Translated material
There is freedom
Post-holiday performance and exhibition in the gallery “E.K. Artburo"
The tandem of classics of unofficial art Vsevolod Nekrasov and Erik Bulatov came up with a visual and poetic manifesto of an independent person: the words “Freedom is” drawn as a portal to infinity. In the history of Moscow conceptualism, this phrase takes on another meaning, understandable with the addition of a new verb: “There is freedom. And drink."The theme of food and gastronomic delights was and remains super important for Moscow conceptualism. After all, the algorithm for exploring the boundaries of art, adopted by apologists of the method, inevitably involves a meeting of the banal and the unique in the most ordinary kitchen of an average Moscow apartment. Conversations, the cooking process, smells, and sounds were and will be artifacts. Words gurgle in pans, fry, steam and generally taste better. And the remaining linguistic broths can then be used in poetry collections. The lexical reserves of Soviet cuisine, the Soviet grocery store, the Soviet grocery line, and Soviet cookbooks served and continue to serve as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Participants in the performance “Well-Tempered Tasty and Healthy Food,” which took place on Old New Year’s Eve in the gallery “E.K. Artburo”, they have long confirmed their love for gastronomy. Lev Rubinstein erected a monument to Stalin’s “Book about Tasty and Healthy Food” on the pages of the magazine “EZh”. And the infinitive constructions of the recipes proposed in it, which are extremely far from the low prose of life, are thought of as completed opuses of new poetry. Maria Chuikova came up with her image as an art housewife: she turns washing, cooking, and cleaning into artifacts. The critic Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, having tasted the soups, dumplings and pancakes prepared by Maria, called her work “high art” (from the words “everyday life” and “art”). This is not the first time that composer Sergei Zagniy has soundtracked the gastronomic performances of the cooking Chuikova and the reading Rubinstein with minimalist or collage-based music.
What happened in the small kitchen of the gallery “E.K. Artburo" the action can be described by the famous children's rhyme: "Kolya sang. Boris was silent. Nikolai was shaking his leg...” The deliberately non-public representation of the trio members’ activities was accentuated by the absence of the audience’s own space. The gallery guests watched the performance, crowding at the kitchen door, and therefore felt a little like voyeurs, spying (like neighbors in a communal Soviet apartment) on someone else's private life. So, Sergei Zagniy played music on the recorder, freely improvising on the theme of the melody that was heard from the tape recorder turned on in the kitchen. In Sergei’s own words, the keyboard music of Bach sounded from the speakers - not preserved anywhere in manuscripts, but nevertheless miraculously heard by Sergei Zagniy’s inner ear and recorded by him. As Mr. Zagny assures, among other themes, this keyboard music is inspired by the theme of a canon recorded a hundred years before Bach and transmitted thanks to Sergei’s intuition, the words to which were coined by musicologist Pyotr Pospelov: “We have food in the kitchen. And the boogers will never be hungry.”
Lev Rubinstein selflessly read aphorisms, sayings, poetic and prosaic passages stored on library cards. Maria Chuikova was cooking noble asparagus soup in a giant yellow saucepan. Improvisation did not prevent the performance from being phrased accurately and its participants finding common agreement and harmony... The pan clinked. Flute sighed. The voice measured the space with hoarse words... In the corner, a shabby but natural Christmas tree, decorated with Soviet toys and beads, glittered. And it became so festive. And the scene seen through the kitchen door seemed as magical as in the drawer of a doll's nativity scene.
After the performance, guests tasted the most wonderful asparagus soup in the large gallery room, given over to Maria Chuikova’s personal exhibition. Pink potatoes reading collections of poetry, tables of products, graphics with graters and mixers floating in the clouds were a side dish to another main dish besides soup - a gastronomic diary: traces circled on whatman paper of those products from which Mrs. Chuikova prepared lunch on a given day or dinner. Under the “aura” of each dish its full recipe is written. So visitors to the exhibition at E.K. Artburo” could and can combine business with pleasure quite effectively.