TOTART: Natalia Abalakova/ Anatoly Zhigalov

🔖 Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov are linguists by education, structuralists by calling, and conceptualists by name. One day, they recognized that for two artists who are legally married, it was better to work together. And together, they spent decades under wonderful intellectual stimulation and sharp aesthetic delights. (They had already started working in the 1960s, when the problem of monetization of art had not yet surfaced - art for art's sake was done exclusively for one's pleasure).At first, as extremely serious and thorough people, Natalia and Anatoly unified their theoretical basis, and only then began its execution. The name TOTART, invented by them at the same time, at the end of the 1970s, was a contraction of the full name of the new group - "A Project of the Total Artistic Action" [trans. Proekt Total'nogo Hudozhestvennogo Deystviya], declaring no more and no less, the "Investigation into the Essence of Art as Applied to Life and Art" in their slogan.Under such a universal brand, one could do anything - succumb to boundless historiography, delve deeper into geo-politics; ponder on the national cultural identity;  conduct sociological field experiments; occasionally, behave like a hooligan; pose questions about gender wars; fall into ardent metaphysics.