Contemporary art in a traditional museum

The festival "Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum" is organized by the PRO ARTE Institute Foundation for Culture and Art (formerly the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg) with the support of the Ford Foundation. Fourteen projects by contemporary Moscow and St. Petersburg artists, winners of the PRO ARTE grant competition, occupied ten St. Petersburg museums, which the artists themselves chose, until the end of July. In September, the fifteenth and final exhibition-action of Semyon Mikhailovsky and Anton Gorlanov will be held in the fresh air - in the Botanical Garden, with champagne and spectators in sun loungers.

The peculiarity of the festival is that (with rare exceptions) non-art and, frankly speaking, marginal museums are chosen for art projects by famous authors. The festival organizers believe that such cooperation will bring mutual benefits. Exhausted art is invited to work with an unusual space, which stimulates imagination and helps to find fresh solutions ("Art in a museum of non-art is more modern than the Museum of Modern Art, and a pawn in someone else's game is the most pleasant and most creative position," the catalog says) . Failing museums, with the help of modern actions, remind the viewer, especially the young and advanced, of their existence and learn (if they want) from artists current techniques. Yes, another gift to museums - within the framework of the project, a new, but quite traditional and addressed to the widest user, short guide “Museums of St. Petersburg” has been published.
Below are micro-reviews of the most spectacular exhibitions of the festival.



(Photo: Victor Vasiliev )

Anatomical person in Peter's Kunstkamera
Olga and Alexander Florensky

Inventory
Vitaly Pushnitsky, Alexander Dodon, Oleg Golovko

Persian carpets
Ilya Piganov

Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography named after. Peter the Great RAS (Kunstkamera)

The Kunstkamera, the most popular of the museums participating in the festival, was the luckiest of all. Here are three projects by very different artists.
Folk “Mitki” Florenskys are shown in the rotunda of the first floor, where anatomical rarities from the collection of Peter I are stored, another masterpiece from the environmentally correct project “Taxidermy” (stuffed animals made of plywood and pieces of iron). Only this time it’s not a “real stuffed Pavlov’s dog” or a “medium-sized stuffed crocodile,” but a life-size “anatomical model” of a person, parodying Peter’s penchant for physiologism. If you press the frog pump, the rubber lungs begin to inflate. Unfortunately, nothing flows from the tap in the lower abdomen.
The project of young St. Petersburg artists “Inventory” also consists of human figures: white, partially painted (imitation clothing) dummies. Has nothing to do with the Kunstkamera. Any museum would be suitable for the authors: dummies imitate visitors turned into exhibits. The idea, and the execution, are poor, but the white dolls look impressive surrounded by Kunstkamera mannequins depicting the “peoples of Southeast Asia.”
And the collages of the Moscow aesthete photographer Ilya Piganov, which really resemble carpets with a picture in the center and ornaments along the edges, on the contrary, merge with the contents of display cabinets with Indian trinkets. It is "an example of dissolution into Eastern culture," as the catalog explains. The example is successful, beautiful and meaningless.

Waiting for a miracle
Olga Chernysheva

Botanical Institute named after. V. L. Komarova

Muscovite Chernysheva exhibited a series of illuminated photographs depicting women's knitted hats in the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden. Several black and white works from this series were shown at the Central House of Artists at the last photobiennale and, I must say, got lost in the general shuffle. Now Chernysheva has presented a color version, which is no longer adjacent to the stylish works of her colleagues, but to real vines and cacti. The expected miracle happened - the project is a wild success. The audience mistook the caps for real cacti, interpreting the artist’s gesture as follows: “Moscow cacti have come to visit St. Petersburg cacti.” In fact, what was meant was the semi-vegetable existence of an ordinary post-Soviet woman, tortured by everyday worries. This can be seen even from the caps.

NOMAGE (new image of the animal anatomy museum)
Igor Makarevich, Elena Yelagina

Museum of the St. Petersburg State Academy of Veterinary Medicine

The classics of Moscow conceptualism, who adore the perverted Soviet science and the theme of death, feel at home in the Museum of Pathological Anatomy (a cat with a horn or a humanoid calf preserved in alcohol in jars, the jars stand in huge wooden cabinets from Stalin’s times). They didn’t even organize an exhibition, instead offering the museum a promotional CD-rom. A text beyond the pale of medical cynicism—the true history of the museum, which to the uninitiated will seem like a work of art—reads Vitaly Komar. The headbands for the sections are illustrated with masterpieces of world fine art: “horse diseases” - a painting by Filonov, “radiation diseases” - “rayonism” by Larionov. In the museum hall there is a screen on which the film is projected, and enlarged images of its “heroes” - anatomical preparations. The employees still didn’t understand what the art was.

Paints and blank sheet
One Artist (Vadim Drapkin)

Museum of the History of Printing of St. Petersburg

Another project of the St. Petersburg minimalist metaphysician, part of the “White and Colored” series. “The world is printed pure/ pure is the basis/ pure is the same/ in all different things” (author’s essay). In all the photographic landscapes exhibited at the Museum of Printing, blank spaces are left in the center - a white vertical or rectangle. The exhibition occupied the hall "Printing of the early 20th century". On authentic machines, One Artist arranged three-color jars of paint and scattered bright pieces of paper across the floor. That is, Colored. Condo typography has turned into an image of the world, which brings multi-colored chaos into the white, pure Origin. Brrr...

Heloise and Abelard, or Five Labors of the Submarine
Factory of Found Clothes (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Olga Egorova)

Memorial complex of the submarine "Narodovolets-2"

There is no picture because nothing is visible. The girls turned off the lights on the antique submarine (built in 1927 - 1931) and handed out flashlights to the spectators, which immediately turned the visit to the museum into a life-threatening attraction. Spectators fumble around in the dark, get stuck in passages, and experience bouts of claustrophobia. The players issued by the artists play fragments from the soul-saving correspondence between the unfortunate Heloise and Abelard, interspersed with the memoirs of submariners. Spiritual torment - physical torment, a submarine as a means of saving the soul through suffering. On the way out, the viewer, blinded by the sun, is greeted by a swamp of tomato paste (blood, presumably). It is important not to fall on the sinful ground, that is, not to slip in the red mud. But the main feat is to get from the center of St. Petersburg to Narodovolets, located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland.

July 14, 2000