Mikhail Sidlin. Moscow diary

Moscow diary
Mikhail Sidlin

Publication date: June 8, 2000

Excerpts

25.05

Tretyakov Gallery. Banquet. Bustle.

Opening with a banquet is a knight's move: first food, then art. And rightly so. People come to exhibitions to eat. Then - everything else. Of course, “the decision is forced”, “imposed from above”... That is, this is what the Tretyakovites were advised to do. The right road... With a full belly it was easier to make a path through the halls.

There is a canteen for workers of the Pravda printing house. Once upon a time - an ordinary worker, today - does it exist? 5 years ago I still visited it. It’s behind the entrance: journalists practically never go there. It would be worth it.

I took some bits there. I couldn't eat. Why?

In Soviet toilets (precisely those classic ones, where the urinal is a groove: the typical station architecture of a small southern city) the following law of dampness applies: everything that is on the wall at a distance from the urinal and ad infinitum is covered with an uneven layer of mucus formed by dead mold, the original dampness, the matter of excrement, fumes of human matter and a small dose of bleach, designed to fight, supposedly, with the secretions of human waste products, but in fact only helping them in creating this dense layer of lifeless glittering mucus, flickering in the dark on uneven concrete, and this unevenness , the initial rough roughness of concrete is exactly what allows the slime to attach and remain on the wall until the death of the toilet structure.

“Whoever donates a secondary product eats well.” Thus, ironically, Voinovich came closer to one of the secrets of Soviet power. Achieving equality between “initial” and “secondary” products is one of the secret points of the equalization program of Bolshevism.

The cutlet substance in the meatballs reaches its peak. If the cutlets had an orgasm, then the cutlets would be in an eternal high. “Bitochki” and “concrete” - consonance. In their color and surface texture, concrete, beats and Moskhov painting are essentially one. There is such a concept - “Moskhov color”.

Dense black, as is known, is formed by the fusion of colors. There are printers who know this, and printers who were poorly taught. When the first issue of the magazine “On Post” was published, Vasya Kopeiko was happy with how real black he managed to get. And it's true - the black cover was inimitable. I washed everyone. Achieving true purity of black is the highest aerobatics for a designer.

In the “Moskhov color” there is deception, lack of investment. Not about the “tops”: after all, they were members of the Moscow Union of Artists. About the middle element: if you take a normal Soviet exhibition, where there is this and that, but the overall mass is neither this nor that, you go through it, then by the end your eyes will dazzle with gray. There was a restaurant opposite the Mossovet - Georgian, which means it was good. So the Moscow Union of Artists had their own “Aragvi”. But overall, it’s an average city canteen. Where the center is the cutlet substance.

Underinvestment is an essential element of Soviet ethics, aesthetics, and economics. The dream of the mid-70s was to work in a cafeteria. A butcher in a store is a profitable suitor. Intellectuals go to work as loaders - they pay less, but get more. The surplus product in the canteen is formed by reducing the mass, changing the grade, and disproportionate composition of the original product. In short, lack of investment.

The Soviet artist saved paint, canvas, and effort. In short, dissatisfaction. The result is obvious - the cutlet substance of art. Moskhovo grey.

Genuine black is an expensive color. Because you have to skate honestly. A lot of paint is wasted. More expensive for a printing house. It seems like a small thing, but even in catalogs they often skimp on black. You look, and there it is green, black, then brown. Etc. But that's nothing else. It can be worse. No matter how you add up the colors on the collective palette of the Moscow Union of Artists, black will never come out. And it will turn out gray.

The round meatballs with their gouges and pimples were covered in the working canteen of Pravda with such a delicate layer of something whitish-shiny, and when I cut them, I saw a greenish tint of gray: the lack of gray - this even delighted me, although, of course, I was driven by a desire for aesthetic exploration, but not to absorb this food, since, I am afraid, for my stomach a deeper interest in gray-green could be fatal.

The cutlet can be imagined as good. For example, Kiev style: on a juicy leg, with a crispy crust. Or breaded in breadcrumbs, sizzling. It is impossible to imagine the bits as anything other than gray. Their very idea is a cutlet substance in its purest form: something that is formed from a lack of real meat. This high ideal of the cue balls is also evidenced by their perfect shape: a ball. But at the same time, being still an idea embodied in the material, the meatballs were always noticeably worse than ordinary table cutlets, and precisely because the lack of inclusion in the cutlets brought them to the level at which the meatballs should have been, but the lack of inclusion in the cutlets brought them to complete and complete inedibility: greenish greyness. At the same time, what is most curious to me is that in Pravda they were still in a state between orgasm and decomposition, because they released some kind of watery substance from themselves that spread over the plate.

Aesthetic curiosity about excrement as the basis of existential experience. This is the feeling with which I walked through the halls of the new Tretyakov Gallery. It seems that the works exhibited are those in which the Moscow Union of Artists was equal. Those that were brighter against the general gray background. All together they are gray now, like mud in the forest near Moscow in the fall.

You can call this a "flaw". Which is true. But the fact is that “flaw” is the essence of this art. It is based on the cult of scarcity.

The main art gesture of the 90s was shitting in the Pushkin Museum. They say Brener desacralized the museum. Nonsense. Brener desacralized shit. Therefore, a conclusion worthy of a new exhibition would be documentation of this action. But, they say, there were no photos in Pushka.

I recently saw a Dutchman in a private collection. Attributed, it seems, to Brouwer. In a tavern: a mother wipes her child’s bottom; next to the table where they are feasting, there is a pot right there in the foreground. An ordinary everyday scene.

The secret cult of shit is the basis of Sovietism. That is why there is a strong taboo on shit in Soviet art. There's a big difference between not being interested in shit and not taking shit. It's normal for art not to be interested in crap. As the lowest sphere of the physical. Or rather, show interest in it when it is justified plot-wise and stylistically: like Brouwer. In one Russian epic, I remember, a dragon, when a hero drives him away from his common mistress, runs and shits out of fear. Healthy fear. Private detail. Of course, excrement can become the theme of a great novel - like Rabelais, but this is the other side of asceticism (Bakhtin). It is in this vein that Sorokin: after socialist realism. Arp's sculptures in Bidstrup's caricature are one of the few examples of the direct penetration of images of crap into the layer of visuality assimilated by the average Soviet intellectual of the 70s. It is curious that Arp himself did not at all deny the connection of his sculptures with shit: in form, but not in essence. It’s even more curious that Bidstrup is a foreign artist, not even from a socialist country. Antiquity was calm about physiology. Diogenes' actions were antisocial, but not anticultural.

I remember the work “Divination by Shit” at the exhibition “Schizo China” in the pavilion on Frunzenskaya Embankment. I don't remember the author. That is why late Soviet culture worked so carefully on the topic of crap - Sorokin and Co., because it was among hitherto taboo topics.

The will to decline, conscious decay. It is difficult to imagine any other basis than this when you look at many of the products of the Brezhnev era. The Tretyakov Gallery erected a new monument to her. The triumph of the secondary product over the primary product at the exhibition is obvious.

Starting with a banquet is a breakthrough to a new era. Starting off as a gobbler was the best thing that could be done at such an exhibition. Because the banquet showed: the times of Sovietism are over. The primary product triumphs in life. This means that it will triumph in art as well. The art of big shit has come to an end. The era of grub has begun.