Translated material
Far and near
Books by artists in the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve
Two very interesting exhibitions have opened in the Tsaritsyno estate, edited to suit the tastes of the capital’s mayor. Both are taking place as part of the Festival of Contemporary Art Collections organized by the State Center for Contemporary Art. One is dedicated to the modern life of the so-called Livre d'Artiste ("artist's book"), a genre that powerfully declared itself at the beginning of the 20th century, not least thanks to the universal plastic thinking of the avant-garde masters.The artists who then collaborated with the famous Marchand and publisher Ambroise Vollard (Chagall, Zadkine, Bonnard, Survage, Arp) legitimized the right to ignore the entire traditional cycle of preparing a printed publication. They were able to reject the question of editors and designers and do everything themselves, becoming full-fledged co-authors (or even the only authors) of Livre d'Artiste. “The Artist's Book” can simultaneously be sculpture, painting, theater, and even cinema (the theme of movement in the image of plastic montage is very important). For all that, there may be no words in this book at all. And the fullness of impressions is preserved and multiplied.
Looking at the modern Livre d'Artiste in the halls of the Bread House of the Tsaritsyno Museum, the visitor has the right to identify himself with a regular in the cabinets of curiosities beloved in the gallant eighteenth century, in which the wonders of nature coexisted with wonders created by the mind and hands of skilled craftsmen, and all together replenished the tables of knowledge about peace and glorified the generosity of divine providence. The books collected by the exhibition curators Yuri Samodurov, Vasily Vlasov, and Viktor Lukin were created by artists of different generations. Works by masters (Eduard Gorokhovsky, Igor Makarevich, Igor Shelkovsky, Vera Khlebnikova, Leonid Sokov) stand side by side with works by young masters and even students of Moscow schools.
The image of today's Livre d'Artiste is often inspired by the subtlest paths of Eastern (Japanese) poetics. Igor Shelkovsky built vortexes of dancing circles in sheets of Japanese paper mounted on a wooden slatted frame - he called them “Grass, flowers, landscapes, portraits and clouds.” In a similar noble style of visualization of poetic elements, the book-leporello (folding out like a screen) “The Passage of Time” by Mikhail Molochnikov was made. The aesthetics of cabinet and curiosities rarities defines Pastario Alfabeto by Mikhail Bensman: in the box there are glass flasks with letters made from pasta, and separately there is text of recipes for various pastas laid out from pasta. The letters in the test tubes correspond to the letters of the Italian alphabet with which the names of the pastes begin. Natalya Sineva materialized the image of a romantic trip. Her “Road Romance” is a leather bag from which spills the evidence of heartfelt adventures and wanderings. The genre of intellectual jokes is not ignored either. Vladimir Smolyar printed Tolstoy’s entire novel “War and Peace” on a canvas seven meters long and 152 cm wide. Perhaps he wanted to demonstrate the relativity of any grandiose human plan.
It is curious that in the neighboring halls of the Bread House, thanks to the curatorial will of Alina Fedorovich and Vitaly Patsyukov, an exhibition was placed that seemed to be in opposition to the Livre d'Artiste genre - this is an exposition of Soviet children's books, illustrated by classics of unofficial art of the 1960s-1980s: Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Yulo Sooster.
Kabakov, Pivovarov, Bulatov and Vasiliev in interviews and conversations (including those given in the elegant catalog of this exhibition) about their work in Detgiz, in the publishing house “Malysh” speak almost with irritation. The official bureaucratic machine for producing “correct” literature for children remains in the memory and is disturbing. The figure of a faceless but powerful editor (a guardian and overseer appointed by the system) is perhaps an anti-example of the conditions for creating a free and artistic “artist’s book.” Kabakov, Bulatov and Vasiliev testify that they had to look for the image of an average Soviet book for children. At the same time, according to Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev, “the editor seemed to personify the normativity of the consciousness of our time.” The normative image was formed thanks to various sources, including realistic illustrations of the 30s and 50s, and World of Art vignette graphics.
And yet, something prevents us from agreeing with the categorical opinion that work in children's books for the classics of unofficial art was only “conscientious hack work.” Thanks to their talent and sensitivity, an honest and complex, in terms of cultural references, ideological self-portrait of the artist of the era was created. In accordance with the strategy of conceptual design, each book can be presented as a commentary on those chapters of the history of art that have become in demand within the Great Artistic Text of a particular master. Thus, the poetics of the Oberiuts is fundamentally important both in a conversation about children's books of the 60s and 80s, and in a conversation about “where did Moscow conceptualism come from” in principle. Moreover, it was the children's book that was the blessed territory to which many masters of the Russian avant-garde “emigrated” after the official defeat. The culture of working with space and form was largely shaped by bold, innovative experiments. The curator of the exhibition, Vitaly Patsyukov, is right when he says that, for example, “the page of Viktor Pivovarov’s book was endowed with those spatial extents that appeared only in the next century: 3D dimensions, the effect of presence in the image itself.” According to Patsyukov, Pivovarov himself had this tradition inspired by the “visual acoustics” of Malevich’s Suprematism. Fantastic realism, surrealism, and art deco are fundamental to the painting of Hulot Sooster. The model of his world is whimsically recognizable in the genre of the same children's book. The same whimsical postmodern game of visual quotations and archiving of forgotten images, half-erased from cultural memory, is carried out in the books of Eduard Gorokhovsky, whose “Alice in Wonderland” is a true masterpiece in the series of illustrator’s Carroll mania.
So, despite the intimidating figure of the Soviet editor and the flywheels of ideology and bureaucracy, Livre d'Artiste and the Soviet children's book with pictures drawn by masters of unofficial art have much more similarities than might seem at first glance. Both introduce artistic design into the laboratory, including “big” author’s themes. And somehow in time I remembered the title of one of Barbara Levandovskaya’s books, illustrated by Ilya Kabakov: “Far and Close.” This is the case with the plots of two book exhibitions.