"Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary" in Artplay

Exhibition contemporary art

Photo: Kommersant / Alexander Shcherbak / buy photo

The exhibition "Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary" proves: the power of the artist today, under a strict curatorial dictatorship, is as conditional as the exhibition space.

Photo: Kommersant / Alexander Shcherbak / buy photo

The Artplay design center is hosting the exhibition "Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary", prepared by the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam with the support of the Mondrian Foundation as part of the Dutch Days in Moscow as a special project of the Moscow Biennale. Curators Elena Sorokina and Jelle Bauwhuis invite the artist to play the role of a legislator and/or dictator. ANNA TOLSTOVA reports.

The largest work at the exhibition is a transparent cage in the shape of a huge centipede spider: this is a pavilion for symposiums and presentations, built by Rotterdam masters of architectural and installation design Jasper Niens and Theis Ewalts. For several days, the Dutch Art Assembly took place in the pavilion: curatorial aces such as Catherine de Zegher, Hedwig Feyen, Charles Esche and Kasper Koenig discussed the question “What kind of curators do we need?” Probably, the image of curators caged and put on public display as exhibits would please many artists. In any case, Guido van der Werve, who was invited to the discussion but did not participate in the project, has long been opposed to curator-dictators. However, the curators of “Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary” Elena Sorokina and Jelle Bauwhuis play at democracy: they invite artists to establish their own laws on the territory of art, and the exhibition hall was given over to the choreographer Anna Abalikhina for a week - in her final performance a whole horde of dancers marched like Soviet athletes between works, depicting the "ornament of the masses".

The starting point of the exhibition is “The Book of Decrees” by Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov: a typewritten samizdat collection of “decrees” - about the beast, about the air, about intimacy, about black - signed by “Chairman D. Prigov.” Published in the stuffy, stagnant Moscow of 1977 and ironically referring to the romantic era of the artistic commissar in the first years of the revolution, the “decrees” of the poet-artist with their empty pages immerse the viewer-addressee in the atmosphere of Oberiut absurdity: Soviet bureaucratic newspeak, no matter how much it claims to be all-encompassing , suffers defeat in the face of an elusive world, beyond the control of any languages, and only poetry, striving to fall silent, has the right to dream of speaking adequate to the subject. “The Book of Decrees” refers to a happy era when unofficial art, free from Soviet ideology, the art market and curatorial dictates, already felt like a sovereign legislator in the territory of art.

Judging by the exhibition, this happy feeling is unknown to anyone today. Of course, Yuri Albert, who turns his painting facing the wall and forces the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, while the Moscow exhibition lasts, to turn the work of Alfredo Haar in the Amsterdam hall in the same way facing the wall, is arbitrary. But he governs himself within the limits of what is permitted. At first, by the way, it was said that Albert would turn his face to the wall of Boris Ender’s drawing in the main exhibition of the Stedelijk, but due to some bureaucratic complications he had to be satisfied with the permitted provocation on the experimental site of the museum. In a word, the power of the artist today, under a strict curatorial dictatorship, is as conditional as the conditional exhibition space. At least in the prosperous “former West”, where it is possible, without much fear of consequences, to gather a “New World Summit” of organizations considered terrorist, as Jonas Stahl does, but as soon as the “Summit” is transferred to Kochi, to the first Indian Biennale of modern art, problems with the police begin. And perhaps, for many, turning to politics is a forced necessity, connected not only and not so much with the fact that curators and grant givers like to ask political topics, but with the need for psychological compensation: a political statement gives the artist a sense of social significance and independence in conditions of institutional unfreedom.

It seems that only street artists are truly free. Of course, Tim Radya got into the network of curators with a photograph of the intervention action “Without further ado.” But the colossal letters of the slogans “attack” and “defend”, describing the laws of capitalism, remained - at least for some time - on the walls of a socialist hostel, that is, on the edges of residential buildings of the Brezhnev era in Yekaterinburg, and therefore to the artist and his work still managed to escape from the space of convention. The rest of the exhibition participants seemed to unanimously agree that art, which was once the Bible for the illiterate, today should serve as political information for the indifferent.

Political information can take a variety of forms: a newspaper article about state sexism in Belarus (Marina Naprushkina), materials for a lecture about colonial stereotypes regarding the Caucasus (Taus Makhacheva), an imaginary correspondence between the present and the past, depicting the situation of sexual minorities in Russia (Evgeniy Fiks), a pseudo-documentary studies of the “terrorist syndrome” (Arnaut Mik), activist design in favor of WikiLeaks (Metahaven), a chronicle of the war of activism against gentrification using the example of Gostiny Dvor in Kyiv (Nikita Kadan and Alexander Burlaka), a Zongspiel in the Brechtian spirit (“What is to be done?”). Sometimes these are very strong works, like the “colonial” abstractions of Willem de Rooy, the “polyphonic fresco” of Nikolai Oleinikov, who forces the heroes of Soviet films to engage in a moralizing conversation, or the apocalyptic-ecological video “Spring” by Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Dzhumaliev, sending the Bishkek Philharmonic Orchestra to play Vivaldi to a colossal trash heap on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital. But it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that the rose, surrounded by the “police tape” of Jiří Kovanda, was brought to the grave of free art, which itself chose whether to engage in politics or not, and was laid in the name of art, which waited for politics to come to grips with it.

Dictatorship of anarcho-conformists