Leaving the exhibition "Hypnosis of Space", you feel some noise in your head, as after a good performance or a long film. Not otherwise was it attacked by Mars - this is the name of the first installation - "Mars Attacks", the name is deliberately fantastic, after Wells, but it consists of completely classical things: an engraving by Piranesi and a text by Odoevsky. And so that's it.
The stated goal of the exhibition is “to understand the logic of the birth of emotions in the Age of Enlightenment and today, in the era of online RPG games”; find a connection between the baroque of the 18th century and the cyber-baroque of the post-internet. Wow task, I must say. In our everyday consciousness, we are used to thinking that computers and books, especially prints, are more likely antipodes, enemies and competitors in the struggle for a person's free time, especially a child. The exhibition proves to us that this is not the case, that the fantastic worlds of the 18th century and the present are closely related, interdependent and, in general, are one and the same. In fact, of course, it is, and good designers of virtual spaces, both game and cinema, know and use this very well, but with the proof, a rather long and laborious story turns out. I think it will take a dozen of such exhibitions to really prove it. On the other hand, the set super task perfectly stimulates hard work on the one hand and liberates the curator on the other. It is not for nothing that the curatorial message consists in a rather unexpected mention of Tsaritsyn's dachas: summer is a playtime, dacha, not too serious, or else it is possible.
The exhibition occupies 11 rooms, divided into nine themes and located on the second floor of the palace in a circle, so that from the end you immediately get back to the beginning. Its strongest and, objectively speaking, the most interesting part is a large number of genuine graphics, mainly engravings, from the collection of "Tsaritsyn" itself, as well as the State Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences named after A. V. Shchusev, State Academic Bolshoi Theater, Bakhrushin Museum, and from two private collections. Quite a lot of Piranesi, and the one from the Tsaritsyn collection - it seems, is not very famous; Gonzaga, Bibiena; Bogaevsky; there is Cranach and two Italian prints of the 16th century. Nicholas Benois's sets for the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bolshoi Theater in 1965 make an amazing impression, clearly showing the similarities between the Gothic hall and the mast forest - they are being exhibited for the first time. A series of engraved sheets of scenography by Johann Kharms for the 1678 ballet "On the Meeting and Movement of Seven Planets", staged at the court of the Saxon Elector Johann George II, was recently acquired by the Tsaritsyno Museum, and curator Sergei Khachaturov and his co-curator Daria Kolpashnikova attributed it. Plus the relatively well-known, but beloved sheets of Brodsky / Utkin and Yuri Avvakumov's folding house of cards.
The most interesting thing at the exhibition is to look at the details of these engravings, in this sense, it falls into the same trend as the recent exhibitions of watercolors in the Historical Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery: they are definitely designed for an amateur, a person who is ready to "hang" for hours over some bizarrely drawn or a column or a living watercolor stroke of Gonzaga on a piece of paper the size of a couple of matchboxes - there is plenty of such material here, joy for the eyes and mind is provided. In addition, among the sheets and series shown, there are quite a few discoveries - that is, things that have not been widely exhibited before. The curator says that Tsaritsyn's graphic collection has never been shown so fully. In a word, there is definitely something to see and admire for connoisseurs. But most of Tsaritsyn's visitors are not among them, the "pictures" are perceived as an element of wall decoration.
For them, perhaps, shocking is provided - drawn by an unsure hand, but brightly the backstage with a generalized version of the characters of computer games (I showed it to four gamers, everyone found it difficult to name the source) from the artist Vladimir Kartashov. The artist is 21 years old, all things of 2018, the freshest, and occupy almost an entire hall. There are no spaces in them at all, one could probably say that the heroes themselves build the space of the game, and the visitor can be inside, enter their circle, especially since they are slightly taller than human height. Located next to the hall dedicated to opera seria - a serious opera, a product of the century of enlightenment, built on allegory and, what is there, moralizing, the most boring thing with lush decorations - "decorations" of computer toys taken out of context and performed in the manner of naive painting - curator calls them "post-Internet" - they can only shock.
Someone will say: this scary room demonstrates to us the absence in the minds of another nature, except for the addictive playful minds - they are not interested in Mars or Venus, give them Sarah Kerrigan. Someone will say, and apparently have already told the curator that it is absolutely impossible to exhibit next to such things as the scenery for Prokofiev's 1945 Cinderella, by Peter Williams, and this is it. Someone will notice that they are very similar in color, or even remember: "There is no story worse in the world than the music of Prokofiev in ballet", remembering what a desperate innovator the current recognized classic was. Curator Sergei Khachaturov actually builds his entire complex story on the search for "avant-garde artists of the past", comparing them with very young - and not very young, such as Brodsky, Utkin, Avvakumov - our contemporaries. Piranesi for him - "the first radical avant-garde in the field of architectural design", Gonzaga - "a true revolutionary of scenographic art." But it's true, over time, the classics are covered with an inevitable layer of dust and sometimes you need to "shake" them a little, change the angles.
Etchings by Brodsky / Utkin coexist with cartoons by Andrei Khrzhanovsky (this is my favorite cartoon,”the curator exclaims,“I saw it for the first time in 1985), the 18th century reigns blissfully in the Ruina hall. A completely new - made for the exhibition - tracing paper by Alexander Brodsky is adjacent to Derzhavin's acrostic "The river of times in its striving …"; it happened so by chance, exclaims Sergey Khachaturov: the verse here precedes the hall of ruins, and Brosky at the last moment brought a drawing with a river of time …
As we move, the theatrical component grows - first we are introduced to the scenography of a "serious opera", then - to the play of the Juliensembl theater on the themes of philosophical doctrines that build a modern, not without screaming, but obvious parallel with the ballet Seven Luminaries. By the way, here, in the big hall, it is absolutely necessary to turn around the corner of a large multimedia screen designed to show details of engravings and find there three paintings by Yegor Koshelev with characters from The Magic Flute (Queen of the Night - in an apron and holding a cardboard cup); they, in turn, form a pandanus to the aforementioned heroes of computer games, but they are drawn academically beautifully and even bewitching - apparently, they are designed to switch the hint given at the beginning to computer games to what the curator is really interested in - to modern art and theater, of which there are many more. And finally, the last hall is completely theatrical, occupied by a large-scale decoration for "The Drillians" of the Boris Yukhananov Electrotheatre, where the gypsum waves-"drills" desperately resemble spiral-shaped columns, for example, such as those at the canopy of St. Peter in Rome, by the word "screw" columns, whimsical and inspirational, are many among the exhibited scenography projects.
When a long time ago Nikolai Merkushev, now a professor at Stroganovka, taught me scenography; and the favorite artist was Valery Leventhal; then the first student's assignment was a “still life” on the theme of the play: we didn’t seem to understand right away, but it had to be not quite a still life, but a sort of heap of different objects that figuratively and emotionally reveal the theme. I remember that it was not a simple task, all the time it turned out to be some kind of indistinct pile. The exhibition resembles such a "still life", only the resulting one, strung on many speculative threads - the connection of the incompletely connected, the search for internal connections, and the stronger the gap, the greater the tension and the sharper the perception, but from time to time for the viewer they pause, give "rest ", For example, immerse yourself in a Masonic temple - objects of the Masonic ceremonial are kept in Tsaritsyno, and if I had my way, I would keep this fragment in a permanent exhibition. Or in Piranesi's karcheri, juxtaposed with Brodsky / Utkin's Columbarium.
All this, of course, must be stitched together somehow. It seems that at times the very defamiliarizing contrast and unexpectedness of juxtapositions serve as a connecting element. But the metaphysical white decorations by Stepan Lukyanov, the leading artist of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, who built pyramids in the Masonic temple, in the Pavilion hall - a bridge similar to the Venetian one, in the Ruin hall, a ruin tower from Désert de Retz under Paris. The whole exhibition thus becomes a work of scenography, a story about the life and possibilities of imaginary architecture - a volumetric version of the performance by Pietro di Gottardo Gonzaga, consisting only of pictures, but no less emotional and speaking from this. It is, like a baroque opera or ballet, strung on a sequence of themes strongly associated with the personality of the curator - a historian of modern architecture, but also a connoisseur of contemporary art and theater. In the third room we are told that the baroque scenography was built on recurring themes: the palace, the dungeon … The exhibition, like a performance, is also built on themes, and they are partly borrowed from baroque scenography, partly from park culture and culture of the Age of Enlightenment in general - a Masonic temple, a pavilion, ruin, - things that were considered important for the development of personality, "learning", that is, as we would now say, personal growth and the development of emotional intelligence.
It was also impossible to do without ordinary speaking, repeated explanations: a lot of accompanying texts are a kind of libretto for the exhibition, they allow you to read it like a book, the curator himself promises to lead excursions (you should look for ads on Facebook), a guidebook on the Izi. Travel platform is attached to the exhibition.
