The idea of the exhibition belongs to Tamara Pikhovkina, and it was prepared by Tatyana Lysova and Anna Ilyicheva from the Moscow Architectural Institute with the participation of Alexander Ermolaev and the TAF Workshop (exposition design). As part of the jubilee exposition, the organizers tried to present all the periods of creativity of the person whose name the students and graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute for many years "spoiled" walls, trains, government furniture and even works of art.
"Ushats" is almost the main code word of the Moscow Institute of Architecture, by which students and graduates of the institute recognize each other in any part of the world, although the question of where the tradition of writing wherever the hand can reach is, by and large it remains open. So at the opening day in the VKHUTEMAS gallery, guests told a variety of versions. So, Mikhail Shubenkov, the first vice-rector of the Moscow Architectural Institute, admitted that in his youth he believed that this was just another name for the institute, and German Orlov remembered an anecdote about Lenin and VKHUTEMAS: allegedly when in 1918 Vladimir Ilyich looked into the Higher artistic and technical workshops and saw the creations of the students, he wandered about the auditoriums, lost, repeating: "What a horror, what a horror!" And since not everything was in order with the diction of the leader of the world proletariat, everyone heard: "What an ear, what an ear!" Ilya Lezhava said that he personally read an article-exposure in "Komsomolskaya Pravda", which spoke about how bad and indecent it is to spoil monuments with inscriptions, and that the architect Mikhail Ushats "distinguished himself" especially in this. There is also a story that even the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR Andrei Gromyko repeatedly received notes of protest from the heads of European states, because the strange inscription "ushats" that appeared everywhere surprised and frightened, and no one knew whether it was a call for war or for peace …
And only Maria Nikolaevna Kostina, a classmate of Mikhail Lazarevich, was able to tell how everything really happened. Once a group of students was sitting in the dining room waiting for lunch, and on one of the aluminum spoons, Mikhail Lazarevich's comrade Volodya Bykov scratched out the name "Ushats": he wanted to check how long the spoon would "return" to them again. Alas, the spoon traveled, and then Bykov scrawled the name of his friend on another spoon. The next time one of them came back! After some time, an announcement appeared on the door of the dining room: “Entry in outer clothing is prohibited. Administration and … Usac”. The same name turned out to be signed on a poster at the medical office. And since then the inscription “Ushac” appears everywhere, to which the students eventually began to add a solid sign. For example, she is often featured in the films of George Danelia. But, in fact, if not for the prank of a classmate, the surname Ushats would not have turned into a visiting card of the Moscow Architectural Institute.
However, as Yuri Murzin noted, Ushats is not a legend, Ushats is, first of all, a man. And this man lived a long and interesting life, he created, painted, invented. He was an artist at the Moscow State University's pop studio "Our House", and there, faced with the need to create scenery in the absence of money, he invented the genre of "flower fables", when text sounds against the background of colored patches flying into the air. Some of these miniatures have survived to this day, and at the opening they were performed by the actors of the Theater of Plastic Thinking (TePlaMysh) at the TAF Workshop.
In addition, Mikhail Ushats was a "permanent freelance artist" in the famous magazine "Crocodile" (there was only one staff artist, he was also the main artist) and for many years worked as a production designer in a variety of opera, drama and puppet theaters in the country. In particular, it was he who invented the isopalindrome genre, when inverted phrases are supplied with humorous pictures, and he is also the author of the main palindrome of each markhishnik: "MARCHI is a temple" (the frame of this isopalindrome is left empty so that those who wish can finish drawing it themselves).
Mikhail Lazarevich also took part in the restoration of portraits of the family tree of ceremonial families of the State Historical Museum, and even the commission of art critics could not distinguish twelve paintings belonging to Ushac's brush from the originals.
One of the goals of the exhibition, which describes in detail all the "stages of the long journey", was to finally find the truth and dispel myths, therefore all the texts presented at it were specially coordinated with Mikhail Lazarevich, and therefore absolutely reliable. In the Moscow Architectural Institute, or rather in the VKHUTEMAS gallery, Usac returned until May 5.
