One of the leitmotifs of the XIII Architecture Biennale in Venice, which will run until November 25 this year, is the synthesis of arts. Curator David Chipperfield suggested not to perceive architecture in isolation, out of context. He suggested taking into account the involvement of architecture in the real process of life, in communication with various social, political, economic subjects, with other types of art.
Moscow artists and architects Alexander Ponomarev, Alexey Kozyr, Ilya Babak and Sergey Shestakov played the most sophisticated and elegant way of communicating architecture with various arts in the exposition of the national pavilion of Ukraine, which they created, located in the Venetian Arsenal. The exposition entitled "The Architecture of Mirages" was supported by the Joint Transportation Company, VIART-GROUP, and the Kirill company.
The theme of "architecture of mirages" presupposes the image of the borderland, gentle balancing on the edge - dream and reality, illusory and real. This theme gives an excellent reason to show architecture in a non-architectural modality - the ghost and reflection of other types of creativity: sculpture, painting, video art. The condition for the synthesis of all these arts at the exhibition was the art of the Theater.
The very exposition with thin light screens, screens with meditative pictures, mysterious objects immersed in flasks with water, virtuoso graphics on top of geographical maps was associated with a kind of mysterious action, the meaning of which had to be solved for a long time and without fuss.
The motto of the pavilion's exposition may be the words of the ancient historian Philostratus the Younger that art is “the ability to make the invisible visible”. In other words, we are talking about the main role of what is called imagination both in the creation of an image and in its perception. It and only it can provide an understanding of the world in its artistic dimension.
The architects and artists of the pavilion proposed to make two projects from a series of so-called mobile museums: the Personal Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
The image of the museums was inspired by the stay of Alexander Ponomarev and Sergey Shestakov at the Ukrainian research station "Vernadsky" in Antarctica. The artists worked there. Documentation of Sergey Shestakov's work is presented in one end hall of the exhibition. It is necessary to enter it, taking off your shoes. You are offered to lie on the pillows, to look at the ceiling in the dark. But first put on stereo glasses. Suddenly everything changes, light pictures begin to appear on the ceiling, and you find yourself in motion along some landscape of fantastic beauty. By the sparkling bubbles splashing right in your face, you realize that the shooting is underwater. And white, like a living and breathing substance, which you bend around, to which you touch in your movement, is nothing more than blocks of ice immersed in the water column, icebergs. This journey is just about the reality of the unreal, the borderland as such.
During the expedition to Antarctica, both Shestakov and Ponomarev were captivated by the beauty of the most romantic natural phenomena - the mirages that arose on the transparent sea horizon. Now everyone understands the nature of this phenomenon, the dependence on rationally explainable physical processes. However, the uniqueness of mirages lies in the fact that with the rigid physical determination of the "construction" of the image (the influence of the meeting of different layers of the atmosphere, different temperatures, refraction, refraction of light, etc.), nature itself gives us an absolutely metaphysical spectacle, not conditioned by any pragmatic explanations. This is truly pure art, woven in kind. It was not for nothing that the best writers were inspired by the images of mirages and introduced them into their works.
The mirages themselves have become the theme of beautiful whirlwinds and scherzo graphics by Alexander Ponomarev. And the architecture of the museums dedicated to them is captured in fragile models floating in the water, and on the screen of an excellently made 3d film.
The personal museum is three interconnected floating mobile cubes, alternately rising above the water and going under it. The facades of these cubes are made of different H2O consistencies: water, steam and ice, respectively. Exhibition halls are located inside the cubes.
The personal art museum is supposed to be made in a minimalist style and put into the ocean to sail its waters from December to March. The very image of this floating museum can be interpreted in two ways. The first is connected with the idea of submobiles, beloved by the artist Ponomarev: structures that spontaneously emerge and submerge into the water, giving happiness to observe sudden changes in the natural environment. The artist has been implementing this idea for many years. You can remember his famous submarines as they pop up in different parts of the world, from Moscow to Paris. You can also remember the exhibition "Memory of Water", which was held in the Paris Museum of Science and Technology in 2002. Then forty submobiles diving inside glass columns created quite an architectural composition reminiscent of the Parisian island of Cité. And New York's Manhattan sank from sand into water and floated up in crystal columns in the Surface Tension project (Cueto Project gallery, New York, 2008).
In the case of the three cubes-halls of the Personal Museum, the viewer gets the opportunity to personally experience the metamorphoses that occur with the perception of art in different environments: in the depths of the ocean, on the surface, in the arms of ice, steam, water, that is, again, it is difficult to understand the topic “borderland . Being in the constant movement of the natural environment, the viewer maximally concentrates his own creative abilities of the imagination. And the art exhibited in the cube halls affects him with tenfold power.
The second aspect of the interpretation of the Personal Museum is related to the theme of the mirage itself. When viewers see the museum on the horizon, it will appear to them as a perfect mirage. And, what is most interesting, correlated with the avant-garde design. Judging by the presented documentary photographs, regarding the mirages observed by Ponomarev and Shestakov, projects born in the laboratory of the Russian avant-garde, in the workshops of the Institute of Artistic Culture (INHUK) in the early 1920s, come to mind. It was then that young masters (Rodchenko, Stenberg, Medunetsky, Ioganson) create spatial constructions as a manifestation of pure engineering form.
It is important to remember here that the spatial constructions of the Russian avant-garde artists (K. Medunetsky, brothers V. and G. Stenberg) worked as ideal modules for "probing" the forces of natural gravity. Thin plates, slats, discs created the illusion of a self-building transformer. In an eternal transformation and at the same time in their precise engineering (the object should in no case fall to pieces, either visually or physically), they anticipated the experiments of the great masters of the 20th century, the "mobiles" of Alexander Calder, for example. At the same time, both the dynamic objects of the avant-garde artists, perceived in motion, and the dynamic image of the Personal Museum testify to their involvement in the image of illusion. This is architecture that takes the lessons of imagination from nature itself.
The second object of "Mirage Architecture" is the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antarctica. His image is also associated with the Russian avant-garde, only with the most radical, experimental projects. Here is how the artist Ponomarev told about the museum: “The museum looks like a 100-meter non-self-propelled vessel and a residential module. An architectural structure is mounted on the deck: a hotel and exhibition halls. When the ship arrives at the site, by redistributing ballast, it stands upright, like a float. At the top there are hotels, under the water - a museum. Steamers dock at the ship, people check into a hotel, admire the floating icebergs … Then they get into a camera-boat, go down and find themselves in the Museum of Modern Art! When the navigation ends and the ice comes to the polar regions, the ship is dragged to the south."
If we look for parallels to such architecture in the great avant-garde past, then one, the most fantastic image comes to mind - "The Flying City" by Georgy Krutikov. The architect defended it as a diploma in 1928 at the school of Nikolai Ladovsky in VKHUTEMAS-VKHUTEIN. Krutikov's project of "mobile architecture" envisaged the creation of buildings with the help of atomic energy, vertically hanging above the ground, assembled in the likeness of huge cylinders. Communication between them and the land, which, according to the architect, was freed up for work and rest, would also be carried out with the help of "flying bathyscaphes" - cabins capable of moving in the air, on land, on water and under water. Moreover, the cabin could also be a living cell. By the way, Georgy Krutikov was immediately called “Soviet Jules-Verne”. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Antarctica brings the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antarctica closer to Krutikov's project not only by powerful technical challenges, but also by the very fact of recognizing the power and audacity of creative imagination. In principle, both the Museum in Antarctica and Krutikov's "Flying City" are also today a pure, disinterested form of communication with nature and the world. Pure mirage!
But what about art, which is literally in the water and which can only be viewed from the bathyscaphe? For its installation, a system of complex modular structures and water-impermeable capsule frames are used. Someone will find it excessive to look at works through the water column. However, the authors of the project are not at all afraid of this visual radicalism. It's just that inside different natural environments, a different emotional perception of the object of art is born, its creative comprehension. In addition, there are artists who, with their work, have proved the likelihood and organic nature of such a vision. It is pertinent to recall, for example, Bill Viola, in whose video installations the element of water plays a simply archetypal, essential role at the biblical level. In many of his works, we contemplate the world precisely through the thickness of the water stream. So the meeting between the artist and his audience in the new float museum is still as possible!
The meeting of Moscow spectators with the exposition "The Architecture of Mirages" promises to take place very soon. Museum of Architecture named after A. V. Shchuseva plans to bring the exhibition to her hall "Outbuilding-Ruin".
