The sign at the entrance says that "this exhibition, fortunately, is not burdened with the ballast of concepts." The phrase belongs to the author of the exposition, who is so reverent about the Word that he never tells anything about his works. Therefore, we will deal with the production of ballast ourselves.
It seems to me that clay sculptures, drawings on paper, metal and roofing felt, inscriptions on plaster - this is again about futurophobia (an exhibition with this name took place in the Gelman gallery in 1997, and there fragments of our civilization made of gray clay made it possible to reflect on the frailty of being). The exhibition in "Triumph" is a look at us and the previous generation from the future: old Moscow telephone numbers scratched on plaster, architectural plans emerging from the motley surface of roofing material. Some kind of iron boxes and toilet seats. And the main installation: the endless, due to the mirrors at the ends, the Soviet "red carpet" with patterns along the edges and Soviet colorful slippers, and behind the curtains - something incomprehensible. Since the road is a symbol of Russia, and there is no getting away from it, it turns out that the whole country is a physiotherapy room. Not the scariest image yet. What is recovering after a long illness? And where does this path lead to? To the temple? To the district committee? To heaven in colorful slippers? Doesn't give an answer.
Empty shoes - even with such a naive Soviet design - have an ominous aura. Everyone remembers the shoe monument to the Holocaust in Budapest (Shoes on the Danube Embankment). The people left, but the shoes remained. Although this is clearly not about that. The Soviet red carpet, in contrast to the symbol of glory at the Cannes Film Festival, was either a symbol of the power of the district committee, or a symbol of heavenly sanatorium rest. There is no district committee here, but paradise is behind the curtains. Light pours from there, but you can't get there. And to enter there, apparently, you need to take off your sneakers.
Old Moscow telephone numbers, consisting of letters and numbers, are scratched on the plaster boards in the manner of antique ruins characteristic of Brodsky. Sometimes a whole board is dedicated to one number, as if it were a portrait. And sometimes the numbers are in a list, as if they were written in a mess, than necessary, on the wall of a prison cell. This brings up the Last Address project. This is a public undertaking, when everyone can order and hang a plaque on the house with the name of a repressed relative or any person who was arrested in this house during the Stalinist terror and never returned. As you know, the design of the plate was made by Alexander Brodsky. A plasterboard with a number is even scarier than a nameplate. Until Brod said the numbers were phone numbers, I thought they were camp numbers.
And everywhere there are "nosed" warriors with a bird's beak - either Roman legionaries (everyone remembers the installation at the Winery "The Night Before the Offensive", where these legionaries sat around the fires), or alien creatures clad in medieval armor. The portrait of a nosy warrior is presented in many techniques - on roofing material, paper, iron. In one of the compositions, these iron people walk in a line, like in Bruegel's, where the blind leads the blind, and fall over the edge of the picture, but these are the sighted, and one looks at us with red eyes. The procession of these same people with weapons on which they lean like crutches is depicted on a long paper scroll. It resembles a procession on antique bas-reliefs. You can walk to different places, sometimes very mysterious. Who are they, where are they being driven? In Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, in the second movement, there is such a mysterious procession, about which no one understands where it is, but the directors love to superimpose this music on the image of another world. It can be assumed that the soldiers are walking along the red carpet.
Finally, in the multi-part installation "New World" (plywood room), the theme of Russian literature appears, which, as you know, plays a significant role in the national mentality. Earlier, Brodsky turned all the signs of our civilization from flesh back into clay, according to the biblical principle: "you are dust and you will return to dust." But here the "imperishable" is also turned into clay. Clay Pushkin appeared for the first time. And his muse is a beauty on the TV screen (or maybe it's Natalya Nikolaevna, she would make a luxurious announcer). And the oak, and the chain on that oak, and the learned cat (sits above all on the crown, as if it were Cheshire), and the poet himself, and the manuscripts, and the landscape outside the window are made of clay. And the muse is digital. This entire scene, reminiscent of a hermitage's hut, is enclosed in a transparent box that rests on a stack of Novy Mir magazines. And Novy Mir, in which Doctor Zhivago and The Gulag Archipelago were published in the late eighties, is the Soviet intellectual archetype, the focus of wisdom and the common agenda of an intellectual of those times. Many people still have these stacks at home.
Well, and the appearance of Pushkin is hardly accidental. Alexander Pushkin has been “our everything” on a national scale for nearly 200 years. Alexander Brodsky is also "our everything" on the scale of modern architectural and artistic life - if not from the 1980s, when he won competitions in paper architecture, then from the 1990s, when each of his exhibitions became an event. Several hundred people each time gather at its opening days, like a rock concert, not fitting into the gallery space. I don't know what kind of national unity it is and what it is based on, but somehow Brodsky unites Russians and foreigners, architects and artists, old and young, rich and poor, children and animals (a two-month-old puppy became the youngest visitor to the gallery, and Brodsky as the host of the evening, the kid also greeted). Thus, two "our everything", Pushkin and Brodsky, finally met. The holiday took place.
