| Exhibition by Georgy Pervov "Languages of walls and street art" Moscow is a mutant city. And Pervov is his prophet. A strange city of continuous outskirts, through which the photographer walks and looks with an aloof look at what is happening to this world. And the further he gets, the stranger and stranger is what he encounters.
Pictures on fences, garages and garbage dumps live their own special life. Luzhkov's campaign to beautify Moscow courtyards led to strange aesthetic results. And now our yards are decorated with a “family of octopuses” or a “bun on a stump.” And Pervov, as a chronicler of koloboks and octopuses, observes the life of Moscow courtyards.
There are dead birds and dog shit under the feet of Muscovites. Looking directly at them, some turn away, others do not notice, but observer Pervov works. Among his subjects are an old syringe in withered grass and brown pellets on dirty ground. It moves objects from the periphery of vision to the center of the visual field. This is the Moscow we strive not to see and in which we strive not to live. Dirty, dysfunctional, overpopulated Asian city.
This Moscow is not a façade. This is a city of polluted earth and dirty walls. The exposition of the famous photographer Georgy Pervov opened in the exhibition hall “Proekta-Fabrika”, with the participation of the Moscow House of Photography and the support of Sony.
Half of Pervov’s photographs still lie on the floor of the exhibition hall (and traces of visitors’ shoes complement the overall picture), the other half are nailed to the partitions with furniture nails. On the floor are enlarged fragments of the underworld. On the partitions there are reduced-scale views of fences and walls. "Factory" - a new fashionable non-profit gallery located inside a Soviet industrial building, in the heart of the factory district - is, of course, the best place for an exhibition of this kind. Along the main walls there are vats into which water drips (the ceiling, of course, leaks - this is not an installation). The only thing missing is industrial music (it's a pity that the factory is no longer noisy).
Chronicle is not a random word here. Because Georgy Pervov is a real chronicler. He enters the date into the title of each of his photographs, and the title only describes the plot and the place where it was seen (for example, “03/2/03. Explosion on the wall of a school”, there and then Pervov saw graffiti depicting an explosion: pieces of the walls fly apart up from a small building). But this is not the chronicle of a documentarian, but the testimony of an artist.
Pervov actively invades reality. And the main evidence of this invasion is the inscriptions and drawings on the fences. These graffiti were painted by obvious intellectuals (there is both a quote from Brodsky and a professional sketch of a vigilant eye with the caption “Big Brother”). The graffiti is made next to photographs (both on the walls and on the floor), and reads like a commentary. This allows us to define the genre of the entire project as a “total installation”, and not an exhibition of documentary photography.
Total installation is a genre introduced into circulation by Ilya Kabakov. The closest analogue to the new Pervovo project (and perhaps a prototype) is Ilya Kabakov’s “corridors”. The themes of garbage and dirt are quite Kabakov. Creating a nomenclature of objects is a completely Kabakovian technique. Games with photography and text commentary are also involved in Kabakov’s artistic space. It’s not Kabakov’s—it’s the world itself in which Pervov lives.
The artist himself insists on “total realism.” By this term he means “a movement towards comprehending the fullness of the materiality of reality in its depth and authenticity, as opposed to digitalization, virtualization, and the refinement of art and life.” The manifesto of total realism, written by Pervov, is one of the few examples in our young art of how the artist himself provides a theoretical basis for his artistic gesture. But the point is not in the manifesto, but in the photographs themselves.
A camera in the hands of an artist is a terrible weapon. Georgy Pervov is a jeweler by first education. And he monitors the world, noting the mutations of urban space with pinpoint accuracy. These strange emissions of the vital energy of the city, settling on its walls and ground. Scary place, Moscow. Mikhail SIDLIN |
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