In the 1970s, a movement emerged in the Moscow Architectural Institute, and in the 1980s, a movement that received the name "paper architecture" with the light hand of Yuri Avvakumov flourished. Much has already been said about the fact that in fact it was never distinguished by unity and purposefulness, rather it was a fad - the reaction of young architects endowed with imagination to the boredom of panel housing construction. Architects came up with fantastic projects, painted them beautifully, sent them to international competitions and won. It was part of graphics, part of architecture, part of literature, or conceptual art. The destinies of the participants in the movement were distributed accordingly - someone began to build, someone remained a schedule, someone is engaged in the production of objects, installations, happenings and other contemporary art. And one of the active participants in the "movement" and certainly its most famous researcher, Yuri Avvakumov, from time to time, sometimes on a larger, sometimes on a smaller scale, arranges exhibitions of "paper architecture", reminding viewers and participants about the past, and critics - about the phenomenon.
Yuri Avvakumov also participated in the arrangement of this exhibition, but not quite as a curator, but rather as a kind genius. The collection that is now on display in the Paperworks gallery has developed, if I may say so, historically. Somewhere in the early 1990s, now it is not known exactly when - but then the artists began to freely travel abroad, the "paper architects" of Novosibirsk Vyacheslav Mizin and Viktor Smyshlyaev took their works to foreign exhibitions - but some of them were forgotten in London with one of my friends. There they were kept for some time, until an acquaintance gave this small collection to the famous collector of "paper utopias" Yuri Avvakumov. With whom a selection of Novosibirsk graphics lay for some time, until Avvakumov handed it over to Evgeny Mitte, one of the founders of the Paperworks gallery. The gallery specializes in graphics, and in February 2006 it hosted an exhibition of three famous masters of Moscow paper architecture - Yuri Avvakumov, Alexander Brodsky and Mikhail Filippov. The chamber exhibition of Novosibirsk graphics, which opened on October 6, continues the theme and rhymes thoughtfully with the name of the gallery, making one suspect the beginning of a series of expositions dedicated to "wallet" architects.
The collection on display for the most part consists of works by Vyacheslav Mizin, but among them there were also several sheets by Viktor Smyshlyaev. Both have participated in the Novosibirsk “paper” movement from the very beginning, since 1982. It must be said that this city is the only one in which, apart from Moscow, "paper art" has seriously developed. It began a little later than Moscow and was closely associated with it - it was definitely a fashion in some way, but it is curious that in other cities it did not take root. The further fate of Novosibirsk "wallets" is somewhat similar to their Moscow colleagues, with the only difference that among them there were more contemporary artists than building architects (there are only two of them, E. Burov and V. Kan).
Vyacheslav Mizin in 1999, after voluntarily spending four days in a concrete bunker in the company of other Siberian artists, became one of the founders of the Blue Noses group, now well-known to the Moscow art scene with ridiculous outrageous Rabelaisian performances. This part of Mizin's art is well known to everyone who is interested in contemporary art - and the exhibition is dedicated to the early, architectural and paper period. It seems that it was made specifically in order to show all interested viewers how ambiguous and contradictory the nature of the Siberian-Moscow artist is, or how different he was in his youth.
Of course, it is likely that the character did not change at all - but the ways and means of expression, as well as the effect produced, have changed greatly: hence the name of the exhibition "1000 years before Blue Noses", intended to emphasize the gap between today's videos and performances - and the "paper" projects shown at the exhibition - they are rarely funny, but more often gloomy, especially those that are black and white. They differ from the sheets of Moscow "wallets" by a certain brutality, concentration - these are just some kind of curled up landscapes of desert cities. And yet - they differ in a very strong similarity with the "metaphysical painting" of Giorgio De Chirico, which similarity is probably due to the absence of people, and perhaps from the properties of the depicted architecture, large, without small details, and from this frighteningly self-absorbed.
Although this impression belongs rather to the category of emotions, and the Novosibirsk architects had enough fun and buffoonery even in their youth. Consider, for example, the assertion that architecture is a sport, or the project of the tower of San Marco in the form of a chest covered with a red cardinal's cap (the “Three Towers” project).
One of the main topics of paper projects by V. Mizin and V. Smyshlyaev is deformation, destruction of a large regular shape. In the project of a "promising cinema" for the All-Union competition, the giant dome of the cinema is cut in two, and from its volume, according to the principle of functional architecture, various constructivist forms emerge from the inside - similar "to someone's dreams or something similar, from which any cinema is made." In "Bastion of Resistance", a competition project for JA magazine, action creates opposition - different curves creep out of the solid rectangular body of a building, thereby destroying the image of inaccessibility.
There is no intricate classicistic decor so beloved by Muscovites - even Loos's column, interpreted by Mizin, turns into an extremely laconic likeness of a lighthouse, accompanied by carelessly written mathematical formulas instead of literary digressions. The author not only does not think to return to the classics - on the contrary, he supplants all possible allusions to it, even if he uses "Art Deco" prototypes. The avant-garde acts in the role of heritage - before us, of course, the "constructivist" direction of "paper architecture".
Judging by the formulas written on the sheets, the second component of Mizin's architectural fantasies is science, which is logical for an inhabitant of the largest and most famous Soviet science city. In the introductory commentary, written at the request of the organizers of the exhibition, Yuri Avvakumov, it is said that the entire Novosibirsk Architectural Institute in the 1980s was fond of reading the book of the pioneer of Soviet cosmonautics Yuri Kondratyuk "The Conquest of Interplanetary Spaces." Space, as well as physics and mathematics inseparable with it, seem to have replaced arches, columns and so on for Siberian wallets - turning their graphics from fantastic projects into metaphysical landscapes, which, from a certain angle, may seem like the seamy side of the Soviet science city. And although Novosibirsk architects received fewer competitive prizes than Muscovites, without them the history of the trend would be incomplete.
