Bartenev.doc from Shlem.com

Presenting himself with intergalactic chic, Andrei Bartenev is a famous performance artist, like-minded person of the outstanding American director Robert Wilson. Bartenev loves to organize grandiose shows in different parts of the world, which involve all genres and types of art, from choreography to dance. Now Bartenev made his debut as a drama theater actor. The NET festival ended with a performance with his participation by Shlem.com based on the novel “Helmet of Horror” by Victor Pelevin. The production claims to be a new word in the language of Russian theater. Three spaces were used: the stage, screens with video art, laptop monitors in the hands of spectators who commented on what they saw in the chat. Despite these techniques, the authors of the play almost failed to establish interactive interaction. Theater critics gave the play itself a low rating. However, the participation of the artist Bartenev in it is intriguing in itself. This is another evidence of Andrey’s obsession with the idea of ​​overcoming the traditional boundaries of art, his passion for organizing a single multimedia space, especially since the material of the performance - the translation of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur into the form of an Internet chat - is conducive to such experiments. Andrey BARTENEV told Alexander BELYAEV and Sergei KHACHATUROV about art without borders, virtual reality and his new role.

— Are the theme and plot of the novel “Helmet of Horror” close to you?

-- When I read the play based on the novel “Helmet of Horror” by Victor Pelevin, at first I didn’t understand anything. The understanding of the image came in the process of working with the actors and director Zivile Montvilaitė. The play, like the novel, is about a virtual consciousness trap into which users wandering on the Internet find themselves. Now for me this situation with the labyrinth and the “helmet of horror” is projected onto many areas of modern life, including art. Today art is in a force field of polar ideas. The themes “form without form” and “desire without realization” are relevant. In this regard, the principle of constructing the text of the play itself is very modern. It is perceived as a sentence without beginning and without end. You can remove all capital letters. Punctuation marks. Do not put spaces between words and perceive the text as one word. This is the “helmet of horror” - designed in such a way that the detail in it is greater than the whole.

-- How do you evaluate the results of the work of the entire team led by Ms. Montvilaite?

-- The project is an attempt to master a new theatrical language. Russian theater upsets me. Wilson made “Madama Butterfly” at the Bolshoi. This is a masterpiece. You come and enjoy. You go to the conservatory. Fedoseev performs there with his Big Symphony Orchestra. Well, this is something incredible. This is a revelation. And the Russian drama theater for the most part plunges into despondency. More often than not, this is some kind of struggle for classicism, for those emotional layers that have gone to other times. You can go to any acupuncturist, and he will say that if you prick the same points for ten years, there will be no benefit. Only the harm will begin. And now a new performance is an attempt to find new points of emotional contact.

— Aren’t you surprised that the project, which claims to be multimedia, nevertheless stalled in the aesthetics of a traditional mothballed theater? Both the style of the game and the visual implementation with cubicles in which phantom users languish were perceived as something retrograde. But everything could have been done much more courageously, more inventively, more avant-garde. Did you like the visual embodiment of the performance, did you want to change anything?

- I’m fine with the details inside the mechanism. If I had staged this work, of course, I would have done everything differently. While working on the role, I, of course, offered my ideas.

-- What is your hero, whose name is Organizm according to posts in the chat?

- This is the embodiment of the passion that arises between a person and a computer. As they say, he went online and never returned. This passion is also sublimated by the Internet. Not alive, not warm, but icy, frozen in pixels. That’s why I had a smooth, robot-like way of speaking and moving. Such primitive sound forms, biological forms: to play a stick, a corner in the interior - that’s just me.

—What multimedia forms do you choose for your performances?

- Well, for example, the synthesis of plastic and sound images. My latest sculpture is called “Say: I love you.” This is an acoustic performance for the First Moscow Biennale (project “Invasion” by Olga Sviblova). Now this sculpture is exhibited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka. These are two hundred speakers mounted on a curved spiral. The program includes nine speaker blocks. There is a microphone. Music is playing. The spectator approaches the microphone. He says “I love you,” and his sound begins to fly through these speakers, transforming. The computer has a library that records previous voices. As you approach, your voice echoes five or six times, and the seventh time a sound echoes out from the library in response. It turns out that the previous voice confesses its love to you. This is sound form in its purest form.

In my productions I always wanted to embody the plasticity of sound.

For example, in New York I did the performance “Staircase of Red” for Robert Wilson. Real opera singers came out and sang arias, for example, the second reincarnation of the dog. We made extensive use of the sounds of empty Coca-Cola cans falling and the splashing of pasta being cooked on huge dishes. “Screamers” were specially invited to throw pasta onto the stage from the second floor. It was an amazing cacophony! The expression of sound gives an emotional impetus to the choreography. I use this.

Interviewed by Alexander BELYAEV and Sergei KHACHATUROV