Stephen j Shanabrook     works in a disparity, a space of unexpected associations, altered perception and exsquisite entropy. In all his undertakings, there is the process of evisceration and a search within process for a different aspect of beauty. Abstracted upon the experience of daily reality, his inveterate and mysterious works leave one with an intensely evocative, sometimes disquieting, yet ultimately peaceful sensibility.

INTERVIEW  with  STEPHEN J SHANABROOK  by JURIJ KRPAN

Jurij Krpan:                 I've seen some early projects dealing with sugar and sweets in your portfolio, but exhibition of chocolates named " Unknown Resurrections " showed in Kapelica Gallery is not alike to any of them.  Why you decided to overexpose the almost banal material of chocolate with such a radical topics?  Was that fact also a statement considering your former, much easier works?

Stephen j  Shanabrook: It is exactly the banality of the chocolate that makes the image so powerful because the viewer is caught off guard.  The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effect of chocolate are the most influential aspect of the morgue chocolate series.  By exhibiting wounds in a chocolate box motif, the mold of a shotgun wound to the face becomes desirable to the viewer.  Even though one would not admit it, the desire is there, and so begins the conflict for the viewer.  This smell is overpowering to the point were one can not come to grips with what one is seeing.  So much so that you begin to wonder what you are really looking at.  How is it that we should desire to eat the representation of another’s pain.  The chocolates are made in sense to be digested mentally or physically removed for the living to process again, but not to acquaint us with death per say but to nourish life, in the sense of connection to.  " Consumption alone has become the manner in which life is sustained.  In this state life's processes can not come full circle.  Upended in a single direction, movements both physical and psychological become stilted and reactionary." (from " Morgue Chocolates" series statement  SjS ). 

         Furthermore, chocolate and blood function at similar temperatures and as fluids they both have come down through history as offerings to the gods or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy.

JK:                      Your former artistic actions and exhibitions did not include a human body beyond you alone.  How you decided to work with bodies of other people and why with dead bodies?  Did you have any references considering all that " body art " heritage from the past?

Sj S:                    The direct use of the human body in my work was not the ideological leap that it may seem.  Most of my work prior to the morgue chocolates dealt with food either as material or as a metaphor referring to the human condition.  Conceptually speaking the formula from which these works spring is that food is to humans; as nature is to the soul.  The morgue chocolates materialized after the edition of chocolate teeth called " I eat people they eat me".  This edition was made from casts from teeth collected by dentists in Holland and America.  But the teeth were only half of nature, I wanted to work the whole.  To do this, one must speak about the other half i.e... death.  So I decided to make chocolate editions that contained impressions from the wounds of death and impressions of the internal workings of the human body (after life).  At this point I realized that this piece was very close to the edge, the forbidden place for artists.  But herein lies its strength, these chocolates speak about the ever-present dichotomy between life and death.  Weather through the stomach or the head the chocolates bring the viewer into the circle of nature, one that contains the pain and happiness, one where things have no name; just opposites. 

JK:                      How did you manage with identity of the corps?  Is in your work any reference to a particular person and his life story?  After all you had worked on a whole corps in the morgue.

Sj S:                    While I was working in the morgue in Moscow the idea of identity wasn't relevant because this morgue was particularly for unidentified persons.  Hence the title of the edition "   Unidentified", this word or a derivative of was written on the body usual the leg with a green marker.  Furthermore in Moscow when these chocolates were first shown, I purposely exhibited them in an old information kiosk next to Red Square.  In this way the identity of corpse was metaphorically supplied by the living through their partaking orally and or visually.  A year later I made a new edition " Evisceration of Waited Moments" from a morgue in America.  The situation there was very different in terms of identity. I was very conscious at that point while making the molds not to be involved with the personal past of corps.  The impressions I was making were only to be representations of death in general not particular or with stories.  Concentrating on the narrative as it were, would, I feel be an unacceptable invasion of the privacy and should only add a useless shock value.  When dealing with such matters I feel strongly that shock value has no place or purpose, it only degrades the work down to the level of a supermarket rag paper.  The chocolates are the generic shadow representations of death, for me they must stay anonymous to keep their universality and poignant. 

JK:                      But the series of masks of still living young Russian poets made by chocolate wears a strong impact even that they are alluding post-mortal mask.  In that project the connection between life and death is more polite.  I guess.  Instead of chocolate wrapped in violence the chocolate masks are wrapped in poetry.  Why poets? 

Sj S:                    It was actually only one poet. was collaboration between myself and twelve well-known Moscow conceptual artists including a poet and a writer.  The artists ranged in age from 22 to 63, this spread of generations I felt was most conducive for achieving the truest response to the project.  Each artist was given an exact replica of their face in chocolate and their pointing finger in graphite.  They were then allotted twenty-four hours to interact with their mask in the manner they deemed fit and to record this interaction on supplied piece of paper, using their graphite finger as the main writing tool.

         In the face or more particularly the eyes are the windows to the soul and the eyes ( in this case) are closed, is it not then, that the artist is only confronted with a representation of the ego.  My part as the antagonist ( the 13^th) was by presenting the artists with a conflict in the sense of making their representation desirable, digestible ( mentally or physically) even though it meant in some cases a form of self-inflicted destruction or revenge on the ego.  Considering the quality of the chocolate I didn't expect to have much leftover to exhibit, but to my amazement the contrary was true, almost half of the "chosen" didn't partake in this self-representational cannibalism.  These masks as chocolates are very similar conceptually speaking to the morgue chocolate, when one takes into account that all the artists felt a notion of looking at their death mask.  This was as you say more polite visual speaking, but at the same time it dealt more with an inner conflict, the sword was turned inwards on the self and we all know the devastating power of inner conflict.  The manifestations of these conflicts are overall to be seen and heard.

JK:                      After all it seems that using the chocolate is like using a powerful tool.  Because of it common and desirable appearance nobody fears it.  On contrary.  Almost everybody first thought is to eat it, but in the next moment they discovered the distractible message that your "candy s" wear.  They find themselves like fish on the hook.  Looking at your work seems that it works from the stomach.  Are you "poisoning" your audience?  Maybe there is an autobiographical note hidden?

Sj S:                    My relation to chocolate in an autobiographical sense stems from my formative years, when I worked in a small candy store. 

" Watch out you don"t melt candy man", they would say to me before I would get into the shower after football practice.  Later in university while formulating my artistic language I began using food as a temporal element in my work.  Soon after leaving university I made my first elaborate installation from chocolate goat fetuses stirred by my job at a slaughterhouse.  In general my oeuvre consist of several works using chocolate as the main "ingredient".  As with the other materials I use, they are chosen for particular conceptual reasons depending on the striven for outcome.  While walking down the street in the summer it was the strong smell emanating from the candy store that began my desire to work there. 

         Now I am sick to my stomach ( listen through your nose, feel with your teeth)!  Chocolate has a physical and psychological Pavlovian affect on the viewer, and this anticipation is sometimes more satisfy than the act itself.  Looking at and smelling at the morgue chocolates the viewer tries to hide the pleasure from themselves.  For me to make for the viewer the most complete vision, then one must speak through all five senses simultaneously.

VIRUS MAGAZINE  1997

Katherine Carl.Common Destination.
        catalog text. 2006.

Stephen j Shanabrook traverses the taboo terrains of desire and violence to explore their paradoxical common ground.  He specifically focuses on the material qualities of these states to conjure a transformation that makes a surprise out of tangibility.  He has, for a example, spent time in a morgue in Moscow, making casts of fatal wounds and then creating chocolates from resulting shapes – bonbons, as it were, of mortality – and he has perforated wallpaper with gunshots to produce even more beautiful patents.  In Memory Confetti Series (2006), he applies an alchemical approach by shredding drawings made on acetate and then jumbling them in a viscous emulsion to make colorful projected kaleidoscopes.  In earlier artwork, Shanabrook often made traces with indeterminate fluids, such as melted chocolate, that are mistakable for blood or oil, an effect that is as scerally potent as it is politically resonant.  These playful works of vanitas subject materialist obsessions to processes of chance in a pungent comment on both consumption and the materialist discourses of communism and socialism.

Shanabrook does not predetermine his marks, which are sometimes made as part of a performance.  He uses dusty surfaces of chalk, flour, and graphite, all of which can be scattered or smudged. In his “walking works,” Shanabrook plots traveling routes, sometimes through public spaces and other times within a small confined square of material in the gallery.  He has walked through the streets of Amsterdam in snowshoes, extruding wisps of flour, and he used a cane to tap out his path in the streets of Moscow, leaving phosphorescent marks to help him to find his way back.  In a gallery space he has walked with Dutch shoes covered in felt on a square of graphite.  Like children’s fairy tales, these works tell the magical story of life’s long journeys and fleeting moments.

Shanabrook marks territory to trace and delineate his own life crossing, its expansion throughout time and space.  He makes his own path visible, and for those who are quick he leaves cues of recognition to welcome fellow travelers. 

Renata Salecl.Hell & Back.
         catalog text. 2006

Stephen Shanabrook’s new work of melted plastic touches two fascinating and at the same time traumatic obsessions of contemporary society: the status of celebrity and death. Shanabrook has for a while been keen observer of our society’s dealing with death, especially with the fact that the latter is more and more perceived as one of the prohibited issues today. If in the Victorian times, sex was taboo, in today’s society death is becoming one. Parents, for example, often do not allow children to attend funerals in order to protect them from the traumatic nature of death and dying. However, as we know from psychoanalysis, what is prohibited and denied often becomes more traumatic than what is allowed. Shanabrook’s work has already in the past exposed the traumatic nature of death. His new work, however, makes death part of the new type of obsession with celebrity culture. The latter have today replaced old authorities as points of people’s identification. This obsession with celebrity culture, on the one hand, creates an impression that everyone can become famous if he or she is able to sell his or her image in the right way, and, on the other hand, it has also created the perception that everyone can become attractive and eternally young, if only one works on one’s image. In this celebrity obsessed world there also seem to be no place for death and decay.

What does it mean when Stephen Shanabrook burns celebrity dolls so that the plastic they are made of melts into horrifying squashed objects. First of all, Shanabrook shows what an object of attraction can easily turn into: from a sublime, inaccessible object of admiration or desire, it can become perceived as an abject, squashed object which provokes unease and anxiety. Melted figures Shanabrook is playing with illustrate very well the Freudian nature of the uncanny – the fascinating and at the same time horrifying nature of the object of desire. But when Shanabrook mixes new celebrities like Zidane, Bruce Willis or Tupac with old mythological figures he mockingly shows how mytholigization from today does not so much differ from that in the past. Both in their own way tried to offer a solution to subject’s problems with death and desire.

Franchesca Alfano Miglietti ( FAM )  from book

"Extreme Bodies. The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art."  

" My relationship with chocolate in an autobiographical sense comes from when I worked in a candy store.  Careful you don't melt, candy man! they would say to me when I would go to take a shower after football practice.  Later, at university, when I began to formulate my artistic language, I started using food as the temporal element of my pieces. Immediately after university, I completed my first installation, developed with chocolate in slaughterhouse.  In general, my artwork consists of different works that use chocolate as a fundamental ingredient.  Looking at and smelling the Morgue Chocolates, a spectator tries to distance pleasure from himself or herself.  For me giving the spectator a complete vision of the artwork means making him or her work with all five senses".  Stephen j Shanabrook is an American artist who lives half of year in Russia and half of year in Holland.  Some of his early pieces were done with sugar and sweets, but it was with " Unknown Resurrections ", using chocolate, that Shanabrook's work became radical, aggressive, powerful.  He intertwines and merges two metaphorical shadows that have nothing in common: chocolate and wounds.  Two metaphorical shadows, of the metaphor of chocolate, joy without sin, and of the metaphor of death, sin without joy.  The symbolic meaning of chocolate, linked to the imperative of pleasure, and the symbolic meaning of the wound linked to the dimension of pain, creates a sort of disorientation in Shanabrook's work, an effect of nausea, waste, sabotage and excitement.

Sickeningly sweet remains that are in no way symbolic like the recognition of something which we are incapable of understanding, like the very substance that sublimates fear and beauty, in which we find renewed emphasis of the paradigm that art is stronger than death.  Chocolate casts that in aesthetic terms lose track and reference to the proportions of "good taste", and which in ethical terms present themselves as an imperative of the ego that demands that we hold out to the very end, whatever it cost.  For the American and Russian series, Unknown Resurrections, Shanabrook chose the bodies of the "different ones", those whom society tries to repress or insult because they make us feel uneasy.  These lives and the traumatic experiences they have undergone are the motifs of Shanabrook's casts.  A detailed description of body parts, living evidence of the end, impersonal parts of injured bodies, that have been shot, crushed, or stitched carelessly back together, which can only be classified in accordance with the findings of forensic medicine.  These casts, made in Moscow, look like so many chocolate bonbons laid out in a sampler box, a vision of violent death rendered peaceful and consumable by the decision to make the casts in chocolate.  The bonbons of the Morgue Chocolates series are a symptomatic product of the artist's vision of life and death in America: the remains of people who have been brutally murdered, bodies that could not be reassembled, constitute a " silent lament ".  Gunshot wounds, protruding eyeballs, knife wounds stitched up with ordinary string, in his work become so many fragments of a horrible and everyday reality that hits us in the solar plexus through the precise little casts made of chocolate.  This vision and this presence of violent death in "chocolate" frightens us and irritates us, much mote than the death that we witness daily in the pages of the morning newspaper and the evening television news: 32 casts of an eye in the box of Halcyon Nest seem to be covered, through the chocolate, by an inevitable death, a series of eyes open and sleepless that seem to want to affirm the refusal to die, an inability to resist and, at the same time, the suggestion that in the face of violent death we cannot close our eyes. 

         And once again art chooses the rejected, the unwatchable, the close-up.  It is precisely the banality of chocolate that renders the image so powerful, because the spectator is caught by surprise.  The familiarity, the odor and the sensory stimulation of the pleasure that the chocolate provokes are the influential aspects of the Morgue series.  A cloying and banal package of chocolate bonbons, which reproduce a case of gangrene, a gunshot wound, a suture of lacerated tissues, is seductive and stimulating, and until the horror takes over it is desirable.  Even if we don't admit it rationally, the desire is there and so, for the spectator, the conflict begins: the odor of the chocolate is so powerful that he cannot manage to face what he sees, even before he begins to ask himself exactly what he is seeing.  As Gilles Deleuze has written:" ... every man who suffers is flesh.  Flesh is the common territory shared by man and beast, an indistinguishable territory, flesh is this "fact", in which we identify with the objects of horror and compassion".  The sensation and the impact are powerful, clashing, disquieting and seductive.  We feel guilty, we feel the disagreeable sensation of wanting to eat the proof and the outline of someone else's pain.  Shanabrook makes chocolate shapes that are apparently similar in their manufacturing and in their visual impact, to those ordinarily available on the market, and he uses as containers the "classic" gift packs: but the decorations on the chocolates themselves, customarily signs of a roguish and popular romantism - little hearts, flowers and cameos - instead reproduce the signs of the abject within the superficial pleasure of the taste buds in order to provoke a complex imbalance: remembering life through the contact with death of another.  "Consumption has become the way in which life sustains itself.  In this moment the process of life does not close its circle.  It goes in a single direction, the physical and psychological movement becomes reactionary and artificial", states Shanabrook, who sees in chocolate a close relationship with the idea of blood, both fluids that have passed through history as offerings for the gods or as a simple remedy for inner melancholy.  After his first performances and exhibitions, in which he utilized only his own body, the artist began to work on other identities and other anatomies, including dead bodies, always using food as a metaphor for the human condition; nonetheless, it was with the Morgue Chocolates, the artworks made of chocolate that contain signs of wounds, death, and those of the internal workings of the human body after death that Shanabrook begins to approach the limit, the place that is forbidden: the place of the artist.  These pieces of chocolate represent the dichotomy that is always present between life and death: utilized both the sensory stimulations of taste and the "information" of disgust in the rational sphere, the spectator finds himself or herself trapped in that dimension in which things, sensations and attractions have no name and are nothing more than a sum total of opposites.  "While I was working in the Moscow morgue, the idea of identity was not particularly important to me, because it was a morgue for unidentified people.  In fact the title of those works was Unidentified, and this word or a derived word was usually written in green on a leg.  Moreover, in Moscow, when I first exhibited these artworks, I presented them intentionally in an old information kiosk not far from Red Square.  In this way, the identity of the corpses was replaced by the identity of the living people through their oral or visual participation".  One year after the presentation of Unidentified, Shanabrook exhibited Evisceration of Waited Moments, in which all of the images of death are "taken" from an American morgue.  " The situation there was quite different.  I was extremely aware that I did not want to be involved in the past of these corpses.  What I was doing was intended merely a as way of representing death in general, not in particular, not in any connection with a specific personal history.  Concentrating on the narrative part would have been an unacceptable invasion of privacy and would have added only a component of shock has no value or purpose and undermines the work, taking it down to the level of a scandal rag.  The pieces of chocolate are generic representations of death, and for me they need to remain anonymous in order to preserve their universality and their cutting edge".

A later series involved the production of masks of young Russian poets done in chocolate, creating a powerful emotional impact in their manufacturing simulating the form and the fixity of death masks.  Once again the main theme of the artworks is the link between life and death; in place of chocolate surrounded by violence we find that it is poetry that now surrounds the chocolate.  Restitution after the Meeting of Thirteen is an artwork executed with the co-operation of twelve Conceptual artists from Moscow: Shanabrook exactly reproduces the faces of each of twelve artists, and then all of them are given an exact copy of their face in chocolate and their index fingers in graphite.  Each artist is given 24 hours to interact with the face as he thinks best, recording what happened on a piece of paper specially supplied, using his graphite finger as the main writing instrument.  " My role as antagonist ( the thirteen one) consisted of presenting the artist as a conflictive being, rendering his image desirable and digestible even if this meant in some cases inflicting a form of self-destruction, or taking revenge on one's own ego.  Given the quality of the chocolate I did not expect that I would have many remains to display, but to my great surprise that is not at all what happened: at least half of the artists chose not to take part in this act of virtual cannibalism..."  The chocolate masks are conceptually very similar to the Morgue Chocolates: the invitation to take into consideration the meaning of what it is to look at one’s own death mask triggered various interventions, even though all the artists who took part in the project left on the masks clear signs of an inner conflict, a sort of restitution to their own funeral effigy of the most vital part of their own being.  In Shanabrook"s vision, the use of chocolate takes on the value of a very powerful weapon, since because of its ordinary and desirable appearance nobody is afraid of chocolate, " indeed, the first thing that comes to the mind of most people is to eat it, while in a second phase they discover the message that I meant to hide in it.  And there they are, like fish on a hook".                                                                                  2003

Mark Kremer.  Apropos of " More  of / than  Chocolate", a project by Stephen j Shanabrook and Olga Chernysheva. 

In the years to come, it is my believe, artists in the western world will find themselves confronted with at least three challenges.  Firstly, there is the challenge to construct a visual language or languages with reference to a specific concept of beauty, in order to address the different realities that we encounter in our lives.  Fundamentally, this is an act of opposition in resistance to the mediocrity of today's visual culture.  At present, the notion of beauty seems to be virtually absent from the critical discourse surrounding art, particularly in regard to works by young artists and to current exhibition practices in publicly funded institutions.  This may well be a problem related to the rhetoric of art professionals, who dismiss the notion for its lack of objectivity.  But although one could and should argue that beauty plays a role in contemporary art even when the notion is neglected on verbal level, it is fact that a substantial number of artists seem to have real doubts about the possibility of creating a visual aesthetic that is up-to-date and credible.  And they have their reasons, to be sure.  Yet, through the ages the meaning of art has come to us through its beauty, and I see no reason why in our day beauty should not be acknowledged as an instrument, serving to help us see reality at its different levels and allowing us to fantasize about the possibility that, although such and such is so and so, it might also be different. 

         Secondly, there is the challenge to invent and adopt a work ethic that corresponds with changing ideas about artists practices, notably the social commitment that artists have recently undertaken in order to overcome the solipsism to which the western idea of individualism in the arts has led.  Three years ago, in Europe several experimental exhibition projects, including 'Unite' ( Firminy) ‘Sonsbeek'93' ( Arnhem) and "On taking a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present" ( Antwerp) focused on a paradigm shift within contemporary artistic practices.  Although these enterprises were problematic in terms of their visual output, they nonetheless presented a lively picture of the aspirations of a generation of artists who are looking foe a way to inscribe their personal project within a social context or network, albeit temporarily for the duration of an exhibition.  The context of the projects was determined for the most part by establishing connections with these existing realities, resulting in an uneasy equilibrium between the individual artistic gesture, seemingly diminished, and the context at which the gesture was aimed, now charged with the sparkle of art.  When the confusion provoked by these exhibitions was over and the process of evaluating their significance began, on questions seemed relevant when considering future in a specific, socially marked, and what type of work should be performed in order to achieve it? 

         Thirdly, there is the challenge to discipline the thought processes involved in artistic undertakings, if only to prevent them from replacing into naive subjectivism.  What is at issue here is the power to withstand on the one hand the indifference of art journalism, and on the other hand the prejudice of institutionalized art criticism, bowed down under the weight of its theoretical premises.  With these counter-forces at work, artists nowadays  cannot afford to refrain from the instrumental application of language, by designing a theory for their own work, for instance.  But more important is that here the possibility for establishing an artistic poetics is revealed, a poetics that is both personal and intelligent, aiming for some kind of synthetic statement. 

The art project "More  of / than  Chocolate", prepared by the American artist Stephen j Shanabrook and his Russian colleague Olga Chernysheva and presented in 1996 at the L-Gallery ( a non-commercial exhibition space in Moscow ), may be viewed as a response to the challenges described above.  This response is realized in the work’s theme (an exploration of the iconographic potential of food, in this case chocolate), its realization ( a co-operation or rather discussion initiated by Shanabrook between two artists who worked closely with the staff and employees of the Moscow Red October chocolate factory), and its ultimate result ( an exhibition in which certain pictures, in spite of their petrified imagery relating to a state of anesthesia or death, evoke a mental space of lived experience).  In all these aspects the project succeeded in bringing about another type of equilibrium - which can also be seen in the work of other young artists - is that the hierarchy that usually exists between an art object ( manifesting itself as Gestalt) and its surroundings disappears or is so prevalent in human life.  A closer look at their project can help us see how this works. 

At the core of the exhibition at the L-Gallery were two works: a series of 6 large photographs of villages in the snow outside Moscow, printed in the dark brown tones reminiscent of chocolate ( " Russian Chocolates or Natural Antidepressants", Olga Chernysheva), and a series of twelve chocolate masks,. cast from faces of Moscow artists and writers, combined with cast graphite reproductions of their pointing finger which each used in making their self-portraits ( 'Restitution after the Meeting of Thirteen', Stephen j Shanabrook).  The remnants of the masks were exhibited directly against the wall, with the portraits on a shelf below.  In Chernysheva's contribution the equation of the consumption of chocolate with a journey to the countryside, preferably in the weekend, in order to forget the daily worries and oppressing effects of everyday life in Russia, is obvious.  Shanabrook's contribution is more complicated to grasp.  The viewer must be told that the masks, after having been produced, were lent out according to an agreement with the artist for a period of 24 hours to the persons whose faces the depict.  They were asked to enjoy the chocolate of their quasi death mask, eat it and while doing so make a self-portrait on paper.  The various results were collected by Shanabrook the next day.  Some persons had violently mutilated the cast faces with their teeth or with mechanical devices, while others hadn't touched them at all.  Reverence for the tokens of individuality went side by side with destructive deeds directed against the definiteness of the very concept.  Thus Shanabrook's work raises the question whether nowadays the prevailing concept of the self is still that of the mythical whole. 

Interestingly enough, chocolate itself embodies a modern myth: its consumption is said to console the lovesick heart and to strengthen the weary worker, and it is an essential component of the survival rations of soldiers dropped in hostile areas.  Shanabrook has made several works in which this surplus value of chocolate, latently present in our minds, is countered by another subtext.  In 1993 and 1994 he visited morgues in Moscow and USA to compile a collection of plaster casts of wounds from deceased persons.  Using these he made a mould from which chocolates were cast to produce four separate editions of boxes with chocolate.  Shanabrook stated that in his view the average chocolate bar is more public than any art gallery.  His ' Morgue Chocolates' are not intended as a confrontation with death per se, but as a reminder of how life coincides with and depends on death.  This idea is also central to " Restitution after the Meeting of Thirteen", his work for Moscow project "More of/than Chocolate".  At another level it plays a role in Chernysheva's photographs of the country houses outside Moscow, for to imagine the life and warmth in their interiors, a spectator has to leave the melancholic portraits of a deadly pale world behind.

Having reached the end of my written statement I am quite aware that I haven't come up with a watertight argument concerning the beauty, work and poetics involved in the project of Stephen j Shanabrook and Olga Chernysheva.  Although I wouldn't want to shy away from this task, I realize at the same moment that only time will tell.  The format of this box, with its collection of pictures and documents, is like an open book that tells different stories, depending on the reader's point of view.  The content of the box makes it clear, that in art projects aimed at constructing another type of beauty ( here a beauty of the terrible), involving a different type of work and implying a radical poetics, one is bound to meet with resistance.  The somewhat unhappy faces of the artists on the cover of this box, shown dressed as chocolates workers in a factory, testify to the personally encountered alienation that many artists nowadays must feel when performing their job.                          text for catalogue   Amsterdam  1996

Ekaterina Degot.  For Desert.  Chocolate as Postscript to Art.

Generally, a contemporary artist knows what he or she should do in art personally; everyone implements one's own life project, individual enough, almost scandalous, and no artist is capable of doing anything else.  The artist, however, is much less certain about the nature of the employing institution, Contemporary Art.  Actually, the artist is not quite in the know. 

Meanwhile, it is only on presupposition that there exists a Whole that parts can be legitimized at all.  Therefore, the artist is haunted by the thoughts that he or she might be out on a limb that might break off as soon as the artist stops talking about it.  This is why artists talk about it interminably ( as illustrated by present text).

It is understandable, therefore. that contemporary art strategies and media ( in fact, the constituents of contemporary art) are fully coincident. Contemporary art as such is the strategy and the medium of contemporary art.  ( Which, BY THE WAY, transforms contemporary art into an equation with two absolutely hopeless Unknowns, and this is what makes a difference from any other type of practice that can be identified either by strategies or by objects.) 

Nevertheless ( at least in this text, as far as it goes), there exist artists of strategy and artists of medium.  As will be shown below Olga Chernysheva is an artist of strategy, while artist's Stephen Shanabrook strategy is the medium. 

Any gesture produced by an artist of strategy is Sisyphean labor involved in the elucidation of contents of the abstract notion of art, and this elucidation is the only way to maintain it while it is living.  This is Sisyphean labor because every effort put forth by the artist reveals a claim for finality, an ambition to reach the ultimate truth about the essence of art.  In the end, however, Sisyphus always finds himself at the point from which he started – having thereby derived ( sometimes considerable) pleasure from the process of ascending/descending the mountain.  ( BY THE WAY, the failure of the artist’s claim for a final statement is pre-ordained, which fact is only guarantee of what in good old times we used to refer to as " quality of work ".)

In search of the status of art, the artist of strategy often makes comparisons with other types of practice, which enables the artist to play an art role of: a surgeon or a conjurer, a chemist or a politician, a military commander or an astronomer, sometimes, surprisingly a painter or sculptor and sometimes a cook or a confectioner, as in Olga Chernysheva's case.  (BY THE WAY, it should always be a poor surgeon, a poor politician, etc., or otherwise he or she can not receive acknowledgment as an artist).

It is commonly believed that contemporary art can be made of anything, which is assumable its differentiating feature.  One can only guess exactly what this "anything" should look like.  It would seem that contemporary art itself would be best suited for the definition of "anything", but again - what kind of medium would it be that carries the highest content of contemporary art?  The first art product in the history of "anything", "Fountain" used faience as a physical medium and urine as a thematic one, i.e., a substance which is human excretion, just like art.  ( Today's "art of corporeality", BY THE WAY, also subsumes under art of medium).

Chocolate is a version of "anything", and a successful version, too.

Any sweet and inessential food is in a way a product of artwork in the area foodstuffs, but chocolate is special because it contains a substance called theobromine, literally, " the food of the gods "). which is natural sedative, a drug.  This is why chocolate can give rise to ( a.) positive emotions and (b.) dependence, and both effects, by the same token, have been the object of creative and commercial ambition of art in the traditional use of term.  It is this aesthetic tradition that the artist works with when he or she manipulates chocolate. 

Olga Chernysheva makes her artwork shows explaining how chocolate is prepared at a confectionary.  Stephen Shanabrook researches chocolate consumption.  Thus, he offered twelve Moscow artists to have their own masks cast in chocolate.  Then, the artists were supposed to consume their masks ( meditatively or gastronomically), bit by bit, during twenty-four hours, followed by a show of what remained of the masks and of consumption experience that found its expression in self-portraits.

The possibility for chocolate to be eaten up, its mortality is what makes it so strikingly different from art, especially contemporary art, which is consumed by no one ( not even authentically), which nobody wants at all.  It is for this reason that art seeks death, and it has been seeking death for so long and with so little success that no other mode of art consumption is ever possible ( BY THE WAY, the idea of the next life as registered in a nursery rhyme: " Mummy, where's that chocolate bar of mine  That I ate yesterday? ". - reminds one of art's claim for self-termination and for a new life after death.)

Stephen Shanabrook makes chocolate which is not at all easy to eat up in normal conditions.  His models were expected to meet with some moral problems in the process of self-eating, but also with considerable problems involved in eating something very sweet and hard.  In the course of Exchange Project in Moscow Shanabrook made " Morgue Chocolates" -chocolates castings of parts from unidentified dead bodies, so the moulds unable to be disinfected were excluded from the process of consumption.  In Bandaged art project the artist used a special device to spin cotton candy around his hands, and then let it melt in the sun after the author had laid down on the earth for a long time, and the melting cotton candy was leaving pink clotted traces.  The cotton candy was not eaten, it died a natural, hence, disgusting death.  Stephen Shanabrook thematises consumption when he compares it to pure destruction whose ignominious and hence heroic victim is slain on a field of battle, together with cotton candy that is melted by the sun.

While Stephen Shanabrook creates his chocolate tragedy, Olga Chernysheva produces a chocolate comedy.  An industrial comedy, one could even say. In her artwork, the tragedy of meaningless expenditure is opposed to a non-stop and therefore meaningless production.  Olga Chernysheva compares art with a filled chocolate production line; she ironically re-reads ( as in the rest of her art production) figurative art by exposing "figurative creativity" in Mother Nature.  In her previous art series Chernysheva was engaged in search for "pastry" as contained in cityscapes.  The comic subtly of her new art work is concealed in the absurd totality of the Chocolate, the Artificial.  Neither chocolate, nor art is presented with any alternative.  The identification of regularity, recurrence, and boredom ( i.e., art) in a domain of which monopoly is claimed by nature, reality and body shows a healthy sense of humor in the artist.  To conclude, it should be noted that while Stephen Shanabrook seems to be haunted by the vision of blood in the place of chocolate, Olga Chernysheva can see chocolate in place of air or any other substance.  ( BY THE WAY, chocolate can be bitter, hard, and adult, but on the other hand it can be sweet, soft, and infantile, while the former is the object of Stephen Shanabrook's artwork, the latter then is the object of Olga Chernysheva's)   text for catalogue, Moscow 1996