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Boris Orlov at the Museum of Modern Art
The exhibition “The Earthly Host and the Heavenly Host” by Boris Orlov, which opened at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (branch on Ermolaevsky Lane), confirms: the plastic tradition today is a treasure trove, a living resource of ideas, meanings and meanings. She is not a servant of ideologies, she valorizes and justifies them.Superbly prepared by Elena Selina, Olga Lopukhova, and the artist himself, the retrospective finally allows everyone to clearly understand that for the Great Artist Boris Orlov, the idea is always in the foreground, not political, but plastic. Socio-political ideology is one of the catalysts for the process of formal fragility, the cardiograms of which are much more important for Orlova to record than to criticize society.
The artist received a good professional education in the class of the famous Soviet monumentalist Georgy Motovilov, then G.A. Schultz. In the fundamental article in the catalogue, written by Professor Evgeniy Barabanov, the first period of Orlov’s work, the 1960s and early 1970s, is seen from a “metaphysical point of contemplation.” This is the existential “experience of space as a breakthrough and boundary.” I remember the reliefs made from epoxy resin. The mise-en-scenes with figures scattered across a field of concave spheres resemble reflections in magnifying mirrors: the figures are pushed out of the spatial bowl, their proportions are exaggeratedly elongated. The born form finds itself in a struggle with the space that gave birth to it. If we accept the thesis of E.V. Barabanov about the “trauma of birth”, represented by the image of an eggshell, then Orlov’s “counter-reliefs” are pieces scattered from the chthonic sphere-egg (a symbol of the beginning of life), doomed to defend their separateness. You also get a strong impression from the series, which resurrects images of ancient archeology: ruined, broken figures and heads of Roman emperors, bound with lead ribbons. Here is a clearly found leitmotif of creativity: the birth of a form and its defenselessness in the face of time, the elements, and even in the face of the threat of the total topoi of civilization, turning each specific, named, “with a Name,” into another fragment of another empire.
The main sections of the exhibition, of course, are devoted to the visual rhetoric of imperial consciousness. The cycles with the characteristic names “Iconostasis”, “Parsuna”, “Totem”, “Heraldic Sign” include a plastic abundance of emblematic mutations: a ceremonial bust of Stalin with magnificent female breasts, order bars replacing a person, a gerontocratic eagle owl with the eyebrows of a general secretary and wings - folding for red slats. Many works are made on the principle of literal reproduction of metaphors (which in this way turn into metonymies). In particular, machine parts are built into the typewriter carriage (we mean: “the lethal power of words”). Four floors of the MMSI in Ermolaevsky Lane are given over to the travesty parade of totalitarian banners.
The impression is that it was important for the artist to conduct a detailed, methodically verified plastic research. In the cultural tradition there is a genre of heraldic, ceremonial presentation. For example, a ceremonial portrait. What will happen if the balance between the “personal” and the “pre-personal” is disrupted, and the person shown in the portrait is completely defeated by hordes of attacking emblematic attributes (orders, medals, insignia), as well as connotations of the iconosphere of the heroic and triumphal? And if these images are borrowed from different ideological systems: ancient Rome, the USSR, even the totality of popular culture, which turned the suprematist abstractions of the Russian avant-garde into a heraldic totem? With enviable artistic insight, Boris Orlov showed us the result of such metamorphoses. This is a return to the pre-reflective world of traditional, archaic myths and archetypes. Oryol busts with chopped profiles of faces and multi-colored bars constructing the breasts are clearly associated with artifacts of disappeared civilizations, “dense” cultures. It is not for nothing that in the new series, photographic objects with Soviet chronicles of labor exploits and imperial busts are covered with a vigorous scarlet Khokhloma pattern - a symbol not only of carnival enthusiasm, but also of other folklore references, in particular the eternal circulation of the self-consuming and reproducing myth. The ornament encrypts the text of the myth, replicates it, and devalues it, reducing it to pure rhetorical nomenclature.
In conclusion, I will return to the notorious “Sots-Art” problem, which became a stumbling block in the controversy between members of the expert council of the new “Innovation” award (see “Vremya Novostei” of February 14) . Should Boris Orlov be considered a socialist artist? Of course not, if we understand the direction only within the boundaries of the method of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who came up with the name itself in 1972 and professed an arrangement of mutually exclusive styles with the aim of conducting a conceptual dialogue about the boundaries of art. Orlov did not manipulate any ready-made styles. Created your own. And ideology for him is not a panacea for creativity. If we understand “sots art” as a kind of broad, creatively active, ambivalent space for discussions on the topic of political reminiscences in Russian art, then, of course, Orlov cannot remain outside the brackets. This is what he himself said in an interview from the catalogue: “Perhaps Sots Art is a curatorial project? If we perceive social art as a stylistic direction in the doctrine of Komar and Melamid, then I do not want to participate in this social art, it is not mine, but if, as now, after the fact, after thirty years from the moment of its inception - as the totality of the experience of different artists , “then I might still agree to participate in this project.”
Boris Orlov’s exhibition takes place within the framework of the “Moscow Current” project, invented and implemented by Elena Selina and Vasily Tsereteli. Ahead are reviews of the achievements of other classics of modern times.