Perhaps the most sensitive of the Russian programs of the XIII Venice Architecture Biennale to the theme of Common Ground, "Common Ground", set by the curator of the architect David Chipperfield, was The Way of Enthusiasts, "Enthusiasts Highway", located on all three floors of the neo-Gothic palazzo Casa dei Tre Oci on the Venetian island of Giudecca until 25 November.
As you know, Chipperfield's idea is to take architecture out of the circle of elite amusements of the bourgeois world, to free it from the glamorous shackles of fashion-style. The English curator wished to show architecture within the living process of the life of human society, in all its complex ties with society, politics, economics, and culture. These connections inevitably manifest the so-called problematic fields of communication, caused by all sorts of cataclysms: wars, black holes in the budget, stratification into rich and poor, systemic mistakes in politics (including cultural). And architecture in this case acts as a barometer of these relations, it accurately reacts to all hopes, expectations and collapse that occur in public life.
Actually, the exhibition “Highway of Enthusiasts” is about the ambivalence of the concepts “utopia” and “dystopia”. They swap places so easily! The material was generously provided by our past of the era of developed socialism, with which we are all frustrated in one way or another.
If we follow the logic of thinking of late Soviet modernism (60s - 80s), then all life in the USSR, as in a children's designer, was modeled from elementary cubes and cells. Houses were built from modular cubes - panels, the family was the unit of society. In this cell, the lifestyle was also determined by a standard set of certain modules: kindergarten, school, institute, work, free medicine, dreams about something more. As well as love, family and pets. Well, a TV set, a washing machine, walls made of "despe", Yugoslavian boots, queues for sausage, scarce books on junk coupons and a savings bank account, on which the sum for the purchase of the desired six hundred square meters or a new "Zhiguli" is unbearably slow.
These existential modules, blocks-bricks, from which the life of an individual in the era of developed socialism and the first years of perestroika was built, have undergone an interesting interpretation by the artists of the Highway of Enthusiasts exhibition (organizer: Foundation V - A - C; curator Katerina Chuchalina, Sylvia Franceschini). When you enter a respectable palazzo, where the exposition is deployed, you are discouraged by an empty hall with six brand-new washing machines that work hard for themselves, wash, spin someone's clothes in the drum. I involuntarily recall the anecdote: "Hello, is this a laundry?" - “Hu… Chechnya! This is the Ministry of Culture. " In our Venetian case, it all turned out the way it is: it is precisely an institution of culture, and the laundry in it is conditioned not by the zealous business plan of owners or tenants who decided to economically use vacant space, but by the leftist discourse of the young generation of domestic artists. In this case, Arseny Zhilyaev, who forked out a rich fund V - A - C for the purchase of washing machines for his project "The Coming Dawn". Art is not a computer game, says Zhilyaev, but real work with people and their problems. That is why he wanted to revive the theme of the communal paradise of the Soviet utopia (recall the plan of life in communal houses, where at the peak of collectivism everything was common, including kitchens and laundries). Each visitor can bring their own linen to the museum's laundry room and wash it free of charge. That way, the money of the rich can actually benefit the poor.
The same age as Zhilyaev, artist Alexei Buldakov, no less well-known and respected in the left milieu, noted that Arseny's project is very insensitive to the territory of art itself, since art gives happiness "purposelessness without a goal" (according to Kant), and Arseny's work is very pragmatic. On my own behalf, I will add that it is still - in the best traditions of the Itinerant populists - and journalistic, and naturalistic, and little aesthetic. So you sometimes wonder: isn't it more honest for such a fashionable left to finally become real politicians and not languish in the ephemeral web of artistic creativity, which is always about abstraction, form and taste. By the way, the Wanderers realized this in the end. It's a pity it's late.
Buldakov himself came up with an excellent project as part of the Urban Fauna Lab group on the fauna of Soviet factories in the late Soviet era. In this case, the object of study was the cats of the Moscow electric lamp plant MELZ, which was built before the revolution, and finally went wild in the late perestroika time. Buldakov and So clearly appeal to the poetics of Moscow conceptualism. They create quasi-scientific descriptions of the life of cats, conduct quasi-studies of their biological structure. Collect laboratory objects: from feces to gnawed objects. They create an archive beloved by Moscow conceptualists. However, they do it with a healthy sense of humor and excellent artistic courage. Having looked at the cat albums created by Alexei Buldakov, where the artist painted the new fluffy aborigines of MELZ in colors, you certainly want to add Buldakov's name to the host of the best portrait painters of the world of four-legged.
In principle, with regard to the peculiarities of the language of communication between contemporary Russian art and the architectonics of late Soviet life, Moscow conceptualism is the most grateful speaker of this language. He, too, recognizes himself in the primary speech modules and cells that are commonly used by the citizens of the USSR, from which archives are formed, whole palaces and cities are built in honor of the vulgarity of the country of soviets, which once reigned, on the one hand, thanks to the systematics of the absurd (the expression of Professor M. M. Allenov), on the other hand, thanks to the ubiquitous gray, murky color of truisms and platitudes.
Moscow conceptualism and its new adherents rule the show at the Casa dei Tre Oci. Documentation of the textbook works by Andrei Monastyrsky and the KD group on the search for existential space in the space of Soviet topography and geography is replaced by photographs of the first absurdist, Oberiut performances by the SZ and Gnezdo groups.
The intonation of smiling melancholy and cheerful loneliness is picked up by young people. Empty metal flagpoles are being assembled into a post-suprematist installation in Anastasia Ryabova's work "Dude, Where's Your Flag?" In one of the photographs of the exhibition, Andrey Kuzkin, a lone figure standing in a dank field of a Moscow microdistrict, is holding a poster with one word - "Tired". The same posters lie in an impressive pile under the photograph. Those who stand in solidarity with Kuzkin can take it as a keepsake. Kuzkin also became the hero of the film, where he is trying to sell in an underground passage his little sculptures made of bread crumbs using prison technology. Sell at a price assigned by unknown buyers. The proceeds of fifteen rubles (ten were given for poverty) honestly testifies to how terribly far the "sovrisk" is from the people!
Special trust in the exhibition and the works of the artists participating in it is born due to the presence of a second, truly archival (without any "quasi") plan. The very name of the exposition obliges this. It contains the ambivalence of the themes of utopia and dystopia of Russia's historical past. Indeed, in ancient times, prisoners were transported to Siberia along the current Moscow "Highway of Enthusiasts".
In separate rooms of Casa dei Tre Oci, documentaries of the 1970s and early 1980s are shown today about the construction of Soviet skyscrapers and new neighborhoods (Troparevo, Strogino, Maryino). And the feeling, as if again in childhood, and in a pioneer camp watching the obligatory spirit-uplifting newsreel before the film "The Fate of the Resident".
The one who enters the first floor is greeted by the classic "Chertanovskaya" series of photographs by Yuri Palmin. Several rooms are dedicated to architectural graphics from the 70s and 80s. The plan of the microdistrict, axonometric projections of houses, a new building of the Brezhnev era in a section. Now it is already the art of sentimental nostalgia. As well as one of the best exhibits of the exhibition - the project of the city of Baikonur (Leninsk), made by the patriarch of Soviet modernism Stanislav Belov.
