July 12th to August 23rd
 Gregory Klassen

A Five Year Plan

A drawing collaboration between Max Lawton
translater of the author Vladimir Sorokin.

The Re Institute is pleased to be showing some very difficult work by Greg Klassen. The gallery hopes that this work will add to the ongoing dialogue about totalitarianism and creativity. By Greg Klassen: In July of 2019, Max Lawton, Vladimir Sorokin’s translator, invited me to work up some drawings for a novel called, Their Four Hearts. No publisher had yet been involved. That would happen three years later, Dalkey Archive Press. My approach is simple. Like a photographer documenting the action of a dangerous place, I would draw what I see. I read the story repeatedly each time abstracting more images. A drawing for every face, every object, every scene. I wondered how many drawings I could wring from Sorokin’s prose. How many drawings are necessary to make a complete visual translation. A third translation. For, Dispatches from the District Committee, a short story collection, I took a new direction. I made one drawing per story. I aimed to illustrate the point at which the prosaic concusses into the outrageous. What Vladimir Sorokin calls the binary bomb in his stories. I have known Max since he was just 15 years old. We formed an instant connection through our love of books and reading. So, I was nothing less than enthusiastic to work with him on these projects. One author, two translators and a fourth collaborator, Dalkey Archive, have banded together to bring forth two wonderful and hideous works of illustrated fiction in print. Look, read, enjoy and beware.

 

 

 

  

By Max Lawton: EIGHT REASONS WHY GREG KLASSEN HAS MANAGED TO PROVE THAT MURDER IS A FINE ART 1. There is the image of a young Greg Klassen studying under Gerhard Richter in Dusseldorf. Upon presenting one sketch of a hand to Richter, the young Wisconsin artist––who’d flown over to Germany by the seat of his pants, living in communes, Marxist revolutionaries, anarchists, the sound of eighties post-punk resounding through the country––was told by Richter “das ist aber ekelhaft!”–– “but that’s disgusting!” 2. There is the image of a young Vladimir Sorokin working on his unpublishably aberrant texts in his tiny corner of a communal apartment. In these texts, Sorokin set out to reveal the id-driven netherworld of the Soviet Union. But the texts themselves also are a kind of netherworld, a map with no territory, a territory with no map. Most extreme among them are Their Four Hearts and the early short stories, unapologetic in their depiction of the violence that, according to Sorokin, defines not only the Soviet Union, but every human polity. Violence, shit, heinous sexual encounters... these are the stuff of life and nothing else. By reading these texts, the supplicant (reader) enters into a kind of shadow realm. There can be no honest guide presented for these texts. 3. As such: to illustrate them would be a LIE. The Virgilian artist presented with the task of accompanying these illustrations with pigment, with charcoal, with ink... whatever the fuck... all this Virgilian artist-mage can do is illustrate the non-illustration of an appalling and incomprehensible world. To accompany something that is a viscous murk, dark as squid ink, it enters the ocular apparati and causes hallucinations, bad thoughts, you’ll be speaking gibberish by the end of ‘em... to accompany such a thing with logocentric diagrams of WHAT HAPPENS WHERE––this would be propaganda for lovers of life as it appears to the uninitiated. This would be a lie. And Greg Klassen is no liar. 4. There is the image of a young Max Lawton in Moscow translating Vladimir Sorokin’s extreme early texts. He has rented a shitty Khrushchevka on Airbnb. It smells like asbestos and cigarettes. Greg Klassen is a great friend of his family. Max remembers Richter’s exclamation about Greg’s sketches “das ist aber ekelhaft!” Max writes to Greg and asks him to illustrate Their Four Hearts. Working by day on motorcycles at a specialized biker garage in a Milwaukee slum where Nazi Harley-riders perpetually impale each other on swastikas to the accompaniment of Wager preludes and Death in June, Greg retires to his studio every night (which gives Greg an inherent comprehension of Sorokin’s critique of the id of totalitarianism––what gets the system (and all the people in it) hard). He becomes entirely nocturnal. He subsists on adrenochrome alone––extracted from unwilling victims just as Doctor Gonzo describes the process in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Max’s family is afraid, no, scratch that, terrified for Greg and his family. Greg is lost in Their Four Hearts. He moves on from adrenochrome to even heavier stuff. He hasn’t slept in six months. He has done at least 666 illustrations. All in blackest charcoal. Greg sits on the fecal dentist’s chair with a hole in its bottom that crowns the book. Greg is the bull of the comic-style speech bubble. Greg is the center of the School of Athens panel. Greg is high on literature (the best drug, Sorokin always claims). Eternal night in washes of charcoal has swallowed him. 5. When the book is published, Greg manages to quit adrenochrome cold turkey. 666 impaled Harley dudes stand guard around his studio. Wagner preludes perma-resound through the city of Milwaukee thanks to the psychic rift Greg has inflicted on the city. He is only just beginning to sleep again––15 or 20 minutes per night––when Max calls him again, from LA this time. Max tells him there’s another book, not a short novel this time, but a collection of those early stories (a couple of late ones too): Dispatches from the District Committee. A deathly shudder passes across Greg’s body. He has to go back (again an’ again an’ again...). “But this time,” Max says, “you’ll be redeemed... The drawings will be in color. Printed in color. Insane brightness... Welcome back to the world of daylight.” Tears flow from Greg’s eyes. His wife and child rejoice. 6. But Max is mistaken... To complete the deranged color frescos of Dispatches from the District Committee, Greg does have to retreat back into the night. His adrenochrome addiction does rear its fearsome head once more. The plague of impaled Nazi bikers does continue. Only, this time, Greg isn’t lost, isn’t stranded, his ocular apparati not invaded by squid ink or sepulchral miasma... He knows just where he is there in the night. His color is his guide. He eats the shit, hurls the Braunschweiger sausage, floats through the grocery store, sledgehammers the pipes into the cleaning lady’s belly, chainsaws the head off for the competition, takes a poo in the tub, builds the monument, smokes every drug in the tobacco pouch, farts for his first working saturday... But he remains Greg. Remains “ekelhaft.” 7. And once Greg finishes Dispatches, once the book has been printed and disseminated all through the country––all through the world––a permanent cry of “das ist aber ekelhaft!” comes to resound through the whole of Milwaukee. Living illustrations of Greg’s non-illustrative tableaus all along the lakefront. They are eternal. They will be there forever. The greatest piece of art ever produced in the city. In the state. These non-illustrative illustrations that smell of adrenochrome and years of no sleep. That reek of impaled Nazi bikers. They present a consummate metaphysics of another world. An enclosed metaphysics of Soviet aberration. Long may it reign over the Milwaukee waterfront! And death (an awful Sorokinian death!) to anyone who would dare take it down! A fate straight outta Their Four Hearts for any who would deny its brilliance! 8. Greg. Ekelhaft. Sorokin. A match made in heaven. PS. Watch out for the third volume of our collaboration coming soon. It’s called Nightingale Grove and it makes the first two look tame (more than 1,000 pages, 1,000 nights of no sleep, 1,000 glands emptied of adrenochrome...).