Fedor Romer. I'm making a reservation for myself...

I'm making a reservation for myself...
Fedor Romer

Publication date: February 16, 2000

At the Dom cultural center, an exhibition opened and closed without much attention from the public or the press, to which the press, it would seem, could not help but react - out of collegial sympathy or envy. The “Pressformat” exhibition (curated by Oksana Sarkisyan) resembled the periodicals department of a regional library, but only half equipped with invaluable materials from the manuscripts department of the central library. The “press format” included not only “ordinary”, albeit specialized, elite publications that are regularly published and have a circulation of four to five figures (those exceeding this were not allowed at the exhibition due to the danger to the intellectual and mental health of visitors), but also ephemeral crafts made by using a photocopier or even a ballpoint pen with the corresponding circulation figures. Moreover, this amateur publishing activity rightly dominated the exhibition, turning its typographically born colleagues into an unnecessary and uninteresting appendage.

“Pressformat” is not just an anthology of samizdat, but artistic samizdat, little known and completely inaccessible to the public. These are magazines, almanacs, collections, etc., created by artists - that is, artistic projects that, for various reasons, use the form of print media. Catalog of a foreign exhibition of a famous Moscow group, decorated as the first (and, naturally, last) issue of a magazine entirely dedicated to the work of the group. Fragile typewritten pieces of paper with interviews, conversations, poems, studies of enviable philosophical condensation - home training for the minds of Soviet intellectuals. A narcissistic touching piece about oneself beloved, supporting the image-perverse strategy of one of the main characters of St. Petersburg bohemia. A rollicking magazine, all decorated with vignettes and filled with comic pictures, a magazine of the hero of Moscow bohemia. Even the “yellow press”, which nevertheless achieved a place in the exhibition, but only in the form of its own “simulacrum”, carefully and almost seriously produced by the artist. Etc., with a seemingly rich and varied content spectrum.

However, in the case of mass media, form determines (and even replaces) content. A magazine, newspaper or some other form of press is based on mass appeal, publicity, attractiveness and concise information content. Art, especially modern art, as a hereditary disease from sinful modernism, has inherited pure individualism, closeness (most clearly manifested in today’s popularity of the video installation genre, which by definition requires a closed space), dark esotericism and blurred expression. Almost all amateur magazines of artists are endowed with all these birthmarks of art, created not to popularize their activities and disseminate their ideas, but as if to protect them from a profane environment, like a meaningless oasis in an information-rich desert. The economy of the “big” press intuitively senses this kind of disregard for itself, and therefore artistic publishing endeavors, which for some reason lay claim to circulation, printing, money, etc., were the first to die after the August crisis (the black and white mummy layout of one of these that never came out magazine was hanging on a string in the "House").

In order to profitably sell his rich, but only interesting, inner world, the artist needs to change it a little, simplify it and paint it in all the colors of the rainbow. What, by the way, did Semyon Faibisovich do at the exhibition “Every Hunter Wants to Know...” at the XL-Gallery, which opened on the same day as “Pressformat”. In it, photographs from the parental archive (purely personal, full of syndromatics known only to Faibisovich, boring for an outsider) were transferred by the artist to film, tinted in the colors of the rainbow spectrum and illuminated from the inside. This inner light can, of course, be interpreted as a metaphysical glow with an astral glow. But it can also be like the spotlight of publicity, illuminating an artist who has entered the mass media market with his intimate goods.