Pictures from the exhibition

The peaks of the year: Magritte, futurism, cowboys

Alexander Genis: Saying goodbye from 2014 and, as usual, summing up the results of his cultural achievements, today we will remind of our listening about the three best exhibitions of the year, held in the three best museums in New York.

We will begin our appearance in the Museum of Contemporary Art, which everyone knows from the abbreviation of Moma, where the exhibition of the great surrealist Rene Magritte was greatly successful.

This exposition, recognized as the best of all the retrospective of the Belgian master, called the “Secret of everyday life”. But in fact, this is a cry of everyday life. He was an inevitable reaction to the total crisis of reason caused by the First World War, the century of which we celebrated the entire outgoing year. In Verden's trenches, a rational man of Europe died, conceived in Athens and conquering the Victorian XIh century. He relied on logic, believed in progress and found meaning in history. But everything that remained from him after the war was a funnel. With horror bypassing her in a circle, the art of the survivors could not but take into account the neighborhood of a murderous emptiness.

Magritte accepted the challenge of time on his conditions. Without seduced by either the speculation of native surrealism, nor the hooliganism of cousin of Dadaism, he differed from his colleagues in that he had experiments on the native of the past - on the respected master in the pot. Without removing him, he lives in a world devoid of previous meaning. The artist who subjected to destructive doubt all the foundations of being helps him to realize this situation. Exploring everyday life, Magritte, this large bert of art, destroys the main thing - what the old, still reliable life relied on: the obvious and granted.

In order to survive on this massacre of reality, you need to hang the usual judgments and learn the language of the survivors. Magritt’s shots are an absurd grammar.

Starting his career as an advertising artist, Rene Magritte was interested in painting itself only as much as she was able to convey the plan, making his work recognizable and unforgettable. Each of them is reminiscent of the rebus, solving which our subconscious reaches out behind the slipped goods. The difference is that Magritt’s rewards cannot be solved, but it can be solved. The artist formulates for the viewer a task that does not have a clear answer.

Magritte discovered the absurdity of being hidden from a named eye. At the same time, absurdity should be meaningful, have a content and put on thought, although it is not known - which ones.

This is what Magritt favorably differed from the salvator Dali, the naked king of the surrealists. On their canvases, they combined not possible with impossible, but what happened. The marriage of an umbrella with a sewing machine does not promise offspring, another thing is the artist’s union with a model. The wife and reality served her Magritt, and he did not spare both. Especially in the picture where the artist, similar to Magritte, writes a naked woman, indistinguishable from his wife. A man and a woman, author and model, are reproduced on canvas with the same degree of naturalism, we have the right to consider the characters with a pigmalin and galatea. The trouble is that the transformation is not completed. The artist did not finish the lady of the second hand. For a statue, this is not important (Venus does not have Milos hands at all), but for the real woman that the artist underestimated, incompleteness is disastrous.

His model is neither alive, nor dead, nor a thing, nor a person, nor a chopping, nor a still life. It is immersed in the lima of reality, in an unthinkable zone located between possible and impossible.

Magritte not only introduced the grammatical category of animation into the painting, but also complicated its comparative degree. On the canvases of Magritt, characters with varying degrees of animation arrange a living ballet with the dead. An example of this is one of his long -suffering nude, which revealed a wood structure under a meat shoulder. So it might look at the autopsy of the nymph Daphne, who turned, as you know, to the laurel.

Playing with the impossible in hide and seek, Magritte replaced the evidence with skepticism. He expanded our consciousness, shaking the ideas about himself and the world in him. His painting cannot be reduced to paradoxes of optical illusions. This is not a trick, not an attraction and not a focus. Magritt's picture requires a metaphysical treatise, which is reduced to the algebraic formula of reality and recorded by visual agents.

Difficult? And what remains to do painting, which refused to echoing the classics, repeating the back of his art?

When modern aesthetics imposed a ban on the reproduction of the environment, the artist is forced to manipulate reality, and not portray it.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: Solomon, naturally after Magritte, talk about absurdity. You have a difficult task, because the music of the absurd, of course, existed, first of all, in the movement of Dadaism, the authors of which produced anarchist sound noise and called it music. But Magritte does not fit here, Magritte was a masterful person, and his absurdity was primarily masterfully made. Can I find something similar in music?

Solomon Volkov: In my opinion, the perfect analogy to exactly the combination that you said, that is, absurdism and skill, we will call it high professionalism, is present in a person who, at first glance, is not so easy to correlate with Magritte, but in this context, he, in my opinion, will look very well with Magritte in one pair. This is Shostakovich, how it may not be unexpectedly sounded. Shostakovich was a man prone to such an absurd humor, he liked the absurd humor in his life. For example, he was going to write an opera called “crucian carp” on Oleinikov’s libretto, according to Oleinikov’s absurd poem. He was generally very close to him, he was friends with them. The question of the opera “Karas” was considered even at the level of the Bolshoi Theater, you can imagine. But Oleinikov never wrote a libretto.

But Shostakovich wrote a wonderful, I would say, the brilliant absurd opera “Nose”. First of all, we must pay tribute to Nikolai Vasilievich as the author. In my opinion, there is simply no more absurd text. The Pushkin’s “House in Kolomna”, of course, does not withstand competitions with the “nose”, “Nose” significantly exceeds it with its absurdism.

Alexander Genis: I think that the “nose” has nothing to compare at all, so it is most surprising to me that contemporaries read this book ...

Solomon Volkov: And somehow they were not very surprised.

Alexander Genis: Yes, it seems like: “Well, it happens with whom it does not happen.”

Solomon Volkov: “Although there is no benefit for the homeland from this,” as Gogol noted, they somehow accepted it. That is, they were not indignant, they did not dump Gogol in feathers and tar.

Alexander Genis: Despite the fact that Gogol crossed all the logic of the development of literature with this work. Something similar happened in another century with Kafka. The famous story "Transformation". After all, what is the horror of this short story? The fact that no one was particularly surprised due to the fact that the hero turned into a beetle: “It happens what to do.” In the same way as in the “nose”: yes, his nose ran away, and, he wanted to escape to Riga, which is important to us, Riga.

Solomon Volkov: This, by the way, is beaten with a wonderful shostakovich in the opera. Of course, the choice was very unexpected, it was served by Shostakovich and criticism friendly under the sauce of the exposure of the cursed tsarist past, which in itself is quite absurd. But the opera, she is, interestingly, at all, not revealing. It is difficult to call it satirical, it is precisely that the absurd, everything is absurd in it. The unworthy criticism of the opera setting in 1929 considered this opera. One of the headlines in the review was this: "The manual bomb of the anarchist."

Alexander Genis: Yes, it looks like.

Solomon Volkov: She was perceived as anarchist hooligan trick. This laid, by the way, the beginning of the perception of a rather long period of Shostakovich’s work, like hooliganism. For example, with venerable professors, including Alexander Borisovich Goldenweiser, with whom I had the happiness of being familiar. He wrote in his diary that these were the hooligan opuses of Shostakovich. Shostakovich’s opera “Nose”, it seems to me, is a good parallel to the creativity of Magritt.

I want to show a fragment - an intermission from the “nose”, in which the ideas of absurdism is a musical technique, namely this fugue, but this fugue is combined with a gallop, slowed down, but nevertheless, with a gallop. This combination of fugue with a gallop creates an element of absurdism.

Alexander Genis: That is, a fugue is a braid in which the gallop is woven? It is really as absurd as the paintings of Magritte.

Solomon Volkov: It seems to me that this musical fragment of Shostakovich from the Nose will be a wonderful accompaniment to Magritt's canvases.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: ACH Touring for the best exhibitions of the year We will continue the campaign to the Guggenheim Museum, which in itself is considered one of the main tourist attractions of New York. It took an interesting and relevant, given the latest political events related to Putin's aggression and the revival of interest in the history of fascism, the exhibition “Italian futurism”. The grand exposition that filled the entire spiral of the museum studied the ways of art and fascism, noting the general sources, fateful intersections and lethal discrepancies.

I must say right away that, unlike Russian, Italian futurism remained a local phenomenon. Its enormous historical significance consists in another: in the creation of a working model of fascism.

Futurists gave the first and most loud answer to a challenge of progress. They despised the past, were interested in the present and strove into the future. Born on the outskirts of the then Europe, in a backward, bogged down country in their classic past, they dreamed of pouring it through their pattern. Marinetti called for compatriots to get rid of “vile reality” and in the 1920 manifesto demanded to provide “all the power of art to people”.

Among those who heard him was Mussolini. Introducing the state as a work of art, he saw himself as an artist creating not with a brush and a cutter, but by force and lawlessness. Taking an example from the Renaissance princes, Mussolini represented the story of infinitely plastic, and himself - the mystical embodiment of her artistic spirit.

“What, after all, is fascism?” - Mussolini asked his intellectual supporters, tired of looking for a definition in the thickets of logical and ideological contradictions of this political doctrine.

“Fascism is me,” the dictator answered concisely, but exhaustively.

Not jealous, like Hitler, to artists, Mussolini first did not impose on them that sovereign concept of heroic realism, which was the art of other totalitarian regimes. He saw all Italy with his canvas, and wanted to paint it not with paints, but by the achievements of progress. Mussolini believed that Italians would be able to get around England and America and become leaders. In the 1930s, Italy achieved visual successes in different but equally noticeable areas. Italians then made the best racing machines, excellent biplans, elegant writing machines. Faster than others, the atlantic was crossed by the luxurious liner “Rex”, depicted in the film “Amarkord”. The Venice Film Festival opened. Italy became the world football champion. Piranello received the Nobel Prize. Boxer Primo Carner nicknamed “King Kong Ring” defeated all rivals in sports, which Mussolini called “the best expressive means of fascism”. Italy seemed to reach the crystal future that the futurists dreamed of. Even a fascist salute, replacing a fraught with an infection, explained the hygiene of a new and pure society.

Mussolini considered fascism an anti -aging hormone, who, tearing Italy, as Marinetti predicted, from a centuries -old hibernation, would allow her not to wander, not to walk, but to run ahead of everyone. The latter must be understood literally. In the same Amarkord there is a scene of the parade in which the bosses examine the system with a run. This is not Fellini’s comic fiction, but a reflection of widespread practice. Demonstrating the video of the regime, Mussolini introduced a run in boots, orders and a sword.

Fascism absorbed futurism and thereby made it unnecessary. For power, he turned out to be too eccentric, in other words - free. Marinette was still a star. One artist wrote his portrait in the form of an “Italian loudspeaker”. Another depicted his apotheosis on porcelain plates. But in general, futurism was blown away, giving way to the masters of the classical genre and monumental proportions.

A characteristic detail. The exhibition is completed by the “fascist triptych”, in the center of which the icon Mussolini. On it, as if parodying a trinity, the artist portrayed a double with three heads. In any perspective, however, it resembles not Augustus, but Nero.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: Solomon, how do you illustrate our conversation about Italian futurism and how he influenced the appearance of fascist aesthetics?

Solomon Volkov: I wanted to show a model of music that German Nazis ... Here we must always distinguish: when we say “fascists”, the Germans traditionally called the Nazis in the Soviet Union.

Alexander Genis: And now everyone who the Kremlin does not like.

Solomon Volkov: But fascism is a definition of the Italian political trend, the Germans had Nazism.

So, with such a bright musical talent, whose work in Nazi Germany was considered their own, recognized him as their own and represented as a model of how genuine Nazi music should sound, although Karl Orf had significant troubles and this composer. He had troubles associated with the Nazi regime, however, his “Karina Buran” was completely accepted to heart, performed.

Alexander Genis: “Karina Buran” is extremely popular and today music, which often sounds in Hollywood films. But even more interesting, especially for our generation, poems that are laid for this music.

The fact is that “Karina Buran” is Vagant's verses, a manuscript from the monastery in Bavaria of the 13th century. It would seem that all this has long been outdated. But when the Vagantov was discovered, there was a revolution in history. Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, who was engaged in a lot of medieval Latin works, in particular, translated the Wagants, said that the discovery of Vagantic poetry proved that in the Middle Ages they not only prayed and not only suffered and feasted. When in the 19th century later romantics opened vagants, the Middle Ages were considered a black era, the poetry flashed brighter.

However, it was still historical poetry, which was stored in anthologies, in special reader, until the translator Lev Vladimirovich Ginzburg, who published the book “The Ligor of the Wagant”, and it played a huge role in my personal life. It was in 1970, we read the Vagants translated by Ginzburg, and it turned out that these verses were unusually consonant with the time in which we lived, and this was, as it is customary to say, Brezhnev’s stagnation. This is what we read in these verses.

If you want to go to the all -night
To escape from the bad?
But at the same time, along the way,
Do not pass the taverns.
Bright candles burn,
Musicians blow:
then make their ceremony
Free vagant.
The walls go stuck
Traffic jams - over the barrels!
Well drink it with wine
A tidbit!
Life in the world is good
If the soul is free
And the free soul is pleasing to the Lord.

It is very interesting that Ginzburg in the preface to his book, and this book was a desktop in my entire company, said that a "collection of vaganta" was published in Stuttgart. The compiler of this anthology included not only the Wagants who lived in Western Europe, but also bards, and German scalds, and our guslyar. There were the famous Russian songs “Here is a three-removable troika along the Volga-Mother in the winter” or “The Jew Maucer rode to the fair”. That is, he attached to the vagans all, as he said, “nomadic poetry”. He believed that all vagants of the world have something in common. This idea is very close to me, because I believed that the vagant, among other things, are quite suitable in order to describe the company of Benes Erofeev. So “Karina Buran” has a special meaning for us.

Solomon Volkov: Here we will listen to her now.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: Our review of the three best exhibitions in 2014 will end at the best museum of New York and America - to the Metro, where a superbly organized exhibition of bronze plasticity - figurines depicting the world and myth of the Wild West in the 19th century.

The West in the American tradition is felt by the providential homeland of America. It is generally accepted that it was here, in the West, a person tasted the dangerous happiness of freedom: empty, as in the first days of creation, the earth on which you can and should build life over the first. Each western - be it, a novel, a picture, a song, a comic book or a film - is built on the same formula: a lonely cowboy in the middle of a beautiful and free West.

The unique role of a cowboy myth is associated with the psychology of America, which was managed to portray in his sculptures the most famous artist of the West Frederick Remington. His best work became an American icon and was awarded a place in the oval office of the White House.

Most of all, Ronald Reagan liked this half -meter composition. An excellent rider, he was able to evaluate the bronze dance of a man with a horse, which the artist himself called the “bypass of Bronko”. On the semi -domestic slang of cowboys “Bronko” - a word denoting a horse that has not yet known the depths. The same can be said about the cowboy, going around the stallion, lean and cheeky, they are even like outwardly. Both are caught by the author at the time of dynamic balance, which may end in the fall of both.

A strut for sculpture, the posture reveals the hidden meaning of the masterpiece. The metaphor of the Wild West is on two legs, and both are horsepower. Cowboys live in a short present, in an intermediate state between the reckless will and the inevitable civilization. It is not surprising that the horse stood on its hind legs.

The horse is one of the most ancient symbols of the unconscious, spontaneous. Only by curbing this powerful and obstinate beginning, a person subjugates the destructive forces both in the external and in the inner world - in himself. Exceptional geographical circumstances - the youth of the American fate - overturned an archaic myth in modern history. In her context, the cowboy myth plays in the vastness of the Wild West the mystery of the birth of order from chaos. As every lover of westerns knows, the best sheriffs come out of lonely cowboys.

But in addition to the historiosophical interpretation, the plot of “man in the saddle” has a very specific, domestic meaning. The sculpture of Remington, which studied the life of cowboys in Montana and Kansas, tells about riding everything that you wanted to know, but did not dare to experience.

An unprofitable horse is needed to use the energy of freedom, and the sculptor to capture the zenith of the West. Still wild, but not for long, he attracted those who civilized and killed him. A short respite of progress gave a chance to survive the excitement of a prehistoric fight with nature. The excitement of this fight for the second century feeds the world with raw emotions. But if the myth of cowboys turned out to be durable, then the Kovoboevs themselves were enough for a short while. The railway and prickly wire took their jobs, except, of course, the one that showed by show business. Having disappeared a hundred years ago from labor American life, cowboys returned to it as an attraction that attracts 200 thousand tourists each year in one Texas, mainly from Europe.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: “Bronze cowboys”, which we talked about and with which the New Yorkers admired with such pleasure in the Metropolitan Museum, of course, vividly resemble other cowboys, those that are shown on film screens. Let's talk about Western music. It seems to me that there would be no western if there were no specific movie music for him. Именно она создает тот драматизм, ту предельно напряженную ситуацию, без которой вестерны невозможны: музыка в вестерне, как в ковбойской дуэли, растягивает время, создает ожидание и накаляет эмоции.

Соломон Волков: Парадокс тут заключается в том, что лучшим композитором музыки вестернов, на мой взгляд, является вовсе не американец, а итальянец Эннио Морриконе, классик киномузыки, количество фильмов, к которым он написал музыку, давно перевалило за сто. Но для меня его наивысшим достижением и знаковым явлением в культуре 20 века является музыка к фильмам Серджо Леоне, создателя или во всяком случае главного автора того, что мы именуем спагетти-вестерн, вестерны, которые снимались в Италии. Мне из всего жанра вестернов нравятся именно спагетти-вестерны, а в них мне больше всего нравится фильмы Леоне. Потому что он сделал из этого жанра настоящую оперу. Его вестерны развиваются как оперы, в них все оперное, жесты оперные, замедленный темп, в котором все это движется, величественность кадра.

Александр Генис: Причем, все это - преувеличенное, гиперболическое почти до пародии.

Соломон Волков: Глядя на экран, все время ожидаешь, что Клинт Иствуд сейчас запоет. Кстати, он единственный американец, по-моему, кто в фильмах Леоне участвует, массовка вся итальянская, но звездой главной был Клинт Иствуд. Ты удивляешься, почему он сейчас не откроет рот и не запоет какую-нибудь классическую итальянскую арию.

Александр Генис: При том, что музыка там как раз совсем не похожа на оперную музыку. Мне кажется, она очень специфическая.

Соломон Волков: Но она подчеркивает общую какую-то оперность, какую-то сказочность того, что разворачивается на экране. Мне очень нравится творчество Эннио Морриконе, и я покажу сейчас отрывок из его ковбойской музыки.

(Music)