A somewhat unusual installation was opened last Thursday at the State Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. Vyacheslav Koleichuk, the author of the well-known gravicapa from the film "Kin-za-dza", completely recreated the exposition of the second exhibition of constructivist artists from the OBMOKHU association. The exhibition, organized 85 years ago, has been recreated in its entirety, in all details, thanks to two preserved archival photographs. Accurately, observing the size and material of the originals, all the works were reconstructed, the lighting, the suspension system, the author's stands were restored - the whole atmosphere of the exhibition at that time. According to the museum's press release, "… we have before us the materialized historical reality of an archival photograph."
The essence of the resulting exhibition turned out to be ambiguous: to look from one side - an installation, an artistic gesture of a famous kineticist, curious about literal appeals "to the roots". On the other hand, there is a historical reconstruction, a scientific work on the theme of one of the early associations of the Russian avant-garde, or rather, the Society of Young Artists, founded by students of the Stroganov School, which held only four exhibitions, but influenced the entire subsequent development of kineticism. For the art gesture - the name of Koleichuk; for a scientific experiment - a symposium with invited celebrities timed to coincide with the opening; S. O. Khan-Magomedov, A. A. Strigalev and others. It turns out some kind of link between art and science, which, in general, is both pleasant and useful.
And yet - we somehow got used to using the word "constructivism" in relation to architecture, forgetting that in fact this is the direction founded by Tatlin with his counter-reliefs, initially combining abstract painting at different poles, proclaiming an extreme degree of materialism (A. Rodchenko, L. Popov, V. Stepanova) and attempts to construct life by creating things and buildings of a new generation (Le Corbusier). So, on the walls of the reconstructed exhibition of 1921, there are paintings by the constructivist artists Konstantin (Casimir) Medunetsky and brothers Vladimir and Georgy Stenberg, and in the center are kinetic objects of their older comrades, Karl Ioganson's "self-stressed structures" made of thin movably connected wooden sticks using the principle of an equilibrium structure, which swings for a long time from touch, like a pendulum, and Alexander Rodchenko's spatial compositions, ovals of successively decreasing sizes, inserted into one another at different angles.