Irene Caesar

Who is Irene Caesar?

Irene Caesar, Ph.D. is a Russian-American conceptual artist and philosopher. She became a professional artist in 1988, and came to prominence in Russia in the early 1990s, with articles about her in major Russian newspapers of that time. Caesar produced a series of performances documented in photographs in the style of absurdism, close to the theatre of the absurd of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. They were staged as role-games, which expressed some concepts in a symbolic way by making participants interact with some object or prop, with themselves, or between each other in some absurd situations. These performances were staged not as static tableaux vivants, since they were characterized by a high degree of dynamism and interaction between Caesar and the participants. As a way of questioning modern art, Caesar created a series of photographic portraits of some well-known critics, film directors, and artists, including Arthur Danto, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Slava Tsukerman, Vadim Perelman, which she produced as absurd role-games. Caesar participated in the dissident movement in Russia, was invited by Marina Salye to make a speech at the Founding Conference of the Free Democratic Party of Russia during the 1991 Putsch, and produced the series of portraits of important dissidents, including portraits of Elena Bonner, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Pavel Litvinov, and others, which showed these nonconformists in some nonconformist controversial situations. These portraits-role games were widely exhibited, including Chelsea Art Museum in New York, State Tretyakov Gallery of Russia in Moscow, The Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York, etc., and were included in such collections as The Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, Mashkov Museum of Fine Arts in Volgograd, Museum "The Other Art" in Moscow, etc. Critics emphasized that the uniqueness of Caesar’s creativity consists in the fact that, for the first time in the history of art, a woman – from a woman’s point of view—gives an assessment of such a wide scope of human ideas via her art. Arthur Danto in his essay "Trickster's Commentary" about Irene Caesar, published in the art magazine "Dialogue of Arts", noted that Caesar's role games created a new paradigm of conceptual art via the intense interaction between a portraitist and a model. Some of Caesar's role games were quite radical, for example, her staging of the American torture by water—waterboarding—of one of Russian opposition leaders Matvei Krylov in the days of the most intense protests of Russian opposition in Moscow in the winter of 2012. Caesar claimed that she was always a philosopher-artist, and that she practiced conceptual art as a way of testing her philosophy, and, being a doctor of philosophy, she practiced philosophy as art, that is, as a practical guide for better living. In February 2012, she delivered a public lecture at the Moscow State University in Russia, in which she presented her "Manifesto: Death of Postmodernism" with a bitter critique of postmodernism for its indifference to human suffering. In her protest against the cynical Western support of terrorism in Syria, she produced her film "National Security: Irene Caesar takes Arthur Danto's fingers," in which the most famous Anglo-American art critic Arthur Danto, as a criminal, gives to her his fingerprints in red paint, resembling blood, with the crying and sobbing of innocent people being killed in the background amidst bomb explosions and shootings by automatic guns. In September 2012, Caesar delivered a public lecture "The Matrix" at the Harriman Institute of the Columbia University, in which she presented her holographic principle for globalization and her concept of the Matrix City as an information-vibration matrix, in which all the aspects of life are controlled by the information-resonance technology. Caesar's "Matrix City" was a critique of Charter city, offered by Paul Romer, and Ocean Cities or Seasteading by Peter Thiel as suicidal for mankind. Caesar used psychotronics for producing artworks for the first time in the history of art. She presented to the public her psychotronic art at her Jubilee Lecture "Man-Sun" at the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow in March 2013. The presentation consisted in a few video installations, all encoded with the text of her Manifesto "Man-Sun" and her childhood matrix, among which was her "Self-portrait as Joan of Ark" and "Self-Portrait as Text" as a derivative from this artwork. The encoding was done by the lasers of the Institute for National Security in Moscow.