Unchangeable above the heads

‘I’m flying!’ shouts the Russian peasant Yefim in the prologue of Andrei Rublyov , the film by Andrei Tarkovsky about Russia’s most famous icon painter. In this masterful epic about art in troubled times, Tarkovsky had Yefim take the first hot air balloon ride in the Russian countryside, nearly four centuries before the Montgolfier brothers actually did so on June 4, 1783, in the French town of Annonay. From a tower, Jefim steps into the messy ropes of the hot air balloon and then sees sheep and horses running away from below. “I’m flying!” he shouts repeatedly, delighted – until things go wrong.

Jefim’s balloon flight is undoubtedly an ode to Vladimir Tatlin, the Ukrainian patriarch of constructivism who wanted to fly. Then Andrei Rublyov after a long struggle with the Soviet censor came out in 1971, Tatlin’s work, if it still existed, was gathering dust like forbidden art in the cellars of Russian museums. Forty years earlier, constructivism had fallen into disgrace in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Tatlin had retired to the abandoned New Virgin Monastery in Moscow. For years he worked there on a small plane made of wooden rods and pieces of cloth that he called the Letatlin, a contraction of ‘letat’, the Russian word for flying, and his own last name. He built three Letatlins, in which the aviator had to move the wings up and down while lying on his stomach. Calculations suggesting it would take six manpower to get his air bike off the ground ignored “the holy madman,” as other constructivists called Tatlin. Flying was something you had to learn, just like swimming, was Tatlin’s answer to the prophecy that his Letatlin would never fly. If schools gave flying lessons a few hours a week, man would soon be a bird, he believed.

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None of the Letatlins ever flew and only a single bent piece of wood remains. However, several replicas have been made in recent decades that have been shown at exhibitions about the Russian avant-garde. Invariably, Tatlin’s plane hung over the heads of the visitors. Just like that, Ader, one of the flying beach animals by Dutch artist Theo Jansen, now hangs in the hall of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag as part of the exhibition. Theo Jansen. Beach animals, the new generation†

For over thirty years Jansen beach animals, multi-legged, more than human-sized structures made of PVC pipes that come to life when the wind blows and then walk on the beach. Over the course of just a few decades, the beach critters have evolved into different species. As a taxonomist, Jansen has given them Latin names like ‘Animaris Vulgaris’, ‘Animaris Rhinoceros’ or ‘Mater Extensa’.

In the two corona years, a new, flying species has emerged. Jansen has therefore christened the short corona era ‘Volantum’. The beach animals from the Volantum don’t really fly, they are not birds, more kites. But since the evolution of the beach animals is moving at lightning speed, a real flying species will undoubtedly emerge in the foreseeable future. With this, Jansen can soar like a bird over the beach and, like Jefim, exclaim: “I’m flying!”

Theo Jansen. Beach animals, the new generation. Until 3 July in Kunstmuseum The Hague