Nadya Plungyan. Terrible death. Rehearsal

And Kille Bonito Oliva opened the exhibition, published a book and was like that. Now the Moscow artistic community can feel like Europe: not at all embarrassed by the still dominant provincial postmodernism here, the Italian curator pretended that everyone understood what “new art” and the anti-American “transavant-garde” were.

Meanwhile, a more objective idea of ​​what was happening in art could be obtained at the Tretyakov Gallery, where by that time three exhibitions of contemporary artists were located on the same floor. Shakhovskoy, Bulatov , Nakhova.

Or rather, the briefly open installation of Irina Nakhova, a student of Viktor Pivovarov and a well-known artist of the Moscow conceptual school in her circle, was separated from Erik Bulatov and Dmitry Shakhovsky by a door to the new “hall of contemporary art.” Modernity, in fact, can be different.

Over the past forty years of ordinary throwing from the figurative to the non-figurative and from the object - back to the plane of the picture, Russian art has made many chaotic leaps. Ironically, these three overlapping exhibitions formed a certain dry remnant of the period when Soviet artists gradually realized the futility of attempts to update the surrounding reality and thought about the Western market. Exactly those forty years, the mythology of which Oliva created in his apparently immortal work.

Let's return to Irina Nakhova. “Rehearsal” is her first exhibition in the main gallery of the country, and perhaps it was this circumstance that influenced the scale of the plan. Having placed rectangular lightbox coffins on the floor of the dark hall, on the lids of which photographs of the artist’s friends in the same dying pose were reproduced, Nakhova did not betray her main principle of quoting other people’s paintings. The pose is taken from Edouard Manet's painting "The Dead Toreador", and an illuminated reproduction of his "Balcony" looks out from the wall. The very idea of ​​the installation can be considered a quotation: at one time, the murder of the artist was proclaimed as a creative act in one of Oleg Kulik’s projects . Don’t be disappointed: according to Oliva, this method of work successfully “makes it possible to immerse a new artistic object in the ritual atmosphere that was traditionally inherent in the perception of valuable objects.”

Like Nakhova’s project based on Jean Fouquet’s painting “The Virgin and Child,” shown a couple of years ago at XL Gallery, this installation does not touch upon an existential problem at all, despite even being dedicated to the deaths of September 11 (Nakhova lives in America). Its result is a rather peculiar collage, in which the author hardly participates.

Nevertheless, it was certainly worthwhile to squeeze this artist between the aloof Shakhovsky and the inexorable Bulatov, at least as an experiment - given that all three were opening up new directions.

Rarely mentioned and not marked with official honors, Dmitry Shakhovskoy (born 1928) relies on the tradition of early futurism, transformed by the cult of artistic craft, accepted in the Moscow circle of students of the famous engraver and book master Vladimir Favorsky . Working primarily in wood, he developed new directions in other techniques (graphics, assemblage, “random sculpture” from found objects). In everything he does, he invariably shows an interest in the material and a craving for the classical form, which is little in demand today. At the same time, his works bear the imprint of innovation, which foresaw many of the bright achievements of art in the second half of the 20th century.

At the same time, he remains strikingly far from the more famous Erik Bulatov, although he is only five years older than him. Their items have one thing in common: the stamp of professionalism and deep thoughtfulness.

Bulatov, however, also belongs to the followers of Favorsky, although he develops a different line, associated, rather, with the theory of the pictorial field and work on the plastic understanding of type. The uncompromising theme and the dry academicism of the form earned him the fame of the “father of modern art” in his time.

Of course, if the name of Favorsky is mentioned now among adherents of contemporary art, it is rarely and in passing, and gallery owners are quite lenient towards the sixties. However, the convincingness of all this archaism, apparently, also affected Irina Nakhova, since her exhibition ended up in the Tretyakov Gallery, and even with a nod to Manet. I’ll add in parentheses that the artist worked in children’s book illustration for a long time.

Combined within one gallery, all three are somehow automatically deprived of their former merits. Is it really so important that Bulatov created a new optics for painting and took the first steps towards social art and conceptualism, that Shakhovskoy developed a new plastic art, and Nakhova was one of the first to try out “room” installation in the Soviet context? In this situation, they represent only a synchronous cross-section of generations, of which the last represents contemporary art. From this retrospective, even without understanding the trends of the second half of the 20th century, it is easy to see how clarity of perception was gradually replaced by tongue-tiedness and self-repetition. The world fell apart again, the artist faced the constant need to form new and new principles of art.

Here it is finally worth asking the question: what is this actuality and what is it, in fact, opposed to? What does relevant and irrelevant art mean today?

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The oxymoronic term “contemporary art” is, on the one hand, an imperative indication of what should be appropriate in the current context, not without its charm. On the other hand, by declaring itself relevant, that is, strictly tied to the current and transitory, art risks depriving itself of the right to immortality. As a result, entire trends in the second half of the twentieth century. began to rapidly become obsolete - much faster than schools at the beginning of the century.

Another important feature of relevance is the proclamation of the dominance of the secular principle. What is relevant cannot even be involved in the sacred, although often the loss of the “connection with Pushkin” becomes a grave surprise for artists of this movement. For example, the postmodernist poet Timur Kibirov said in a recent interview with bitter irony that the new generation, “raised on Pepsi or Coca-Cola, is experiencing irreversible changes in taste, and it is almost impossible to accustom them to something else.” It seems that the problem is rather that for the new generation the relevance of Soviet and even post-Soviet romance has lost its meaning. Kibirov is read - at least at the moment - almost exclusively by people of his age and circle.

Secularity is also associated with speculation on ideology. Deprived of the usual living nerve, that is, the sacred component, ideology in contemporary art turns into a joke, a clear example of which is the work of Dm. Vrubel and Victoria Timofeeva, endlessly portraying the president. (As a compliment to their obvious relevance, let me express doubts about their artistic, much less political, relevance ten years from now.) The continuous search for ways of expression in the pursuit of relevance completely emasculates art, turning it into the use of a technique or concept based on constant fixation of one's own life.

Finally, the last thing. Conceptual completeness is often perceived by the artists themselves as insufficient. Hence, the exploitation of someone else’s cultural potential, characteristic of the current movement, is an interesting technique for deconstructing creativity through shifting responsibility for one’s own artistic gesture . Let me give you another quote from Kibirov: “I have an extremely bad attitude towards the so-called youth culture... I myself am increasingly inclined towards the classics. And earlier in my poems I referred the reader to Pushkin, then to Nekrasov, then to Baratynsky...”

From this point of view, in the context of “between Shakhovsky and Bulatov,” Irina Nakhova can be considered as a curator of Edouard Manet , who relatively successfully placed the famous impressionist in modern space. If Bulatov instantly selects “his” viewer (according to the caretaker, the screening occurs, as they say, from a hanger: “He has a picture hanging here right in front of the door, it says: “No entry.” So people come in, see it, that means, well, come back out"), then Nakhova in “Rehearsal” offers rather unaddressed “pictures at an exhibition” on a well-known plot, in which there is neither integrity nor aggression, and the helplessness of the double quotation is discouraging.

Achille Bonito Oliva, with his characteristic optimism, proclaimed the triumph of a non-ideological line in pan-European art. Perhaps it has come in Europe - as a consequence of democracy. In Russia, apparently, we should first wait for the destruction of the secular space and the formation of an alternative. Conceptualism is already rehearsing its death.