Eyes inward

Collection of conceptual art of the Sigmund Freud Museum at the Stella Art Foundation

Have you ever observed a strange effect - as if you were not looking at a painting, but the painting was looking at you, studying you carefully? Now imagine that a similar incident happened to the space of an entire exhibition, which seemed to capsize through the looking glass, became empty, and made the bright vernissage audience the object of its secret observation. This happened at the exhibition of the contemporary art collection of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum that opened at the Stella Art Foundation.

The museum of the great psychoanalyst was created 35 years ago in the Viennese house where Freud lived until his emigration in 1938. Conceptualist classic Joseph Kosuth in 1989 decided to revive the memorial spirit of the museum with an injection of modern art. He managed to convince his like-minded people from different countries of the world to donate one work to the Freud Museum. This is how works by John Baldessari, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jenny Holzer, Ilya Kabakov and others appeared in the Art Fund of the Freud Museum. It’s interesting that when you’re in Vienna, you won’t see the entire collection of the conceptual section of the museum. According to eyewitnesses, only some installations are available for viewing (Kabakov’s, for example), while others were honorably sent to rest in storage. So the exhibition in Moscow is a unique opportunity to see the collection as a whole, to appreciate its phenomenal ability to turn away from the “normal” interpretation and secretly spy on the viewer.

Joseph Kosuth, for example, scribbled a photo of a page with the text of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” on the wall, leaned a framed photo of a hallway and front door against the text, and stuck the text at the bottom of the photo: “The boundary here is between an independent “thing” and its replacement and substitution " As a result, the visual image of real space is squeezed by the space of the text, and unable to master the text (it is closed by the photo), we find ourselves in a trap - a linguistic mousetrap that blocks the possibility of interpretation. Placed literally at the boundaries of concepts, the framework of discourse, we find ourselves as exhibits of language, because its performative capabilities, that is, speech, are the prerogative of everyone, who independently forms meaning within the boundaries specified by the text.

The ceremonial photographic portrait of bookshelves with Freud's works belongs to the Clegg&Gutman tandem. Again, the seduction of the text (books with worn spines look much more appetizing in the photo) and the impossibility of mastering it create the effect of “reverse reading” - books look at us and we are an object of study for them. (It’s interesting that the German artist Lisa Schmitz is currently doing a similar conceptual project in Moscow: she “turns the libraries of famous cultural researchers inside out” - she places the books with their spines backwards in the recess of the shelf and photographs stacks of indistinguishable, tongueless pages sandwiched between the bindings.)

Stepping back, they explore us at the exhibition and everyday objects. A representative of “poor art,” a movement that glorified the banal world of objects, Pier-Paolo Calzolari hung a knotted leather belt, above which the neon inscription “greedy” glows. In this case, desire is fraught with violence, which in turn indicates the bonds of a weakling with a noose of fear around his neck. A thing that aggressively studies us. Franz West's empty iron couch is just as aggressively unresponsive to the viewer. The work was done in the “aesthetics of absence” and simply requires the visitor to turn into an exhibit - to complete the act of art and lie down on the couch, and therefore feel like Dr. Freud’s patient.

And closing the perspective of “significant absence” is Ilya Kabakov’s installation “A Man Who Flew Away into His Picture” (1987-1989). Table with folders, wooden barrier behind the table. A white chair is pushed up to the barrier. Behind the barrier on the wall is an empty white panel with a tiny dot - a figurine of a flying artist. Moving in perspective towards this installation, the viewer feels like a witness invited to interrogation in a courtroom. He is interrogated by empty, isolated artifacts, which are therefore even more creepy in their energy of invisible surveillance.

Sergei KHACHATUROV