63.  MEANS OF A SEQUENCE
(to Yu.Leiderman)

We came to the snowy Kyevgorodskoe field and prompted Leiderman to move across the field dragging heavy plaster rosette on a belt and thus draw a line with this rosette pointing the zone on the field from which the hangars in the north-western part of the field could not be visible (see Volume 5 of “Going to the country” – “Preface” and “Hangars in the north-west”).

While doing the drawing, Leiderman held a closed cardboard box in the other hand. Each time the box moved slightly, subtle dinging of tiny bells could be heard from it.

After marking the required area with the rosette trace on the snow (such possibility was provided by the sloped form of the field) Leiderman approached us (closer to the field’s center) and – against the background of hangars – received from A.M. a big black notebook with an inscription on the front page: “To Yu.Leiderman”. Inside the notebook there were scaled-up images from the small notebook titled “On the roof”  (from S.Haensgen’s series “The Videoteque”) and also two sheets with photographs: S.Haensgen on the pedestal of Mukhina’s sculpture next to the Collective Farm Woman’s heel plastered with cards with Chinese hieroglyphs, and Yu.Leiderman’s briefcase standing on the pedestal of another Mukhina’s sculpture titled “For Peace” (it is located not far from “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” on Prospekt Mira). Besides that, inside the notebook there was a sheet of paper with  fragment of A.M.’s letter to S.H. concerning tradition and continuity of Noma.

After S.H.’s having questioned Leiderman in front of a camera, A.M asked Yu.L. to leave the scene (i.e. to move outside the field), put the rosette on the snow, produced from a box a plastic doll with a musical mechanism inside (Leiderman wasn’t aware of what he was carrying in the box and what the above described part of the action consisted of), put it on the rosette and read aloud to the video camera’s microphone (in the picture there was the doll standing on the rosette) the text of Hridayam Sutra.

 

Moscow region, Savyolovskaya railway line, Kiovogorskoe field

26.12.1991

A. Monastyrski, S. Haensgen