Ghost (2008)/ Rostan Tavasiev

On a white plinth lies a multicoloured toy bear; body depressed, sunken and eyeless, from its torn side emerges white stuffing shaped like a released gas or cartoon-genii when first emerging from a lamp. The ‘ghost’ possesses the eyes the stuffed toy no longer has. The eyes are the evidence of sentience and vitality. Given the bombast of a plinth, the toy parodies the state monuments of oppressive regimes - drawing stark comparisons between what is celebrated, what is ignored and what is sanctioned as subject for heartless ridicule.

One cannot extract this work - Ghost (2008) by Rostan Tavasiev, from its context: part of a group show at Paradise Row, London, curated by Maria Baibakova, called Laughterlife, featuring new art from Russia, which in the words of the press release "exemplify the vein of absurdity and black humour that has been an enduring characteristic of Russian culture, from the early 19th century literary works of Gogol, to absurdists writings and theatre of the OBERIU group".

It is through the lens of Russian life and history that the work comes demands reading:

Writer and curator, Andrey Erofeev, in a text about Tavasiev’s practice observes: “Cheap toys were the only things that were never in shortage in the Soviet Union.” He goes on to note “Along with imagery of the communist propaganda industry, toys became the brunt of sarcasm and parody in Russian pop art. But Rostan is far from condemning the lowbrow aesthetics of Chinese consumer goods. His plush heroes do not spoil the world's grace with their ugly shape. On the contrary, it is the world that continually threatens his beloved toys.”

Significantly, Tavasiev depicts the moment of expiration, the ‘spirit’ leaving the body. It is as though this instant had been captured in the moment and frozen in time. A documentary-realist-photographic methodology has been applied to a work that is materially metaphoric. Perhaps this speaks of the quietly political ambitions of the work. It is hard not read the mass produced factory toys as substitutes for the humble, powerless and defenceless in society. These toys are a dominant and recurring motif in his work. From whose point of view are the people presented so? Could it be the oppressors’? People as throwaway consumer products. Or are we viewing how the people, himself included, might tragically have come to see themselves?

Erofeev, writes of ‘the world that continually threatens his beloved toys’ in doing so, he gives the toys an independent existence of their own. Not symbolic of the economically disadvantaged Russian underclass but a parallel existence to our own. As though our world might do damage to his. It suggests Tavasiev has created a mythology of his own, as children do with their toys - a universe away from the one we share with which might echo our own without being a simple 1-to-1 correlative.

Below is an image of a similar, earlier work, Towards Light (2005, fur, sintypon, marble 50 x 20 x 20 cm). The fictive ghost of the toy billows toward the electric light which actually shines, it is not a model of a light bulb (which it could have been), but a functioning real-world one. This speaks of the relationship between the two; Tavasiev’s mythic community of toys and that of ours, of human beings: The bulb, of the real world, illuminates the Tavasiev’s one, and in illuminating this fiction, the light bulb itself is imbued with symbolism, it becomes part of the image as a whole and the artwork, no longer soley a functional object, but truly switched on.