Translated material
Plus museumification of the whole country
The exhibition of Kandinsky Prize nominees determined the trends in the Russian art process
To paraphrase the words of the leader of the world proletariat, who is kind to left-wing artists, about communism and electrification, let us formulate it this way: “Sovrisk is our banner plus the museumification of the entire country.” This slogan was convincingly illustrated by the exhibition of nominees for the main unofficial, independent prize in the field of contemporary art (abbreviated as Sovrisk), established by the Artchronika cultural foundation in 2007 - the Kandinsky Prize.Created by curator Andrei Erofeev and the architectural bureau Bernasconi, the exhibition in the suites of the third floor of the Central House of Artists turned out to be successful. Thanks to the corridors and rooms built from multi-colored false walls, crushing the huge tunnels of the Soviet exhibition center, the space was subordinated to the scale of each project. Each nominee with their exhibits no longer settled in a communal apartment, but in a one-room apartment. Thanks to the work of the jury and expert council, assembled from various representatives of the international art community, the tenants of the Central House of Artists were not random artists. And the works are mostly convincing, many are even included in the mainstream of the Russian art process, and have participated in prestigious exhibitions and festivals. Everything is respectable. Moderately shocking “Blue Noses”, moderately esoteric Vladimir Kustov, moderately spectacular AES+F, moderately melancholic Arseny Zhilyaev... Everything is correct. For some reason, I feel like I’m not at an exhibition that provides an adrenaline rush from the cool new products of today’s art life, from meeting new names. The impression is as if you were in the venerable archives of a museum, where the cataloging of what is already familiar and seen becomes an event.
To some extent, the responsibility for this museumification of impressions from the exhibition lies with me, a member of the award’s expert council. I will say quite sincerely that the overall level of the competition this year was weaker than the previous one. The lion's share of submitted applications were extremely bad. There was almost nothing to choose from among regional projects. Let’s not even talk about “being done” - the quality of thought is so infantile and helpless that I experienced a feeling of awkwardness many times. As a result, the jury, who joined after the first screening, chose for sure: mostly verified, recognizable even from encrypted applications, with a good background.
At the vernissage, I talked with the guru of Soviet unofficial art, an artist who has made a feat in communicating this art with the world, Mikhail Odnoralov. He suddenly told me: “You are criticizing my art from the standpoint of modernism. And I’m a postmodernist.” So: most of the exhibited works by Kandinsky nominees were made precisely “from the standpoint of postmodernism.” This is intriguing. That is, it is as if each individual artist left that era long ago. And together - by analogy with Gogol’s overcoat - they came out of Odnoralov’s coat (there was such an object “Odnoralov’s Coat” at the legendary 1975 exhibition at the VDNKh House of Culture). General vector: evasion from the “body of art”, little trust in what Martin Heidegger called “here-being”, Dasein. The preference is to escape from this problem of the spatial-plastic appearance of the image into the jungle of comments, self-reflective discourses, into simulative spaces where a horizontal meaning justified by total parody and citations reigns. If the body is art, then it is either ruined (opuses by Arseny Zhilyaev, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Dmitry Kavarga, Pyotr Bely - that’s how they follow each other in the halls), or simulated, “feigned” (groups Recycle, AES+F). If we are talking, then about scattered fragments of thoughts scattered throughout the world, which cannot be collected into a coherent text (that is why the form of a scattered archive and an empty pantry reigns - many storage vessels, drawers, boxes, chests: works by Olga Treivas, Valeria Matveeva-Nibiru , Andrey Kuzkin, Andrey Kuleshov and Mikhail Ivanov, Marina Fomenko). If emotions, then melancholy (installation by Alexander Brodsky, painting by Dmitry Gretsky, photo by Natalia Pavlovskaya, Alexander Gronsky). If style, then nostalgic conceptualism: works by Irina Steinberg, Evgeny Semenov. If the songs are old, they are about the main thing: deconstructivist exercises about the national idea and a strong state by Igor Mukhin, Gleb Kosorukov, Alexander Lavrov.
In themselves, many of the works of the listed artists are good and even wonderful (a small discovery for me was, for example, the installation “Observation Station” by Marina Fomenko, an employee of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, made using a labyrinth of archival (!) boxes and video devices - a virtuoso interactive variation on the theme of today’s conditions of total surveillance, a paraphrase of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” invented in the 18th century). All together, however, it adds up to a new chronicle of time, Present perfect - the present complete.
Well, don't wait any longer? Are there any projects in which the discovery of the essence - the essence of art, the full-fledged spatial-plastic experience of an image - would be revived? Hurray, there are. For me there are three main ones. One - Ontheground by Anton Litvin. Absolutely amazingly, using water at a temperature of minus 20 degrees, the artist painted petroglyphs inside the cracks of the asphalt. Then I printed the images onto abrasive paper. The jewel-like color and precise plasticity of the drawings frozen into the ice can rival those of Altamira. The refined perfection of Lytvyn’s images really (naturally) exposes the seam of archaic memory on the body of a modern metropolis.
The second project was created by as many as four masters: Innokenty Sharkov, Alexander Tarbeev, Daria Chapkovskaya, Katerina Kochkina (two of them - Sharkov and Chapkovskaya - are graduates of the Stroganov Academy). The installation Pelicula (in Spanish “Film”) is visually, perhaps, excessive, even eclectic (among others, it refers to the images of Bruce Nauman), but it allows you to feel the very important idea of the difficult need to create meaning in a situation of permanent presence in the valves of devalued words and things . There is a transparent film hanging. Texts are projected onto it (when I looked, there were texts from the Bible about the days of creation). Sculpted heads and silhouettes of spectators are visible through the film. Both of them significantly interfere with reading. Let's go get the film. It turns out that the sculpted heads are ruined portraits of former leaders (at least as I understood), created from thousands of coins. Wherever you are, your presence is dramatic. Reading in front of the screen is a pain. Behind the screen - among idols - because of your own shadow, you yourself become the cause of torment for others. Expressive work: deconstruction of deconstruction, longing for the rehabilitation of full meaning and knowledge.
Finally, the third project is “Many - few - few - many” by the excellent artist Nikita Alekseev. His credo “Art is the making of smart and kind stools” is categorically anti-post-modern. Because it is radically modern, as confirmed by his smart and kind paintings exhibited at the awards.