Man-Orchestra: Artist’s Monologue

Musikalnoye Obozrenye (Music Review), January 1991

Alexander Tokarev was born in Odessa in 1946. In 1966 he graduated from the Odessa College of Arts and in 1972 from the Fine Arts Faculty of the USSR Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). The artist's works are exhibited in Russian museums and in private collections in France, the United States, and Japan. Tokarev makes easel paintings: landscapes, still-lives, and portraits. He has authored a number of screenplays and worked as a scenographer in movies. Currently his second one-man exhibit is on display in Paris.

“I grew up in a family of artists, so the artistic trade was not something novel to me. I wanted to be a musician, a poet, an actor, a director, and a screen writer. As regards music, I have a complex. At the age of 6 when my ear for music was tested it was pronounced missing, and I didn't get any training in music. Now I regret not being able to read sheet music. But that does not stop me from loving music. My parents often took me to the Odessa Philharmonia and to the opera. Then there was the jazz boom—a strange, distant world with Armstrong's husky voice and Ella Fitzgerald singing. I have an undying love of Chopin. Music often provides a stimulus for my work; when I work I listen to it.

When you become an artist, you have an important issue to resolve. You have to choose your theme, one that will be comfortable and give you a feeling of being in harmony with yourself. In the times of “glorious stagnation” an artist faced a dilemma: to march in tight ranks with others and have a sweet life, or to become a nonconformist. That would not do for me. To remain honest, to be outside politics and above time, to be in the realm of pure art one had to find a third way. This way had abstract themes, and one of them was Music.

I believe that, without knowing the music of Ancient Greece, we can imagine and hear it when looking at the paintings on ancient amphorae and vases. The same is probably true of the epoch of romanticism: composers, artists, poets—all of them are conduits of one circulation system, of one aesthetic spiritual milieu.

When you are navigating a river, you must choose a proper course. No need to fuss, just look around. And I look around and also inside myself and try to hear something, to hear the sounds that are around me and within me. When they agree, something comes out on the canvas.

One of my first paintings was the Farewell Orchestra. It was an attempt to resolve the history theme. A small orchestra (a drummer, a violinist, and a trumpeter) are, as it were, seeing someone off to the battlefield. They are bidding farewell to all those embarking on a lengthy journey into history. Afterwards there were other themes. But every time it was a search for a coloristic, plastic, tonal rhythm, a search for melodies. And at different times it brought different outcomes. In the 70s I wanted to speak very quietly, and I made low-key paintings. I also had a parallel urge to create large works on the scale of a symphony or an opera. They called for a different language, a different involvement with sounds. That was when I painted the largest canvas in my life, two by four meters, the Grand Orchestra. I tried (paradoxical as it may sound) to make a symphony. A grand symphony. A symphony of life and death. A symphony of the cosmos. I tried to do that by depicting the musicians of a large orchestra with its attendant tragedies, the Muses—all the stuff of our lives. I wanted to create something approaching a Judgment Day icon, the Russian interpretation of an Apocalypse icon. A Russian icon, by the way, is very musical and sublime. It always is—strangely—festive.

I used to look down upon people who paint series and cycles, unaware that I was to come to that myself. At first there appeared the Man-Orchestra theme. It was abstract and multifaceted. Once I was getting ready to go to a birthday party. Contemplating a possible gift I decided to make a small bouquet… (After all, each one of us is such a bouquet. Different flowers in it combine to make a whole.) Then it occurred to me that a bouquet was an orchestra, and the flowers became musicians. It may be a naive thought, but it is ripe with plastic possibilities. I tried to make something of it, and the very process, the formulation of the idea, appealed to me. I made several different versions, and the further I worked the more interesting and endless the topic seemed, just like music. The first man-orchestras were like musical etudes. Some depicted jazz musicians—trios and quartets. Sometimes the form was driven by color.

The characters—musicians' heads, somewhat awkward, bold and earless—are not faces, but countenances, signs. Signs of people playing music. In an icon a face is never a face. It is a sign of God.

In the instruments I've also never tried to show every detail. The likeness of an instrument in that context is more like a sign of the sound of that instrument. For example, if you need strings for rhythm, you can show ten thousand times more of them or make them that much thicker than in real life, or the other way around.

Man-Orchestra is a still life of people and instruments as signs.

In the language of music, it was an exploration of the sonata form. And it was possible to search and experiment by introducing various elements. Anything in the world could be refracted through that form. Once in the Brooklyn Museum in New York I saw a Mexican wooden bird sculpture. I liked it a lot and thought that Man-Orchestra was a bird that can fly but can also sing. That's how Man-Orchestra: The Singing Bird was born.

On Madison Avenue in New York I met a solitary black trumpet player several times on the same spot. He was always standing by himself playing good music. The sound of his silver trumpet floated among skyscrapers as if hitting stalagmites of glass and then streaming up and away, leaving everything and everyone behind. I could have painted a solitary musician amongst skyscrapers, but I came up with a “small orchestra” named Man-Orchestra in New York. I was later told that the trumpet player had an idiosyncratic reaction to working in an orchestra or an ensemble. He could not stand anyone else. He is a loner in life. And he is content with that. But I do not think he is lonely because there is his orchestra playing inside him.

The Man-Orchestra idea is not mine. There have always been musicians playing several instruments. What's mine here is something altogether different. My Man-Orchestra is an orchestra that sounds within every one of us. It is an orchestra of our states, our contradictions that blend together and tear us apart; they unify our soul and fight within it turning us into human beings.

The monologue was recorded by Zhanna Braginskaya