Inspection Medical Hermeneutics (Инспекция Медицинская Герменевтика) was a pioneering artists’ collective formed in December 1987 in a squat in Furman Lane in Moscow.
The group created installations and performances which experimented with language and meaning, imagining their work as an investigation of their culture at a time when Glasnost was opening it up to the West.
They described Glasnost as a moment when ‘the sky opened up’, akin to psychedelic experience, when a rupture between systems brings anxiety as well as the promise of renewal.
Their work drew from Russian traditions and fairy tales – often relating these to objects from Western visual culture – as well as psychedelia and pseudo-scientific methodology.
[1] In Pepperstein’s words, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics produced ‘a thick mumble, white noise and other incomprehensible, unclear things’.
[2] In his book on Moscow Conceptualism, Professor Matthew Jesse Jackson writes, “Uniting, according to Pepperstein, the camaraderie of John Landis’s Blues Brothers and the method of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, the inspection combined western mass culture with the rigorous analysis of collective actions, styling itself as an alternative monitoring agency, a quasi-institutional entity designed to resist the recent invasion of foreign “experts”.
He continues: “A typical undertaking occurred in May 1988 at a presentation in which Pepperstein encouraged members of a Moscow audience to don a stethoscope to listen to the beating heart of an infant depicted on an empty box of Soviet baby-food.
In 1998 the XI issue of the influential Russian art journal Mesto Pechati was dedicated to the tenth anniversary of Inspection Medical Hermeneutics.
The eccentric and erotic drawings are copies of a series by the turn-of-the- century German artist Max Klinger, which all focus on the motif of the glove.
These objects, such as felt boots, woollen mittens, hats with ear-flaps, downy (fluffy) shawls, which were elements of the basic peasant’s clothing, are still very much ‘alive’ and being worn to this day.
From the viewpoint of this “internal” function, each element of the installation appears as a quotation from or reference to one or another of our texts (either already written or as yet only planned, and sometimes existing as a memory of an oral discussion).
It is this that gives rise to the requirement for textual commentaries “for the catalogue”, by means of which this “laboratory” space of intersecting and unfolding or, on the contrary, stagnating discourses can be engaged as the exhibition background of the work itself".
But make only one step to the side, and this little paradise will disappear, revealing the mythological figure of the “Kolobkovost” or “Escape”, a recurring theme in the aesthetics of the Moscow conceptual school.
Articulating such categories as distance, time and disappearance, the artists reduced their size to infinity and embody a conceptual view of issues of life, death and immortality.