INTERPRETATION with Alexander Milov

 

    There have been very few images that have captivating my attention with such astonishment before as this one pictured.

I was browsing through pictures from Burning Man circa 2016, when I ran into this beautiful piece. I was dazzled. And after that, my research lost its meaning and was detoured to Alexander Milov, the artist and sculptor.

The magnitude, the contrast in materials, the illumination, the meaning... And those two beautiful children underneath it all. I felt chills. I immediately connected with my inner child, innocence, human connection, unconditional love and the ego.

But it was all part of my own's INTERPRETATION, so I had to get in contact with Alexander to understand his meaning and purpose.

Viviana: I am flattered to talk to you about your art, but especially this beautiful piece called “Love”. First and foremost, tell us about you; Where are you from and what was your childhood like?

Alexander: I was born at the crossroads of time, during the collapse of the USSR, when everything that had been preached to us from childhood, both good and bad, was falling apart before our eyes. Plus, in a family of parents with completely different cultures. My mother was a Bulgarian with family values, and my father had Cossack roots and, on the contrary, was always a loner;I think that it was this constant war of opposites and the lack of clearly defined values ​​that played a key role in my formation. Then it manifested itself in everything: First of all, in the denial of any ready-made proposed solutions and the inability to fit into the framework, which, in principle, only worsened over time.

 

V: I love to hear people’s stories about their learnings and process, some with great teachers who helped them develop their sense of art appreciation, and some self-taught. How was your love for art born?

AM: I think it was an opportunity to hide from any kind of demands imposed on me every day. That which I physically did not want to perform and since the finished world did not suit me, my fantasy drew what I would like to be in. The first milestones were probably when I was two years old. I was constantly drawing while at my mother's work site, then it all passed through kindergarten to school, and so I basically redrawn all the last pages in notebooks and, often, more than half of the notebooks were in drawings rather than school assignments. Before that, it was a very clumsy fantasy world and I cannot say that I painted very well in quality. My biggest school has been the redrawing of Donald Duck's liners, Thunder Cats and Ninja Turtles. I just put them on the glass and outlined them. I think that this set the foundation, because at some point I realized that I could draw them without the source code, without translating and twisting them in my head in any position, and from this the ability to modify them and natural attempts to turn them into my own the world spilled over into comics.

    Then there was an attempt to go to art school, which I skipped, then I entered a school named after M. B. Grekov and realized that the classical form of education breaks me very much from the inside, so I, frankly, did not stay in any of the educational institutions.

 

V: Would you say your art expresses your inner thoughts, feelings? Or it is a manifestation of your external reality?

 AM: I almost answered this question in the previous question. I think that in any case, everything that I create, from the moment I draw, is the work of my subconscious, which would be a good carrier of information for psychologists to delve into my head, because I still often do not know why and what I am doing. At the moment, the greatest motivation rests in the form of money, because everything that I am now drawing is the solution of someone's specific problems, and not my inner response to what is happening.

 

V: I came across a statue memorializing soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in the Ukraine which was transformed into a monument to Darth Vader, was this your idea?

 AM: Specifically, to remake Lenin into Darth Vader was part of the situation at the moment, since at that time we were already doing a large project dedicated to Darth Vader with the idea of making him president in the country and the decommunization law entailed an immediate decision. This decision came simultaneously to all the participants in the game. My idea was not to destroy the monument to Vladimir Lenin by putting Darth Vader in its place, but to preserve it on the inside.

 

V: I find art very therapeutic myself, even healthy, both mentally and emotionally... The way it opens a channel for expression and meaning; How does your art connect you with yourself and the world?

 AM: If we move away from philosophy and try to poeticize all this, then, probably, this is still an opportunity, first of all, of daily earnings. But, of course, I cannot afford to do this just to please others. I always pass through my inner perception and, probably, there are some things that I can't do. Those things that my conscience prevents me from doing. Although I can often find a solution: for example, doing political campaigns, which is alien to me, I find it motivated to distort them into the form of Darth Vader, to turn them into art, which also gives me some pleasure, in addition to money.

 

V: What is your story behind the LOVE sculpture?

AM: The concept of this sculpture came during the creation of some art that I created for

a Japanese-Ukrainian festival: A cultural exchange that took place sometime in the late 2000s. At that moment we were doing a series of scotch sculptures on the topic of the day, and I chose topics that worried me and we lacked one more work for the exposition, and just at hand there was a doll that we wrapped with scotch tape, we looked at what it could become in a large scale and add some meaning to it. Due to the fact that at that time I was in another difficult relationship myself, I somehow realized very quickly that this should be a counterbalance between the external form and the internal one. We made a boy and a girl with each other's supporting backs, and then we cut out these backs and put two scotch children there. In the end, when all this was outlined, it became clear that it made sense to complete the contour of adults in the form of a cage. So this work has appeared several times at exhibitions.

When we learned about Burning Man, it became clear that we needed to do something global and we took this sculpture as a basis. The scotch tape was certainly not suitable for this scale, so the very idea of ​​the cell turned into a large shape of pipes.

 

 

V: I’m guessing you did not expect the huge response to your piece to such extent! People must share with you all the time their own INTERPRETATION; Mine was those lighted Childs where their inner children trying to connect, to enlighten each other. LOVED! It still gives me chills... What has been the strangest interpretation you’ve ever gotten from it?

AM: There were a million of them. Starting from the fact that they turned this into a monument to pregnant women, which is generally incomprehensible to me, what do people see there about pregnancy? To probably completely absurd ones, when people simply did not physically notice the essence of the object. Because some see this as a pile of pipes, and moreover, the quality of our children, their visual form, it is not anatomical, since it was done by ordinary locksmiths who are engaged in car bodies and we did not have time to observe some kind of harmonious and beautiful shape. Therefore, they are often disgusted simply by the appearance of children, and the fact that they are inside cells in the form of people is completely imperceptible to them, so it was perceived as contemporary art, which still required a lot of explanation, what I wanted to say by this. Which for me in itself is absurd, because for this work, just one of the few, I managed to relay from the information field where I got it from, without having time to spoil it with my own interpretation.

 

V: Well thank you very much for giving us such interesting insight on your life, art and its developments. Love still keeps us all connected.

You can find more about Alexander Milov on his Instagram account at: @AlexanderMilov