Field of meanings

Exposition “Care” in the Exhibition Hall of Armenian Lane

The main project of the Moscow Biennale is breaking attendance records. This in itself, a gratifying fact, still has a negative consequence: truly interesting chamber exhibitions have little chance of being seen and appreciated. The task is to pay attention to them. In particular, to the exhibition of the young curator Maria Chekhonadskikh “Care”.

First of all, “Care” is a radically new project for the modern Moscow art scene. Thanks to him, for example, it becomes clear that promising “young stars,” such as artists Arseny Zhilyaev, Mikhail Lylov, Ivan Gorshkov, and the curator Maria Chekhonadskikh herself, are the new “Voronezh wave.” All four were born in this city. The stand of the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art was recently presented at the alternative art fair “Universam”, and the artists themselves participated in the exhibition “Machine and Natasha”, which took place at the Project Factory art center and was prepared by Arseny Zhilyaev. The South Russian wave has overturned, the Samara wave is approaching, but the Voronezh wave will most likely be the strongest, at least now this forecast is fully justified.

In addition to discovering a new reservoir of talent, “Caring” is also interesting because of its theme. This is a statement in the genre of land art, which involves working with the natural context, with the earth. Having studied the theory of land art for a long time, starting with the American classics of the genre Smithson and Oppenheim, the curator set the following task: to articulate the possibility of the existence of this local trend in the chronotope here and now. Originating in the course of a serious dispute between conceptual art of the 60s and commercial criticism, land art existed on a territory of absolute freedom, seemingly independent of the artistic infrastructure. It seems that we can also consider the field of activity of the Moscow group “Collective Actions” that appeared in Soviet times (in this case, “field” is also understood in the literal sense: the actions took place in the open air outside Moscow). Thanks to land art, “KD” moved away from repressive social reality, while their American colleagues reflected on the topic of commercialization of modernist art.

“Caring” poses a number of questions for both the authors and the audience. These are questions about the missed opportunities of contemporary art in a once agrarian state, these are questions about private property, statehood and privatization, and, most importantly, questions about the possibility of non-violent intervention by the artist in the context of the natural. The word “culture” itself is originally associated with the cultivation of the soil. This post-romantic metaphor of the “cultivation” of the natural as violence against free territory, over subjectivity, over something initially innocent, the complex ethics of relations with the environment served as the main theme of the artists’ statements.

The plein air, the documentation of which is presented at the exhibition, took place in the Divnogorye Nature Reserve in the Voronezh region, of course. This reserve has long been developed by the tourism business and turned into a real corporate brand. And it was precisely the moment of consumption of nature and, accordingly, culture that was subjected to plastic comprehension. So, for example, Arseny Zhilyaev laid out a rug and rested on it for two days, after which he presented as an object a trace of trampled grass under the rug as a result of the impossibility of not only direct intervention, but also the unauthorized harmless presence of a person. Mikhail Lylov spoke on the topic of the absurdity and artificiality of the institution of private property in agricultural work: he grew lettuce in the beds, surrounded the shoots with a fence, and then, having destroyed it, committed theft from himself. Other installations are no less interesting. Among them are a sculpture made from scrap material by Ivan Gorshkov, a huge environment in the form of the “@” sign by Yegor Koshelev, marking with chalk supremus by Nadezhda Busheneva of soil scorched by cultivation, documentation of alternative tourist “reserve” routes invented by Alexandra Sukhareva, plastic interventions in the natural landscape by Alexander Povzner. .. At the exhibition you can see photos and text documentation of many works. Of course, during a huge biennale, this exhibition, subtle in meaning and restrained in presentation, risks going unnoticed. It's a pity...

Andrey PARSHIKOV