Exhibition "Five"

(Photo: Natalia Struchkova )

In fact, it is neither a “group” nor an “exhibition” - traditional artistic designations are used here for the sake of respectability. The one-time (summer, as the name implies) group brought together young artists, graduates of last year’s “New Artistic Strategies” courses at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art and the “Institute for the Study of Contemporary Art,” which was born this year. Not an exhibition, but a festival-action "Five" - ​​something like a thesis work, only intended not for the internal use of students and teachers, but brazenly addressed to the widest public.

"Five" are "installations, performances, actions, artistic gestures, objects" (as the invitation card says), produced and shown for five summer days every day at five o'clock in the evening in five places in the city (each day in a new place). The places are not weak: Manezhnaya Square and the underground passage to the Manege, the Zoo (the space next to Tsereteli’s “Tree of Fairy Tales”), Leningradsky Station, and also the inconspicuous Zverev Bridge over the Vodootvodny Canal. So, the “exhibition”, heterogeneous in structure and genres, was held together by a single internal plot, equally entertaining for both its participants and idle spectators: “Will they be noticed or not? And if they are noticed, then when?” In the end, they didn’t sweep it up (only once the artist had to flee from a policeman by running across the entire Manezhnaya Square), but for the most part they dispersed it. The authorities are not asleep.

The artists, however, managed practically without destruction, aggression, as well as moral, ethical and political issues. This is their fundamental—and meaningful—difference from the so-called Moscow actionism of radicals of the early 90s like Kulik, Brener or Osmolovsky. The same Kulik, in his words, returning from the Zoological Museum (where else should he spend his leisure time?) and accidentally finding himself among the spectators of the action in the underground passage near Manezhnaya, recognized with satisfaction the noted generational difference: “We were violently crazy, and these - quiet psychos."

Even Brener’s former associate and the most venerable of the members of the “Five,” Anton Litvin, was now conducting an advertising campaign for himself, quite innocent in form. Everyone was asked to perform some meaningless action (cut a hair off their head, take a photo in a child’s mask, blow soap bubbles from the middle of the bridge, etc.) in order to become a participant in a win-win lottery with the main prize “Dinner at a restaurant with Anton Litvin.” Among other prizes are “one item from A. Litvin’s wardrobe”, “an acquaintance with the biography of A. Litvin”, “three laps along the Garden Ring during rush hour in A. Litvin’s car.” So, this action parodies not only the endless scams near the metro, but also the egocentrism of the artists of “Moscow actionism” from five years ago with its desire to “correct social mores.”

Apparently, artist 2000 does not want to correct the world. As a last resort, he wants to “create a non-standard situation of shifting habitual relationships,” to use the expressions of “Five” member Elena Kovylina. For example, on Manezhnaya Square she tried - quite successfully - to meet men and treat them to ice cream. Yulia Aksenova hung freshly washed laundry over the arena fountains with Tsereteli’s animals. Temur Kozyrev returned the human appearance to the walking “sandwich” by placing naked photographs on billboards. Anna Titovets set up a “gallery of prohibitions” on the descent into the underground passage - a cluster of prohibitory signs that make each other meaningless. Art today, as young artists see it, is a safe defamiliarization of everyday life, a skit of everyday life.

Although it can also occur with a risk to life, as in the case of the “Light Dinner” event by Kovylina and Maxim Ilyukhin, who ate chicken with a side dish and a bottle of wine under the Zverev Bridge on chairs tied to the railings at a tied table. For this - "five plus".

And in general, youth art - a little naive and old-fashioned - was generally liked by your humble servant (although not all of them were seen). Is “Summer” to blame for this or...summer?

August 4, 2000