On August 28, the exhibition “Look into the eyes of war. Russia in the First World War in newsreels, photographs and documents. " The authors of the design, or rather even the architectural solution of its space articulating the exposition, are Evgeny Ass, Kirill Ass and Nadezhda Korbut. The rest of the curatorial staff is complex and multi-part: in addition to the project manager (Zelfira Tregulov), scientific advisor (Sergey Mironenko), scientific curators (Olga Barkovets, Alexey Litvin), designers (Alexander Vasin, Yulia Kondratyeva), there is a production director (Pavel Lungin) and just a director (Elena Yakovich). High-quality performance was ensured by the company "SpetsialMontazhServis" Alexander Starovoitov. It is unrealistic to understand the contribution of all participants without inside information, but one can appreciate the result: the exhibition of historical materials is presented as a very effective performance in which architecture plays one of the most important roles. It, in fact, creates visuality, because despite the presence of a number of large paintings, most of the exhibits are old black-and-white photographs, written documents and newsreels, which also had to be turned into a material component of the exposition.
The space of the New Manege, two long halls diverging from the lobby, has been completely transformed and does not at all resemble the usual white box. The first part, dedicated to the years before the war and its very beginning, is framed in the spirit of Adolf Loos. The space of the hall is, in fact, built into a home interior with plank floors and walls painted in white, gray-blue and terracotta. This house is cozy and imperceptibly Viennese, immediately reminiscent of the Steiner house, the Secession building and the MAK Museum of Applied Arts. The Austrian association is quite appropriate: upon entering, we are immediately reminded that the world war began with an incident in the Habsburg Empire and that it was preceded by a local war in the Balkans. The home atmosphere conveys a relaxed state in which future enemies stayed until the beginning of the pan-European catastrophe. The large hall looks like a dining room due to the fact that its entire middle is occupied by a table of quite everyday appearance, although it is covered with impeccably illuminated showcases with documents and photographs instead of dining utensils. Antique prints in neat frames are hung on the walls in a very homely way. One of them is devoted to the meetings of the cousins Nicholas, Wilhelm and George; there is also a portrait of their common grandmother, Queen Victoria, which is indispensable in such cases. Serenity by inertia continues after the declaration of war. Even the pictures of the three sons of the Grand Duke Constantine in military uniform and ordinary soldiers who visited a photo studio before being sent to the front are imbued with it. Only artists with their inherent sensitivity describe what is happening in terms of the Apocalypse: such are Natalia Goncharova's Mystical Images of War and Olga Rozanova's collages for Alexei Kruchenykh's man-made book The Universal War.
The next section, which reveals the topic of the work of the medical service and the participation of women in war, is, by contrast, completely otherworldly, aloof. Here, instead of clear wooden walls with openings, white curtains sway, sometimes dividing compartments with display tables, or serving as screens onto which frames of the chronicle are projected. The solution is very simple and at the same time effective: we are in a tent, a hospital ward, but also in a world dominated by women, and in the clouds, that is, maybe already on our way to heaven. The transcendental note brings to mind the white curtains on the luminous "windows" from the installation "Cistern", made in 2011 by Alexander Brodsky. This is probably not a coincidence - Nadezhda Korbut and Kirill Ass have been working in Brodsky's bureau for many years.
The third part of the exposition, which entirely occupies the second hall, is not only not minimalistic, but expressive in a baroque way, and for good reason: it tells about military actions, heroism and death, patriotic appeals and the inglorious exit from the war of the country, which has ceased to be the former Russia. In contrast to the bright first half, it is dark here. Spots of light burst out of the darkness: lightboxes with photographs of the military, front maps, illuminated shop windows, newsreel screens, rectangles of paintings. The dramatic contrast between light and shadow is compounded by the contrast between order and chaos. Slanting strokes break into the rectangular logic of the walls - showcases and screens seem to be in motion. Spatial disorientation is further exacerbated by crumpled metal sheets covering the floor. They glare like the surface of the sea, in which everything floats and seems to sink, and at the same time they rattle alarmingly under the feet of the audience. Chaos brings death: the wall lined with cells with portraits of the Cavaliers of St. George looks like the wall of a columbarium, the black podiums of showcases look like coffins. The largest architectural element here is the "headquarters building", climbing into which, you can look around the space of the hall, extended by the mirrored end wall, and feel the helplessness of the command. Surprisingly, the exposition in the rooms of the "headquarters" is devoted not to the high command, but to General Brusilov, who declared that loyalty to Russia for him is higher than loyalty to the emperor. The logic of the exposition leads the viewer from the beginning of the hall, where the main theme is military glory and patriotic appeals, to the last exhibit: an electronic copy of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Looking back, the viewer sees that the banner-like textile screens have turned into red banners.
In principle, you can not turn around, but simply raise your head and see the perspective of the hall reflected in the mirror, together with yourself. The impression is unexpected, even shocking: the light conditions are such that until the last moment you do not realize that there is a mirror in front, and suddenly you see yourself among the coffins floating on the dark sea. This is the most powerful, but not the only one, of the techniques used by the authors of the exhibition to curtail historical time and actualize the message of the exhibition, the title of which contains three dates: 1914/1918/2014. In the first, "home" part, there are two such tricks. One of them is a kind of automatic monarchical altar. On the wall hangs a completely kitsch-looking kerchief with portraits of Emperor Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, and under it there is a rather low showcase table with a page of the first All-Russian census with their names (“Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, owner of the Russian land, Alexandra Fedorovna Romanova, mistress of the Russian land "). To view the recordings, the viewer bends down - and involuntarily bows to the royal couple. The second focus is purely visual. The sheets of Kruchenykh-Rozanova's "Ecumenical War" are assembled by eight in a black mat, similar to the binding of a window: this is how they hint to us that the events in response to which they appeared did not remain in the past, separated from the present day by a safe distance. Well, in the hospital part, the illusion of merging with the other world is simply achieved. The curtains are translucent, and the figures of visitors that shine through behind them seem as immaterial as the moving shadows of people who lived and died a hundred years ago.
Exhibition projects with a large budget and international participation take a long time, and at the beginning of preparation, no one, of course, could have foreseen that "Look War in the Eyes" would open against the background of reports of hostilities and fruitless negotiations of top officials of states that it would turn out to be so frighteningly relevant … The choice of the hall, the huge number of images of members of the royal family and the fact that Dmitry Medvedev spoke at the opening suggest that the exhibition was conceived as a state-patriotic one. But the resulting artistic statement carries a completely different meaning. Go and watch.
