2. Irene Caesar is a Russian born and NYC based philosopher, mystic, poet and conceptual artist who works in the traditional and digital media. Her early art work and writings in Russia in the late 80’s and early 90’s were predominantly esoteric and linked to the various mystical schools and especially theosophy of the turn of the 20th century. At the present moment she creates art works and writings both on the esoteric and exoteric levels. As a professionally trained philosopher (1985 BA in philosophy from the Leningrad State University, and 2009 Ph.D. in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center), she studied ancient philosophy and mysticism, and, beyond the scholarly study, she claims to have mystical visions and paranormal occurrences both in the sleep and in the waken state. As early as 1989-90, she started creating esoteric writings in which she predicted the emergence of the mass mind programmed and controlled as a quantum computer – the post-human reality of transmutations which she called at that time “the invasion of insects”. In 1990, on the completion of a series of paintings, she and her at that time husband, Vladimir Dookh had witnessed twice how, first time, a wall clock in their flat, and, the second time, all the clocks and watches in their flat, even the broken ones, began to work without being wound up, and worked for the whole cycle. They also witnessed a burn on their sofa similar to the burns that were caused by the touch of Nina Kulagina, the well-known Russian psychic who possessed the ability of telekinesis and whose abilities were confirmed by the decades of study and verification by three Russian Communist Scientific Institutions. The invited psychics registered the presence of the paranormal energy. In 1993, an extract from her esoteric writings was published as the book “Art of Spirits” by the Ivan Fyodorov Publishing House (the major publisher of St. Petersburg, Russia). She defined her early style as trans-realism which reveals the co-existence of different dimensions in one spatio-temporal continuum. Most characteristically, she combined the abstract and representational techniques of painting to reveal that they are simply the different stages of transmutation, i.e., the materialization and dematerialization of energy. Her ideas became well-known in Russia via the series of interviews in press, on the radio and TV,in the newspaper articles in the major Russian newspapers, and in two documentary films shown on the St. Petersburg and all-Russia TV. When she emigrated to the US in 1994 with the visa O of extraordinary ability on the invitation of Chuck Levitan Gallery in SoHo, NYC, she conceived of her arrival in the US as a mission to fight against the insect-like computer mass-mind. She claims to have, in May 2009, the other significant paranormal occurrence that violated the laws of conventional physics. Her most recent exoteric project is “A New History of Ideas in Pictures” (2008-2009) representing absurd performances documented by photography. She defines the objective of this project as the re-valuation of the major concepts of the human civilization, and, more precisely, as the ideological subversion and diversion of the outdated values that bring suffering to the millions of people. The project aims to destroy the iron curtain of these outlived cultural, moral, social and political fetishes which distract the attention of people from what is currently happing in the world, i.e., from the emergence of the post-human society with the computational biology and nanotechnology which will slowly but surely transform masses into bio-computers via the implantation of the DNA chips and micro biological computers in order to, for example, save someone’s life from cancer. in parallel to this, there will be synthesized the bio-robots, totally programmable and controllable. Irene Caesar claims that the major risk of this inevitable development is the dehumanization, the emergence of the consumerist totalitarianism, loss of privacy and total control. She says that because very soon humanity, as we know it now, will cease to exist, being changed by computational biology, artists have responsibility to document humanity in its pure form - with all its suffering and imperfection. The art work of Irene Caesar is in the Duke University Museum of Art, Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, and Bayly Museum at the University of Virginia. Irene Caesar lives in New York and Stamford, CT. This VASA Gallery Talk immediately follows her exhibition “A New History of Ideas in Pictures” at the Orensanz Art Gallery in SoHo, New York, USA (November 5-November 27, 2009).
