Altered Man is an important metaphor of the twentieth as well as the twenty-first centuries; of history and politics that try to erase and deface the individual. Boris Lurie (1924-2008), Soviet-born American non-conformist artist and writer, founder of the NO!art movement was one of the first to raise questions that had long been in the air: the disappearance of individuality, the entropy of personality – and thus of reality.
Boris Lurie’s art is deeply intertwined with the Holocaust. His Altered Man exhibit is a conversation about the end of metaphysics, which is “impossible after Auschwitz.” Lurie, a survivor of four concentration camps, believed that the only moral path in the context of the “total concentration camp” of modern reality is rebellion, and chose scathing criticism as his mode of expression. The vision of the world as both a concentration camp in which people ruthlessly destroy one another, and of the world as a brothel, in which people, particularly women, are objectified—this was the touchstone and the thread that runs through Lurie’s art.
Altered Man is a precise diagnosis of its time. The works presented in the exhibition can be seen as a Dadaistic gesture of destruction. The hated object or character is transformed and effaced. Evil in all its guises is neutralized by erasing it and removing it from the historical record.
Lurie’s art rebels against bourgeois values, be they moral, aesthetic or institutional, and instead stakes out a position of civic and personal liberty and independent expression. This is precisely why the current exhibition of Altered Man in Ukraine is a notable sign of the openness of contemporary Ukrainian society.