The sculptor who makes the rocks sing

Pinuccio Sciola, a renowned Italian sculptor who sadly passed away two months ago, was one of those artists who used sound in his sculptures, and even performed them. Often called “the man who makes the rocks sing”, his most famous works are the Pietre Sonore, or the Sounding Stones: and sculptures, often made of limestone, that he used to play with his hands or with small rocks.

His ideas on these sounding stones were quite spiritual: he believed that stones have a voice that has always been there, but he only helps to release it. His limestone sculptures for example make a sound of a “liquid quality” when played, because geologically seen limestone is just fossillized water. As if the memory of water was imprisoned inside the stone during glaciation. An interesting way of looking at the world which might be very abstract, but helps one to think about long timespans.

To the rational minds that are sceptical of his ideas, Sciola only had only one thing to say: “I want to remind those who are sceptical that all the information circulated today by computers and digital networks in the end is stored and elaborated using infinitesimal silicon crystals.”

Economy of our post socialist culture

State and Municipality (and recently NGO distributing municipal and state funds) are both the largest producer (through the act of entrustment) and the largest customer of art of professional quality or of imitating professional standards quality. This is a self-sufficient process that aims at presenting a non creative environment as normal and "market". The gallery is the place of presentation. The work done is a selection on a given topic, a presentation the collected and its reporting in the media. This system functions due to the regulations of the economic team, which first grants money and then approves the cost. The comparative analysis of the work done has demonstrated that the results of money spent are comparable with international practice and from this perspective the presentation is art. I'll tell you - once in the gallery it is art. Otherwise might be a hellhole. It’s called Social art. Not long ago such an act was "curated" in the National gallery.

The only difference between this "creative work" and normal is that in this post-socialist practice, the creative result and the artistic contribution that should be the result from a creative process is defined preliminary before the creative act, its result is set as known and comparable with international practice.

It is the same like to discover America before you left and to prove before departure, it has been discovered like that (there is no risk whether it will be discovered, it is already discovered) and there is no risk to venture. What if you don’t discover it, you will get fired - right? Wife, children, family? The absurdity is obvious, but the only real existing practice carried out by the state and municipalities is the management of  cultural process. The requested expert potential is the economic skills to budget "some money" and later lawfully from an audit perspective, not from art perspective, that money to be absorbed and spent.

A funny story some years ago beautifully illustrates the practice. The organizers of an International Music Festival decided to steal (to absorb lawfully :) one million lev for the festival. To get away with that, the  Accounting division of the budgeting organization should match the amount with fees and expenses of the world-famous violinist, the chief economist should have at least heard about, in order the overspending to sound convincing. They wrote down that Yehudi Menuhin would be performing. The money was allocated. The failure occurred when a famous journalist, a month before the concert of Yehudi Menuhin called him into his office to ask for an interview prior to his arrival in Bulgaria. Surprised that the Maestro has not even heard that there is such a festival, let alone that he should participate. The journalist, outraged, reported the case in the newspaper.

You will ask what happened with the money!? Well, the money has already been allocated! They absorbed them :)

For the auditors they wrote that the maestro was sick and so the concert failed. There is a subtle detail. Budgeting in Bulgaria is precedent-based - meaning if you got away with that once, it becomes a successful practice for insiders. Did you get it? I will tell you. The next year it was no longer necessary to seek a world famous violinist for the scheme. They just copied last year's budget.

Medium level culture budgets are copied with variations of at least forty years. There is no art market in Bulgaria as you can see. There is a market of schemes. Do not expect the so cultivated experts of spaces representative for the authority, such as city and state galleries, to organize market, let alone fight for your art at the international market.

The boss of the Institute of Biotechnology, whose Design department I created, was very funny. He was completing the budget as follows "Over the coming year we will create three ingenious discoveries, fifteen talented innovations and about forty standard scientific contributions in our research activity." After this bombastic statement the figures were filled in. He had them, because he was our guy. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Seven years after the October Revolution Ilf and Petrov have already described it. So there over the counter of the pavilion a notice in red letters is displayed: BEER ONLY FOR UNION MEMBERS.

Socialism is one of the greatest achievements of our civilization. In socialism selection is done according to belonging, not according to qualities. This freedom of natural selection and the accompanying freedom from responsibility for the consequences of the actions – that is the victory of Socialism over Common Sense.

And "common sense" as Einstein says is the accumulated prejudices up to 18 years. Take it easy. The party is going on. You are such losers! Take your bucks and listen to what daddy has to tell you!?

Now seriously. The creator in this kind of creativity apparently is not the artist. The artist is only the performer. He is salary remunerated – looking for the budget. He has the position named artist. In fact, he is a contractor and not an author, he only performs works by already known artists. These works are usually foreign, and their subjects, time, work and ideas have nothing to do with our reality – therefore they are politically and socially toothless. But as in the Yehudi Menuhin scheme you can complete with quasi creative, pseudo cultural activity the European standards for culture expenditures in a normal European country.

Money for AUTHORS  - artists, playwrights, writers and any other art creators is not provided. Right, uh? Write something to change the pattern! And moreover culture dominates the minds. It is not just a tool of the authority, it is authority itself. The rest is administration. We will import culture. From abroad. The proper culture. Not ours. We with our own resources, we reproduce foreign potential. Foreign creativity. And we'll be just performers. Elegant, isn’t it?!

Culture and Freedom are natural human rights. Culture is generating and cultivating of values ​​and their free exchange. The only real capital are the ideas and creativity.

The entrepreneur is a person whose ideas and practices create opportunities. The artist is an innovative entrepreneur who has the potential to continually generate opportunities. Realization of potential is the economy of culture. Culture of the economy. Art is personal contact with the Spirit and the Truth, which we can experience together, which is Culture.

Have you got 5 stotinki? Look at the coin from one side  - there is a picture – it is called edge. There is a digit on the other side. Without the image, the digit does not cost anything. The image represents authority, within whose patrimony the standard of value exchange ​​is secured. Value is Culture. Culture is authority. The authority defines the objectives "evaluating" them. A digit is quantitative, not qualitative measure of comparability with other value. The free exchange of comparable values ​​is the foundation of our society. Without culture and without freedom it is impossible.

Varna Montmartre

There was a time when the world was ordered. Do you get it? Yes? The working class, there was no other, the rest were liquidated and expropriated, was falling into two categories: men and women. Those “ drugari and drugarki” for their part were two categories – workers and peasants.  “ It is a good thing that on 9^th September workers were those who took over the authority and not the peasants – the Director of the Biotechnology Institute whose design department I created was saying – as I am now a scientific worker and otherwise I would have been a scientific peasant!”

Art had the task assigned by the party to present these basic notions of life in a realistic manner and with high from excitement face expressions and compositions. Is it clear?! So ... that is how the world looked through the life-affirming eyes of colleague Vera Moukhina back in 1975.

Nonetheless Varna has always been an open city. Sea, tourists, smuggling .. you can not nail the windows shut. And the feeling and the urge towards a more colorful, more free and spontaneous way of living and creating art, was constantly sprouting in every way. It was a natural process. No matter how many generations of white sheep you paint red – there will always be white born.

White sheep between our colleagues were held up with ignorance into the mainstream of the figure and realism, but trends of constructivism, expressionism and surrealism via formal experiments forced their way through. The figure broke into a collage of unrelated realistic pieces and the composition from static and parade became "more so." "More so," is the term that comes to replace the lack of conceptual and theoretical thinking through associations. The other term was "more vigorous" However, this clearly identifiable trend has changed art view in the country from Socialist to Associative Realism. The experiment spirit was lost out of control and had at least to be far from Sofia ... Varna turned into this free place.

Varna Montmartre  was his spontaneously arisen - and so natural medium. In this direction a door open to normal professional world has evolved, far away from Sofia – the door of the true normal art of Varna International Graphic Bienniale. The members of the spontaneous community of Varna Montmartre became its natural leaders and organizers. The wall (The Iron Wall) was pierced under control. In Sofia they knew that the time of the Potsdam agreement was expiring, that changes would come and had to be immortalized with monuments, while the new sprouts that in 10 years would lead the New Age were being patronized. 10 years before the Perestroika.

You think I imagine stories. It’s True. However Mirjana Basheva came in my garage to talk, six months after her father was killed. Her father had created a new economic model and it was being tested like Texim. An alternative to the socialist economy. Yes. Texim bank as you know it now. But we did not know it at the time. The authority-holders knew it. The authority holders were ordering monuments. Monuments in Varna looked like that:

Monument of Bulgarian – Soviet friendship

Alyosha Kafedjiisky and Evgeni Baramov Varna, 1975

Their sculptors had the right of a large sculpture hall, and we without the rights were renting garages in proximity to the City Market. (Business itself after the coup emerged from garages located at almost the same place). I was the youngest - I was only 21. Petio Marinov, Joro Lechev and Kolio Nikolov, were already serious artists and men in their 26-27 years. Graduates of the University of Tarnovo and discriminated by Sofia Academy had also found shelter in the garages. Later Mitko Traychev came from Moscow and brought the Underground and Jazz with high professional international standards, and with him Mary Zafirkova. Maria did come from Prague. This spontaneous community grew like a snowball and marked the direction towards free – even though it was not yet free. Or at least not free in the meaning we understand it now. Only at that time in our garages the sound of Miles Davis was played and not "Podmoskovnie vechera." That is where I created my debut work "Seated Figure". 1979.

1979. My father was seized at the border. He was sentenced for 12 years. 150 days he was kept in "odinochka" in the basement of the General Directorate of Milizia. Do you know what odinochka means? It is an underground concrete room the sizes of 1.50 x 1.50 x 1.50m. A bucket. A mug. Beaten two or three times a week. With a bag full of sand – the shot causes internal bleeding but there are no external traces. Exquisite work, right? "One third did not make it out – my father told me years later – We were tied on a double ladder, arms and legs stretched and they were striking us in the stomach."

1979. I got married. I created “Seated figure”. I received invitations  for my solo exhibition in Athens. From the City Hall. Because I did not have rights, institutions prosecuted me. They seriously prosecuted me. A kind of a paid training :)

You have studied what comes next in art history. After seven years together with Lubo Prahov, we succeeded to realize this exhibition. It crossed the border in a sealed wagon. 7 years of adventures. Not an asylum. A Camp. The socialist camp.

The Garagists,

who later founded Vulcan:

Mitko Traychev
Maria Zafirkova
Dobrinka Banova
Kolio Nikolov
Joro Lechev
Venko Ivanov
Petio Marinov
Vesso Dimov
Toni Ignatov
Stoycho Nikiforov
Kiril Yanev
Todor Tachev

I met Joro Lechev a few months ago.

Hugs. Joy. We talked about the beginning of contemporary art in Bulgaria. The scandal with my exhibition in 1982 is considered as the beginning point!

A scandal cannot be the beginning of something meaningful – a scandal would launch scandals!

-          There is no way, Joro, to talk about contemporary art without Mitko Traychev!

-          Of course there is no way!, Joro replied angrily.

Did you get it? Take notes. Contemporary art is not a system of provocations and show parallel to the Normal Art as taught and practiced in our country. Do not be surprised. Basics and terminology of academic from that time are not yet lived over. I integrated in a museum exposition the work of socialist philosopher and ideologist Academician Todor Pavlov titled "Einstein or Engels? Judge for yourself. " Edition of BAN from 1955. They are still studying Art as Fine Art. You think this is all past. History. No, alas.

I went to see Mitko Traychev recently and told him about our conversations with Joro and my desire to dedicate the first exhibition in club-gallery Sculpture Park Varna to the garagistes. We remembered who were they and when. I told him that Joro has kept an article from 1977 published in the newspaper "Narodno delo" entitled "Varna Montmartre." You saw it foregoing. Can you imagine what impulse contained the title at that time? And can you imagine how it looks now in the Institute of Art Study?

Here's the gallery. It is still under construction.