Elshevskaya G. A collage of old reviews, or “Stranger Games” // Art Journal. – 1999. – No. 28 – 29.- P. 1- 9.

ART MAGAZINE N°28­29 Galina Yelshevskaya Collage of old reviews, or “Stranger Games” Proposing to publish reviews of long-past events – perhaps remembered only by the participants – is a strange idea. Especially since these events, even “in their lifetime,” did not claim to become milestones in the sluggish artistic process. Rather, they served as background, marginalia. But, on the one hand, the ratio of marginalia to center can change over time: revealing a different alignment in reverse perspective, forgotten incidents reflect on current reality. On the other hand, the 90s, in calendar terms, are experiencing a terminal period, and culturally, perhaps, have already ended; and so it is time to remember them. Fragments of old texts with today’s commentary allow constructing a perspective “from two angles” – optically advantageous. Many old texts unpublished in their time have accumulated on the computer (unpublished because, for example, the newspaper closed or the magazine never opened, or publication was not even considered), but they do not even form a dotted line of actual chronology. Therefore, only those that in one way or another touch on the category of “game” are selected. The category is, of course, boundless (any strategy is a game, postmodernism is a game, and so on), but here we mean projects built according to the rules of the game – into something or with someone; and the image of the “other” (in various roles – a tool and material, spectator and consumer, mirror or marked absent figure) is important here. At one pole are actionist games “with strangers,” involving the space and characters present in it into a total environment (though this setup is largely fictitious), at the other – “autistic” games related to composing personal worlds, with mythological, anthropological, and literary simulations. 1. Games “into the other” …from a private letter describing the action “The Last Jewish Pogrom,” Gelman Gallery, 1995. Authors – Igor Podolchak, Igor Dyurich. …at the entrance, “Instructions for pogrom participants” and identification signs were handed out, and the instructions very competently explained that there are two roles, pogromist and victim, and mere curious onlookers are not allowed (and rightly so): “all participants in the art action consciously and voluntarily make their choice,” no sanctimonious “above the fray.” The role of the pogromist frees its bearer from all social conventions, ethical and moral boundaries; relations between victims and pogromists “can be built according to historically established traditions.” The victim has no right to remove the yellow star and leave the action space before it ends; the pogromist is free to move; vodka is given to him, which the victim is denied. The victim has the right to inscribe their name on the memorial plaque, the pogromist – to desecrate it. Such are the rules. Taking the instruction, I realized that I could not get inside, although I should, and this means that everything is arranged very precisely. It is impossible to appoint oneself a pogromist in any game situation, and the victim must stay until the end of the party, which is already impossible due to lack of time. So I had to think “at the front door” about various things. Starting from Stolbun’s psychodramas (there, if you remember, extreme situations were modeled with patients) to amazing comics with mice in a concentration camp (I forgot the author due to amnesia); and about the fact that if my bristling is from personal fear of identification, then this is a plus for the organizers. By the way, I know what was inside – photographs of tombstones on which someone wrote their names, and someone, accordingly, “beat the Jews”; a ransom auction that failed due to the sluggishness of participants (Schindler’s List!); and, most importantly, a hired guard in a black shirt – they say nearly two meters of pure shit, worked for money but “with soul,” a very, again, appropriate figure. I know about the “inside” from acquaintances among young pogromists, fortunately, they freely roamed Yakimanka. The role did not cause unpleasant feelings in anyone (feeling like a curious elderly aunt, I asked if it “pinched” – no). Maybe this is youth – both the Holocaust and the Battle of Kulikovo were long ago and untrue; but maybe, unlike me, they are rooted in the space of this culture and instinctively know that simulational work with historical practices is undertaken to relieve frustrations, not the other way around. Which is also clear to me, and the competence of this undertaking is also clear. Only – rearranging parts of a known formula – it turns out that “it can be understood, but not raised”… None of this would make sense to publish and comment on four years later if it were a personal problem. However, time has shown that it is not purely personal. That in a situation of predetermined role distribution, unaccounted positions can be traumatic and even dangerous. The pogrom action, being a “politically correct” example of a “cold” strategy and assuming voluntary choice of “participating” roles, indirectly communicated the fundamental absence of a “spectator’s place” for this story and for art in general. But it was precisely at this point that the practice of the 90s showed a symptomatic failure. In Avdey Ter-Oganian’s recent iconoclastic act, spectators fully engaged (calling the police and thus unintentionally reviving the tradition of appealing to the city policeman for “expertise” of futurist antics); characteristically, the spectators belonged – in a broad sense – to the same artistic circle. On the other hand, outraged Orthodox from completely different circles, spraying the “iconoclast’s” paintings with spray (Gelman Gallery, 19.04.1999), showed the ability to reproduce the artistic gesture; and if the story ended on this “duel,” its ring composition would look quite harmonious. Violent actionism of the 90s, despite all its violence (with statistics of directly “affected” people), assumed the presence of “others” only as static extras. Neither the authors of publicly destroyed works, nor motorists under whose cars a naked man smeared with oil was thrown from the slush (O. Kulik), nor the Van Gogh hall attendant forced to witness an attempt by some character to defecate under the entrusted object (A. Brener), were provoked to conscious reaction; the unarticulated scenario of their roles made such a reaction impossible. The artist, even working in the square, still made a “leap into the void,” which included both the traditionally romantic confrontation with the homogeneous substance of the “crowd,” and more specifically Russian shades (thus, Brener’s tautological appearance at the “Leap into the Void” exhibition – with the cry “why wasn’t I taken to this exhibition?” – evoked associations not only with a teenager tormented by puberty complexes but also with poor Akaky Akakievich). Witnesses were supposed either to experience shock from not understanding what was happening (this was the “general type” provocation, and the question of its ethical permissibility was beforehand excluded), or, having assessed the gesture as artistic and rhetorical, to distance themselves precisely because of this assessment. However, representatives of the current community could also be provoked figures – such cases, recall, regularly happened during animal killings, and in this sense, the experience of Viennese actionism of the 70s was secondarily played out here. Avdey Ter-Oganian’s action, as a statement not entirely clear (protest against kitsch? against false Orthodoxy? against sacredness as such, including the sacredness of the “artistic”?), and as a Dadaist gesture, on the contrary, too saturated with possible meanings, was a belated remake of both flagellant and quite correct acts. (Among recent ones, one can recall Brener’s “Plagiarism” at the Pushkin Museum, not provocative at all, but absolutely precise, and the project of medical hermeneuts “Empty Icons,” shown at L-Gallery in 1993.) However, it fell into a different, socially “hot” context, and was perceived literally and “addressed.” Perhaps some role was played by the mismatch of creative settings of the “inductor” and “recipients”; however, more importantly, the zone of self-identification of the latter, so clearly marked, turned out to be connected not with creativity but with a purely existential and rather inflamed (due to a combination of circumstances) experience. Naturally, these common social circumstances sharpen the maximalist potentials of consciousness, already educated on dual models (“chaos – cosmos” or “God – devil”) and reading the teleology of every act based on them. That is, there was no artistic space capable of adequately assessing the artistic gesture, and there still isn’t; in this sense, it is completely irrelevant that the icon cutting took place in a gallery where any event should be read as an art event in principle. However, the artistic circle polarized as a result of the event – one part recalled corporate ethics, the other, on the contrary, put ethical values of a different order, not connected with the corporate scale, at the forefront. And in this sense, the provocation (regardless of its actual address) turned out to be effective; one can only hope that it will not end in full affect, because it is not easy to perceive the domestic penitentiary system as a simulacrum. 2. Games “with others” Fragments from unpublished articles: Admission to the exhibition “The Art of Dying” on the mezzanines of Manezh was by list. Which is an unpleasant rarity for our vernissages: the uninvited part of the crowd, rejected as “free riders,” languished on the porch and, in the best leftist traditions, cursed the beau monde, the old and new bourgeoisie, and the gallerist Yakut personally. But Yakut himself gave similar speeches. That the exhibition he arranged marks “the death of the avant-garde,” that the situation at the end of the last century perfectly corresponds to the situation at the end of this century (hence the passing works of Vrubel, Benois, and Somov from the collection of the “Idigov Product” corporation in the exposition), and that with Vertinsky’s songs played at unimaginable decibels, he means “to crush the bourgeois.” Never mind the historical inconsistencies (if the end of the century is reproduced, then the avant-garde in Russia has not yet been born, why should it die?) – this is, after all, just a passionate speech and falls under the category “who’s counting?” But the bourgeois present in the hall did not seem crushed (only slightly stunned) – they enjoyed champagne, bustling waiters, décolletage ladies, and other signs of “refined atmosphere.” Including art. This art seemed to articulate fundamental mythologems of the Art Nouveau style: mythologems of the dream of melancholy, visual illusions, and other worlds. The overall level of the high salon (with some exceptions); however, the exceptions (for example, works by I. Makarevich and E. Elagina, V. Koshlyakov, and others) were presented in the appropriate “packaging”; in this sense, the exposition was built quite consistently and stylishly. But somehow it convincingly demonstrated that this end of the century is not equal to “that one” in any sense, that it is probably too early for us to die because we think about it the least. From the prescribed relaxation of poses and languor of gestures, the young, fresh, healthy, and cheeky broke through irresistibly; and the models (in photographs) clearly grew on enhanced nutrition, and the technological shine reminded not of death but of the price of the “picture.” There is no trouble either in “expensive art” or in the high-society party; but what about the cultural mush in heads, forcing all this to be declared as “the death of the avant-garde,” and the nouveau riche instability of self-identification, allowing the simultaneous need to please one’s audience and to crush it – in the inventive sense? If the exhibition at Manezh is “about dying,” then the exhibition at L-Gallery is precisely about how to live. Or, more precisely, survive: Vladimir Arkhipov’s project “Forced Things, or Help Yourself” asserts the complete equality of these concepts for the Russian mentality. …Everyone who held the magazine “Rabotnitsa” probably remembers the “Useful Tips” section. Housewives and folk craftsmen from all corners of the once multinational and vast Motherland wrote here, sharing little tricks: how to turn a spinning top into a mixer, a useless box into a bookshelf, and cucumber peel into a cosmetic mask. The cosmopolitan Dr. Gaspar Arneri pondered the question “how to make steam from stone”; the domestic “lefty” strove for the opposite – to make something tangible from steam, from emptiness, so that no little thing would be wasted in a poor household… Solzhenitsyn placed the image of “repair” at the center of the “Russian idea”; Vladimir Arkhipov embodied this total image in his exposition. Anonymous inventions are realized in projects – from a “washing-sewing machine” to a satellite model representing a ball threaded into a broken chair seat. The pot lid stands stationary on noodles crawling out of the pot, providing them with much-needed air access; the installation “Twenty-nine Shovels” clearly presents a metaphor of poverty, “shovel-ness,” and multiplying zero by zero, which results in the same zero. Conceptualism, having experienced linguistic alienation from the described object, returns to the material element, to absurd and completely real everyday life… …Alena Romanova is concerned with the habitation of contemporary art. Her first experience of this kind was the group exhibition “Shop” organized by her in 1993. Strange objects – boots painted with mythological scenes, “poetic fabric in cuts,” pillows for fighting, wrist hourglasses, windows with painted landscapes – were sold on the first floor of the Olympic complex building, and on the second floor there was a real shop; there the company “Konstantin” sold “rich” office furniture. And this very furniture and conceptual toys were bought sluggishly, one might say, not bought at all, but random visitors wandered the floors, not immediately realizing that one “market” had already turned into another. The audience recognized the products of highbrow intellectual activity as “things for themselves”; the artistic language, seemingly quite hermetic, turned out to be easily adaptable. Which, in fact, was to be proven… Fragments from a newspaper “seasonal” review of exhibitions describing routine events of the season years later look, of course, not necessarily memoir-like. However, a certain characteristic knot is marked here: connected with attempts to overcome the hermeticism of artistic activity, with the reduction of conceptualist language towards “commodity-ness,” on the one hand, and “humanity” – on the other. The first tendency turned out to be doomed; the second, having experienced “heroic” milestones (see fragment about the “Shop” exhibition), partially left a trace in the field of design, but essentially “thinned out” in the field of already simulational constructs. The same Vladimir Arkhipov moved from producing “useful self-made things” to collecting and cataloging them. However, this occupation is quite cunning because authorship is not verified. Perhaps his “expedition reports” with drawings and descriptions are actually an expanded quasi-ethnographic simulation; even if not, the genre itself turns in the usual direction – towards mystifying inventive utopias, like, for example, the “Russian Patent” by Olga and Alexander Florensky. The “truth of fact” naturally integrates into the system of “fantasy.” 3. Games with oneself The 90s abound with “autogalaxies.” On various exhibition platforms: the Ho people, the Shapituk people and other Martynchikov peoples, the bunny people of Yye Florensky, the collective “Keme culture” from Petersburg, the civilization of Kopys by Petr Perevezentsev, “dabloids,” “stomachs,” “divers” and other creatures of Leonid Tishkov, and so on. All this is somehow pushed out of the current mainstream into border zones, perhaps for the fascination (which is also entertainment) of demiurgic undertakings both at the level of a single project “composition” and an expanded hypertext. However, under favorable circumstances for the authors, such art easily converts and is welcomed in the West: the image of the mysterious Russian soul, mostly inspired by non-Russian literary models, from Borges to Tolkien. Expelled through the door, narrativity climbs in through the window. There also climbs an active personality: the monologic statement that does not require an interlocutor. These attempts at structuring some space, building systematics, and generally reflecting on wholeness are very symptomatic; especially interesting are cases when the impossibility of reconstructing such wholeness is simultaneously played out. From an unpublished review of P. Perevezentsev’s exhibition “Kopystian Chronicles.” (Velta Gallery, 1997). …The story that Petr Perevezentsev tells in different versions has no developed plot. That is, its plot is the plot of description, not narration: a kind of supplemented and varied catalog of forms or lexical units of some language. A slight rhythm failure or violation of ornament marking within the canonical system is perceived as a kind of message; linguistic wholeness seems to strive to discover its structural organization here. However, the probability of reading such a message is deceptive – the literary intrigue of the “text” remains unrecognized, the meaning escapes direct interpretations… In a static, orientationless space and frozen time, inactive characters seem to demonstrate a return to the infinity of mythological repetitions and recollections – including recollections of language. Such recollections “at the output” give mannerism (natural for the turn of the century) – some excess of refinement and spiritual incorporeality, the beauty of silhouettes and dull, “patinated” gold. But it looks like “second-order” mannerism – as a deliberately chosen style in the story of the decline of style. One can assume that this fundamentally plotless story contains a description of the situation of exhaustion of plots – the fully spoken culture, the impossibility of actions, contacts, and a common language… Regarding the project of P. Perevezentsev and S. Yakunin “Three Versions of Alitka’s Life” (Velta Gallery, 1998). …an eschatological myth about a hero who was in the whale’s belly and got “irritated” upon exit, resulting in symbolic destruction, the collapse of the traditional world and language. However, the finale resembles the style of Kharms’ finales – the performance is canceled, everyone gets sick. …The feeling of total stylistic and semantic reversibility does not leave throughout the performance. How many unidentified characters, changing masks, participate here? How many conditional “authors” interpret conditional archaism? The declared number of versions is deceptive, since no “voice” has strict identity. Layering and vibration are given to the text as a form-building principle; ritual components are commented on by a structural-philological “frame,” but the word, “sealing” reality, makes it quite illusory – the reality of unreadable imitations of a subscript and hallucinogenic chanting, enchanted by its own tautologies. A kind of flickering arrhythmia also spreads to the material world of the project – to the ambivalent dynamics of speaking megaphones and hiding masks, to the yaranga, also the whale’s womb, symbolizing “closedness,” but clearly showing permeability. Sergey Yakunin built the yaranga as a “no-place” space: without internal hierarchy, without locatives and clear semiotic status – as a pure situation of entry and “exit.” Kraft, being the only construction material, seems to indicate the unity of the mythological universe, while the structural-textual part of the action, on the contrary, emphasizes the semantics of transitions, ambiguous metamorphoses, and total mediation. But precisely in the parallel authorial movement, the plot is realized both as the “plot of the end” (of story and History) and as a plot about restoring connection: at least at the project level. The holistic worldview appears as a contamination of versions, albeit deceptive and compromised; a kind of postmodern “puzzle” of equal possibilities… Perevezentsev and Yakunin’s projects represent the full spectrum of postmodern consciousness reflection in times of crisis: they play out motives of universal reversibility of meanings, multi-species oversaturation, semantic “holes,” and nonlinear movements. Civilization, seen at sunset, convinces by similarity. Artists of non-conceptual origin, proclaiming their own marginality and avoiding even intra-scene “institutionalization,” created a portrait – or self-portrait – of the present culture; which justifies the targeted optics. 4. Outside the game …In the introductory article to the catalog of Vera Miturich’s exhibition “Artist’s House” (1997, XL Gallery), a symptomatic mistake was made. Interpreting the way Vera Miturich introduced the archive of some artist Burobin into circulation, the article’s author notes (in a positive sense, however) the “unprecedented cruelty” with which the viewer was offered to “walk over drawings, watercolors, and lithographs, which here means not just to spoil things made by someone, but… to trample on an unfulfilled fate.” Meanwhile, having arranged a total installation of studies, portraits, and landscapes of an unknown and probably already deceased artist (whose legacy was found by Alexander Dzhikiya in a dumpster), Vera Miturich did not dare to cover the floor with his works. On the floor lay old sketches belonging to her and her daughter… Which returns us not only to the problem of the boundaries of appropriation and, in general, intrusion into someone else’s existential space but also to the question of the “other,” which is the reverse side of the question of oneself. It is characteristic that, using unclaimed archives, Vera Miturich is unable to return even the worked-out material “to the trash.” Her self-perception directly depends on the characters whose fulfilled life does not allow them to be considered virtual. Fulfilled – therefore, already possessing artistic meaning. Reflection on the traditional components of the artist’s image continues to remain a commonplace (recent examples include Y. Albert’s exhibition “Mom, Look, an Artist” at L-Gallery). In other projects of the 90s, too, regardless of success, reflection extends to the history of art as a whole (as a completed concept) and to the hierarchical systematics of meanings established in it (“Kunstkamera” at Gallery 1.0; D. Krymov. “Alphabetical Truths,” Gallery “Today”; “World of Sensual Things” at the State Museum of Fine Arts). Vera Miturich’s exposition, in the context of rather painful rejections of any genetic dependence and identification traumas, looks like a model of tolerance and ethical approach. In the confrontation with entropy, the artist (understanding her role precisely this way) saves another artist from oblivion – albeit in a way that the other would hardly understand and approve. Both turn out to be “kinsmen” in the palimpsest of the cultural layer; such self-perception, at least far from catastrophic, emphasizes the existential significance of any artistic activity. Which in a certain sense also marks a refusal of games. Galina Yelshevskaya Art historian and critic. Author of several books (“Few Chosen”, Moscow, 1995, etc.). Lives in Moscow.Comment type: Published comment