The present past

In last year's final material about the state of art in Russia, Natalya Serkova identified three trends that she noticed on the domestic art scene. Colta.ru asked her to speak in more detail for each of the three points. So, today is the text about the “process of very powerful academicization”, which we do not notice, since we are not looking for where it really takes place.

As a rule, contemporary art is separated by the fact that often under the same name comes out of art academies, insensitive to changes that shift the context as quickly as irrevocably. Contemporary art and its authors, since neither the artist nor the produced by him did not obscure himself with the rejection shadow of such an academy, is given a carte blanche of involvement in the honey banks of relevance. Often for this there is enough formal correspondence with a plastic agenda with an increase in the form of texts containing the necessary set of discursive tags, and rotation in a good society. Mimicry is so successful, and the eye of criticism is so blind that the galvanized corpse begins to flirt: in modern it is recorded that in its methodology it lags behind for many years, but for decades. Upon more closely, it turns out that the method, sprinkled with sparkles and once really expanding the language of art, has long been academic and dusty. At the same time, there are criteria that allows to separate the living from the dead - an art that constructs its method by turning to the relevance inexhaustible so far, from one that shows the present, which has not yet become the interpretation of its closed interpretation.

Infunity is scary: it is always a creeping, changing, amorphous formation, deforming space around itself. Subtract it with your tongue, immerse it in the description - and it will crystallize into something whose structural grate will become visible first, and in the limit - motionless. This illusory visibility will become sufficiently covered by the tongue so that the pattern is formed, having perceived which, next time, the bars can not only be recognized, but also reproduced. So the syllogism of the method, ABC grilles, step -by -step instructions for the manufacture of art will be born. The tongue will outline the contour, thereby indicating the edges of the creeping, closed the shape and separate it from the continuing to move.

The inhospitable worries the perceiving subject: there is no pattern yet, and, therefore, you have to make an effort for independent assembly - to catch, separate, name. This producing work is difficult, as it requires the entry into the belief zone for personal responsibility for each step of such a process. And even the passage of all the stages of crystallization does not guarantee, strictly speaking, nothing: the grille may not appear, the form can not get together, and the pattern thereby cannot arise. This danger equally awaits both producing and reading art. The artist identifies from the creeping plasma many points of the point through which the structure is best seen for him. Having allocated the points and separating the necessary for a separate case from those that will be involved next time or not at all, in short, having removed the excess, the artist extends the ribs between the points; There is a lot between the ribs. The points become formally revealed in the work, many - implicitly present in the statement. The perceiving, in turn, gets the reverse process: the need to decrypt of logic, through which those and not other points were raised above the surface and, as a result, those and not other ribs were stretched between them.

Mimicry is so successful, and the eye of criticism is so blind that the galvanized corpse begins to flirt.

And while the formulated logic of choice on the part of the artist is not ahead of the choice itself, and while the resulting structure retains the hidden of this logic as the possibility of its own non -calculation - until then this statement will slip away from academicity, but at the same time there will be the possibility of failure, failure both from the part of the structure and from its reader. Therefore, every new assembly, that is, a new logic of choosing points, is always a risk; The intercostal variety may not manifest itself, but it is meat on the bones presented as art. On the one hand, the points should be collected in such a way that, interconnected, is able to close the part of the infinite plane in the form, on the other hand, their location should remain elusive, unveiled with the help of any patterns, already known to both the artist himself and the reader of such art. Only under these conditions will the meat will hide the bone, and the bone will hold the meat connected in a single shape.

This materialistic metaphor says that we are not talking about the metaphysics of art and not about the fact that “it can never be prompted”, but only about the references system that, as a fan, unfolds from the structure of the ribs and presents such a system of relations of the environment, which would be not easy to consider. If there is already a well -known connection between point A and the point B , it is not necessary to restore it, going backwards from one end of the stretched rib to the place where they only intended to stretch the rib, sorting out and collecting for their assistants certain methods of relations that led to extending. You don’t have to slide and fall on the icy surface, and then we either remain at the level of receiving an aesthetic message from the contemplation of the finished assembly (at the level of “I - perfectly/recognizable/instructive/...”), or move, already knowing the road, and then we will not recognize anything that we did not know before. Arts doomed to these two options, whose production logic has already been formulated and whose method is given. Where the question does not arise about why A stands next to B , and a grill that has hardened long before our arrival will open. And this means that art can be academy, being completely separated from the institution caught on the teaching of obsolete methods: how the brain reaches for laziness, so avoiding already known patterns in the work does not happen thanks to the desire to produce “art”.

At this stage, distinction comes into force, often masking and letting the decoder dust in the eyes. The methodological plan for the production of art, strictly speaking, does not depend on the plastic plan, in other words, the assembly method (in our case, the logic of choosing points and the laying of the ribs) exists separately from the points found on a particular fenced off part of the mobile plane. Points are the formal side of art manifested by HIC ET NUNC , visible to the eye, presented as a plastic base of the object - they can be taken from the present, from the most “actual” context. At the same time, the principle of their choice, the logic of relations within the fields outlined by the ribs can remain in any time zone, belong to the past, to varying degrees of art history problem. Inside the statement, a subtle -perceptible canus is thickening: the eye sees something that meets the agenda of the present, while the tongue is absorbed into the funnel of the developed logic of things developed, closed by the past. The internal structural logic of art conflicts with its surface, brilliant with its indication of here and now , but it is the system of relations that determines the time formed by art, because it is ultimately that it is subjected to reflection and processing with the language.

Explained art loses access to the present: what is the past, as not the present, separated by a distance of reflection, and what is an academy, as not explained art?

A point that once could serve as an autonomous object, once self-suffering in its isolation and seizure from a general surface, can no longer be raised so that one fact of its seizure to report the bending of the logic of its presence. Today we have so many points, constantly mobile in our flow, inside which there are no more obstacles to building any plan of references. The mesh of references, this plasma surrounding us is so life and transparent, and its movement is so active that one point allocated from this field will inevitably entail the sum of others. Therefore, the object, which was put into the invisible boundaries, cannot tell anything separately, but at the same time it will tell us anything. Only the system of relations of points, this costal structure, constructed by the artist, is able to reduce the amplitude of the references, concentrate the language so that the fan of references, on the one hand, was limited by the structure, but on the other hand, it is revealed in the obscuring structure of latitude. The metaphysics of the object of art is not formed in the reference to the transcendental Dali, this Terra Incognita of the Divine presence, but in the structure of relations between points laid and acting here and now .

So, we move backwards, laying the ribs between the points selected by the artist (the essence of the formal elements of the statement) and trying to read the opening fan of the references. We have to sort out and stretch out a lot of manifesting in the intercostal space: communication begins to pop up in front of us, not installed and unobvious, the ice surface becomes convex, a relief is manifested on it, according to which we glided before the collision with points without noticing the pattern. According to various hypotheses of linguistic relativity, the language forms the perception of time. Turning a lot, reading connections, we simultaneously form the present, show its relief. Thus, the art that compels us to move from the visible end to the invisible before the beginning, forces us to connect our own reading mechanisms, pushes us to form a language through which the present will begin to unfold in front of us. The present is realized in our movement backward: in order to become directed to the future, time must turn to the past and move in the opposite direction.

When the structure is read and thereby fixed, it manifests itself in front of us in all its connectedness. Now, knowing the sources, we can read from the beginning to the end - we already know what the artist did, how and why he chose certain points and handed these or other ribs above that, and not other many. The structure plunged into the language, became narrative, accessible to linear reading - and at the same time it became the past. We closed the fan, laid it out in the entire causal figure; Now we can read the structure as a classic novel, moving from the beginning of history to its end: the past moves forward and only in such a movement can be perceived as the past. This paradox of time also contains the paradox of art: it belongs to the present, only so far, it is completely unconscious to the end, so far, it is unclear and vaguely, while it is confused on the network of the meaning and does not give out its foundations, but it should manifest it in the fullness of the description of his logic, it instantly falls into the funnel of the past. So any explication explaining to us what is happening in each individual statement is drowning this statement in the opacity of the past tense. The art deciphered ahead of time loses that play, that limitation limit in which it could close the flows that surround us at every specific moment. Explained art loses access to the present: what is the past, as not the present, separated by a distance of reflection, and what is an academy, as not explained art?

Art can be academized, being completely separated from the institution caught on the teaching of outdated methods.

The present is always not read. To stay in the present, without falling into the funnel of the past, we have to learn to read again each time. But, having read a particular bunch, we automatically immerse it in the past. Where is the present and what is it? It can be said that based on such logic, we simply do not have access to it, but in the same situation, it turns out to be art: it is forced to work with the material, literally invisible, as invisibly chaotic under the ice crust of the horizon of stay, as the edges between points under the pile of references. The answer collected from invisible data is never an answer, but only an indication, option and hypothesis. The art that belonged to the present today simply cannot have an answer, and even a claim to give it, will convict the artist in a misunderstanding of the specifics of the current time.

The phenomenological concept believed the mastery of time through the direct presence, while in our case we are talking about the linguistic construction of temporality. In this case, reading of art does not depend on the point of stay relative to it: we are no longer tied to the spatial coordinate of its presence, art can be anywhere . So high -quality documentation organized between the objects of dramaturgy can tell us more than finding right in the middle of them. The fixing eye of the technique, colder than ours, enters with many in a relationship closer than a person who is hardly capable of by the points raised by points at the same time grab the entire number of ribs - guides to expand the references.

The distinction of the art that works on the horizon of today's, always invisible day is formulated in the above way, and one that even with all the visible correspondence of this invisibility at the structural level belongs to the past that does not have access to now . In the second case, we will always wait for the footboard: covered with brilliance of visible relevance, we will with satisfaction with such art on the front edge of what is happening, but at the first attempt to describe it inevitably rummaging into the last tense funnel. There will be a discrepancy, a crack, through which the deceiving already-serving will flow. The present will be flooded with live corpses of the worked out instrumentality, stop flowing in its reverse movement, in its need for constant interpretation, and the past, this already dedicated system of relations, paralyzes us in an attempt to expand the describing invisible language. That is why we should dwell with distrust whenever it seems to us that we realized what was happening.

The heading "prints" is supported by the Fund for Assistance to the Study of Russian Fine Arts "Russian Art The World".