Bestiaries: a neobarbaric encyclopedia of strategies

In the context of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov's audacious “lifelong” project, an encyclopedic perspective can be traced quite clearly through various approaches, languages and methodologies throughout the artist's creative career. Prigov's Bestiaries not only deviate from the traditional path of encyclopedic genealogy; they are the prototype of later, more pronounced taxonomic projects, and even act as a reference to what he called his “lifelong project”. Our task is to show how the Bestiaries series is not only a study of the Russian cultural space, but is also the very concept of Prigov's anthropology from the beginning of the history of culture to the present day in a post-Soviet and even post-human perspective, thus asserting itself as a proto-encyclopedia of his New Anthropology. In the process of researching, methods such as theoretical, general philosophical analyses (systemic method, analysis, analogy, synthesis) were used, including the analysis of texts, interviews and artistic production of Prigov. The sociological methods are also taken as the basis for drawing conclusions and the main approach moves from a semiotic and poststructuralist point of view, especially the theory of culture of Yuri Lotman, the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and George Bataille. Thus, we have outlined the importance of the Bestaries in presenting the theory of cultural evolution of Dmitry Prigov and his “new anthropology”, referring to this series on the role of the visual conclusion of his new anthropological system.