press clipping - more about Zankovs' activity

„The art of Ventsislav Zankov, born 1962, is anthropocentric. He demonstrates with consistency and true commitment that his ego is the main anthropoid in his works. Zankov keeps experimenting over himself in search of intellectual phenomena behind life’s material manifestations. His performances render naturalistic presentations of humanist metaphors, presented with the ruthlessness of everyday routine. The author is interested in the structural relations of the world we live in and cuts them down to their elemental meanings without the fear that the whole might get lost or changed. Interpreting is not among his goals, his powers rather lie in the revelation of these elements, in tearing them naked. Zankov achieves that through „accumulating“ associations, through arranging dramatic „pick“ circumstances or intervening/ changing the structure of reality/event and thus revealing the pattern behind.“

At the beginning of 1991 Ventsislav Zankov held his first performance of the 'Red' series in the park in front of the Shipka Gallery, Sofia. After spraying blood everywhere, especially over his own sculptures, he - naked and covered in blood - finally fell down into the snow. It was at a time when Bulgarian artists had only just discovered performance as a genre and they were making their first attempt to demonstrate what they had learned as a result of reading. more often than not their results were quite naive. Ventsislav Zankov, in fact, was the first artist to make a sustained and convincing effect by taking his virulent bloody series further into exhibition halls and galleries.

Virulence is quite characteristic of his works, whether he is involved in a slaughterhouse action or placing pornographic pictures on a elaborately embroidered tablecloth.

The first impression produced by the 'The Last Supper' at the VideoHart Exhibition is that of an incredibly cold, pure and non-dramatic piece of art: a single image communicates with itself from the 13 different monitors. the speaker (fellow artist Kosio Minchev), dressed formally, offers a diverse variety of cliches in multiple variations and utter incomprehensible words of wisdom from an unidentifiable source. While the viewer is busy searching for the source yet another completely new statement commences...

'The Last Supper' remains a mystery - a conspiracy impenetrable to the viewers, despite actually being in its centre. The "conference" has been organized for the sake of the spectator, of course, but hr remains alienated - somewhere somebody is thinking of something, interpreting, making decisions for him. Television reality stands out in all its depressing ambiguity. It is both of vital significance and beyond one's reach, the spectator within it is really no more than an on-looker, i.e merely a witness and the only activity he is entitled to is to either switch on or to switch off this part of his life. Vetsislav Zankov's work in fact is dramatic - the spectator experiences the most real suffering caused by the benefits of civilization.

„...Zankov’s exhibition of paintings at the MIX Gallery in Sofia is an event in itself. The author of performances, installations, and happenings is now presenting oil paintings to the public. Faces - symbols of movies, fashion magazines, posters and adverts are looking at the visitor, from the 3 meter long canvases, symbols of everything that is daily intruding on us. The canvas is in fact an aggression against the viewer, and that is exactly what the author meant: to shock and outrage, to force us into understanding. „When I lost the sense of things my themes came” Zankov says. the world of false promises, of foreign culture (that we follow automatically, unaware of our lost identity) has invaded the Gallery. The outright and at times brutal appeal of some of his works is only the first impression they make. There is the pain behind the aggressiveness: the artist’s gesture leaves a trace in us and insists on finding the message behind. The exhibition of Venstislav Zankov is an outcry against the misunderstood fads and the indifference to our own selves in the world of moral values, torn apart, of intellectual vacuum and lack of perspective. The way out, suggested by the author, is through facing the truth about us, here and now. ....We are present: philistine traps still have not got hold of us all...”

Vania Slavova, Without Innocence: the Last Challenge of Avant-Garde Artist Zankov,

„ The artist Ventsislav Zankov is standing in front of me, in his studio, showing me his new works. Taking them out from „a secret place” and arranging them, one by one, propped up against the wall. He asks me not to write about them in this interview, there’s an exhibition coming soon...I am looking at them and I pretend I don’t see. He adds a word here, another there, asks me a question, we turn back to the pictures for a while, and Ventsi takes them back to the secret place. He did not let me inside. “Sense makes no sense” is his receipt about modernity and video-art.

This is not our story, we did not made it. It has been already told - and besides told somewhere else. Our part is, if we take there is video-art in Bulgaria, to interpret meanings that have already been articulated. Performance was in the beginning. Performance, videoinstallation, videosculpture. The aesthetics of Videoart may be interpreted along three main aspects. First, The TV image is exploited as simulation of reality, a kind of transformation. Second, TV images may be used as structural elements. In aesthetic terms the TV image, similar to the canvas and the paints, may be regarded as means of expression. videosculptures are made this way: the TV screen and the image displayed on it, build up a fiction world that has little to share with reality. The TV image as means of expression is fairly limited in potential: it makes room for a variety of interpretations, yet it remains limited....Third comes the aesthetic aspect: let’s take an example, you put a lodestone over the TV set and get a distorted image as a result. That is to give new meaning to communication values: there’s more to TV than the vision itself. In fact, that was my motivation to attempt a videoinstallation titled „The Last Supper”: 13 TV screens, displaying one and the same image of a man (Christ implied) and the images talking to one another. At the same time it’s a man talking to himself. This is a real talk, with dialogues, interrupted by pauses, participants listening to each other, casting quick glances...

We are still in the middle of the 60ies, just before the video-art was about to come into the world. ..Performances, for example, haven’t yet grown into a distinct art genre. They are still to grow round and full fledged, to be got over and transformed into true art. Video-art in Bulgaria is compilating in character and vague as a concept, because it is rather an imitation than a logical consequence - it is still to be developed, to be grasped as both necessary and aesthetically appropriate.

How come that young Bulgarian artists often turn to narratives from the Bible?

Because there is no understanding about what’s going on around. You keep feeling your way towards something safe and stable. Hunting authenticities from the past. It is safe, because it has been put to the test many times. I don’t meant the aesthetic part, I mean the attitude. At least you will not blow the theme.

There is the fear to look around, to see where you are. To avoid fear you turn to something different. Maybe that is the reason for the fairly successful performance of evangelical priests in Bulgaria....because we avoid asking questions; what’s on? who am I? what is my part in this? Who am I? A Hybrid of something and something else, of something and nothing?! And preachers promise the world to you, and comfort, and escape from questions. You’ve found sense somewhere else. Video-art is an alternative interpretation of the media, it lends a new way of understanding the world. Of grasping time. The relation between art and TV generates the opposite response - to find an alternative to TV as a phenomenon. To get over the traditional attitude: watching and watching without an effort to grasp it aesthetically. To push the TV out of its status of „my world connection”. To find the object and the picture in it. I don’t mean that the TV should generate art. It is a prerequisite. That is the way I imagine civilization came into birth. It is pretty simple: you start shooting your performance, next you look closer into the thing you’ve shot and get to seeing the image behind. It is not the action, it’s the appearance...next you come to fooling around your camera....and that is the simplest way to do it. ......”

„Ventsislav Zankov and Tsveatn Krastev are two young artists whose works have an immediately recognizable spirituality. Shortly after the changes, Zankov, Bulgaria’s leading performance artist, created a series of sensual, minimalist bronze and white plaster temples, offering refugee from the chaos of contemporary life. At the Lessedra gallery in February 1992, Zankov temples of separate often nested pieces, arched over one another to powerfully define the space around them.”

„ Performance artist Ventsislav Zankov also deals with myth and religion - he frequently appears as a life-giver, a robed Christ, or a doctor. In his Limits of Agony performance last year, he appeared garbedin white robes, observed the slaughter of cattle at the local butcher, and made blood imprints on the carcasses.”

„...Ventsislav Zankov can hardly be considered to belong with the group of artists, whose names have been chaotically and often for no good reason related to the unconventional manifestations in the field of visual arts. I can make at least two points in favour: he is consistent in his strategy of expression and the results from his artistic activities bear the drive of an unceasing provocativeness. There aren’t many artists today that can afford resisting the temptation of repeating „guest visits” into different imagery, content and visual territories ( that often reduces the possibility to accept them as serious authors)...”

„...Ventsislav Zankov made a series of performances,....charged with consistent philosophical and aesthetic position, that brought together his works under the motto of his exhibition “The Limits of Agony”...”

„...Only the work of Ventsislav Zankov suggests “sculpture” feelings, because of its distinct spatial stylistics. Yet this work reminds rather of a remnant from an ancient Eastern civilization, or of a totem, guarding sacred places than a piece of modern art...”

„...yet I also know his sure touch in drawings, his performances at sculpture symposia, his sculptures at the Doctors’ Park, torn down by strangers....let him keep his unrest and the core of his inspiration...”

„The genre of Park Sculpture or plastic art in open air have been for long considered to be second quality. The monument in the center of the town square, with its, instructive, moralizing and other totalitarian functions, was the paragon of organizing public space...Are we ready now to take sculpture for what it really is?...Before yielding to the sheer pleasure that the works of sculptor Zankov brings our public should grasp the new criteria that rule the process of artistic recognition today: the artist’s personal merits, his drive and ability to take risks. This young sculptor is trying to prove it: he takes his work and his public to his heart only.”

„...The “RED” Performance of sculptor Zankov was not only a strange and unknown experience to the public, it was also a elaborately designed and subtly played performance. ....A performance can hardly be put into words, it’s even more desperate to try and describe an avant-garde performance...Still he have a clue to think over...let the true and strange works of art never end...”

„...it is a breath-taking transition. Straight after the entrance of Bulgarian TV bldg. entrance you sneak into a rickety yard, full of cars, and behind them the poster of the happening is hanging carelessly: ”The Creation”...You come from the sunlight and sink into a cool darkness, stinking of must, acetone, dust and barley...Huge flakes of dry old paint are hanging from the walls and down the ceiling like yellow afternoon bats, they will drop down any moment...I am leaping over bricks, small pools, old shoes, iron rods, swarfs, must-covered mirrors, blown down doors... I feel awkaward in the old brewery of Proshek Brothers, not used to the avant-garde. But I first come into a hall, turned into a cave and full of gigantic boilers, pipes and cranes. They are shining. Ventsi (Ventsislav Zankov) has turned them into “Light Machines”. This is my first encounter with giving new meaning to this negative zone... I am not looking for symbols and messages, I don’t try recalling schools and trends. I only feel atavistic resistance to it all....AND I LIKE IT. It is wonderful to make rust shine again...”

„...”The Creation” Happening moved to the Doctors’ Park where after a substantial “blood transfusion” of avant-garde art the Cosmic Tree of Venstislav Zankov came to growth...”

„...Zankov’s exhibition was the week’s most impressing art event...the author is a real representative of untraditional artistic thought and expression. Both the elite among journalists’ guild and the Prime minister with his modest and intelligent presence, attended the inauguration of the exhibition. Some of the artists stood on the alert: when an avant-garde exhibition was last attended by a politician (it was Hruschov in the end of 60ies), bulldozers appeared there on the following day and tore it down. This time, to everybody’s relief the exhibition survived...”

„...Zankov’s exhibition at the Lessedra Gallery, presenting drawings and small size sculpture, that seem to be messages from ancient time and provide interesting rendition of pre-historic forms and symbols. The sculpture images of “cathedrals” remind of children’s sand castles, built up on the sea shore....the intriguing architectonics in the juxtaposition of sculpture elements turns every single work into a hieroglyph...”

Velislava Stoyanova, The chaos from the beginning of the World has been ordered in Lozenets,

„... Sculptor Zankov, with a torch-lamp in hand is welding a rusted iron cage and the public of the new performance at 199 Theater in Sofia will go through it on their way to the theater hall. The installations appear at the entrance of the thereto, go round the stage and the seats of the visitors...the broken clockwork of Ventsi Zankov adds to the grotesque touch of the everyday stage setting, consisting of a bike, a toilet seat and a dirty frying pan...timelessness and the cage, being the vehicles of the authors’ message...”

„...Ventsislav Zankov: “A Room”( a real bed-spring, placed over spread sheets of “Rabotnichesko Delo” Newspaper, the ex-Communist Party official newspaper,a child’s cot with an embrio in it, a table with some glasses of water put on it, and in the glasses we leave our lives at peace before going to bed: a denture, an eyes and a phalus..”

‘ . . . But let’s go back to the so called elitist art. I would share with you a detail of the exhibition performance of Ventsislav Zankov. To me, there were two striking things about this exhibition, that should be pointed out. The first thing is that the presence of Prime Minister Dimitrov at the opening of the exhibition nearly brought the media to trance. This is both ridiculous and paradoxical: ridiculous, because similar ‘visit’s provoked ‘similar’ effects in the past; and paradoxical because true avant-garde needn’t address mastodons of the political situation as spectators . . Moreover this type of ‘culture for the masses’ reduces the potential of both ethics and genre. I don’t find the right words to describe neither the Parliament nor the avant-garde in Bulgaria. Ventsislav Zankov is an interesting artist, yet authorities seem to assign different attributes to him.

real player G2 install files	zankov's CV	performances actions	classical ART4KUNST paintings drawings sculptures	on line stuff on line stuff on line stuff	*projects*	video+ installations	presentations + texts+descriptions	perss- clippings
	XXX countrie	red1		real zankov ctrl_z_radio sofia MF lessons *art_in_action* my legitimate faces xxx countres on line	ctrl_z_radio off line	VIDEOS	the silence 1999	interviews TV realVideos
		red2			beauty hunter
		red3				the Last Supper	dear...1999 new status MANIFESTO
staRt my first music here		am I a God			10 years later		**Because 1997**
		steak&chips					utopia'1996 NORTH-WETERN UNIVERSITY' chicago usa
	childhood coming soon	Limes Agoniae 1			a subway guide	Homo Sapience
		Limes Agoniae 2			MF lessons off line	light machines	body, flesh...1995 prague CZ
		make war not Love					ready or not... my diaries.doc short version
							ANTHROPOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE project 1992-1995 archive word6