Translated material
Dream space
Russian Dreams in Miami
In parallel with the world's largest contemporary art fair, Art Basel-Miami Beach, the Russian exhibition Russian Dreams opened at the Bass Museum in the resort city of Miami Beach. This is the third visit of Russian art to the prestigious fair. The most ambitious and noisy. The curator, director of the Multimedia Complex of Contemporary Arts, Olga Sviblova, with the support of MasterCard, the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and TSUM, brought art that cannot be called invisible.Inside the museum, architect Yuri Avvakumov created a dream space. It disturbs the memory of constructivist utopias. Using technical modules - wooden pallets for carrying agricultural products - Avvakumov inserted a diagonal corridor into the museum enfilade. Pallets of wooden board modules turned into its walls, three meters high. They discipline thought and set a clear rhythm of movement. This plastic direction is very important, because the dreams revealed by the curator Sviblova are very different and are not subject to strict logic.
Let me note right away: when compared with the most interesting projects of the main territory of the American “Art Basel” (which the crisis contributed to a lot of decoration: there was more experimental, young art, less linear meters of Warhol and Picasso designed for fat wallets), the Russian exhibition stands up with dignity. For the most part, Russia brought art that was smart, interestingly made, and capable of dialogue with the best works of artists in demand in the world.
Masters who work with the archetypes of Russian dreams correlate well with those who see the full value of a statement in the ability to entrust the viewer with their own existential experience. In both cases, expectations were violated mostly successfully. Stereotypes of understanding Russian did not triumph. Some projects destroyed these same stereotypes on their own territory, on the territory of souvenir brands, for example. Yuri Avvakumov brought a model of the mausoleum. It’s wonderful, we know... The Kremlin, Lenin, the revolution, left-wing art, which was later devoured by the evil empire... But Avvakumov’s mausoleum is beautiful not just as a cute souvenir assembled from ready-made cliches of the Soviet theme. He is beautiful, defiantly, brazenly, sickeningly and shamelessly. Because it is made of black dice (even playing ones - dominoes). The white dimpled circles in them are replaced with sparkling rhinestones. Such a souvenir is no less frightening than the skulls with rhinestones of the infant terrible of modern art by Damien Hirst or the turtles with rhinestones from Trushevsky’s recent project “Sweet”, which rhyme with the image of Huysmans’s decadent novel “On the contrary.” The antinomy of manneristic dreams at all times, from the 16th century to Soviet utopia and beyond: narcissistic aesthetics is vulgarity and the blade between them is vanity of vanities, black melancholy, mortal melancholy.
The works of Rostan Tavasiev, Nikita Alekseev, Leonid Tishkov, Boris Bendikov turned out to be perfectly rhymed. Rostand built a tower of cubes in memory of the Third International. Inside each cube there is a blue sky. On the last cube, the tower builder is an orange bunny. The cubes look like Nikita Alekseev’s paintings with piercingly tender images on the theme of things dear to the heart, and the glass of the picture frames reflects the glowing “private moon” of Tishkov and Bendikov, the history of which is captured in a series of photographs opposite.
Dreams of strength and powerlessness helped the talented projects of Dmitry Gutov and Alexey Kostroma see the light of day. Dmitry Gutov used Kalashnikov assault rifle cartridges welded to steel wire to recreate the score of Dmitry Shostakovich’s piano trio “In Memory of Sollertinsky” (Ivan Sollertinsky is a musicologist who was friends with Shostakovich and died in evacuation in 1944). Alexey Kostroma dressed a real cannon in bird feathers, the feathered muzzle of which, when the viewer approaches, suddenly lowers, like an elephant’s trunk. In both cases, the theme of desacralization of militarism and all sorts of war games is clearly articulated.
The space card was interestingly played by Yulia Milner and Sergei Shutov. In Julia Milner's video, the female womb is combined with photographs of cosmic galaxies, ring nebulae, astronomical spots and holes. The artist sends a witty greeting to Gustav Courbet's famous and once scandalous painting “The Origin of the World,” in which a woman's vulva resembles an archetypal natural landscape. Sergei Shutov cut figures of rockets and satellites from barbed wire. I made an applique out of them on the wall, signaling that the technical support for the cosmic fantasies of earthlings is often done in forced conditions, with the labor of prisoners behind barbed wire.
Dreams about the sacred, non-verbalizable, musical and intimate are revealed in the installations of Alexander Ponomarev, Alexander Brodsky, Vladimir Tarasov. Alexander Ponomarev, with the help of menacingly noisy machines, created a conveyor of smoke rings, sparkling like halos, and with their disembodied radiance similar to the substance of dreams itself. Alexander Brodsky brought a barrel organ with a model of a residential area of a Soviet city inside. You turn the handle and music starts playing and a blizzard swirls inside the glass box: the soul is taken away by the same aching nostalgia that is now inseparable from the images of Norshtein’s “Hedgehog in the Fog” (by the way, Brodsky himself admitted that the prototype of the barrel organ was a glass cube in which there was a forest and hedgehog, and if you shake it, it snows inside). Vladimir Tarasov dedicated the installation “Chushala” to his parents and the village of Chushala near the Pinega River, where his father was born. A room in a village house has been recreated. Autumn landscape outside the window. Russian songs sound, drawn-out, as Petrov-Vodkin used to say, “to the point of heartache.” Sensitive American viewers found in “Chushal” something very close to their folklore.
Also noteworthy is the project that, in my opinion, turned out to be an outsider. These are photographic portraits of dead people, computer-generated in expensive outfits, taken by members of the AES+F group. The authors consider the series to be something of an illustration of Nikolai Fedorov's ideas about physical resurrection after death through the collective efforts of art and science. It’s awkward to look at the photograph: it’s like you’re spying on someone else’s grief. And even ceremoniously served. If this is a commentary on Fedorov, then it is primitive, as if the metaphysical treatises were illustrated by the positivists-Itinerants, and not by the great artist-spiritual visionary Vasily Chekrygin, who did not turn to Fedorov’s ideas, for example. If this desire is to be done in spite of the political correctness that for some reason bothers Russians living in an authoritarian society, then the barrier between the AES product and the viewer is precisely that of the basic humanistic value system. Many people are disgusted by the word “democracy” (in another exhibition project by artist Andrei Molodkin, it is deliberately filled with oil). However, nothing better has been invented in protecting the rights of the Individual. And it is precisely a free and equal society that obliges, for example, to respect the dead and ask the living whether, after death, they agree to become participants in an (anti) glamor fashion show or not. If this agreement is not there, then your dreams will be a slap in my face.
The AES+F project, which fell out of context, also gave reason to think about our mystery and the limits of our dreams. Judging by the reviews of foreign colleagues, the drama of the exhibition itself is very exciting. On the opening day, thousands of people came to the museum. Almost the entire “Art Basel-Miami Beach”, including the most authoritative curators, museum directors, gallerists, and artists, was at the vernissage. Proposals have already been received to make the Russian Dreams exhibition an interesting world tour.