| The anniversary of the best exhibition series was celebrated at the Moscow House of Photography Initially, the project of photo exhibitions was called “24” by curator Yuri Avvakumov. It was assumed that this is how many opening days there would be. No more, no less. Clock dial. Day. Twenty four is two times twelve. Twelve months. Year. Twenty-four photographs in the hall. Two years monthly. Has the circle been completed? Time up? Not so. The project turned out to be so successful that the mechanism was started again. Now “24+”. And forty-eight does not seem to be the limit.
Here is the thirty-fifth, “anniversary” exhibition. Boom - ding. Tram - bam. The hour has struck. The parade of planets has begun. And star speaks to star. Curator Yuri Avvakumov and exhibitor Alexander Brodsky. Two founders, two geniuses of “paper architecture” - still the most interesting genre in Russia in the 80s and 2000s.
Thanks to Alexander Brodsky’s new exhibition “Unmanifested,” the important meanings of the entire “24” project suddenly came to light. What did we usually contemplate on the walls? Industrial zones. Pipes. Non-photogenic barns. Rusty locks. Gateways. Peeling plaster. Texture, texture of ruins. Yuri Avvakumov loves these “excesses of asceticism” and invites many photographers to show their versions of industrial zones, barns, and gateways. I'll be honest: sometimes it gets boring. Some photographs seem to have been taken by neophytes who yesterday discovered the poetry of landfills and desolation. Smoked facades. Craquelure web. Rust and mold. Oh, how patterned and delicious. For the photographer. And for the viewer it is a carefully executed exercise in studying textured surfaces. That's all. Puritan ethics and philosophical asceticism turn into absolute, self-sufficient decorativeness.
Brodsky was needed to return the project to its original wise, epic scale. I’ll say right away: his exhibition is one of the few that cannot be looked at incorrectly from photograph to photograph. Only panoramic. Then a syncopated series is built, where the same, repeating form (a window boarded up with boards, a white door or the ridge of a roof) - like your cursor on a computer - moves through the text and helps to read the message and find its meaning. What do we see in Brodsky's photo? Yes, the same as his predecessors. Industrial areas, pipes, gateways, peeling plaster, rust, sheds, sheds, sheds. And yet, it is his suite that can be called the meditation of the architect-philosopher, who chose architecture as his guide - translator - medium in communication with the world and God. “The unmanifested” for Brodsky is precisely “Not About the Manifested.” About the hidden. About “scientific ignorance”. An imitation of wooden rafters painted in white on the tympanum of the pediment of an iron garage, a window with a pupil-reflection-forest (you can’t look into it, it studies you), the terrible black mouth of a village cellar... Something vague, desperate, animated is stirring in all this. What stupid decorativeness is this! Surrounded by signs to each other, winking creatures made of concrete, wood, stones, iron, we lose the remnants of our former self-confidence and positivist arrogance. Are we creating architecture? Come on... What if she controls us? And he acts out, and shows temper, and is capricious. And sobs.
It's time to bring the orbits of the two distant planets "Brodsky" closer together and tell them in the words of Joseph. In the afterword to the collection “Christmas Poems,” in a conversation with Pyotr Weil, he mentioned the psychiatric concept of the “hood complex”: “When a person tries to protect himself from the world, he covers his head with a hood and sits down, slouching.” The namesake Alexander showed that the “hood complex” also appears in architectural photography.
And here's another from Joseph - as an untimely epigraph to Alexander's work:
There, beyond nowhere, beyond its limits
black, colorless, possibly white -
there is some thing, an object.
Maybe the body. In an era of friction
the speed of light is the speed of vision;
even when there is no light.
We'll be lucky, we'll see. Sergei KHACHATUROV |
|
