The sound of silence

Dmitry Volkostrelov expands the territory of his experiments. This time - in the museum space. His exhibition is "Everyday life. Simple actions ” is a rehearsal of some future answers to elementary and fundamental questions, invariably-yesterday-today or tomorrow-of interest to contemporary artists. The duration of such a performing exhibition, where visitors enter or do not come into contact with the author’s sentence-write a marker the most used words, sign, brew and drink tea, tie laces, dial a pin, wash your hands, listen to the noise of noise on Tver Bulvar, the accumulation of unique experience suggests. It seems to be a primitive, but in this context of a completely unknown. Experience of the director, curator, spectators and people from the outside.

CCTV cameras record “simple actions” or inaction of the public. The rehearsal of the visual “cut”, in which the repeatability of reactivity/passivity of visitors is still somehow plastic, mentally different, documents a gray, transparent, invisible zone of everyday life. Consequently, the drives (new practice) of the “ POST Theater” using “folk performers” will sooner or later go beyond this zone. This experience is a potential forerunner of future projects.

Why is such a test of the behavioral tactics of the "common man" is needed? Theater viewer or character of the latest play. In the meantime, a visitor to the exhibition who has the opportunity to become its participant, sitting on one of the ottomans behind the racks of fences, and burying in the phone. The time of such a lesson, familiar in any public space, is unlimited. At the same time, this participant, located in a quiet museum zone, which the caretaker guard (in her role - actress Alena Starostina) is a living exhibit.

In the dark room, you can listen to the recorded rumble of the boulevard ahead of time. And you can skip without removing the headphones. This noise is, as it were, the image of the lack of conceptual meaning, which is unknown to everyday life, but also the image of the ordinary, indistinguishable on actions, sounds. An attempt to delve into differences/distinction-which is important, without fear of freezing-and makes up the intrigue of the exhibition.

It is no secret that Volkostroelova is occupied by the problem of communication. Its automatism, its rationalization - or the process of its understanding. You, an artist or spectator of his performances, abandon your role requirements, entering into a new relationship with other viewers, artists, with the media etc. Or you resist the reflection on which the servants of the POST Theater provoke you, content with the reflex skills of the theater consumer.

Thinking about the inconspicuous cosmos of everyday life with its ritual actions, wolfers, it seems to me, tried to explore a non-postdramatic field of interests, but the basics of deduction, or conflict, which implies some new experience in the theater, museum, urban space. It is no accident that at the exhibition he will reconstruct a chamber theatrical space with a tiny scene, offering a museum visitor to stand there and “do nothing” - thus performing the “most difficult action”. Or something else to do, likeining himself as an actor-amateur. The place of the viewer (leisure agent, and not professional responsibilities) in this theater is quietly occupied by actor Ivan Nikolaev, who reads something from the screen of his phone. The redistribution of role -playing functions does not facilitate communication, but it relies on it.

Here we may be mistakenly guessed: to do something out of habit (to wash your hands or tie laces) does not mean acting at all; Nothing to do (just standing on stage, for example) means quite decisively to persuade yourself to unusual practice of complicity. It is possible that the curator of the exhibition ignored such a look.

To believe that the task of Volkostroelov was only to knock out a common person when the accomplishment of simple actions from automatism would be naive. Although if you think at the exhibition, say, “how many times a bag of tea is dipped in boiling water and whether it is necessary to do it,” then, later, your perception of post -conceptual art will become more sane. But no, Volkostroles, rather, puzzled by the non -obviousness of the elementary, strange -known. Therefore, it is obvious, well -known pulls out of the flow of everyday life, distances from it into the pure space of the Museum of Modern Art. And at the same time, without betraying his own confusion, he is observing concentratedly, having perched in one of the halls with a computer, what unexpected joys, troubles or discoveries will be evaporated from glossary of everyday words, from the price list of familiar actions or the unraveling of the reactions of new driver and ordinary visitors.

But the main thing is not this. In my opinion, the director is dumbfounded by everyday life as a familiar and unidentified world, capable of or powerless (there is no answer yet) to expand the history of the modern theater in the other direction. Start over. Turn not to the archaic who invariably attracted avant-garde artists who feel the exhaustion of “new forms”, but to everyday life, devoid of drama. At the same time, the unpredictable (“actual art”) of conflict and conflict in such a property and conflict in such a property are rushed.