Alice:
- Yes, and you, forgive me, smile in a strange way.
Smile of a cat:
- A normal cat would begin to smile, yes …
Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll / translated by Nina Demura / radio play 1976
Yesterday the Zodchestvo festival opened with Gostiny Dvor, it will close tomorrow - for several years in a row the festival has lasted not four, but three days, so you need to watch it quickly.
The festival was opened by Minister Medinsky, Lenin and Putin are smiling at the entrance, Khrushchev is waving his shoe, then there are “domnash” and “Crimeanash”, and the theme is identity. In a word, I went there in fright, although not without preparation: all autumn we
interviewed the curators of special projects about their intentions. And there are few visitors; someone has already called the festival half empty. People seem to be getting smaller every year, despite the free admission. But in vain. Because the curators, the Asadov brothers, despite their unexpected ideas about both avant-garde and identity, managed to organize the exhibition space very well, which does not happen so often with Zodchestvo.
This year, the exhibition space has become a hybrid of cells, proposed by Yuri Avvakumov several years ago in an attempt to transform Zodchestvo into a biennial in a proportional way - and the labyrinth that the festival has always been. Gostiny Dvor is filled with frames of stands, not high, but of massive thickness, built basilically along the wide main nave, intersected by a wide "transept". Outside, the walls are mostly light gray, on them in the corridors between the pavilions there are exhibitions of the curatorial program, inside - the regions and departments, although towards the end this logic changes. But - it is light, spacious and almost invisible both too plastic exhibitions and spots of kitsch luxury.
The lightness of the atmosphere is successfully supported by two main stands - Moscow and St. Petersburg: we all remember carpets, luminous floors and other expensive and spectacular undertakings; now the Moscow stand dedicated to the Moskva River competition is finished with plywood, and it is decorated with a model of the river, which the General Planning Institute already showed at Zodchestvo last year. The stand of the St. Petersburg KGA must be recognized as the best of all regional and city ones: a very generalized and non-pathetic, but large, waist-length model of the city center is built in it. The visitor wanders between the laconic pedestals-houses, and can write on them with a red felt-tip pen his thoughts about different places; something, for orientation, has already been written, and the information collected at the exhibition is promised to be transferred directly to the KGA. I must admit it is not interactive, but the attraction is pleasant.
The curators promised that there will be more thematic exhibitions than ever, and they did not deceive. Half of them turned out to be tablets on the walls, but the other half turned out to be in earnest. But you need to start with the theme of the festival. It was chosen collegially, and as it happens, they could not agree - it turned out that Zodchestvo is dedicated at least simultaneously to the century of the avant-garde and the search for the identity of Russian architecture.
Two festival themes, avant-garde and identity, coexist in the central space of the exhibition in parallel and in completely different ways. Everything that concerns the avant-garde and modernism looks more like a catalog-guide and perceptibly relates to educating the public about the history of the architectural direction, which had its anniversary. Fragments of the catalog are diluted with a number of solid black kiosks, representing each - one object of post-war modernism and a performance project by Eduard Kubensky, where visitors are entertained with kaleidoscopes of figures of the "black square", "Mayakovsky T-shirts", "Melnikov windows" and many others: kaleidoscopes can be assembled by taste and buy as a keepsake.
In comparison with the avant-garde, already almost decomposed into cells, identity is a controversial thing: no one really knows what it is, although many are looking for it: someone their own personal, creative; someone national and state. These latter are especially alarming: the festival has already been accused of politicization, and perhaps for good reason. However: before, at all the previous "Architecture" were present and were very noticeable fragments of homespun-gilded identity - now the Cossacks, now the huts - and now there is almost nothing of the kind, or at least not noticeable.
The given search for a mysterious artistic identity turned out to be surprisingly correct, in the spirit of the torments of Russian literature - and this is the only normal way for this painful topic. All identity has gone into objects and feels great there. The best collection of objects became - here I will join the opinion of Yuri Avvakumov, expressed yesterday in the fb - an exhibition of students and graduates of the MARSH school, a project that emerged from nowhere, for some reason not announced in advance among special projects, although it is noticeable that it was prepared: all models of one size and perfectly reveal the Russian soul.
For example, Andrey Kostanda, 1st year master's program, "Innocence" - a forest of chaotically placed identical sticks, smaller in the center (did everyone run away from the stage?), More on the edges: "symbolizes simplicity in the character of a Russian person, but is difficult to read by other peoples … Mikhail Mikadze, also 1 year student, "Becoming", is designed to reflect "… the chronically unfinished state of Russian architecture and the formalization of the relationship between managers and governed" - a model of scaffolding. Maria Kurkova - "Fence to Europe". Natalya Sablina: the pavilion "symbolizes the transparent but intricate subtle organization of the soul of the Russian person."
Elena Petukhova's project turned out to be remarkable - she managed not only to collect video judgments of many famous architects about the "genetic code" of their work, but also - each or almost every project participant illustrated his view with an installation object; some of them were created specifically for the exhibition. The string of objects is cramped in the corridor between the pavilions, they spill out, and not everyone is noticeable because of this. The most inconspicuous, but in my opinion one of the best - Ilya Mukosey and Natalia Voinova, stands in front of the entrance. The viewer is invited "to see the national architectural identity, carefully look at the center of the square for 20 seconds, if the effect is not achieved, pause and repeat." They would ask to look at the center of a black square - it would not be funny or interesting. And so - the excessive irony is understandable, if only because Ilya Mukosey himself dealt with a similar topic in the summer - as the curator of the "Russian Character" competition for the Morton Grad microdistrict.
All objects are absolutely beautiful, but after the empty space, the funniest of them is the jar of pickles: “Identity. Five liters”by Nikita Yavein and a golden ax from Yuliy Borisov. The most mysterious is the muddy spiral sphere, the generalized dome of St. Basil the Blessed from Alexei Levchuk and Vladimir Frolov; and if it were not for the dubious assertion of the authors that a spiral convex ornament adorned the domes of Russian churches in the 16th century (even if they asked someone, there are very few such famous examples, more precisely one or two), then the object with its smell of glue would be, I suppose it's perfect.
The curators themselves, Andrei and Nikita Asadovs, have added odors to the image of Russian identity, having erected a model of the Shukhov Tower in their “own” part of the exposition, from the top of which tar beats, depicting, presumably, oil. Exactly the same model of the tower, only ice, the brothers showed at Arch Moscow in the summer; Apparently something fuel is actual in winter. And even then: there is something of an oil derrick in the tower, and Shukhov, as everyone now knows, at one time designed oil tanks like the one in which Comrade Sukhov sat with the women of the East. A wooden block and a silk shawl with a hint of diamonds complement the tower to the triad, and on the wall there are many more triads written, presumably, revealing the Russian soul, but arbitrary, for example: pewter-wooden-glass.
It is striking that the overwhelming majority of authors did not seek "actual identity" in the vanguard. The students focused on the abstract, again rather literary, strings of the Russian soul. The venerable architects, for the most part, relied on irony of varying degrees of bitterness and on recollections of their projects (which is not surprising, because they were asked to tell about the genocode of their own work) it seems that only Sergei Tchoban showed something similar to the search for special plasticity, however, in the description he talks about Pskov and Novgorod, and the object is paradoxically similar to the capital of Golosov.
Almost no one began to look for an actual identity in the vanguard, as the curators called to do. This was probably the only way to merge two very different themes of the festival. One can talk endlessly about identity, it can be personal, creative, national, state. It is strange to talk about imperial identity, an empire, by definition, should claim to be global, not identity, but such eccentrics are in no small number. As for architectural national identity, it is known that both Russian and all other European cultures were looking for it in the 19th and early 20th centuries, responding to the call of romantics, and mainly in medieval models. The search ended with the emergence of the avant-garde, which replaced the national with the global, and the universal with the personal and creative. That is why it is at least strange to look for national identity in the vanguard. One can assume only one adequate way: since the avant-garde makes the main person and the will of the artist-creator (see, for example, Kandinsky, but not only him), then identity must be sought in oneself. But then what does the national have to do with it? This explains the irony of many objects on the topic.
The theory proposed by the Assadovs, who discovered the "five avant-gardes" in Russian history, starting with Prince Vladimir, were criticized without me, but it seems to me that something needs to be added here. This version of Russian architectural identity looks like a hybrid of the romantic quest for historicism - and the forced need to look in history not just for identity, but for good identity. As if they explained to Academician Solntsev that in addition to the Terem Palace there is also an avant-garde, and it is much cleaner, more popular, it is him who must be revived in order to cling to the source. In a word, Russian cultured people now, if they don't know, then they feel: there is a bad identity, imperial, pseudo-Russian, and there is a good, avant-garde, and from time to time, no, no, yes, and there is a hope that this, the second, a good identity will save us from the first, bad one.
Quite an absurd proposition, generally speaking. “Zodchestvo” traditionally has a grain of absurdity, it does not leave him as his own; but this time it seemed to me that it was also intentionally strengthened somewhat. Indeed, who in their right mind would believe that Kizhi is the avant-garde, just because Peter in 1714 banned stone construction? Yes, and Putin and Lenin smile in a strange way. And the Mother of God in the painting by Petrov-Vodkin throws up her hands in eternal amazement. The weirder the better.
