Translated material
Noodles in "Kvadrat"
The Second Moscow Biennale starts with an accompanying program at the Central House of Artists
Today, the exhibition “An Artist’s Diary”, prepared by Marat Gelman and Alexander Panov, opens at the Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val. She will talk about the lives of those who consider themselves to be part of the art community. What does it feel like to be an Artist today? Easily? Is it difficult? Is there a burden of responsibility? Or is the lightness of existence unbearable? The form of confessional presentation is an artifact: installations, painting, graphics, sculpture, video. The team of masters is stellar: Koshlyakov, Gutov, Dzhikia, Politov and Belova and many others, totaling about forty.It is symbolic that it was from this exhibition that the Expo-Park association. Exhibition Projects” and its director Vasily Bychkov are presenting their own “Black Square” program, independent from the biennale, but taking place at the same time as it, introducing the latest trends in the world artistic process. The program will include the Central European Art Festival M@NARCHIA, a personal exhibition of the radical (literally not sparing his belly) French performance artist Pierrick Soren (it’s funny that his project will open on Defender of the Fatherland Day), and finally, on March 3, the main event of “Black square" - the exhibition "Workshop "Art-Moscow", the culmination of which will be the awarding of the best participant with a prize established by Expo Park, which bears the same name as the entire current program. The Art Moscow workshop and the Black Square Prize were created with the noble goal of supporting the most independent, most non-commercial, most energetic and advanced art in Russia. A competition is announced. A jury of curators, researchers of modern culture, collaborating with periodicals, selects thirty or forty projects they like. They become the “Art Moscow Workshop” exhibition, then the same jury searches for the best one from the exhibits. The artist is awarded a prize and given the opportunity to participate in the next prestigious program.
For technical (financial) reasons, the Black Square Prize was postponed for three years. Today it is being reborn. And the work of the jury with questionnaires and applications from potential participants in the “Workshop” coincided with the opening of the exhibition “An Artist’s Diary”. Since the chairman of the jury, Ekaterina Degot, invited your observer to her team this year, I began to study with interest and care the submitted applications with attached pictures and look for the answer to the question that today’s exhibition is actually dedicated to: artists, why are you torturing the world? What questions do you pester him with?
Acquaintance with the applications strengthened my conviction: traditional quality criteria have been abolished, which is why the consistency of an art statement directly depends on the state of the brain, the ability for an intense, even aggressive brain attack. Alas, the level of the competition showed that something is wrong with our brains and attacks. Of course, we will make allowances for the fact that most of the works were sent by beginners, inexperienced, yellow-haired people. On the other hand, the purer the experiment of monitoring the general process of art communication. The first feeling: few of the competitors understand that there is a territory of contemporary art, where its borders are, what its language is. Submitted applications can be divided into several conditional groups. The first, with realistic (surreal, symbolist) landscapes, flowers and nudes, we will immediately dismiss as curious. This is what is called “the wrong door” - such eternal subjects in the style of “history of art at dumping prices” will work great in other commercial halls of the Central House of Artists. Another category is the category of those who overdo it in reading very learned literature. Objects and rooms are offered in which, in one way or another, all world philosophy, occultism, hermetic and hermeneutics, and Freemasonry will live. Either the Eternal Nothing, or Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjieff will rule the show. All this decorates the complete absence of one’s own thoughts and the fear of posing the question itself: who needs this circle of young deconstructors (mystics, occultists)? The third group is a secret society of savvy advertising managers who believe that the purpose of modern art is limited to playing with brands and trends that everyone has been crying about. The most typical example of such “ironic defamiliarization” and criticism of consumer society is the work, the whole meaning of which is in the title written in graffiti: “Yahooee!”
The fourth group - “I’m a star, that’s all”! Most of the projects of our eminent workers with a knife, an ax, a brush and a computer were hacked to death simply because of their arrogant emptiness.
The fifth category turned out to be the most attractive: young artists working with social or gender issues, fans of left-wing discourse. But without fanaticism. And very attentive to the processes of contemporary international art. Their projects are witty, neat, and ready for use at biennials and triennials of various formats. They will become basically the core of the March “Workshop”. Another thing is that they are practically indistinguishable from hundreds of similar ones produced by young (and not so young) talents from Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and China, which wander through the same biennials and triennials. The well-packaged assortment of the global supermarket of contemporary art: a consumption critique of consumer society. True, among them I remember one, made by Escape group member Liza Morozova. The work interprets the theme of gender, the theme of feminism exclusively in the vernacular version. It’s just that Lisa will weave an abstract picture in real time from very Russian boiled noodles. Constellations of pasta knots will become silent evidence of many cultural meanings, including the difficult fate of women (that’s hellish work!).
Lisa’s project is also charming because it honestly states: while camouflaging in many cases the inability and unwillingness to speak interestingly and clearly about life, contemporary art practices the art of elegantly pulling the wool over the eyes of the viewer.