Herbarium of everyday life

The NCCA is fighting for the democratization of photography

The curatorial logic is dark and capricious. You read in the press release of the exhibition, written in advance and sent over the Internet, that it “expands the scope of traditional visual aesthetics, appealing to the mass audience.” And, spellbound, without thinking about the direct logical inconsistency (the notorious “mass audience” is most eager for “traditional aesthetics”), you expect from the advanced organizers some kind of hooligan prank, oscillating between modern art and kitsch. Either a video installation with Petrosyan, or a kinetic object in the form of Pugacheva. However, in the end, when you get to the vernissage, you see a stylish, aesthetic, quite high-brow, devoid of flashy effects, almost monochrome and slightly monotonous exhibition. An exhibition in which the uninitiated will fall asleep on the go and which, in essence and spirit, is much more traditional than museum halls with masterpieces of old masters or folk crafts. This is me - it's time to move on to specifics - about the exhibition “Photogram. Projection. Silhouette”, opened at the State Center for Contemporary Art.

Crafts are not crafts, but handicrafts were not remembered by chance. It is quite obvious that the current project of its curator Vitaly Patsyukov was inspired by the work with the exhibition “Black on White”, which was held in the capital’s “Gary Tatintsian Gallery” from the end of April to the end of June. On it, photograms (photographs taken without a camera - by simply exposing photographic paper, on which the outline of the object lying on it is imprinted) of Russian avant-garde artists of the early 20th century were wittily combined with the silhouettes of Fyodor Tolstoy, which the vice-president of the Academy of Arts cut out of paper in 1840-- 1850s. It was Patsyukov who wrote the text for the catalog of that exhibition, and without hesitation (and without much editing) he converted it into a curatorial manifesto for the project at the NCCA. The exhibition also opens with works by classics Alexander Rodchenko and Alexander Khlebnikov, already seen at Tatintsyan. But if there the main character was a virtuoso graphic artist of the mid-nineteenth century, here the focus was on our contemporaries, continuing the “photogram” tradition.

The creators of the project consider it precisely the art direction that will definitely attract a “mass viewer” and entail the democratization of photography. Firstly, shooting without a camera is a simple and accessible activity. It is no coincidence that among the authors of the exhibition were Yuri Gerchuk and Valery Stigneev - two respected art critics who belong to the guild whose representatives are usually denied artistic talent by evil artists. But even an art critic can probably handle a photogram.

Secondly, the author of the photogram most often deals with the most ordinary things that he puts on paper - cigarettes, matches, beads, oak leaves, dried bouquets, candy wrappers. Even water connections, like Anatoly Boldin. A photogram is a kind of herbarium of everyday life. She valorizes the base, transferring it into the space of Art. It directly, practically without intermediaries, connects Art and reality, turning the latter into an artifact through a simple mechanical process. A photogram is “the shadows of disappeared objects, footprints in the sand, lines drawn by a finger across a layer of dust” (theorist and curator Rosalind Krauss). This is the fragile skeleton of a burnt object, preserving its materiality, “the untouched ashes of an object that disappeared in the flame” (the inventor of the photogram, Dadaist Man Ray, whose early film experiments, by the way, are also shown at the NCCA).

Beautiful quotes and sublime interpretations can be multiplied indefinitely, just as one can continuously “photogram” the surrounding material world. But the more philosophy and lyricism, the more black and white, bluish and brown monotonous prints on the walls of the exhibition hall, the more and more bored the reader and viewer become, about whose interests the curators and writers of explications were so concerned. One should, alas, ponder over the “secrets of created creatures” and contemplate the materialized “shadows of patching” in Bryusov’s kiosques, and not at exhibitions of contemporary art.

Probably, the curators from the NCCA understand this, and the current exhibition of photograms is diluted, as the name implies, with “projections” with “silhouettes”. That is, works of different genres that use shadows and reflections, contrasts of black and white, contour and background. The best thing at the exhibition is a minimalistic, paradoxical and hooligan piece from this “additional” program - an installation by the increasingly creative young Rostan Tavasiev, which has nothing to do with photography. “One, two, three, four, five... Nostalgic projection and object” is a toy hare hanging from the ceiling and casting a shadow on the wall circle of light. All. No patching or creating. Sapienti sat.

Alexander PANOV