Glass Man

Exhibition of Oleg Kulik in the Central House of Artists

The event aims to become one of the main ones of the season. For the first time in history, the entire Central House of Artists with its three floors was given to one person - Oleg Kulik, who placed his archive for 20 years, from 1987 to 2007, in the enfilades of the Soviet exhibition hangar. The exhibition was prepared by the International Confederation of the Union of Artists, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, XL Gallery (curator Elena Selina). The exhibition became the third in the “Moscow Current” program created by Mrs. Selina.

Among contemporary Russian artists, Oleg Kulik’s fame can only compete with Ilya Kabakov. Radical actions of the mid-90s with reincarnation as a dog seriously bit the global art community. Gradually, Mr. Kulik became a hostage to his own image. The image of the dog man has been privatized by consumer society. Apart from this label, no one wanted to know anything about him. The action, taken out of context, at some point began to be perceived even by many intellectuals as outright vulgarity, in the perspective of the desires of that same Shchedrin bear who wanted to get onto the tablet of history at any cost.

Lately, Oleg Kulik has been trying to restore the space of trust to his creativity. Since last year, he has been engaged in the monumental program “I Believe”, in which his own personality is comparable only to that of a darner of communication holes in relation to the robustly formulated problem of finding the transcendental in our world. Keeping his distance, Kulik created precisely that space of communication on a given topic. Even before the “I Believe” program, at the last Venice Biennale the artist showed his deliberately artlessly made film about his 2005 trip to Mongolia, “The Gobi Test.” And this film, shot mostly with a shaky camera from a car window with views of the endless and disturbing Mongolian steppes, is also, in general, about the restoration of spatial connections, about the radical humility of one’s own gaze, admiring the harmony of the universe untouched by civilization. Kulik needed to fit himself into the maximum spatial scale even now, when he is building a chronicle of his own creativity.

According to the design of the young architect Boris Bernasconi, the gigantic halls of the Central House of Artists are divided by strips of dark cellophane film, through which silhouettes are visible, video noise is heard, and the light flickers. This veil seems to be a symbol of transparent opacity, a metaphor for how everything is connected to everything else and at the same time hidden. Sculptures, videos, photos, documentation of famous dog performances are by no means arranged chronologically. They form a gigantic total installation, no less impressive than the synthetic actions of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” or the actions of Joseph Beuys. The archive cannot be said to be very huge, but the very movement through the empty corridors rustling with cellophane ribbons sets the correct rhythm of communication with each opus. This is not a museum exhibition at all, and the irritation of the head of the department of newest trends at the Tretyakov Gallery, Andrei Erofeev, is understandable about it. After all, he is used to filling the halls sparingly allocated by the leadership of the State Tretyakov Gallery to capacity, preparing thick, vigorous borscht from names, concepts, directions, where it is important to appreciate the tart taste, and not everyone can think about the ingredients. And then such space disappears! Yes, the entire Tretyakov Gallery could, according to the logic of the museum workers, be crammed into it!

But Kulik again emerged victorious. After all, it is in the empty, glare labyrinth that the artist’s fundamental metaphor of creativity as a glass screen on which only tiny particles of Existence are reflected is most fully realized. The main hall of the second floor has been turned into a kind of cinema hall. A film about a trip through the steppes of Mongolia is projected onto the wall at the end of the perspective. But you need to look at it through a glass frame, which focuses the image and adds your own reflection to the picture. This image is key to understanding Kulik’s artistic idea. Even in the most aggressive dog performances, the artist takes his repressive presence in relation to the viewer’s freedom beyond the boundaries of obsessive, predetermined communication patterns. And his dog is essentially the same glass in which we reflected and reflected on our own identity. In my opinion, it is very logical that in a naive, anti-dogmatic knowledge of the vital force of Being, the glass man Oleg Kulik successively went through the Aristotelian phases of “capturing the soul”, from “vegetative” and “sensual” (animal) to “understanding”, born of the divine intellect.

Sergei KHACHATUROV