Andrey Kovalev. Terrible disgusting

Terrible disgusting thing - this jellied fish of yours
Andrey Kovalev

Date of publication: October 11, 2000

Essay on how I visited the Warhol exhibition in the Hermitage
Andy Warhol (1928-1987): life and work.
October 3 - November 28, 2000

We somehow suffered for a very long time from our isolation from the paths of world culture and mass culture. It seems like completely different times have come now. "Pepsi-Cola" - at least fill yourself up. Complete happiness has arrived - you can go to St. Petersburg and see with your own eyes what he really is like, this Andrei Warhola, this simple Slavic guy who realized the Great American Dream. I’ve already gone and everything is in order there: Marilyn and neatly arranged boxes of Heinz sauce. Even the primitivist drawings of Warhol’s mother are all there. Even the completely blind Timur Petrovich Novikov is in his unchanged place.

It’s not even clear why I went there - everything I could say was told on the basis of the catalog and many sweet stories that were swarming in my head. Andy really achieved his goal - looking at him is as sad as an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola or some diapers. Although, on the other hand, the philosopher Baudrillard (more correctly, Baudrillard ) once said here that “Warhol gives us the pure illusion of technology - technology as a radical illusion - much greater today than the illusion of painting. In this sense, the machine itself can become famous, and Warhol never pretended to be anything other than this machine celebrity, without consequences and without leaving traces . "

Very true, but how sad is the posthumous fate of this embodied Great Illusion that you no longer want to look at it under any circumstances? Although, of course, if you look closely, you will see that Warhol never fully managed to become a machine - the surface of the canvases was too man-made and exciting, it was all too roughly and inappropriately put together. Everyone is breathing, but somehow surreptitiously and very shyly.

Although, what the hell am I really writing? He himself spoke many times about the end of painting, and about all sorts of different simulacra that finally replaced sweet painting. And so on. It seems that from the depths of my completely confused soul, in my old age, retrospections of university formalism are crawling out, requiring you to run your nose over the picture, look at all sorts of brush strokes, and so on. But, really, and this is sometimes useful - to look not at “how it works”, but at “how it’s done.” The spectacle, let me tell you, friends, is very so-so. It looks like the shabby walls of the archaeological halls of the Hermitage, where all this is on display. By the way, the dear Ivan Chechet, who I met at the vernissage, told me in surprise that he was so hoping that all this would be exhibited somewhere in the upper halls - where there is luxury and gold. Of course, everything would look different there.

Here it also makes sense to remember, of course, about art in the era of mechanical reproduction. But the thing here is that the status of the visual sign has completely changed since the time of Benjamin, and Andy reproduced what was reproduced in cyclopean quantities, simulated simulacra, simulated simulacra, and so on. But, I repeat once again, his efforts seem to have led to such a surprisingly vulgar result - that is, the radical determination to manipulate the profane somehow in itself began to look like ordinary bad taste. It's hard to understand, it's better to explain. And the above is, of course, not yet a reason to start admiring greasy and oily pictures in the spirit of the left Moscow Union of Artists.

Of course, in St. Petersburg, artistic foolishness is commonplace. There, both Timur Petrovich and Afrikanych are great masters with a kind smile at selling the public and the powers that be about all kinds of crap under the guise of something great. And they succeed brilliantly - now go and say that neo-academicism is terrible junk. They'll peck you. This is the same as publicly declaring that pop art is just plain garbage. It’s a shame, you can’t help but think of yourself as some kind of terrible retrograde.

By the way, to the question of both show-off and luxury. I was always amazed at the great skill of Serezha Bugaev, better known as Africa , to be close to the VIPs. And what is this navel next to Africa? Yes, the ambassador seems to be American. By the way, is it nice that American neo-globalism is now promoting its great ideals of Freedom through Warhol? (The exhibition was organized, as you know, by the State Department and was named completely stupidly, as if it were an Honored Artist of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic - “Life and Creativity”. What kind of life does this Vapriryaki have, what kind of creativity is there? Isn’t all this strange? It would be better They showed the film “Blowjob.” And that would have been more correct.

But here Michal Borisych Piotrovsky also distinguished himself - he also gained popularity for 15 minutes. The BMW company, which brought Andy's painted car and a group of scribblers (me too) to the Hermitage, leased (!!???) to Piotrovsky an excellent executive class car. Here is a new star in our sky - this is not some Pugacheva or Masha Pochechueva. The only funny thing is that in the meantime it was discovered that Michal Borisych already had a good Mercedes, a silver one. (I hope that the auditors of the Accounts Chamber did not read up to this point.) And then my friend Fyodor Romer, who suddenly became a very new leftist and very correct one, simply became completely exhausted. He whined all the way, even in the restaurant, that all this was bad and that BMW and its PR people broke the hymen of a most respectable man. I, as a simpleton old leftist, now believe that Piotrovsky is not Mavromati, he should be rich and famous.

Even the presence of Nik Ilyin, a man with a catastrophically bad reputation, during this whole affair did not bother me in any way. So what, but the man is very prominent.

So I recommend that everyone who has read this far drop everything and immediately rush to the State Hermitage to look at how poorly Warhol painted. And the paper critics have already told you about how soft and fluffy he was.

However, you don’t have to go anywhere and buy Warhol from Gelman and Feldman . There is nothing to watch, I need to buy it urgently. (Marat and Ronald, I'm waiting for dealer interest.)

But the best thing is to read the master’s biography on Gey.Ru or all the jokes - Alexey Munipov, CARAVAN OF STORIES magazine, June 1999.

Andy Warhole. The philosophy of Andy Warhol (for some reason found by Sergei Teterin ).

You don’t have to read this at all: complete nonsense. A.A. Danilova . The role of artistic copying in art systems of the second half of the 20th century.

And here are the links (stolen from Marat):