Its curator - architect, designer and theorist Sergei Sitar, first showed the exhibition in France, in Lyon, now the exposition has returned home, to the Museum of Architecture, which has been keeping these strange objects for three years, after the late director of the museum David Sargsyan took them to storage with the author's relatives.
The exhibition is organized competently: from the entrance you are directed to the stands with notebooks in which Lyovochkin himself described his work, there you can also see photographs of a typical 14-storey tower in which he lived and the apartment in which his objects existed, let's say, in situ. This is followed by a projection with a film made up of family photo albums, and since Nikolai Lyovochkin did everything very carefully, assembled, glued, signed, these albums give a fairly accurate idea of his life. And only then the viewer is admitted to the main exposition - a small oval space fenced off with tissue paper inside the Ruins. In terms of area, it approaches two rooms of the author's cramped apartment, and this is done correctly, because it allows you to at least partially imagine where these objects appeared and existed, and how they were transferred to the museum. For greater similarity, a photograph of a birch grove is glued to the ephemeral paper wall - if you go back to the photographs of the apartment, you can make sure that the author's room was pasted over with just such pictures. The tissue paper, from which the walls are fenced off, rustles, and if you look from the outside, the bizarre silhouettes of teremkovy temples build on it an alluring shadow theater. In a word, Sergei Sitar did everything right - he turned the exposition of naive art objects into a study and demonstration of the phenomenon; duly captivated the viewer, paid tribute to the environment, context, cause and effect - collected data and prepared the ground for interpretation. The museum has published a catalog.
According to the curator's definition, Lyovochkin's objects "… give a new, dreamlike life to the historical and monumental beginning …". This definition is echoed by the title of the exhibition: "the machinist and architect of Paradise", which seems to be understandable, a man worked as a machinist in the subway during his lifetime, but cunning - one might think that he is not an architect, but also a machinist of a fantastic steam locomotive, ready to take us to some paradise like a train from Harry Potter and many other films. Lyovochkin turns out to be a very fantastic character, the creator of a fabulous Paradise, but in reality everything is simpler, although no less entertaining.
The naive (if you read his diary - even too naive) artist Lyovochkin built something like a mini-city inside his apartment. Reflecting primarily his own "inner world". But his inner world, in turn, reflected many things that worried people of the seventies. At this time, more or less professional artists went inside themselves or parties, but Lyovochkin did not quite like that - he collected fragments of the interests of the outside world and built his own from them. Therefore, the components of his work are easy to list.
The first is “wooden architecture”. This is how Lyovochkin named his collection of mini-buildings when he began to describe them in a notebook in 1989. He called his room "the area of wooden architecture" and hung a sign on the wall. I must say that the phrase "wooden architecture" is a very peculiar one in itself. Once, about 15 years ago, a tour bus driver who brought schoolchildren to the Suzdal Museum of Wooden Architecture asked me - what is it? When are such funny toys made of wood? And I must admit, I hit it very accurately. It sounds strange - wooden architecture, bears on a stick are here somewhere very close, purely in consonance.
After Khrushchev, museums of wooden architecture became a special and fairly widespread genre: the remains of wooden buildings, mainly of the 18th century, were brought there from the villages (the earlier ones almost did not reach us, and they were not interested in the later ones), which at that time were disappearing before our eyes. burned, and even more became a victim of enlargement and panel 3-5 storeys with amenities. The noble work of saving rare huts, mills and churches in the eyes of the executive committees was covered by the study of the history of the masses. In fact, these were museums of an irrevocably gone country, deeply alternative to the country of the Soviets, small lifeless reservations of another life. And tourists were constantly taken there, and Nikolai Lyovochkin and his wife were serviceable visitors to excursions. In 1982, he began his construction experiments with a wooden mill - namely, the mill, as you know, was the protagonist of wooden architecture museums. Lyovochkin named the mill "Century", after the name of the street on which he lived (this name clearly inspired him, and in some way overlapped with "wooden architecture").
Then, in 1983, "The Castle" or "Court of Mirages" followed. The second source is felt in it - television films, or rather even, on the one hand, television fairy tales, and on the other, films by Mark Zakharov with their permanent mirrors, phantasmagoric theatrical environment. Mirrors and pictures appear inside the wooden tower, outside - clocks (all this will be preserved in subsequent "hand-made articles" - as Lyovochkin himself called his works).
The third source is the church. In general, all of Lyovochkin's works are a peculiarly understood idea of Holy Russia, a country that exists in the imagination. By the thirties, she was practically expelled, and after the war, or rather even after the mysterious fact of the flight of the icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir around Moscow in 1941, it steadily increased, and it was also mainly in the imagination. Taking bizarre forms there at times. In the 1980s, on the eve of the millennium of the baptism of Russia, everyone raved about the restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the road leading to the temple, with its own temple, which "he built himself, and there is no other such." And Nikolai Lyovochkin begins to build his churches. Not right away, let us note that the Yard of Mirages was also a temple at first, but Lyovochkin for some reason removed the crosses from it (this is written in the diaries). In 1984 he builds the "Moscow Cathedral", one of the highlights of the exhibition.
It is completely different from the XXS, and one must think that it is a collective, according to Lyovochkin, the image of a Russian, Moscow temple (most of all similar to the "Naryshkinsky" churches of the late 17th century). Here again we must recall the art critic Mikhail Ilyin, who believed that the Russian image of the temple is high, and abundant in external decor "temple-monument", the internal space of which is minimal, and which must apparently be observed from the outside. Nikolai Lyovochkin definitely did not read Ilyin, but the idea was in the air, and his churches were redundant with decor made from everything that was possible, and their interior space was completely inaccessible - on one, the Church of St. Lydia (1985), dedicated to the angel of his wife, it even hangs large castle.
You can speculate further. Mini-temples of Lyovochkin, multi-colored, with paper icons instead of windows - most of all look like an old woman's red corner. All this heavy tinsel is also found on old church iconostases, only Lyovochkin has it in abundance, this time, and it is framed instead of a corner - in sculptures. As if Lyovochkin brought the idea of the art critic Ilyin to the point - he created a temple for which one must pray outside, and placed it in his room, like a personal iconostasis.
The apotheosis in the works of Lyovochkin comes in 1991, when he builds "the Cathedral of Holy Russia" in the form of a three-tower tower, quite fabulous, and imperceptibly reminiscent of the palace in Kolomenskoye of Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov. Between these two dreamers - locked in a typical box on a street with a strange name, and those who have been the master of the city for a long time - oddly enough, there is a lot in common. They expressed the same idea, to a large extent the dream of a generation: the idea of building an alternative country, sweetly decorated, holy, Old Russian (condo, fat-ass), marked by a gloomy eclectic fantasy that turns it into an almost phantasmagoria. Only one had the whole city at his disposal, while the other had only an apartment, and he could not build buildings, but only toys, therefore the idea was concentrated more densely.
The turning point in Lyovochkin's work comes in 1993, after the death of his wife. At the same time, the topic of building an individual model of Holy Russia appears to have been exhausted. In the 1990s, he constructs his handicrafts from chandeliers, reproductions of Leonardo and other handy plastics, and although the crosses do not disappear, the themes become more and more fabulous. And somewhere there is even a nostalgia for the Soviet past: now a globe, now a statue from Mamayev Kurgan, crowning his later works.
The exhibition will run until October 2.
