Small-town mystetstvo

Festival of Contemporary Art as a resource for regional development

Have you ever heard about the Ukrainian city of Shargorod? Neither did I until recently. Residents of nearby “serious” cities like Vinnitsa or Zhmerinka (nothing funny - it turns out, the largest junction station!) heard, but did not set out to get here. And now we’ve arrived, and not only from Zhmerinka. Guests arrived in Shargorod from Kyiv, and from Moscow, and from Kaliningrad, and from Prague, Berlin, Munich, Bruges, etc. All in all, the city hosted the contemporary art festival “Art-town: Shargorod”.

After our Art-Moscow fair, Art-Pole exhibition, ARTKlyazma festival, ARTStrelka cultural center, Ukraine also grew its own “Art-town” - only for now according to the Moscow recipe. The organizer and main sponsor of the festival was businessman and collector Alexander Pogorelsky, a native of Shargorod who had long settled in Moscow. The curator is the art director of the capital's art center "Winzavod" Nikolai Palazhchenko (I know that the unpatriotic word "art" has already exceeded the permitted dose of use - but what to do?). The “executive curator” (as Palazhchenko formulated the position, thereby apparently admitting his own inability to perform) is Yulia Gnirenko, an employee of the Moscow State Center for Contemporary Art. And this trio, who know a lot about the difficult business of contemporary art, was able to bring an international team of artists to the seedy Shargorod, to whom any European capital would get the keys. And not only artists, but also a solid support group in the form of collectors, experts, museum workers, and journalists. And also just enthusiasts who justifiably strive for the Ukrainian expanse of August, although there is no sea in Shargorod, and both existing rivers look like aeration fields.

All work was done right on site. The main part of the work made using the oil on canvas technique was hung on the opening day of the festival directly on the walls of houses in the old part of the city. An installation by Anna Brochet, who wanders between Moscow and Paris, made of drawings on plexiglass, casting spectacular shadows when illuminated, located in the darkness between the barrels of a juice (but vinegar-burning) factory that occupied an old synagogue. Krasnodar resident Vladimir Kolesnikov depicted - quite in the classical spirit of Michelangelo - a flying naked man on a concrete tower of a water station. A member of the Yekaterinburg group “Zer Gut” Vladimir Seleznev made the city fountain emit foam with the help of the ubiquitous Fairy. Samarian Andrei Syailev took up rock art, carving urban landscapes on rocks above the river - a view of the bus station through the eyes of a Carmagnon. Kiev resident Ilya Chichkan hoisted a giant inflatable ball at the foot of the Lenin monument - they say, Ilyich played too much in his time, and free throws go to us. In remote garages, meditative video installations were placed (Masha-Sha from St. Petersburg has an inflatable ball jumping through the ruined spaces of an unfinished swimming pool, and wasps flicker over a watermelon; at the German Ukrainian Lesya Zayats, views of Shargorod turn into a computer pixel abstraction). All over the city there are works of graffiti artists. In general, a total aesthetic occupation - the city was taken.

Shargorod really fell under the power of modern art. For several days, Kiev painter Nikolai Matsenko held a comical event at the local bazaar to sell copies of Malevich’s “Black Square,” which is quite in the spirit of a mad suprematist who wanted to arrange the whole world according to his own canon and settle down in every home. 99 hryvnia (six hundred rubles in our opinion) is an affordable price for a real painting. And the quasi-Malevich was taken apart not only by visiting collectors, but also by local residents. And two market “brothers” even offered Matsenko intermediary services: he draws, and they sell. So, when Malevich sells things better than the Kavuns, this is another victory of “current” artists over common sense.

And in this euphoric light, covering the eyes of the organizers, sponsors and participants of the Shargorod super-successful adventure, all caustic claims of the critic-zoil fade and dim. Like: “Do even the best works live outside of a very specific Shargorod space, or are they destined to spend the rest of their days in the local film center?” Or: “Have the festivals that have proliferated not only in Russia, but all over the world become an opportunity for free vacations for their participants, who do not bother themselves much with the moral and physical costs of production?” And here’s another: “Doesn’t the provincial specificity of a place provoke the creation of deliberately parochial art, which its creators would not even take with them to the capitals?”

On the other hand, the categorical imperative aut Caesar, aut nihil, which is appropriate in megacities, can hardly be extended to the regions. The arrival of not only art-loving, but also creditworthy guests in the outback can actively contribute to its economic recovery, and what will motivate art tourists to travel - a painting, a river or a synagogue - is no longer important in the financial aspect. But let's return from money to aesthetics. Over the entire existence of all kinds of traveling art festivals (to the organization of which your humble servant had a hand), it becomes obvious that the spontaneously arising clumsiness and wretchedness of artifacts is for the latter an indispensable condition for assimilation and further existence. In the future ideal, every artist internally ready for nomadism should have in stock a certain number of works, accompanied by the label “Made in the village of Zh. by order of the G. festival,” and the unbearable spirit of the place exuded by the work should increase its value in the eyes of a collector who has not made it to Zh. .-G. And now all that remains is to persuade our Aboriginal partners to accept contemporary art in their native lands, as a guarantee of an influx of wide audiences.

However, this very art grows from unknown rubbish. And a series of photographs of the living classic Boris Mikhailov (he, who lives in Berlin, and Kabakov, who lives in New York, are the only masters convertible on the international art market after Malevich), created in Shargorod, there is no need to make a regional markdown. But the local Kodak studio still couldn’t print them adequately—there were some yellow stripes. Site specific, as cultural scientists say, has quietly come into its own.

PS Mystetstvo (see title) is Ukrainian for “art”. At the party on the occasion of the opening of the festival, the cult group from the city of Sumy “Hammerman Znyschuye Viri” performed the song “Nesty mystetstvo people”, which is very relevant for artists. A newspaper-friendly quote from the repertoire of young musicians is the title of the song. Its sounds are still in my ears and in my heart.

Fedor ROMER, Shargorod - Moscow