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Academy of Lagado (Sheet 3 from the Graphic Cycle "Jonathan Swift's Kingdom of Absurdity")

Alexander Aksinin

Basic information

ID: Г-IV-3641
Author: Alexander Aksinin
Name: Academy of Lagado (Sheet 3 from the Graphic Cycle "Jonathan Swift's Kingdom of Absurdity")
Date of creation: 1978
Technique: etching
Material: imprint on paper
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 29.5 x 29

Additionally

Type: printmaking
Provenance: Purchased and kept in permanent storage,1983

Information about author

Author: Alexander Aksinin
Artist's lifetime: 1949–1985
Country: the Ukrainian SSR, now Ukraine
Biography: Alexander Aksinin was a graphic artist and one of the brightest representatives of Lviv nonconformist culture. He was born on October 2, 1949, in Lviv, in the family of a military cartographer and railroad official of the Lviv railway. Between 1963 and 1966, he received his art education at the evening art school in Lviv. Between 1967 and 1972, the artist continued his studies at the Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute, where he specialised in Graphic Art. After graduation, Aksinin served in the Soviet Army, where he participated in designing the exposition of the Military History Museum. Between 1974 and 1977, he worked as an art designer in an industrial design office. In 1977, he left the official service and began to work exclusively as a freelance artist. The apartment of Aksinin and his wife, the writer and artist Engelina (Gelya) Buriakovska (1944–1982), became one of the Lviv centres of informal art; the first home exhibitions were held here. Alexander and Gelya were well acquainted with the representatives of the cultural underground of Moscow and Leningrad, particularly with Dmytro Prihov, Viktor Kryvulin, Illia Kabakov, and others. They also had friendly relations with Baltic artists, such as Tõnis Vint, with whom Alexander developed a close rapport and Polish ones. Since 1974, Aksinin participated in group exhibitions; in 1979, his first personal exhibition was organised in Tallinn with the assistance of the artist Tõnis Vint. In the early 1980s, the poet Viktor Kryvulin helped to arrange several of Aksinin's "kvartirnik" exhibitions in Leningrad and Moscow.
On May 3, 1985, on his way back from Tallinn, Alexander Aksinin died in a plane crash over Zolochiv near Lviv. During his lifetime, the artist created 343 etchings, about 200 sheets of uniquely drawn graphics (drawings in watercolour, Indian ink, and gouache, including prints), as well as five paintings. 27 volumes of the artist's diaries for the period from 1965 to 1985 contain more than 200 sketches and a large number of drawings-ideas; they are partially publicly available on the artist's website. In 2015, Alexander Aksinin's etching series "Boskhiana" was included in the permanent exposition of the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. The works are stored in the Lviv National Art Gallery, the Estonian Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of Ukraine. In 1981, Alexander Aksinin wrote his laconic autobiography for an article by Viktor Kryvulin, in which he consciously contrasted his inner world with external events, combining the facts of his biography with his own artistic and metaphysical experience: "In 1949, a seemingly russian man was born in the seemingly European city of Lviv. Orthodox Christian. In 1972 – received a diploma from the Polygraphic Institute in the field of Graphic Art. In 1977 – the first revelation with a concomitant sense of time. In 1981 – the second revelation with a concomitant sense of eternity. In 1979 – the first solo exhibition in Tallinn. In 1981 – the second one in Poland. That is all."

Object description

Alexander Aksinin's legacy of graphic works contains a series of etchings based on some literary works, one of which is Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1977–1978). In this series (as in others, such as Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland"), Aksinin often turned the texts into part of an image. The artist's creative world is characterised by a condensed intellectual atmosphere full of "codes of aesthetic information". The art critic Mykhailo Sokolov noted that the artist introduced into his works a subject line, which was to symbolically reproduce not a separate part of the text but to give the image of the text as a whole, as well as to serve as a sign and matrix of an illustrated verbal work.
The work is the third sheet of 11 etchings from the graphic cycle "Jonathan Swift's Kingdom of Absurdity" and one of the earliest works by the artist. The third chapter of the book "Gulliver's Travels" written by Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish satirist of the 17th–18th centuries, became the object of the author's allusion. Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of "Gulliver's Travels", was landed by pirates on the island of Balnibarbi, which the king of the flying island of Laputa ruled. In Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi, the king had invested a great fortune on building an Academy of Projectors so that it shall contribute to the nation's development through research; however, the projectors' experiments and bizarre inventions are pointless, and ambitious "researchers" just dwell in their unreal world. Alexander Aksinin's composition is arranged in a circle-sphere, which looks like a pumpkin in this engraving. At the top, the fruit's rind is presented as an ocean space in which three sailboats were lost, referring to the fact that the hero came to the island on a ship. The peduncle resembles the curved Leaning Tower of Pisa topped with a hat (an allusion to poorly built houses in Lagado).
In the middle of the pumpkin is a vertically cut slice with its cavity forming the compositional emphasis in the work. A miniature character, sitting on the edge of the ocean surface, lowers down a fishing rod with a bucket filled with some substance into the cavity; the shadow of the bucket reflects in the form of an oval on the surface of a cutout slice. Empty bowls fly down diagonally below. This mass of bowls falls, starting from the left side of the sphere, where the dishes are depicted against the background of a cross-section of the pumpkin. In the cross-sections on the left, bizarre cooking processes occur, as evidenced by the meat-minced spiral-type serpentines (distillation of human excretion), coming out from the taps at the top. However, they bear little resemblance to edible substances. Empty pots, knives, and forks scattered on shelves in cross-sections, as well as mice consuming food from the feeder below also testify to some cooking processes. In the far left cross-section, one can see a figure of a man dressed as a nobleman; it is none other than Gulliver, the hero of the novel. The author may associate Gulliver with himself, for the artist's signature A. AKSININ–77 is depicted at the bottom, in the cavity of the cutout slice, next to the sharp-pointed spikes of the pumpkin rind. The phantasmagoric process continues in the pumpkin cross-section shown to the right of the cutout slice. That's where the mass of bowls is flying towards, eventually interspersing with masks and fragments of figures, generally reminiscent of human images, who are seriously engaged in their "research".
The artist "projects" the novel by Jonathan Swift onto the realities of his time, disguising specific nuances in the abyss of intellectual satire of the Anglo-Irish novelist. In this work, the artist imitates the compositional completeness and symbolic basic principles of Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch artist of the 15th–16th centuries.

Inscriptions

At the bottom right under the imprint, there is an author's inscription "A. Aksinin – 78"

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery