This exhibition is organized by the Solo Mosaico company and is intended to become the first event in the life of a new art gallery, arranged by this company in the farthest (but very cozy) corner of the Art Play center on Yauza. Solo Mosaico is engaged in the production of mosaic panels from smalt, and in the future, the gallery will host mainly exhibitions of artists-decorators working with smalt. And this exhibition is the first, shock, and for it they called the curator Yuri Avvakumov, who invited 8 more architects and proposed to each of them to make a project of the "reliquary" object. They painted and the mosaic artists implemented, and the result is a very impressive exposition.
But first of all, I must say that this exhibition fits into a number of similar curatorial projects that arise once or twice a year and bring together art objects of architects from a rather narrow circle - such architects who are also very fine-minded artists. Critics have repeatedly spoken about the objects of these architects as the most enjoyable exhibits of contemporary art exhibitions. It is impossible to call them a group, the exhibition curator invites the participants every time, and the composition varies slightly, but some, quite obvious constancy of the “core” is quite obvious, and one already wants to talk about who is not in the composition and who is. But we will not talk about it, you never know.
And from similar exhibitions, one can recall, in particular: "Persimfans" in the Museum of Architecture and "Maternity Hospital", which opened the VKHUTEMAS gallery in the building of the Moscow Architectural Institute, just as now "Reliquary" is opening a gallery of mosaicists in the Artplay. And the curator there was the same - Yuri Avvakumov. Then Yuri Avvakumov showed the objects of the Maternity Hospital in Venice, having built for them (in co-authorship with Yuri Grigoryan) a large house glowing from the inside through many round holes, very similar to a Gothic reliquary. Honestly, having learned the topic of the current exhibition, I expected something similar - but no, Avvakumov turned the topic completely differently. All this looks like a very consistent development of the theme - I must say that such a thoroughness is characteristic of Avvakumov both as a curator and as an artist: if he takes on a topic, then he seeks to exhaust it completely.
In this case, the theme is almost endless, and it successfully rhymes with the ancient and beautiful, for our consciousness predominantly Byzantine material - mosaics. The mosaic added both weight and glamor to the objects (it's hard not to notice, and we've already written about this). Compared to previous similar exhibitions, where everything was mostly made of cardboard and wood, from scrap materials, everything here is very serious and thorough, and it is not clear whether this is good or bad. On the one hand, the warmth of the former free cardboardness inevitably leaves, and on the other hand, the architect is supposed to subjugate any material, and especially expensive, and for the gallery these architects are an absolute find, because the mosaic here was revealed from completely unexpected sides: monochromatic palette focused on the texture of Sergei Tchoban; simple as streaks of red paint at Blue Noses; thorny anthracite at Art-Bla; beads loved by women at the "Icing of Architects". The exhibition reveals the possibilities of the material in full.
But the material is material, and the theme is more interesting, and it has, let's say, two sides: first, what prototype of the reliquary the architects choose, and secondly, why they have it, what exactly do they hide in it. The answers to these two questions determine the properties of the objects shown, and it must be said that these answers are no less diverse than the demonstrated properties of the material.
Slava Mizin from "Blue Noses" turned to "the relic of the Russian avant-garde - Malevich." In his opinion, seeing the glamorization of the heritage and followers of the avant-garde, Malevich would turn over in his grave, so Mizin depicted how the Suprematist coffin made for Malevich by Suetin rears up, raised by red hammer-sickles, intending to fly away from museum officials and cultural workers who supplied its "ruffles". It remains unclear: whether the mosaic sickles are the very glamorous little things that poor Malevich is running away from, or whether the revolutionary idea still conflicts with the beautiful design of the object.
The curator of the exhibition, Yuri Avvakumov, in collaboration with Alena Kirtsova, designed the largest (almost to the ceiling) exhibition object, and not even just an object, but a project of a monument to Joseph Brodsky on Vasilyevsky Island. It is a large stone urn of a beautiful antique shape, tapered downwards. Outside, it is lined with plates of Pudog stone, and inside it is lined with round shelves with imitation of book spines. At the exhibition, the spines of the books are made of smalt, and the urn is equipped with an additional outer wall, similar to the second rack, as if all the books did not fit inside and the owner had to buy additional shelves.
The idea is beautiful, and, as is often the case with Avvakumov's objects, clever: in the object you can find several meanings and associations. First of all, of course, both the antique urn and the semi-known word cenotaph rhyme well with Brodsky's texts, in which there is a lot of interest in Roman and antique. Many books - if you take it as a sign, also rhyme with Brodsky's erudition. All together form the image of the book man's refuge.
Further contradictions. The cenotaph is a false tomb, an empty box, placed where the body of the deceased is not. In the Orthodox tradition, it is placed above the burial of a revered deceased, whose remains are buried "under the cover" (as a rule, with rare exceptions, cenotaphs receive individuals who have not yet been canonized, and the extraction of relics is followed by canonization and the placement of relics in a shrine - actually a reliquary, or, more simply, ground coffin). In this sense, Avvakumov's cenotaph is an under-reliquary, since the relic is fundamentally absent in it. Or a certain spirit of Joseph Brodsky should be considered a relic - which, in my opinion, in this case is close to the truth.
However, the cenotaph of Avvakumov / Kirtsova in no way refers to the Central Russian tradition, but on the contrary, in every possible way distances himself from it. First of all, we see not a tomb-box, but a jug without handles, that is, an urn. Urns never seem to have served as cenotaphs; either a cenotaph - an empty coffin, or an urn, here you have to choose. The shape of the urn contradicts the name cenotaph, but here it can also be assumed that this contradiction is intentional.
Because the first association that comes to mind when looking at this mega jug with miniature peeping windows in the shelter of Brodsky's spirit is the jug in which, as you know, Diogenes lived (he lived in pithos - a large jug, and not in a barrel, as we are used to speaking colloquially). The shape chosen by Avvakumov / Kirtsova is very similar to the antique pithos, jugs for grain, wine or oil, the shape of which sharply narrowed downwards allowed them to be buried in the ground to cool the product.
Brodsky's spirit then turns out to be a modern Diogenes, a hermit living among books in a jug. This, in general, is a true association, since Joseph Brodsky was alive for this country, for that Vasilievsky Island where he was going to come to die - an exile, an alien person. So his posthumous spirit must also be placed in something like a Diogenes jug. And, strictly speaking, any intellectual of this country, not even expelled and not left, but even simply locked in his small apartment filled with books around the perimeter, exists in exactly the same jug. With the only exception that Avvakumov, in the project of the monument, proposes to attach a spiral staircase to the jug, so that the curious can look inside the scribe's shelter (at the exhibition, one could look through the mirror in the ceiling). However, the main prototype of the cenotaph is not even a jug, but Newton's cenotaph, drawn at the end of the 18th century by the paper architect of the abstract forms of the French Revolution, Etienne Louis Bull. In this sense, the cenotaph performed by the famous master of "paper architecture" Yuri Avvakumov looks like a program work.
The second famous representative of the "paper" movement of the 1980s, participating in this exhibition, Ilya Utkin, took a fundamentally opposite path, designing a children's reliquary - a dollhouse. Its shape is the most typical, simplest and most understandable: a house with a four-pitched roof. It looks like any orphanage, and at the same time the most traditional Gothic or Renaissance reliquary-reliquary, or even an enlarged church "Zion", although the last comparison is, of course, a stretch.
If Avvakumov's object was realized almost exactly according to the project, perhaps without a staircase, which makes it possible to evaluate the architect's thought, but noticeably constrains the imagination of the mosaicist, then in the annotation to Utkin's project it is written that “the artist has the right not to repeat the architect's drawing, but to come up with his own image that meets the general idea . And this, in my opinion, was done in vain, since in Utkin's sketch the outer facades of the house were delightful promising tricks in the spirit of classical theater and Renaissance leads, and in the performance of Pelagia Angelopole the house is hung with toys and jewelry and this made him too girlish, too for children. Although it is insanely curious to look at it, and it must be admitted that it is the warmest and most soulful object at the exhibition.
Sergei Tchoban, one of the most successful Russian architects of our time, showed the Museum of Architectural Drawing, an object that at first glance looks like an imposing model of an architectural project. Such a museum could well have been built: it consists of four white bars, laid on top of each other with a slight shift, like an unfinished Rubik's cube or like boxes in some kind of filing cabinet (this technique of shifting tiers is popular in modern architecture, cf.
The new Shojima Museum in New York, a recent project by Farshid Moussawi for Defense or Eric Egeraat's Capital City for the City). The fifth, upper bar is mirrored and its edges, touched by an artificial tempering, reflect the wooden beams of the gallery ceiling, creating curious perspective illusions. Spots on mirrors are only part of the most complex texture that covers the entire volume. Their entire surface is covered with a mosaic of ivory color, or even rather - the color of antique marble, the pattern is constantly changing, alternating light cone-shaped bulges with fractional ornamental belts and a chaotically rough surface of thorny smalts. This reminds of two things: antique mosaics and many times rebuilt wall of the Byzantine city, in which, in addition to decorative masonry, there are the ends of marble columns used as building material and thinning the variegated surface.
Therefore, the Chobanov Museum of Drawing is perceived in two ways: it looks like a box with a secret that archaeologists have found and began to open, but the ancient mechanism has jammed, the movement has not ended, and now we will never, without destroying the priceless fabric of layers, find out what was inside. Perhaps drawings. The whole object looks like an antique artifact from excavations, and the similarity is enhanced by the painted columns placed by Tchoban on the walls - the mental illusion of a colonnade around makes one think of this object as an unusual kind of ancient capital … On the other hand, as already mentioned, such an object may well be to be a museum building, and remembering how much the SPEECH bureau of Choban and Kuznetsov is carried away by ornament, stone, classical allusions within modern architecture - it will not be surprising at all to see such a project not in the form of an object, but in earnest. And, of course, here I must say that Sergei Tchoban collects architectural graphics and draws beautifully himself.
Totan Kuzembaev chose an egg with a koshcheevy death in the relic. Death in an egg, an egg in a casket … The plot is fabulous, and the theme is rather archaic, ritual, some kind of shamanic, which is not surprising if you remember that three years ago in Venice Kuzembaev exhibited a Zaporozhets in a yurt. Generally speaking, if Avvakumov tied a knot between Joseph Brodsky and Diogenes, Ilya Utkin - between the children's Christmastide games of the 19th century and the Renaissance vedic, and Sergei Tchoban was thoroughly bogged down in ancient archeology, Kuzembaev plunged deeper than anyone else, into the unwritten ancient tales and rituals. Although in the project he suspended his object from a flying platform, thus extending the longest bridge from archaic to futurological fantasies.
Kuzembaev's "Kashchei Immortal" is a large and heavy metal box, into two lateral planes of which a multitude of iron spikes are inserted, sharpened looking inside the box and clearly threatening the black and white egg inside. The pikes can be moved manually, closing or, conversely, opening the egg. There is a mosaic at the ends of the peak, but since the mosaic dots seemed insufficient, the artist of this object, Verdiano Marzi, decorated the frame of an iron box with abstract color compositions. The paradox is that the object of storage, actually a relic, a needle, with a fabulous contradiction appeared outside and multiplied. Or the peaks should be considered attributes of the main needle hidden in the egg, its, so to speak, older brothers in number of a couple of hundred.
These five "big" objects are five of the most ambitious improvisations on the theme, and all have happily moved away from the direct historical prototypes of the reliquary. Among the four smaller objects exhibited on the mezzanine of the Solo Mosaico gallery, there is also an obvious unanimity in the search for diversity.
The religious theme was touched upon only by the architects of Icing, who co-authored with Olga Soldatova “Stavroasterion” - loosely translated as a cross-star. The hexagonal prism is trimmed with black and white beads and placed on a bead scattering. On the six sides there are crosses very similar to the crosses of the metropolitan's vestments, and on the two ends there are six-pointed Magendavids, the stars of Judaism, which in a curious way alternate with the three petals of the Mitsubishi emblem, which adds a third to the two religious symbols - from the consumer society, modern fans of Mamon, an evil spirit earthly goods from the Old Testament. It is difficult to guess what exactly "Icing" considers a relic, their work itself looks like a relic of the three gods. But it fits perfectly into their creative credo: you should at least remember the penguin who meditated before the commandments of all religions on the screen of the modern god - the TV.
Art-Bla, true to their favorite principle of abstract anthropomorphism, exhibited a shaggy black oval with a thin, brightly glowing slit and called it “Pi Number”. The mosaic is very interesting, matte anthracite.
Project Meganom turned their reliquary into a narrow, sprawling molded building called Fish, which would fit a modern Catholic basilica.
and Dmitry Bush and many collaborators showed an object apparently inspired by a surreal head cut into ribbons like an orange peel. Here, however, it looks more like a partially bandaged mummy, and the surfaces of the ribbons can be viewed both from the inside (there they are dark with a golden sheen and imply thoughts) and outside, where they are fawn with a slight relief, like leather, and symbolize, according to the authors' intention, cultural layers.
A catalog has been published for the exhibition, presented at the finish of the exposition last Thursday.
