the situation of the world in general without targeting prominent political or cultural personalities or institutions.

In Testing the Self-Gratification Mode Maiofis portrays himself as an anonym and, according to his own words, reconstructs the memories of his school years when Gregori and his classmates were engaged in crafts in similar workshops. Teachers explained the importance of this practice by constructing their own logical context, but from a different perspective — their praising of unskilled physical labor on the eve of the digital age was absurd. In his new project the artist often appears in the background of his elaborate scenes. However, these images are neither self-portraits in the conventional sense nor even a cameo by Gregori Maiofis in [Mixed Reality]. They present an opportunity to recreate the composition in the most accurate way at minimum expense by focusing on the production of a print as the final form of an artwork.

[Mixed Reality] confronts the viewer with the ambiguity of being gratified by the sight of the artist's works — contemplating the surface of original prints or reading the titles while looking at the images. The dichotomy of gratification is greater as compared to his previous projects. The titles are the keys to the semantic field of images. Offering the delight of recognition to both experts in modern gaming slang and those raised on museum originals and art history books, thus making them equal in rights.

At times nothing happens in the images of [Mixed Reality] and we are left trying to guess at what is going on inside the character fused to the augmented reality goggles. (Or is it a virtual reality headset? The two devices are almost identical in design.) The artist himself refers to these headsets or goggles as muzzles, emphasizing that they deprive their owners of identity rendering them submissive to what is transmitted inside the device. Only the title gives us a clue in the form of a dialog between the headset wearers (Who Are You in Real Life? or I Used to Be a Brilliant Dancer) or a meme echoing the depicted situation (Mr. V. is Gazing at Broken Pixels or Retired Couple in Survival Mode). The lexical constructions built by Maiofis are so accurate that the viewer, having read the title, will always see in the image the very subject depicted (and named) by the author. Having fathomed the meme, the viewer becomes a machine, relaying the titles, like a zombie. Without resort to augmented reality glasses, Maiofis shows his audience how the matrix mechanism operates by creating his own matrix of symbiotic links between image and text.

The most dramatic pieces of [Mixed Reality] are likely the most detached and — ostensibly — full of harmony and peace. Two works, Briefing at the Safe Zone and No Headset—No Reality, represent contemporaries in an idyllic landscape so harmonious that is seems to have been produced by artificial intelligence. Only the titles, which stand in contrast to the beauty of nature and the stoic coldness of the characters in headsets, reveal the depth of the action, filling our hearts with sympathy and compassion. In these works, as in no other pieces of this cycle of Maiofis’ work, one can hear De Profundis of the worlds of culture and nature that are subject to the revisions of modern civilization without rules.