EN
AUTHOR
Konstantin Bokhorov
TITLE
Upon the conclusion of the project
ABOUTH AUTHOR
1 The exhibition Aesthetics vs Information at the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre has summed up the intermediate result of the discussion of the work of art, carried on by Moscow artists. In a situation where conceptual design on one side and behavioural strategies on the other devalue the real artistic product, this issue has become relevant again. It was immensely important for me and all the artists who took part in the project that our Lithuanian partners offered us an opportunity to present this problem in the form of a complete exhibition, and thus shared our concern. Surely, the Lithuanian audience, which lives in a different situation, has interpreted the exhibition in its own way, yet we felt that the statement of the problem engaged it, as well. 2 When working on this exhibition, my curatorial strategy was to cause a clash between the different artistic trends in Russian contemporary art. Yet a puzzling transformation took place in the course of preparation. Artists who were “engaged in aesthetics” (Anatoly Osmolovsky) suddenly decided to demonstrate an “informational approach”, while the artists who were supposed to figure as the apologists of “information” in my exhibition text produced works that were largely “aesthetic” (Valery Chtak). Nevertheless, by and large the initial idea proved to be right, which was evidenced by the heated debate within the exhibition space. At the same time, one must admit that the information camp has prevailed by both numbers and the strength of argument. As the exhibition was an experiment and I refrained from taking sides, I am quite content with the result. One can observe the same trends in Moscow’s art life. In May of the last year, the same problem was addressed in the project of the trial of Damian Hirst’s For the Love of God, or the diamond skull, organised by Osmolovsky. At first there was a strong desire to condemn the “skull” in the name of the aesthetic, but the audience sympathising with postmodernism, which pronounced the verdict, deemed this commercial piece to be a work of art, thereby recognising its aesthetic quality.
the exhibition in the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre). Therefore, it is possible that Aesthetics vs Information resembled a Gypsy camp to the local critics. Yet it seems to me that in general the exhibition and the project as a whole, including the discussions and meetings with Lithuanian artists, curators, gallerists and students, were quite successful. In addition, I would like to note its unintended resonance in the context of Klaipėda, thanks to the works of Osmolovsky, Mukhin and Chtak, which contained clear Lithuanian connotations. 3 The fact that the communication took place in the end is a significant achievement of the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, which did everything to make it possible for the Russian artists to produce and show their works. The centre has proven that it is an organisation of international significance, capable of organising the most complex projects. It is equally important that the centre has offered a hand of friendship to Russian art. In an era of estrangement, this is an important cultural and political act of goodwill. This means that we can understand each other if we speak the language of art, that there is mutual attraction between us. The Klaipėda centre has acted as an agent of consolidation of prominent geopolitical forces, and if this cultural initiative could be elevated to the level of politics, it is entirely possible that it would culminate in a large-scale, continuous international project, because the nations that used to be united within the framework of the Soviet Union feel culturally attracted to each other and do not wish to lose the cultural connections.
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As for the most notable works in the exhibition, it seems to me that the presented projects were powerful and representative. The exhibition opened with a remarkable project of the Cupid group (Yuri Albert, Andrei Filippov, Viktor Skersis), who created sand dunes in the form of coffins and ironically “informatised” contemporary culture with the help of various other devices; echoing the work of Cupid, the living meat grinders of the Yekaterinburg group Where Dogs Run were crawling before the entrance to the second floor; on the latter, an informational highlight was provided by Ter-Oganian’s work, which lured the viewer into the world of a computer game augmented with elements of contemporary art; Osmolovsky’s sound work set the tone for the whole exhibition space, Chtak’s psychoanalytical linguistics simultaneously served as a portal into Bulnygin’s psychedelic world; Mukhin developed the theme of local specificity, started by Chtak’s language game, in an aesthetic confessionalpsychological key; the psychologism and emotional tension of his piece perfectly resonated in the work of the Nizhny Novgorod-based video art group Provmiza, the emotional intensity of the resonance of the aesthetic declined and found rational form in the ornaments of Alisa Ioffe, and, finally, was embodied, in a detached manner, in Alexander Pepelyayev’s erotic fantasy simulator. The discussion of the nature of the work of art between the “aesthetes” and the “informationalists” in Russia has spawned an attractive spectacular exposition, which might contradict the dominant trend of the minimisation of the visual component and the sprawl of the conceptual structure in Lithuanian contemporary art (demonstrated, for instance, by
Konstantin Bokhorov, PhD. Freelance art critic and curator from Moscow. Member of AICA.
4 It must be noted that Aesthetics vs Information was organised as a more or less independent curatorial project, almost as a private initiative of its organisers. The credit for this goes, first of all, to Ignas Kazakevičius. Being the director of the centre, Ignas led the preparations for the project incredibly tactfully, without imposing his positions on me as an independent curator. He provided me with an opportunity to unite in one exhibition text very different artists who represent different fractions in art and usually do not appear together in institutional projects in Moscow. Therefore, when I speak about cultural collaboration, I have in my forms of the latter that are based on the free initiative of independent curators and managers. Had the Klaipėda centre collaborated with some Moscow-based institution, it would have knowingly adopted its institutional perspective of the situation. Working with independent curators is the level of institutional culture that is still unknown in Russia. Here the development of art takes place in the framework of the strategies of large (and usually commercial) institutions and through the efforts of their full-time employees, who usually follow the direction of their top managers. Free initiative, if any, is exercised only at the grassroots level in Russia’s art world. Aesthetics vs Information has demonstrated the triumph of freedom in the discussion of art, which is particularly important in the situation of excessive institutionalisation and commercialisation that to a large extent condition the development of contemporary art in today’s Russia.