For the pavilion dedicated to Russian émigré poets, the Pushkin House in London could not have chosen a more suitable author than Alexander Brodsky. All his installations are completely far from construction and are close to poetry - subtle, nostalgic and quiet, non-pathetic - that one wants to place them somewhere at the extreme extreme of the ultra-spectrum. Here, at one pole, a merchant-successful, fat-bellied panel construction complex, on the other - the silent poetry of a barn and a barrack, cracking, dying. The architecture of the search for theme and meaning, and such a search when the found is not declared, but seems to be hidden back, inside a dull imagery. It seems that building materials in Brodsky's installations are being deliberately destroyed, worn out like an old rug, subjected to the austerity of a barn: a minimum of materials, colors. Forms too, however, the minimum, the most such, barely subsistence. In a word, the poetry of the actual internal emigration, now and then, so Brodsky fits here in every sense.
The project of the Pushkin House "101st Kilometer - Further Everywhere" is dedicated to the work of Russian émigré poets and the centenary of the October Revolution (interestingly, it has not yet been forbidden to be called a coup?). It's so funny that in Moscow they don't celebrate it at all, they seem to be shy, but in London they already, one might say, noted it. The project consists of an exhibition of photographs of today's emigrant artists from Russia, lectures, readings, film screenings and concerts that will take place at the Pushkin House in Bloomsbury Square. And the pavilion in the park is nearby.
Poems are shown in the pavilion - which in itself is not very typical for an exhibition. However, the pavilion is not an exhibition, the curators clarify, but an integral installation. Leaflets with poems by Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky are attached to the plywood walls with clothespins - we are talking about both the exiled and the murdered poets; small lamps shine on the leaves. A video of a railway track is projected onto the end wall. According to the plot, the pavilion is a metaphor for a carriage that travels for 101 kilometers, closer than which unreliable citizens were forbidden to approach the capitals, and “further everywhere,” citing announcements in electric trains. A certain car, which looks like a heating plant inside, travels for 101 kilometers, and - then everywhere - lands in London. Although in fact it does not go anywhere and from the outside it looks more like a carriage - there are not even attempts to achieve resemblance to a carriage, but a shed or a barrack, raised on thin legs of a metal frame to a height of about a meter, and from the outside upholstered with vertical slats, which seem to they press the roofing paper, but there is no roofing paper, instead of it there is plywood painted with transparent black paint.
There is no entrance or exit here, that's what. That is, there are no doors, you can enter and exit from below, bending down strongly, which is inconvenient. This is a common exposition technique of our time, it allows you to isolate the viewer from reality and focus all feelings on what is inside, while providing a little charge. Everyone knows and is used to it, no one is surprised that one has to crawl into the pavilion. But here it is not the same as everywhere else - it happens that the technique is used arbitrarily, but here the absence of the externally manifested input-output takes on a powerful metaphorical load from the category of metro "no way out." It is both the depth of emigration, not so much external as the internal isolation of the persecuted poets, and the absence of a way out as such. It is easy to get into a repressive mechanism, and it is not always clear where it has an entrance - why? - I took it and hit it, because it was not my own. Neither there nor here is not your own. And it turns out a kind of floating, barely touching the ground, a house, which looks like a house only in general outlines. Without roots, without the notorious plot, it has landed, and can still fly away somewhere along with its ephemeral verbal content. At night, when the indoor lamps illuminate the rectangle under the pavilion, the floating effect is enhanced.
And one more thing: if you look from a distance, you get the feeling that all these people reading poetry there, inside, carry this house on their shoulders, like a snail their shell. This is a load: poetry, emigration - the burden that the poets have borne on their shoulders. And they continue, however.
