Assembly meeting

A festival of contemporary art collections opened in Moscow

Apparently, there will be no low season for art life this summer. Informational occasions stretch like a folded news feed. No sooner had we said goodbye to the big festival of young art than “hello, please” - welcome to the new festival. This time collections of contemporary art. The festival will last two months (until September 27). Prepared by the Ministry of Culture and the State Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA). The curators are employees of the NCCA (Alina Fedorovich), gallery owners and artists (Igor Shelkovsky, Sergey Popov...). Many Moscow sites are involved, from the “Project Factory” to the State Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val and the Museum of Personal Collections of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin. In respected museums, round tables are expected on the specifics of forming collections of contemporary art.

The festival began with a large-scale display of video art from the collection of the Center for Contemporary Art. In the exhibition hall of the NCCA, large and small screens flash with video works of famous and young authors. Most of the works were donated to the center. The systematic acquaintance with the best examples of video art by the masters of contemporary art (Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, Valery Aizenberg, Vadim Zakharov) contributes to the fact that the barrier of alienation between the previously unseen video and us is being overcome quite successfully. The eye, thought and feelings have been educated, and video art, running between different continents of visuality (from painting to computer anime), is now accepted as native.

However, not all videos exhibited at the NCCA are equally convincing. Most of the works of those who cannot yet be called masters are made using one, carefully articulated visual idea, a found leitmotif. For example, Yakov Kazhdan, with the help of great images of world art appropriated by consumer society, criticizes advertising dominance. Inspired at the same time by Michelangelo's fresco and the screensaver of a Nokia phone, he captured the movement of two hands towards each other, recognizable as the smile of Gioconda. Only in his video they meet to exchange everyday goods. It cannot be said that the work amazes with the depth of its design or the perfection of its execution. Just like the old AES+F video with children from modeling agencies crowding into the main palace hall in white underwear. The children huddle together, and the camera shamelessly savors their confused faces, keeping the shots in slow motion. The work is called “The Forest King”, and it was at the origins of the AES+F series about debunking the myth of sinless childhood. Only the inarticulateness of these first opuses (in contrast to the more recent ones, from the Venice Biennale last year) itself leads to ambiguous conclusions about the obsession of the theme and the dissolute relishing of it. The state of hysterical meditativeness (sorry for such an oxymoron) became the theme of Ksenia Peretrukhina’s good work “Rhyme.” First, in the mise-en-scene of a Chekhov play and old photographs with gentlemen from the century before last, a boy, standing on a stool, reads a poem in front of secular society. Then Tibetan monks in red flowing robes fill the stage. They pray exultantly. It turns out that the boy becomes something like a little Buddha. A strong wind blows, and everything is transformed in accordance with the color scheme of Baroque paintings. Still, the ghosts of Greenaway's films still haunt young artists.

Of the videos of this new generation, perhaps one work claims to be a masterpiece. In it, scattered across various young video works, found, nurtured themes and leitmotifs form a polyphonic, multi-dimensional symphony. This is “Ode” from 2002 by Viktor Alimpiev and Marian Zhunin, shown in 2003 as part of the Venice Biennale in one of the main curatorial projects. Having divided the film into twenty-one movement chapters, the artists masterfully and completely freely, trusting only the whimsical play of associations, stage the mechanics of poetic delight in world culture. Moreover, the plastic themes of ancient theater, commedia dell'arte, and classic rhetoric are intricately intertwined. Staged rather according to the laws of an ancient spectacle, requiring attentive participation, the creation of Alimpiev and Zhunin admits into itself the ghost of the “demon of inspiration” Boileau, and the messengers of praise - the Epinikian choirs of Pindar, and the characters of Beckett, and the masks of the Venice Carnival (it is interesting that among those employed in the film made up to look like white-faced masks of the heroes, Moscow Biennale Commissioner Joseph Backstein, who brilliantly fit into the company of dell'arte). The verbal score is intricately related to the plastic score. Every rhetorical element, be it the gathering of “speaking” folds of clothing or ritual gesticulation in the affect of triumph, is found and seen. All together, with great force, we manifest our voluptuous submission to collective psychoses and a mass of enthusiastic paranoia. And the main thing is that this “Ode” does not condemn such paranoia. It really is a masterpiece. Odic pathos functions like a clock. After all, the Greeks who assembled it thought through everything, right down to the breathing rhythms. The wise Alimpiev and Zhunin do not condemn, do not expose, but demonstrate the original multipolarity of the ethical and aesthetic. Moreover, in this work there is a precise relationship between improvisation and the iron logic of composition, which alone is the essence of great art (the second work that pleased me with this found measure is “Three Sisters” by the Nizhny Novgorod group Provmyza).

The next day, the new London-Moscow Ravenscourt gallery on Gagarinsky Lane, which delighted many with its excellent sense of taste and understanding of the diversity of subtle cultural connections, opened an exhibition from the collections of Maxim Boxer, Olga Kovaleva and Alena Solod. The composition of the collections representing the art of recent decades convinces us that the newest opuses are already being introduced into history and acquiring the weight not of price, but of value. The first exhibit of the exhibition is especially remarkable - a drawing with a mountain of dragons, made in an exquisite, slightly comic-style, slightly stylizing manner of ancient graphics by Georgy Ostretsov in 1983. The artist, like the future collector, curator of the Ravenscourt gallery Maxim Boxer, was then 16 years old. They were classmates, and the historic deal that predetermined the fates of both took place during recess. The sale amount is astronomical by the standards of a Soviet schoolchild's budget - three pre-reform honest Soviet rubles.

Today, at the Sakharov Museum and Public Center, another exhibition opens to the public - archives and artwork from personal collections of the unique magazine of unofficial Russian art “A-Z”, published in Paris from 1979 to 1986. The curator of the exhibition, magazine editor, artist Igor Shelkovsky collected materials related to the names of permanent participants of “A-Z” Igor Golomshtok, Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Francisco Infante, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Boris Groys...

Sergei KHACHATUROV