Masha Vlasova
“The Imaginary Kaleidoscope is a meditation on voyeurism and the performative quality of public-facing private displays, and on the desire to reintegrate animals into our life. ”
Hi! Welcome :) Can you introduce yourself?
MV: Hi, thanks for having me! My name is Masha Vlasova and I’m an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, currently living in South Carolina, where I teach video art to college students.
I appreciate the opportunity to share my new piece “The Imaginary Kaleidoscope.” I started working on the piece in the early weeks of the pandemic, so it feels meaningful to show it now, a year into it, as there is (hopefully) an end in sight. Connecting to a larger arts community has been keeping me grounded in this time of isolation. Thank you.
I love kitsch and I find lawn ornaments really endearing. But there is a shift in your film when the viewer is forced to inspect the little creatures. I quickly became unnerved as they smiled back at me. The images suggest they know something.
MV: I love that that has been your experience with the piece! The yard sculptures are banal, recognizable objects. For me, they exist in the liminal space between the public and private. They’re usually on private lawns, expressing the private desires and tastes of whoever places them there. Yet they face out onto the street into the public realm. And when we observe these private(-ish) objects, it is usually in passing. I wanted to use the camera’s ability to frame tightly and to excise context to suggest portraiture. We encounter these animals at their eye level, as equals. And as such, they look back at us.
One of the basic pleasures of cinema is looking at people without being seen. Perhaps the animal sculptures unsettled you because they both look at us and don’t see us? We know intellectually that they’re inanimate objects, yet the camera’s ability to animate anything it frames suggests otherwise.
Could you talk a little about the voice over? It flows so well as an introspective narrative but you had written that it is a compilation of quotes?
MV: I’m glad that it reads as a singular voice. I aimed to create a collective poetic voice that inhabits an animal’s perspective. Unlike the visuals, the voiceover text came together very quickly and organically. I’d been collecting videos of animal yard sculptures for a few years. I couldn’t tell you why. I just was compelled by them, their liminality, their industrial materiality intended to endure outside, their uncanny gaze. When I began editing the video in March 2020, I wanted to meditate on the gaze of the sculptures. Around that time, I was reading a brilliant essay by the art critic John Berger, “Why Look at Animals” from 1972, which became a big inspiration for the film. In it, he traces the role of animals as subjects in art from cave paintings to divine symbols to reminders of our own alienation. Berger argues that, under capitalism, animals have been marginalized from our lives. They’ve become something to look at (think: zoo or circus) but impossible to see. Berger doesn’t mention yard art animal sculpture specifically, but what he says about representations of animals in our culture applies to these objects. I began looking for other instances in literature where authors attempted to adapt the animal voice or gaze and I found so much material! It turns out that we’re obsessed with inhabiting the animal voice. I guess it’s a very human thing to want to know what the other animals are thinking, and we’ve done a lot of that imagining through literature. The rest was just the process of elimination and editing (much like I would edit video). I wanted some of it to be more recognizable, like Franz Kafka’s famous “A Report to an Academy,” where he inhabits the voice of an ape, but some to be a bit more obscure, like Leo Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” (sometimes translated as “Strider”), where he narrates a story through the eyes of a horse.
Americans have a tendency to anthropomorphize their pets. (I have three animals and I am definitely guilty!). The voice over points to this. Many of the lawn ornaments are in human poses, some even wearing clothing. Is the draw towards lawn ornaments motivated by the same desire to see our pets as human members of the family? Are we filling a void?
MV: If we follow Berger, then yes. And he’d probably add that since animals are no longer fundamental participants in our daily lives (i.e. we neither hunt them, nor depend on their labor for survival, nor sacrifice them to our gods), the only way animals can inhabit our world is as anthropomorphized, neutered, and isolated pets, or as a spectacle. Interpreted in this way, bunnies frozen in play, ducks, frogs, and racoons in human poses placed among flowers and on a manicured lawn are a kind of monument to our alienation, desire, and ultimate inability to reintegrate animals back into our lives.
In terms of pets, I don’t know if I agree Berger entirely. Right before the pandemic started, I adopted my dog Azul. I didn’t grow up with dogs so the experience of living with an animal was incredibly illuminating and humbling. I wrote elsewhere about watching Azul watch an experimental film with me and have an experience of the film, as if it was made for her (the film is about huskies and there is no human dialogue but lots and lots of barking and howling). I certainly anthropomorphize her, narrate her, imagine her thoughts, and read into her actions. Sometimes I feel like I can predict her moods and interpret her behavior completely. But at other times Azul surprises me and I’m left with my own human limited gaze reflected back at me.
What have you been listening to / reading / watching lately?
MV: I recently read three very different novels by three very different writers: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell; Children’s Bach by Helen Garner; and Beloved by Toni Morrison (as a fan of Morrison’s writing, I’m embarrassed to admit that this was my first time reading her most famous novel)…and now that I’m in between novels I’ve been reading a lot of horoscopes—Happy New Moon in Aries, everyone!
Recipe of the Week: Vinegret (a Russian beat salad!)
“This was one of my favorite "salads" growing up and my grandfather's version was particularly good because he used sauerkraut of his own making. Hope you enjoy it” - Masha Vlasova
Ingredients
3 (ish) medium potatoes washed, peeled and boiled.
2 (ish) large carrots washed, peeled and boiled (or baked in aluminum foil)
1 large beat (or 4 small beats) washed, peeled and boiled (or baked in aluminum foil)
about a cup of sauerkraut or more if you like sauerkraut
2 large/medium pickles or more if you love pickles
1 small yellow onion
a can of sweet peas (optional)
salt, pepper to taste
a couple tablespoons of olive or veg oil
Method: Cut all boiled veggies and the pickles into half-inch squares. Mince onions. Mix all together with the sauerkraut and green peas if using. Add salt, pepper, and olive oil. Mix very very well and enjoy! OR chill for an hour and serve as a side dish.