The Tretyakov Gallery shows nothing in the art of the 20th century

The exhibition “Hostages of Emptiness”, prepared by the department of the latest trends of the Tretyakov Gallery with the support of philanthropist Evgeny Samoilov, is dedicated to the difficult-to-describe work with nothing, which artists from the avant-garde and conceptualism have been engaged in up to the present day. VALENTIN DYAKONOV reports.

The name of the special project of the Moscow Biennale from the main Moscow museum echoes the exhibition seven years ago, entitled “Prisoners of Beauty” and dedicated to salon and academic artists of the Russian Empire. Both here and there, apparently, mean that the love of depicting everything beautiful or the desire to reflect the great Nothing on the surface of the canvas is a purely forced matter, possible only in the case of a forceful capture of the subject of the image by the artist himself. This, of course, is not true: the content of the exhibitions contradicts the title. In the case of “Hostages of the Void,” it is clear that the artists consciously sought to capture absence and shape the vacuum. True, emptiness can be different, so the curators boldly mix the chronological and semantic principles, on the one hand, moving from the 19th century to the political actions of the 2000s, on the other, pitting Vereshchagin against the hyperrealism of the 1980s.

However, the exhibition suggests many points of view on emptiness as a state and a philosophical category. Quotes from Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Ilya Kabakov and other theorists on the walls lack only dating and indication of the source. However, they already add weight and academicity to the exhibition about nothing. The artistic preface to the exhibition is the minimalist hut of the architect Evgeniy Assa, where his graphic sheets act as windows - landscapes of sky and grass, indicated by rough and expressive shading. Actually, this building contains the main answer to the question of what emptiness in art is. This is, first of all, a view of indifferent nature designed by the artist. Or generally anything indifferent - for example, the principles of Zen Buddhism or the silence of a white sheet.

In the first hall, Aivazovsky, Kuntsevo, the brushes of the author of Unequal Marriage Vasily Pukirev and the conceptual landscape of Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina are located opposite the photo documentation of the actions of the Collective Actions group. Black and white photos of the autumn Moscow region rhyme with both the former suburb from the Itinerant Pukirev and the graphics of Assa. The peaceful mood disappears thanks to the spectacularly hung canvas by socialist realist Fyodor Shurpin “The Morning of Our Motherland” with Stalin in the title role. Shurpin’s landscape, of course, is sparse and monochrome, but the meaning of the picture is that the Generalissimo, like a character from Russian fairy tales, is everywhere at the same time and soars over the country, noticing all the details of Soviet life. Emptiness in his presence is impossible and even criminal. The connection to the emptiness of the metaphysical paintings of Alexander Tyshler looks somewhat doubtful. In his case, the canvas acts as a stage box (Tyshler worked a lot for the theater and even received state awards in those years when showing his easel works was out of the question). The Soviet period is complemented by paintings by Deineka’s colleague in the Easel Society Sergei Luchishkin, a landscape by Malevich’s student Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, the beautiful “Song” by Konstantin Istomin and other works that rarely appear in the main exhibition of the gallery.

The abstractions of the sixties are replaced by the experiments of conceptualists, real specialists in emptiness. Ilya Kabakov's album "On Gray Paper" consists of sheets of that same paper. “Collective Actions” appear again, and the geometric abstractions of Viktor Pivovarov are pleasing. The entrance to the 90s is accompanied by the canvas of the great avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova “Emptiness” - a bright, seemingly pulsating form on a blue-green background. In the hall itself are works by artists from the circle of Anatoly Osmolovsky, created within the framework of the nonspectacularity he borrowed from the West. Osmolovsky himself is represented by four works at once, the best of which is a white board called “Criticism of the Condition of the Wall.” Next to this piece of perfect whiteness, any wall will really seem unclean. "Hostages" ends spectacularly, in the spirit of the former head of the department of modern trends, Andrei Erofeev. Next to the self-portrait of Sergei Mironenko from the late 80s entitled “I have nothing to say in the language of art,” where the author shows a blank sheet of paper with his mouth taped, hangs documentation of a speech by the group of political activists “We” (leader Roman Dobrokhotov). The young people also have their mouths taped shut, and they also have white paper in their hands. They just stand at the White House and fight censorship. With the exception of Shurpin's painting, this is the only explicitly political work in the exhibition. But the ironic postmodernist environment reduces it to a staging of an anecdote from the times of stagnation about Rabinovich at a demonstration with an empty poster: “Why write? And so everything is clear!” Perhaps it would be worth strengthening the theme of emptiness as the absence of a text due to someone’s political will; fortunately, both the Stalinist era and the era of the debunking of the cult of personality provide a lot of interesting documentary material about how nothingness reigned in the place of leaders. The exhibition, however, is already one of the most interesting events of the biennale outside the main project.

Emptiness is a terrible force