Artist’s statement for the project “3D Idiot”

In March 2022, a European university briefly cancelled a lecture course on the work of F. M. Dostoevsky, an episode that became a notable example of the logic of “cancel culture” applied to a classic of Russian literature. The decision was reversed within a day under pressure from public reaction, but this brief gesture itself, the readiness to take an author out of cultural circulation, became material for my artistic practice.

The project “3D Idiot” is a response to prohibition not through polemic but through form. Instead of defending the text, I propose its transformation: the book is no longer read, it is seen.

Using deconstruction (J. Derrida) and the logic of structural psychoanalysis (J. Lacan), I consider prohibition as a form-giving act. Just as in psychoanalysis the prohibition imposed by culture (the symbolic law) deprives the subject of the possibility of merging with the Other and thereby gives rise not to emptiness but to a complex symbolic structure, so the cultural ban on Dostoevsky leads not to disappearance but to the birth of a new form of the book.

In the project, each page of the novel is folded into a sharp form using the principle of origami. The text remains visible but cannot be read: meaning is replaced by form. The Reader gives way to the Viewer. The sequence of pages is replaced by a spatial construction. The title acquires the prefix 3D: this means not only volume but also the three dimensions of the book’s existence: the historical (Dostoevsky), the material (paper, form) and the contemporary (the artist as witness).

1. Trajectories of the object’s passage into the cultural field of postmodernism
The art object “3D Idiot” is a book translated into a new dimension. Under the influence of the present day and of cultural and political shifts, Dostoevsky’s novel acquires a new form, using a logic characteristic of postmodernism. The postmodern position deprives the object of stability, exposing the gap between what the object seemed to be and what it may become. What happens in this gap, destruction or transformation, is decided by a specific gesture. Deprived of their supports, objects expose the stereotype that holds them in place: the notion of a cultural object primarily as a bearer of national belonging (“Russian classics”, “Russian literature”) rather than as an independent work, part of the heritage of world literature. It was this stereotype, not the text itself, that became the basis for the ban and, consequently, the cause of the affect around which the further work is built. Another, no less persistent stereotype about Dostoevsky’s books, that they are “difficult” and “gloomy” literature, will become material of a different kind: not a source of affect but the building material of the form itself.
One of the key instruments of poststructuralist thought (closely linked to postmodernism) is Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. It aims to unsettle stable meanings and to reveal the binary elements that sustain the stereotypical integrity of an object. When such an object, for example a book by Dostoevsky, is placed in a new context, in this case a situation of cultural prohibition, its structure (both the text and the object itself) may undergo change. Jacques Lacan’s theory of structural psychoanalysis helps to outline possible trajectories of this change. I use it not as an analysis of the book’s content but as a lens: if we imagine that a cultural object is able to react to prohibition, and draw an analogy with how the psyche reacts to the impossibility of complete merging with the Other, this reaction reveals the same structure: a lack that sets the process of symbolisation in motion.

2. The structure of the book as an object
Dostoevsky’s books, especially The Idiot, have long been held in culture by a stereotype: “difficult”, “gloomy”, “profound”, “hard to understand”. This stereotype makes them a suitable object for future deconstruction: it is at once stable and vulnerable.

A book can be imagined as a construct consisting of the following elements:

• cover,
• pages,
• title,
• text as a system of signs,
• content as the transmission of meaning,
• author (Dostoevsky as a figure),
• reader,
• the stereotype of “difficult” literature

The Reader traditionally enters into dialogue with the text: agrees, argues, interprets. It is the Reader who binds all the other elements into a single whole. Without the Reader, the book ceases to function as a cultural object.

3. The logic of prohibition in structural psychoanalysis
In psychoanalysis, prohibition, namely the impossibility of complete merging with the Other, constitutes the subject: the subject cannot return to a state of original fullness, and in this place a structural lack forms, which becomes the driving force of the psyche. The subject seeks substitutes, objects that resemble the lost fullness but are not identical to it, and through these substitutions builds metaphors: one signifier takes the place of another without ever fully coinciding with it. Thus lack becomes not a dead end but an engine: the more the subject seeks what was lost, the more complex the structure built around this search becomes.
Similarly, the ban on Dostoevsky creates a cultural lack: the place the book occupied in cultural circulation cannot simply be erased; it remains as an emptiness that demands to be filled.


4. Dismantling the reader and the formation of lack
If the ban is aimed at Russian culture, its direct addressee is the Reader, as a representative of the present capable of perceiving and transmitting this cultural code. Deprived of the Reader, the book loses its function. Deconstruction begins with dismantling precisely this element.
In psychoanalytic logic, the loss of an object does not lead to emptiness but sets off a process of restructuring. The objects within the construct begin to change their functions and take up new positions.

5. The structure of the object “reader”

A text exists simultaneously in two dimensions: as meaning, the imaginary picture of the world that a description evokes, and as sign, the symbolic fabric of letters from which the text is made. Accordingly, the function of the reader also splits in two: the reader takes in the meaning and sees the signs. This duality can be expressed as a division into two objects:

• reader takes in meaning,
• viewer sees signs.

6. Deconstructing the binary opposition reader/viewer
Within the system “book – Reader” a binary opposition is revealed that sustains the book as cultural heritage: reader/meaning and viewer/sign. The first term traditionally dominates: it is reading, the extraction of meaning, that certifies the book’s status as a bearer of thought. The second is considered its subordinate, incomplete form: seeing a text without reading it is perceived as an insufficient, unfinished act, as what the reader lacks for full reading.
Deconstruction reveals the opposite: in order to read, one must first see. The pair viewer/sign is a necessary condition of the pair reader/meaning, not its deficiency. Formally, this can be expressed as follows:
Reader = reader/meaning + viewer/sign
Then the pair viewer/sign is not a deficient reader but what remains if we subtract the pair reader/meaning from the whole:
viewer/sign = Reader − reader/meaning
The dismantling of the reader discussed above is precisely the subtraction of the pair reader/meaning in its entirety: what remains reveals what was hidden in it, the pair viewer/sign.
In the “3D Idiot” project this subtraction is carried out literally: the text remains visible but loses the possibility of being read line by line. The hierarchy is overturned: in place of the pair reader/meaning, which dominated as the norm of how one treats a book, stands the pair viewer/sign: the sign remains visible, the text is not hidden, it is in plain sight, but it has no possibility of being read.

7. Redistribution of functions between objects
Having taken the Reader’s place, the Viewer no longer uncovers meaning but perceives form. In place of content (meaning) comes the artist’s gesture: a materialised affect provoked by the prohibition. In Lacanian logic, this affect, subordinated to the law, is directed towards complicating its own structure rather than destroying the source of the prohibition.
Formally, this can be expressed as a continuation of the formula from the previous section: after the dismantling, the pair viewer/sign remained, and into the vacated place, where meaning used to stand, comes gesture. The new integral figure that has taken the place of the former Reader looks like this:
Viewer = viewer/sign + gesture
Gesture occupies the same position in the structure that meaning once occupied, but it is not identical to it: it is not read but perceived directly, as energy and form.
Important: accepting the law is not the same as agreeing with it. The artist does not justify the prohibition but incorporates it into their own system in order to create a new form from within, re-appropriating the very mechanism of suppression as material for a new form rather than opposing it directly.

8. Assembling material for the new structure of the book
As a result of deconstruction:

• a new object appears: the Viewer;
• the artist’s gesture is realised (in the form of affect)

Preserved are:

• the pages with text,
• the title of the novel, The Idiot,
• the stereotype of the “difficult book”,

The function of the author is now partly passed to the artist: Dostoevsky becomes an ally, an observer, but not the sole source of meaning. The cover loses its significance: it was a threshold marking the beginning of the narrative sequence, but for the viewer, who perceives the book as a whole, there is no longer a beginning or an end. The sequence of pages that set the order of reading is no longer needed: the book can be taken apart so that it can be seen all at once.

9. The stereotypical signifier as an object of form-making
The logic of lack demanded a complication of the structure, a complication of form. In the very word complication a direction can already be heard. In Russian, uslozhnit’ (to complicate) contains slozhit’ (to fold) and slozhennoe (folded); in English, too, “complicate” goes back to the Latin complicare, “to fold together”. The stereotype of the “difficult book” acquires a literal meaning: the book becomes physically folded. The consonance of the Russian words slozhnaya (“difficult, complex”) and slozhennaya (“folded”) exposes a connection that was not obvious before, and it is this consonance that, through the logic of the theory itself, leads to the choice of artistic technique: origami, in which a sheet of paper is folded into a new form while the original material remains recognisable.

10. Giving form to affect through image
The affect provoked by the prohibition is associated with anger, a sharp, cutting feeling. Origami makes it possible to translate this sharpness into material: each page of the book turns into a pointed figure, at once harsh, tense and fragile.

11. A book for the viewer: reading form
The new book no longer exists in a linear dimension (text in 2D) but in a spatial one. All the pages, folded into sharp forms, are arranged in a spatial sequence on two planes, like a book spread, so that it comes to resemble an installation. Each page directs the gaze towards its point, where the material form acquires semantic tension: it is there that the artist’s gesture is concentrated.

12. Transforming the title
The title “The Idiot” acquires the prefix 3D because it points to several meanings at once:

1. “Idiot cubed”: a response, in a postmodern spirit, to the attempt to ban art;
2. the literal embodiment of the book in three-dimensional space;
3. the three dimensions of the new book:

• the dimension of the artist (the present),
• the dimension of the material (paper, form, object),
• the dimension of the writer (historicity, tradition).

Conclusion
The “3D Idiot” project is not merely a reinterpretation of a classic but an act of cultural transformation through form.