More style

Exhibition "Baroque" at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition “Baroque: Symptoms of a Great Style” as a visual show was done very well and of high quality. Alexander Petrovichev, who has extensive experience in exhibition activities at the Krokin Gallery, created a very convincing intrigue in the halls of the MMSI on Petrovka. The works he selected are very good in themselves; a lot of strong artists are invested in the concept of “Baroque”. Everything is baroque, not only Valery Koshlyakov with his nostalgic ruins or Konstantin Batynkov, a tireless artist - producer of fantastic battles. Both the bravura visionary of new imperial triumphs, Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt, and the insightful photographer Sergei Chilikov, who admired the cellulite of provincial bathers, turn out to be baroque. Walking through the exhibition, you believe everything. That the late Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov is a representative of the new Baroque. And the strict social analyst Yuri Shabelnikov, who reveals the theme of labor in contemporary art, is also very baroque. That the FENSO group also belongs to this style, packaging their psychedelic visions in heavy frames. Kitchen philosopher Leonid Tishkov also looks very baroque, having hung a fragile architecture made of fluttering pasta in the middle of one of the halls. And the stuffed bear in a luxurious fur coat that greets the viewer, leading the people somewhere into a bright future, undoubtedly falls under the stylistic definition.

However, this luxurious and clownish work by Dmitry Tsvetkov would look much more natural at the exhibition of Sots Art, which our minister liked so much. And it should be banned from showing for maliciously undermining the foundations of Russian statehood. However, there is no particular contradiction here; from the curatorial text we learn that “the collapse of gigantic state-political entities, hysterical consumerism, the commercialization of sex, the threat of global terrorism and aggressive riots breaking out in major world capitals give rise to a feeling of the rebirth of the Baroque.” The author of the text, Alexander Petrovichev, directly appeals to Heinrich Wölfflin, the creator of the classic scheme for changing styles. However, both in the unforgettable monograph “Renaissance and Baroque” and in “Basic Concepts of the History of Art,” which all good art students memorized, Wölfflin categorically rejects all reductionism, that is, the imposition of the laws of economics and politics on art. And he strictly insists that the history of art is an immanent history of form. And every true formalist, even if his interests have moved from the sphere of the classical to the field of the contemporary, must operate with such binary oppositions as “linear/picturesque”, “planar/depth”, “absolute and relative clarity”.

However, these glorious techniques, discovered at the end of the last century, do not work very well even when applied to classical art itself, in the sense in which the German formalists and their domestic followers understood it. And the style categories themselves have long become banal designer brands. A chest of drawers with curlicues will be nicknamed “Baroque”. And a table with thin legs, without curls, we’ll call, of course, “avant-garde” or “minimalism.” And so on and so on, ad infinitum. And it is not at all surprising that journalistic voluntarism is replacing strict methodology. Which is why it seems that if, as the author of the text under discussion believes, “we demonstrate the relevance of the concept of “baroque” in the context of the cultural and political cataclysms of the turn of the millennium,” then everything will immediately fall into place. This is where we should change the vector, turn to the methodological heritage of the Marxists and sociologists of art of the twenties. Start looking for natural connections between the mode of production, social formation and forms of ideological superstructures. That is, art as such.

However, for some reason this path is closed by many strict taboos and branded with the term “vulgar sociology of art.” Reading today's art, armed with books on economics, is, of course, almost impossible, since no one has yet come up with any other than purely expressive definitions of our current formation and method of production. And who needs such truth, as they say in one bearded joke. If we accept as true the definition of “oligarchic capitalism”, introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, then perhaps the only work that reflects our socio-economic reality will be Nikolai Nasedkin’s still life painted in oil.

So, it is clear that both purely “formalistic” and “vulgar sociological” ways of interpreting the situation in modern art lead to the same dead end.

Therefore, it is still better to leave all these formalisms and sociologisms, to remember the old skeptic Ortega y Gasset, who wrote in 1915 that “the circle cannot be made even more round; This is precisely the essence of what will interest us today and in the near future in the Baroque.” So somehow it’s still calmer.

Andrey KOVALEV