Sergey Kuznetsov. NasNet: issue 56

NasNet: issue 56
Sergey Kuznetsov

Publication date: August 21, 2001

Once upon a time I already wrote that the prototype of guestbooks were various “Books of Complaints and Suggestions”, as well as various “Books of Reviews” sewn with beautiful cords in museums. At one time, I read with great interest the thick Talmud in Coffee Bean, but recently - one might say, on my last day in my homeland - I had the opportunity to read the Real Museum Book.

However, the book will be at the end. In the beginning there was a word and that word was “surf”. In the sense in which it is used in “net-surfing” - in other words, in the sense of aimless, but not devoid of pleasant wandering.

In fact, I had a lot of goals - when I leave my hometown for what seems like a year, I have to go around a bunch of places that I couldn’t get to before - from cemeteries and notary offices to editorial offices and friends’ apartments. But behind all this seemingly very businesslike wandering, a strange feeling of farewell arose - completely devoid of pathos and hysteria, but filled with anticipation of the sweetness of nostalgia and - in a slightly more distant future - the sadness of return. It’s as if you’re trying to guess in advance which of the features of the city landscape will not survive this winter - and at the same time you remember how it was twelve, ten or six years ago.

In approximately this mood, I headed towards Taganskaya Square, thinking about how in the early nineties I walked through it every day to work at Inostranka , and at the end of the eighties - at Illusion . However, I was approaching it from the other side, and therefore the cityscape around me was more unfamiliar than nostalgic.

And then I saw the sign “Museum of Furniture” .

In essence, such a sign is a typical link. Not only due to crude Saussurean semiotics (the sign, the arbitrariness of the signifier and the Derridean unknown of the signified - what will happen if you click or enter? Another sign?), but also due to a certain pragmatics. Both the link and the museum sign are essentially a call. Click the mouse or open the door. Unlike advertising, both of them deceive with the imaginary ease of reversibility (“I’ll only look into the courtyard, but won’t go to the museum itself”). However, it has long been known - if you already clicked on the link, then good for you.

That's what happened this time too.

In the courtyard of the museum (so to speak, on the index.html page ) there was a huge stool to match the Tsar Bell. The sign underneath explained that this monument was erected in honor of the first Russian stool. Unfortunately, the date of manufacture of the first stool was missing. As well as the date of its final destruction.

I’m unlikely to be able to describe the museum itself (entrance - 25 rubles, discounts for students) - primarily due to the lack of necessary words. Any unprofessional description will inevitably be tautological - there is furniture in a furniture museum. From the XVIII to the XX centuries. Various. Mostly beautiful.

Continuing the protracted metaphor with the site, we can say that in some rooms there were pieces of paper with descriptions of the interior - exactly the size of one or two screens, usual for amateur sites. And about the same expressiveness. I even wrote down my favorite quote:

“The chess table of the late 18th century, a kind of Russian analogue of K. Malevich’s “Black Square”, made as a kind of primitive, possessing its own self-sufficient philosophy, evokes the constant admiration of specialists.”

Need I say that the chess table was not black at all, although it was indeed square? However, I have no reason not to believe the specialists who discover a self-sufficient philosophy in it - thank God, I had to listen to enough reproaches that I wrote something about a film or a book that the author and the “ordinary viewer” were talking about "and they have no idea. It is worth being a film critic in order to find new meanings - and in the same way I would like to become a furniture specialist in order to discover a self-sufficient philosophy in a chess table.

(Here I thought that the self-sufficiency of philosophy in this case means that the table can perfectly exist on its own. Without applied interest, chess pieces and players).

The last room is dedicated to modern furniture. There are five gigantic chairs, with beautiful names: “Demiurge” - with his arms folded at the top of the back, “Nostradamus” - with a raven on the back and a wooden hand on the armrest, “Bat”... well, only Bela Lugosi can sit on this chair . But the main hit of the collection is the “Big Bill” chair, the back of which looks like a half-unzipped zipper, from which an American flag with hearts instead of stars peeks out. “Yeah,” I thought.

magazine, whom I met on the same day A colleague from Premier , noticed that the chair should come with a table in the shape of the very stain that Monica L. had saved before the trial.

However, they couldn’t do without a table - the table was part of a set called “Dedication to Petrov-Vodkin” or something like that. The main part of the set was precisely the table on which the famous still life with a herring was reproduced in Florentine mosaic. The original painting, in my opinion, can serve as a reminder of the post-revolutionary famine - and its copying by Florentine mosaics involuntarily evokes blasphemous associations with the golden images of the instrument of slow torture hanging around the necks of most of my compatriots. In other words, art has once again replaced religion: it’s nonsense about hunger, but it’s so beautiful.

Beauty, we know, will save the world. You will win.

In the same room lay the very book with which I began today's column. Let me quote just three entries, sending those interested to the museum (“at the same time, look at the furniture,” I could say, paraphrasing the famous joke about the bathhouse).

When I got here, I found myself in an old house from the late 19th century. It was fun!

What twenty years ago seemed banter, ten years ago - postmodernism, has now become just ordinary speech - a mixture of the language of a textbook and the style of a youth magazine.

You created a wonderful aesthetic atmosphere

I think the best caption for the typeface about Petrov-Vodkin . Atmosphere of aesthetics. Exactly.

And finally, it is unclear why the quotation from La Rochefoucauld was written down in the Book . If this were a guest book, then a link to his website would be built into it:

Looking and not thinking is the same as eating food and not digesting it.

(NB! Consider the Buddhist practice of eating without digestion - analogous to contemplation without thinking).

And then we leave the Museum and go back out onto the street, realizing that everything that has just been written, in terms of genre, is precisely an entry in the visitors’ book... except that it is a little long. So it wasn’t written by hand.

***

This issue of Nas.Net is the penultimate and last one written in Russia. The final one will be written - at least as intended - in Amsterdam . There we will return to the "project of the nineties" to complete it. After all, is there a better place in the world than Amsterdam to say goodbye to the fun years of the nineties?