Two primary and opposing tendencies in the development of 20th century art meet in the work of Vladimir Arkhipov. One of them is a tradition, which traces back to Productionism, that maintained that the standard everyday thing was an object of the artist’s constructive endeavour. However, unlike the constructivists, who devoted themselves to the design and production of new everyday things, Arkhipov does not create them himself but collects things that have been designed and created by others. In its turn this precept of Arkhipov's to search for everyday home-made things, divested at the moment of their discovery of any obvious connection to the world of art, can be recognised in the traditions of Dadaism and primarily in the theory and practise of the ready-made or objet trouvé.
However, if one is to start examining Arkhipov’s work by defining its place in the traditions of Dadaism, then one soon notes that the home-made things that he finds represent a very idiosyncratic type of the ready-made. The founder of this tradition, Marcel Duchamp’s work with everyday things proposed two procedures. Firstly, a thing is to be used in order to play with the institutional context of art, to destroy the aesthetic conventions existing in it. As a result the everyday object, which is imputed by the artist as a work of art, having lost its utilitarian meaning in the exhibition space merely acquires a new meaning – it becomes a sign of production and simultaneously a sign of the loss of utility. The Dadaist gesture does not reveal any other inferred resources onto the standard everyday thing. By adding his banal pissoir to the world of art, Duchamp did not reveal any sculptural qualities or poetic meaning that might have been concealed in it, which is customarily what one expects from a traditional work. Also important is the fact that this new meaning of the everyday object – its status as a sign of a work of art - is extremely ephemeral. It is imprescriptible from the figure of the artist, who inferred this meaning onto it. Because, if we see a pissoir at an exhibition, which is not Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”, then the maximum artistic meaning that we can ascribe to it is that it is "an exhibit of European design from a certain period of the 20th century”. i Hence – the second component of Duchamp’s methodology, which, also, as it happens, is an attempt to compensate for the notionally ephemeral and one dimensional nature of the ready-made. As is well known, Duchamp was preoccupied with the creation of a sophisticated and esoteric authorial mythology, imbuing his initially unassuming objects with a system of secret symbolic meanings. Thus, we once again find ourselves dealing with the imposing of certain misplaced meanings and values onto an everyday object.
A similar concept of the everyday thing (as something divested of the personal meanings autonomous of its use by man) was an extremely characteristic feature of the consciousness for a large part of the 20th century. Thus, one of the founders of modern sociology, Georg Simmel noted two aspects in things. Firstly, being of itself “an insignificant phenomenon", the thing is of interest only through "the symbolic relationships/attitudes*", in which it is included in culture and society. Secondly, the thing is of interest, due to the fact that being a part of relationships, it is a marginal phenomenon, which intersects and collides with various notional realities. It is characteristic that Simmel dedicated his key text on the sociology of the thing to the picture frame, i.e. an object leading towards the boundary between the everyday object and the work of art, furniture and art, everyday reality and artistic illusionii. This text was written a year after the “Fountain” had been created and looks like a statement on Duchamp’s theory of the ready-made.
At the next stage, in the second half of the 20th century, several schools of theoretical thought began to examine the phenomenon of the everyday thing in the context of the analysis of the structure of the everyday. The congruence of separate things in conceptual structures became obvious and likewise the rootedness of these structures in the patterns of social organisation. At the same time artists – for example Ilya Kabakov, were no longer affected by the provocative effect of the ready-made and needed to include it in a certain subjective authorial mythology*. The artist is now occupied with the reconstruction of the social mythology, which set the conceptual horizons for the whole of society. And theoreticians and artists began to demonstrate how the objective environment actively takes part in the social rituals and the regulation and demarcation of human behaviour or, as some sociologists would put it – “sets social frames”. iii And if the social theoreticians compare the world of real things with “a theatre props department”, then in Kabakov’s installations this metaphor was realised literally. The things here – for example an announcement board or a nail driven into a wall set social rituals, they serve as an “anchor” of social interactioniv. Therefore objects in Kabakov’s installations are usually surrounded by words – like verbal cues accompanying the social interactions. Alongside this and unlike Duchamp, Kabakov’s things, carrying out the function of a social “anchor”, bear various and completely conventional meanings, and their alteration or destruction also bears a conceptual message. Therefore the mixture of objects in various combinations could be a form of communication. And it is also on this that Kabakov's total installations are built - each of them consists of a large selection of objects, the constellation of which transmits an epic narrative. Finally, the durability of the meanings of everyday things suggests the presence of a certain centre, setting a given social and symbolic order. Hence also the very possibility of the figure of the narrator identifying him or herself with the idea producing centre and suggesting on its behalf variants of the possible order of the things.
The way that the thing is understood in the work of Vladimir Arkhipov, distinguishes it from both the poetics of Marcel Duchamp, the trailblazer of the ready-made and Kabakov's poetic of the total installation. The main and most fundamental distinction lies in the fact that meanings are not imposed on Arkhipov’s things from without – by the subjective tyranny of the artist or an intersubjective social order. His things themselves become independent, fully legitimate participants of the interaction: from being objects they become subjects. To rephrase Bruno Latour, who turned the understanding of the thing in modern theory on its head, one could say – in Arkhipov’s art “things strike back” v.
In fact the first thing that strikes one when comparing the home-made things from Arkhipov’s collection with the classic ready-made one is the fact that although at the moment of their discovery they do not have the status of a work of art, they are, from the word go, anything but banal objects. After all, home-made things are born of a certain authorial labour, they are, by definition, unique and curious, even if it is only a curiosity as to how they came to light. Hence it follows that home-made things become interesting not because of what the artist does to it, but thanks to how they were made by their makers, i.e. that which they contain within themselves independent of Arkhipov’s will. It is precisely for this reason, as the artist himself admits, that he “tries to show things as naturally as possible, without changing anything within them” vi. In addition, the autonomous value of home-made things is underlined by the artist by adding the oral testimony and photographic portrait of their makers during their public showing, which describes the conditions under which they were created, documentation regarding their location at the moment of their discovery and so on and so forth. To put it another way, the goals of Arkhipov’s research work, in accordance with the most sophisticated methods of contemporary cultural anthropology lie in proving to us that things have their own “biography” that is independent of usvii. There is, finally, one more extremely characteristic difference about Arkhipov’s objets trouvés that distinguishes his practises from those of his predecessors. Previously the poetics of the ready-made had been built upon the fact that the simplicity of the everyday thing collided by means of the artist with the complexity of the social world – the world of Duchamp’s art systems and the world of Kabakov’s social organisation. Arkhipov’s poetics is built on the opposite effect - on the presentation of the complexity of the thing itself. After all, the nature of the home-made thing does not just stop with its history and the circumstances of its creation. Of extreme interest are their many components – their construction out of many different fragments or even whole objects, which in their turn have their own “biography”, circumstances surrounding their creation, function and history of being used in this way. These component things might be borrowed by the makers of these home-made things from a totally different sphere of functional or professional use, social setting, geography of production and distribution and so on and so forth. Moreover the contrasting natures of these component formative elements of the home-made thing also predetermine its interest and charm. Thus, the wide social network of meaning that in Kabakov’s total installations ensnared the objects between themselves, with Arkhipov, is rooted in the very things themselves. When describing his finds in the exhibition, he does not recount some sort epic tale with their help: the things themselves tell us their stories, luring our imaginations deep inside the object and via a multi-furcated network of links into the depths of historical time and the geographical expanses of the global world. This completely new concept of the thing as the focal point of internal network interactions with other things, was expressed academically in the theory of "interobjectivity” with its trumpeting slogan “Back to the things themselves!" viii A similar vision of the world of objects as a natural and externally uncontrolled network of interactions destroys the idea, inherent in Kabakov’s total installations, of a certain metaphysical centre that binds the order of things from within. Hence, Arkhipov is unable to identify himself with the figure of the all knowing narrator who subordinates things to a certain notional external narrative. Arkhipov sees himself as an applied researcher, each thing that is found by him turns out to be “the entrance to a huge labyrinth with numerous doors that are still waiting to be opened"ix.
This netlike and complex concept adopted by Arkhipov for the everyday thing counters the one-sided interpretations, which are often imputed to the object of his research, as indeed they are to the whole of his work. One has in mind the explanation of home-made things and the circumstances of their creation as the result of strictly local and empirical circumstances and, in particular, the shortages of goods typical of the late Soviet periodx that had been postponed by the specific nature of "Soviet poverty"xi. However the Arkhipov’s finds demonstrate that home-made things were not only created in Soviet times but are also being made in contemporary Russia and that their creators come from various social strata and enjoy various standards of well being and education. In addition, as the artist’s tireless research dictates similar things have been created and continue to be created not only in Russia but throughout the world - from Brazil to Switzerland. In other words, the discovery of a home-made thing is not a nostalgic reflection on a rudimentarily prevailing past that has elapsed, the discussion is about a certain transnational phenomenon, a symptom of the global worldxii . Therefore, it is highly symptomatic that Arkhipov’s poetics first made itself known at the beginning of the 90’s, i.e. at the time when the globalization of the world and its social and artistic processes was at its most impetuous, constructing a multi-layered and transnational system of interaction. Thus, one seems justified in examining Arkhipov’s work in the context of the so called “Relational Aesthetics” that was making itself known at the time at the beginning of the 1990’sxiii. Theoreticians and practitioners of this line in the art of the 1990’s showed solidarity with Arkhipov in their rejection of the concept of the work of art as an autonomous and self-contained artefact. They were also of one mind with him in seeing creativity, by its nature, as a network-based activity that is also aimed at the production of a new network of interactions. However, Arkhipov also appears to be a unique figure within the framework of this context that is the most aesthetically close to him. Unlike him, none of the relational artists have maintained with such precision and continuity the concept of the thing as the bearer of an interactive experience that is independent of the artist. Thus the objects of the everyday environment are constantly present in the actions of Rirkrit Tiravaniya. These are standard tables, chairs, crockery, containers, frying pans and pots, i.e. everything that accompanies the process of preparing and consuming food. The ancient ritual of the collective feast – is basically that paradigm of social interaction, which is constantly reproduced in the work of this artist. However, although things are also a constant and unavoidable presence in the works of Tiravaniya they are, however, of no interest to the artist in and of themselves: they are simply used by him according to their purpose.
In his turn, Laim Gillick does not use ready made things but creates them himself. His formalistic spatial objects do not have a conventional function or a defined artistic meaning. Their purpose, being displayed in an exhibition space, is to become the reason for the meeting and interaction of the visitors of the artistic institution. The absence in these objects of any personal significance has a deliberate and planned meaning for Gillick: things should not distract the public’s attention but only provoke its members into socialising with one another. Both of these polar examples from the radical (for the 90’s) field of “Relational Aesthetics” demonstrate, just how conservative this aesthetic remained as a whole in its understanding of the phenomenon of the thing. The thing here continues to be understood in extremely traditional terms: it is the object, but not the subject of interaction, it continues to remain here as a prop and tool, it is not prepared to “strike back”. Developing the idea of “Relational Aesthetics”, its creator Nicholas Bourriaud formulated the poetics of post-productionxiv. And again Arkhipov’s work with home-made things proves to a radical counterpoint to the artists that were distorting other people's works in their own creations. Arkhipov is not a disc jockey, the value his works does not lie in the way that he has arranged other people’s works, but in the way that “the appearance of the thing” is manifested in themxv. And if he insists that he "tries to show things as naturally as possible without changing anything in them", then it is because he understands that in order that the thing "strikes back", it should speak for itself.
However, in order that the “appearance of a thing” takes place, in order that the thing reveals the resource for interaction concealed within itself, it cannot be an isolated case - for example just a mere work of art. Therefore, Arkhipov is also interested in the everyday home-made thing – an object, which unlike those created by Gillick, has not been made for privileged artistic distribution but everyday use. It is only this sort of thing that can speak with its own voice and not that of its maker. But at the same time, in order to acquire a voice, the thing should end up in a place where it will be heard, and that place for the thing can only be art. And this is yet another reason why it is specifically the home-made thing that has become the hero in Arkhipov's art: despite being created by a non-professional artist, it is nevertheless a thing that has a maker! And this is what distinguishes them from the everyday things in Tiravaniya’s works, which despite themselves being an example of a type of everyday object, nevertheless only play an auxillary role in his art.
The ambivalence of the home-made thing predetermines the ambivalence of Arkhipov's interrelation with the creators of the home-made things. It is undoubtedly only thanks to Arkhipov that the works created by these makers gain the status of a work of art. However, and Arkipov categorically insists on this, they were already works of art even before his appearance and their makers are genuine artists. Hence, unlike the majority of the practitioners of “Relational Aesthetics”, Arkhipov is not engaged with an apologia for the system of art, demonstrating that any social interaction on its territory – the group consumption of couscous or a private view party can be given the status of art. On the contrary, having started his creative project in Russia in the 90’s – in a context deprived of a system of art and only trying to create one, he paid attention to the fact that genuine art also exists beyond the professional artistic sphere. To put it another way, the innovation of Arkhipov's work lies in the fact that he was that rare artist for his generation, for whom art was not limited by the narrow boundaries laid down by the arts world and who found art in a place where it was not the done thing to look – in the real worldxvi. However, this capability of the home-made thing to overcome the dualism of the professional and unprofessional, art and non-art can be recognised in the huge changes that are taking place today not only in the field of artistic endeavour but also in production practises in general. In contemporary post-industrial society a creative and artistic component is beginning to be found in any labour activity. Therefore, it has become acceptable to define contemporary production as post-Fordian, and contemporary labour as non-material. “Today,” - as one of the theoreticians of non-material labour writes – “in the conditions of contemporary capitalism… the dialectic opposition of “work and play” has been transformed in the continuum in which work and play are merely two extremes. Between them one can find thousands of different methods of reinforcing and feeding the capitalist lionisation of the efficiency of work and play, autonomy and subordination, activity and passivity, intellectual and manual labour” xvii. In this way the democratic ideal of the artistic avant-garde as formulated by Joseph Beuys’s statement: "Everyman is an artist”, is realised not by the virtue of the fact that society has mastered the ideas of the avant-garde but by virtue of changes in the nature of contemporary production. It is important, however, that in a situation when the division between the professional and unprofessional is becoming relative, not only the aesthetic is beginning to step out of its disciplinary boundaries but also artistic endeavour itself is ceasing to follow the traditional disciplinary norms. If traditional creative endeavour relied on codified, formalised procedures and made evaluations on the way an artist has mastered these procedures, then topical creative endeavour has obviated this burden with ease. The contemporary artist no long strives to acquire a special mastery, but relies on certain generic human abilities such as wit, astuteness, common sense and organisational skills to name but a few. This is that initial level of consciousness that theoreticians of non-material labour (in the footsteps of Marx) call “general intellect”, and which from their point of view is the core foundation of contemporary labour practicexviii. Hence, Arkhipov’s unshakeable confidence that the makers of these home-made things are fully legitimate artists. After all, they, like all those, who it is accepted to include in the professional world of art, do not depart in their creative work beyond the boundaries of the generic human skills of “the general intellect”. Arkhipov asserts that the only thing that distinguishes the creators of home-made things from professional artists is the fact that they “do not attempt to exhibit and sell their things, i.e. everything they make is made in order to serve themselves only” xix. Moreover, this very fact – that home-made things are created, without taking into account any aims that might be found beyond their own limits – “the exhibition and sale”, imbues them with an advantage over the status works of contemporary art. After all, creative endeavour differs from other types of human practices by the fact that its purpose is located not outside but within itself. Therefore home-made things are created by their originators in order “that they serve only them”, they advantageously differ in terms of their “naturalness”, in contradistinction to the examples of contemporary art and design, which are more often than not characterised by their “artificiality”. Flawless manufacture, formal flawlessness and other qualities, which are usually present in the professional work are also the very result of the adherence to aims that are external to creative endeavour. After all, this is nothing other than, “an instrument to attract the attention of the buyer, a means of stimulating consumption"xx. This is also a sign of the fact that professional artistic culture has also not overcome its dependence on the codified, formalised procedures of traditional art. As well as a homeliness, hand craftsmanship and angularity to home-made things, there is also a reliable guarantee of their authentic connection with the genuine roots of creativity - with man’s generic capabilities. It is precisely this that Arkhipov also has in mind when he talks about home-made things being the bearers of the “thing’s ideas”. Each thing of this sort returns, as it were, to the generic originating laws of creativity to the act of the first creation. Another philosopher Felix Guattari said that “the return to the starting point of the creation of identities is in essence the artist’s goal” xxi. Thus, not being created for the sake of art, commercial galleries or museums, home-made things are created in order to be a part of life. And it is precisely this that makes them genuine works of art. After all, as the theoreticians of non-material labour assert, contemporary art does not create self-sufficient artefacts but forms of life. Therefore if a man on the street created a spade, and Vladimir Arkhipov exhibited it as a work of art, would “it be possible, after the exhibition, to take it and continue to dig the earth with it” xxii. And all the same, the fact that the makers of home-made things create them “in order that they only serve themselves”, contradicts one of the main peculiarities of non-material labour. Contemporary production is also defined as non-material because it is inalienable from the processes of communication. Even if the product produced has the characteristics of a tangible and material object, its pertinence is defined by the measure and pertinence of the symbolic value invested in it. Contemporary production includes a creative and artistic component, because it bears a public a character and is addressed to the public. The introversion of the creators of home-made things, their concealment from the public space is found in a violent contradiction in the things that have been made by them, which, as has been said above, are an open system of external interactions. However, this contradiction highlights not only the labour of these creators of home-made things, it is essentially the contradiction of non-material labour itself. In contemporary society, although labour and its product are public in their nature, they are however, deprived of a public spherexxiii. This overall thesis of contemporary theory is graphically confirmed by the case of home-made works of art. Although “general intellect” also unites all types of labour practises, although this also violates the traditional demarcations between labour and creativity, professionals and non-professionals, however, the public artistic sphere and to this day is also identified with the infrastructure of contemporary art. The whole system of economic, social and powerful interests advocating this infrastructure invoke its strictly observed shop floor autonomy, limiting access to it for those who are not considered worthy of taking part in it. Thus the access to home-made things in the public sphere of contemporary art turns out to be closed. A similar situation is also invoked in Vladimir Arkhipov’s life mission. His main aim is to transform the potential publicity of self-regulating work into a real publicity. The aim is implementable by virtue of the fact that Arkhipov, being a recognised artist has access to the system of contemporary art. Using this, he introduces home-made things to this domain, having for this purpose taken recourse in a classical and undisputed form of modern art – the ready-made. It is as if Arkhipov takes the creators of these home-made things under his guarantee acting as the guarantor for the artistic creditworthiness of their work before the system of contemporary art. Characteristically there is also another thing here, being extrovert and open to external interaction, Arkhipov’s work fully engages in a way that the amateur authors' works were unable to. All his activities are an example of classic communicational non-material labour. After all, the initial and main stage of his work - his field research, would not be possible without direct communication, without interaction with real people. As the artist himself puts it: “In order for the work to happen, it requires the involvement or at least a lack of indifference on the part of many people. As a result, it turns out to be a genuine collective work of art: the artist has caught sight of something, a second has translated, a third has helped to find an address, a fourth has remembered, a fifth has provided a telephone number, a sixth has said that the maker is on holiday, a seventh has suggested going for a glass of wine and at his house the artist catches sight of something else, but something different… and so on…”xxiv.In this way Arkhipov’s activity is a private case of what is acceptably defined as affective labour – the ability to involve others in a playful interaction, to form group support and sympathisers for his research, to incline the makers of home-made things towards collaboration, to convince them to make a part of their intimate everyday life a thing of public display and so on. Thus Arkhipov’s activities bear an additional and compensatory nature in relation to the work of the makers of these home-made things. Finally, the crowning summary stage of his work is also an example of non-material labour. To date Arkhipov’s main work is his website www.folkforms.ru, an open platform that exhibits his finds, introduces their makers and communicates with anybody who is interested in an object, providing useful information etc. Like any other internet resource Arkhipov’s site – is not only a source of information but also a means of setting up a transnational community. Thanks to it singular individuals can find their place in a collective that is new for them, acknowledging that what connects them is the fact that they are all artists! However, at this stage, the suspicion could once again arise that Arkhipov's activities are fraught with contradiction. And specifically that no matter how open and extrovert his work in its initial and final stages, is the representation of its result not limited and introverted in the artistic context? Do the home-made things not lose their vital dignity, their “naturalness” at the very moment when they end up in the domain of contemporary art? After all, as was asserted earlier, it is the very fact of their indifference to the institutional world of art that also divests them of the “artificiality”, that is present in professional works of art and design! It is precisely this fact that makes home-made things genuine masterpieces! Would it not be appropriate to reproach Arkhipov’s activities for the same reasons that the relational artists are reproached - for the insularity of the work bounded as it is by the artistic world? Arkhipov has devised and directed the entire methodology of this work towards overcoming this possible contradiction. The essence of this methodology is to liberate the home-made thing from any defined status or being placed in any pre-prescribed classification. This aim is taken into account during the first stage of his work, i.e. during the field research. After all, as Claude Levi-Strauss noted, field research is by definition divested of any a priori, it approaches its subject without any preliminary precepts. Unlike a connoisseur of old paintings or a museum curator, a commentator on ancient texts or a historian of literary criticism and so forth, the subject of Arkhipov’s interest is divested of any obvious status. As the artist himself admits: “We are not even statistically close to knowing anything precise about this phenomenon. Neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. My finds are always the chance result of wanderings whither I know not where ”xxv. One could add that during his work he not only “walks not knowing whither" but also searches not knowing what. Moreover, if anthropologists or archaeologists have a thing, that being found and researched, is granted a status and this is the main aim of their work, then Arkhipov does not confer a defined status on his finds. He includes home-made things in a sequential and reversible chain of changeable statuses: “everyday home-made thing – art object - everyday home-made thing”. Commenting on this principle of his work Arkhipov admits: “This chain that I have created soothes my artistic ambition. But I consider my main achievement to be the victory over my own vanity: I put my signature on the works last. And potentially I see this project as the independent technology of revealing and presenting folk forms of home-made things as visual objects"xxvi. This is how he explains the second component of his work methodology: he divests not only the object of his research and exposure but also his own personal figure of its defining and predetermining status. If during the first stage of his work he is busy "revealing things", i.e. he appears in the guise of a specialist field researcher or anthropologist, then he activates his status as an artist in order to endow the everyday thing with the status of a work of art by means a demiurgical gesture that is not devoid of “vanity”. However, in order to tame his “vanity”, he subsequently appears in the guise of the curator, a task, which by definition does not endow non-art with the status of art (after the discovery of the ready-made only the artist can do this), and honourably “present” something which indisputably has artistic status. In addition, Arkhipov’s project also anticipates his other professional guises. At the present moment, the quantity of home-made things that have been collected by him, and also the work that he is carrying out on this collection with its cataloguing, systemisation, representation etc., gives him the grounds to talk about a unique museum of home-made works. All his artistic projects, that give him a reason to show examples of home-made things at various art exhibitions, can be considered fragments of his museum exhibition. However, he does not hence insist that these exhibitions only be held in an artistic environment, just as he refuses to insist that his museum is automatically an artistic one. Arkhipov is prepared to show and discuss his finds with sociologists, anthropologists, cultural analysts and others. Thus, starting as anthropological field research, Arkhipov’s project returns to a context that is more suitable for the discussion of the results of this research. For a complete picture it could be added that the interdisciplinary nature of Arkhipov’s work, by balancing between artistic and research practises also recognises the practises of anthropologists themselves, whose work today is also of an interdisciplinary nature. By following the principles of non-material labour, researchers increasingly include an artistic component in their workxxvii. Moreover Arkhipov himself by ending up in territory that is not artistic insists on his status as an artist and on the highly artistic status of his finds. Incidentally, he insists on this status, by also showing home-made things in an artistic context, only this time it is another effect that is important to him. His aim in this case is to desanctify the traditional figures of the artist and the curator, and, incidentally, also the whole of the professional artistic infrastructure. Only as a result of such manipulations with the status of the artist and the work of art that are not devoid of paradox, does Arkhipov succeed in realising his main creative goal – to present us with “the appearance of a thing”. It is only thus that he succeeds in achieving his main aesthetic effect – that the more non-artistic the home-made things that are kept by him in his exhibits then the stronger the artistic impression they create. In conclusion we can state: firstly, the expressiveness of Arkhipov’s finds are built upon a non-artistic component that is permanently preserved in them and secondly the whole tenor of his activities are directed at overcoming the disciplinary boundaries then the main effect of his activity can not only be aesthetic. After all, this disciplinary division, (Jacques Ranciere calls it “the division of the sensual”), into professional and non-professional, into art and non-art, into form and content, the sensual and rational, play and work bears a political characterxxviii. As the French theoretician demonstrates, all this system “the division of the sensual” “divides and provides a hierarchy for society on the basis of subordinating relationships. A “cultured” person (activity) confers power onto an “unsophisticated” person (passivity); a person who freely controls their time (freedom) confers power on a person who is working (necessity); the class of intellectual labour (autonomy) confers power on the class of manual labour (submission)” xxix. Thus by asserting in his work the democratic slogan of the artistic avant garde “Every man is an artist”, Arkhipov, like Beuys and the whole of the revolutionary avant garde of the 20th century, is bearing in mind not only the fact that each person has the right to art, but each, including the artist as well, has the right to freedom. xxx As has already stated, in the first lines of this text: two arterial and opposing tendencies in the development of 20th century art meet in the work of Vladimir Arkhipov. As a conclusion to this text we note that these two lines meet in order to remove this age old confrontation. Following the traditions of the disciples of counter culture Arkhipov desanctifies the ruling system of art, only he does this not purely for the sake of subversion but for the sake of confirming the universal right to art. Following the traditions of the “productionsts” Arkhipov insists that art’s authentic place – is not an autonomous sphere of the beauty but life itself, only this fine reality is made manifest not by professional artists but by the people themselves. And not in a utopian perspective but in the here and now.