Biennale in the port

Moscow, as you know, is a port of five seas. Therefore, everything should be no worse for us than people living on the far coast of at least the very neighboring of them. And in this direction, “the work of hell will be done and is already done,” as Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky wrote in 1929.

For example, for some time, there has been an entrance to the subway on the square near the Kyiv station, the twisted metal design of which is exactly the same repeats the retro design of the Paris subway. Seeing for the first time, he did not believe his eyes: the same smooth lines of the Art Nouveau style, almost the same lanterns. Only all this splendor is painted with green paint recognizable of state -owned color. Paris Paris, but former Soviet pride has; For nothing that this place is now called the Square of Europe.

The daily artistic life of Moscow Biennale of contemporary art affects the minimum; most metropolitan artists did not even suspect his dangerous proximity

Or I had a chance to recently take advantage of the advertised Moscow monorail from the former VDNH to the current metro station Timiryazevskaya. The pleasure is expensive, the route is whimsical and, as it turns out, little in demand; Some stations are closed, trains move at large intervals and somehow uncertainly overcome the industrial zone and the quarters of the Khrushchev development. But the railing on the escalator with heated. But, most importantly, who can now say that in the Russian capital there is no such transport?

For some time now, in our city (now it can already be said, regularly), the Biennale of contemporary art has been held. Invited curators arrange exhibitions of Western authors invited by them - however, preferring projects that are optimal for overcoming customs. Video, photos, installations from improvised materials are good. Or you can draw something with a felt-tip pen on the window glass. The event of the everyday art life of Moscow affects the minimum; I even suspect, most of the capital's artists not only did not feel in their own skin, but they did not even suspect a dangerous intimacy: the blind text posts that are usually reserved, where Nadezhda Kadyshev and its “golden ring” usually reside. But this was what the most visual agitation looked in order to suddenly climb onto the 19th floor of the unfinished Tower of the Federation or to begin to bypass other sites. Yes, and expensive catalogs of the current Biennale are unlikely to actively go hand: the so -called sponsors have been forbidden to distribute them to reporters accredited at the event. On the other hand, the fact that the series of March vernisages, again addressing Mayakovsky, passed the “side of how the oblique rain passes”, there is even something humane. Unlike the situation with the Tretyakov Gallery, where the demonstration of “political art in China” demanded the actual destruction of the constant exposition “Art of the twentieth century”, the Biennale exhibition on construction sites did not squeeze anyone. But now no one will turn to say that Russia is a backward country in an aesthetic sense.

03/15/2007 The material was published in the newspaper No. 47 dated 03.16.2007.