Translated material
Disciples and sorcerers
The first experiment was staged in the new exhibition space Laboratoria
Scientists gained power over the very foundations of life and discovered the secrets of the existence of matter. They looked into the Sorcerer’s treasured book and read out the necessary spells in it, like the student from Goethe’s ballad:The old medicine man has gone away!
Rejoicing at his departure,
I decided to test the power
Over obedient nature.
But in the ballad, the thoughtless use of the spell almost led to very sad consequences. Artists, participants in the first project in the new discussion and exhibition center Laboratoria, created on the basis of the Scientific Physico-Chemical Institute named after L.Ya. Karpova (Obukha Lane, 3), wanted to prevent them in modern life by creatively comprehending the received spells and establishing connections between science and other spheres of culture.
For six months, the artists met with prominent scientists from research institutes, listened, discussed, and reflected. At the Art Moscow fair, representatives of the humanities, older generation artists, and famous curators joined the discussion. As a result, a new artistic and scientific space, Art&Science Space Laboratory, appeared, and as part of the first youth biennale “Stop! Who's coming?" The exhibition “Experiment 1” opened there.
At the entrance, artist Chaim Sokol selflessly reads out loud art critic Viktor Tupitsyn’s mantras about the “body-without-name” and a scientific treatise on oscillatory processes in some specific nanocrystals. Both texts are opaque and lifeless (like the reader’s face); their deliberate abstruseness can only cause bewilderment or an ironic smile in the listener.
Arseny Zhilyaev addressed the topic of the infinity of the mathematical series, the infinity of embodiments of the infinite straight line, the desire and impossibility of imagining infinity. To catch the rhythm of his minimalist stripes (paper, simple pencil), you can quickly move along the wall.
In “The Cartesian Portrait,” Chaim Sokol ironizes the desire for extreme objectivity of the positivist sciences. The portrait comes down to the decomposition of a person into elementary components (proteins, fats and carbohydrates), subjected to spectral analysis. The multi-colored circles are topped with a black Cogito ring.
“The Big Bang” by Igor Bitman is a metaphor for a society of information consumption, where the human “lazy mind creates machines and delegates its functions to them for the sake of intensifying existence.” The impossibility of communication in this world of lost cause-and-effect relationships turns into discord and complete disintegration, in a word, catastrophe.
The Mishmash group and Petr Goryev are “working” with catastrophe, or rather, with catastrophes. By raising a text about some tragic event to the minus ninth power of language (i.e., sequentially parsing it into letters), artists turn it into a mass of cold and meaningless signs. And again, what is important here is not so much the execution as the metaphor itself of the semantic transformation of the tragedy in the information dimension.
The most poetic and open to interpretation work at the exhibition is “Signals” by Natalia Zintsova. The invisible, hidden life of nature is revealed in the pulsation of rings, in the slow fluidity of tree memory.
The remaining works are more entertaining and superficial in content: this is an interactive sculpture by Roman Sakin, depicting the “first meeting of scientists and artists”; and the deathly blue rose of Ilya Trushevsky in a flask with sterile blue blood; and a diamond-coated skull that Diana Machulina placed under the moving edge of a mechanical saw (a playful and slightly morbid reflection on the delights of eternal life); and a nanolithographic copy of Magritte’s “not a tube” in the work “Mishmash” “Is this not Magritte?”; and fluorescent pseudo-waves in a black-black room (Daria Buyun and Dmitry Stepanov); and finally, glossy photographs of the microcosm of Vladimir Nikishin.
Overall, of course, one can hardly call the exhibition magical, but at the same time it has many advantages. In particular, Daria Parkhomenko’s curatorial merits include a combination of intellectual and playful, interactive dimensions, a well-thought-out concept, and well-executed space. The first experience went well. We'll wait for the next ones.