"Trilogy" "AES+F" in Manege

The first exhibition has opened at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, which under the leadership of Marina Loshak should now turn into something like a Moscow Kunsthalle. They are showing “Trilogy” by the group “AES+F” (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeniy Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes), a blockbuster project made with the support of the Triumph gallery and the Multimedia Art Museum. In parallel, the same exhibition opened at Martin-Gropius-Bau, one of the most prestigious venues in Berlin. ANNA TOLSTOVA reports.

Exhibition contemporary art

First of all, it's beautiful. Everything: the models' faces, their bodies, movements, costumes, scenery - imaginary spaces modeled in 3D, exotic landscapes and exotic architecture. The poses in which the models freeze are beautiful, because they refer to classical compositions memorized by the eye from the painting and sculpture of the High Renaissance and Baroque. The soundtracks are beautiful because Pavel Karmanov composed them from classical fragments - from Vivaldi to Tchaikovsky. The strange films stitched together through computer animation from thousands of Friedkes photographs are beautiful. The colorful photographic paintings and snow-white sculptures are beautiful, like porcelain accelerator figurines made based on films. This “beautiful” is not shy about its outright kitschness, peacocks, parrots and other hotel and restaurant chic: what else remains when beauty is equated with kitsch.

The three films are being shown together for the first time, and out of mercy for the viewer, they were probably shortened a little, and the first one, it seems, was even sped up a little - it will take about an hour to watch the entire “Trilogy”. When comparing all three, it is clear that there was hardly a plan for the trilogy from the beginning; at least the first part - “The Last Rebellion” - stands out technically, stylistically and plot-wise, being, rather, the finale of previous works on the theme of adolescence. And it is also noticeable that the skill of the performance grows from film to film: in the most perfect ballet of the third part, “Allegoria Sacra”, the spectacle acquires Hollywood quality, and the production is truly Hollywood in scope. Meanwhile, the "Aes" insist that this is exactly the "Trilogy", where the computer-game belligerence of "The Last of the Revolt" is hell, the luxury of a coastal hotel in "The Feast of Trimalchio" is paradise, and the uncertainty of waiting at the international airport "Allegoria Sacra" - purgatory. Allusions to The Divine Comedy, no matter how pretentious they may seem, are justified in the sense that the three parts really add up to a coherent picture of the world, which is also a political pamphlet. But the political is not like Dante or the painters of the Florentine Quattrocento, when on the fresco in the chapel, among the saints and extras, every somewhat noticeable figure of the republic is recognized, although the faces from the society chronicles can indeed be identified in the last two episodes of the epic. And it is impossible to understand where heaven, hell and purgatory actually are: apocalyptic motifs, visions of disasters and a premonition of the end are present in every part of the “Trilogy”. It is not for nothing that it received the subtitle “The Liminal Space,” “liminal space,” that is, a state of transition, intermediary, which can be understood psychologically, sociologically and anthropologically. That is why the movements here are predominantly oscillatory, and time has frozen, like a computer with a memory overloaded with information.

The “Trilogy” is also overloaded with quotes - from painting, sculpture and architecture, opera and ballet, cinema and computer games, it is so stuffed with them that the main prototype is somehow lost behind them. And only in the huge space of the “Manege”, where for the multi-channel “The Last of the Rebellion”, “The Feast of Trimalchio” and “Allegoria Sacra” the exhibition is arranged in a pavilion, so that the viewer can stand in the center so that the screens surround it in a semicircle or a complete circle, it becomes clear that this prototype is not a Renaissance altar, not a Baroque ceiling, and not a Wagnerian scene. The great-grandfather of AES films is the panorama, a favorite spectacle of the 19th century. Entertainment for a very diverse, mostly undemanding public and the end, or rather a dead end, of academic painting. The panorama could seduce with the illusory proximity of exotic countries, forcing the viewer’s imagination to work, involuntarily transported to the painted distances, or it could flaunt the fact that it was capable of creating a complete illusion of reality, killing any fantasy in the bud. Like, for example, the Panorama of Mesdag in The Hague, which accurately depicts the nearby seaside resort of Scheveningen, which is only a quarter of an hour away by horse. And “AES+F” combines both types of illusions so that the seductive world of gloss and advertising, where today, instead of panoramic exoticism, the fantasies and desires of the undemanding public are projected, turns out to be the real world of creative consumption, which has built itself according to advertising-glossy templates. This merging of reality with virtuality could be solemnly proclaimed as the end of history, bowing to Hegel and Fukuyama. If only this reality, captured either by the dispassionate or critical gaze of sociologists-anthropologists from the “AES+F” group, was not just a very conditional construct suspended in uncertainty, a beautiful kitschy picture, a fireplace in Papa Carlo’s closet, behind which, however, , there is nothing magical.

Beauty won't save the world