Not only because the project brought together works by stellar authors of the late 19th and early 21st centuries: from Kazimir Malevich to Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, from Ivan Aivazovsky to Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev, from Olga Rozanova to Zaha Hadid, from Pablo Picasso to Jean-Michel Basquiat, from Wassily Kandinsky to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov… Not only because GES-2 is a space created by the genius of Renzo Piano. The exhibition is structured by the curators like a 20th-century novel and by the architect Evgeniy Ass – like a city.
Budetlyanos
The Prologue reminds us of the genre of the novel, disconcerting with its non-obvious connections. The first visitors to be received here are the painting by the itinerant Illarion Pryanichnikov “The Common Sacrificial Cauldron on the Patronal Feast”, a sketch of the portrait of Francis Bacon, “The Black Sea” by Aivazovsky and “Black Square” by Malevich.
Frankly, “Prologue” allows you to travel without a navigator along a freely chosen route. But a navigator will appear – a notebook with a description of the twelve sections of the project, with a list of artists and reproductions of some works. A novel will also appear, in the form of an extension of Laurence Sterne’s ironic book “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”, considered the predecessor of the 20th-century novel. But it turns out that it is not only Proust and Joyce who owe a lot to Stern. The black rectangle at the beginning of the 1792 edition not only evokes dark thoughts about 1789 in France, but also reminds us of Malevich. In the end, both Stern and Malevich turn out to be harbingers of a new era and a new art. Well, the distant history of the appearance of the hero turns out to be no less important for the curators of the project than for Laurence Stern – the background story of Tristram’s birth.
But, of course, the history of the appearance of the “Black Square” in the sketches of the scenery for the opera “Victory over the Sun”, created by Matyushin, Kruchenykh and Malevich in 1913, has not been forgotten. This theatrical line of the fate of the “Square” will continue in the costume designs invented by Malevich for the opera characters, in the image of the “Suprematist Theatre” by Ivan Kudryashov, in the pronouns of El Lissitzky and the architects of Ilya Chashnik… Born first for the opera, “Black Square” was a part of the stage space. And this gave the curators the basis for “translating” the “Black Square” from the plane of the canvas into the space of a square, a building, a city. Actually, this exit from one dimension to another, or, if you prefer, the projection of the “Black Square” into the space of GES-2, is one of the key plots of the project.
Eclipse
This projection might seem like a completely speculative experiment if the “Black Square” did not also have a backstory associated with the solar eclipse of August 8, 1914. John Boult, one of the researchers of the Russian avant-garde, wrote about this background. Of course, total eclipses have happened before. About one of them, from 1887, Vasily Surikov remarked in shock: “I saw it, as if I had been in the other world. It is like the apostolic providence of the apocalypse, it is death, ultraviolet death!” The eclipse of August 1914 also coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the First World War, which contributed to its mystical perception. The “Victory over the Sun” in retrospect began to seem like a universal mystery. But when the sun stopped shining, a new source of light appeared in the opera: the electric one. In other words, during eclipses, hope is in man-made light. By the way, the power station for Moscow trams, from which GES-2 will emerge, was built in 1907. So the “Black Square”, the opera house and the power station on Bolotnaya Embankment are almost the same age.
Of course, the image of the “Black Square” is not reduced to either the calculated movement of the luminaries or the joy that “we see an electric lantern more often than an old romantic moon.” But for Malevich himself, the “Black Square,” apparently, was closely connected with the idea of breaking through the “blue screen of color restrictions and coming out into the white.” As he wrote: “I myself go into the dark tunnel of the night in order to build a new morning from there.”
In the architecture of the exhibition “Square and Space”, built by Evgeny Ass, this gloomy tunnel is not present. But there is an image of rays that penetrate the ground floor space of the GES-2 cultural center. This image is emphasized by the ascetic horizontal of Lev Nusberg’s painting “Piercing Like an Idea”; taut, like a bowstring, “Standing Thread” by Vyacheslav Koleichuk; photomontages by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, where the cables look like the plan of a road in the sky; a black dot in the center of a white spiral on a white canvas by Francisco Infante Arana; the Glow disco from the Kazan office light and music installation “Prometheus” model 1974; Black and White Geometric Abstractions by Rimma Zanevskaya-Sapgir…
The very logic of this “penetrating” aspiration towards light takes the viewer from the starting point, “Black Square”, to the installation “White Clothes” by Tatyana Badanina. Paper cones and rectangles, illuminated from the inside, look like patterns of angelic clothing. In fact, the author explains the name of the installation with reference to the Apocalypse of John the Theologian: “He who conquers will be clothed in white robes, and I will not blot out his name from the book of life.” But these images are no less reminiscent of Malevich’s architects and the laconic outlines of space rockets. Thus, the ray of light of the “new morning” acquires an eschatological connotation.
Megapolis
The structure of the exhibition is reminiscent not only of rayonism and futurism, but also of the classics of urbanism. The “grid” of apples seems to emerge in terms of display. You can walk through the exhibition as if you were walking through the avenues of the city. Here there are central streets and there are side streets where you can find in a window, as in a second-hand bookstore, publications from past centuries. Here the streets do not separate, but rather connect, squares and blocks. From Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph of the Shukhov Tower and the sculpture of the “Seated Man” they lead to a wooden barn without windows, but with a door. It could turn out to be a black hole, but it is crossed by the sun’s rays. They pass through holes drilled in the wall and ceiling. And the wooden shed, jumbled with splinters, once built by the Megan architecture studio for Archstoyanie, turns out to be a space of silence and memory inside.
You can take selfies in this city: Black Square is perhaps unrivalled. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s works are no less willing to pose in front of Aivazovsky’s Black Sea, where he depicts a growing brick wall on the mirror surface. It separates us from ourselves.
This city can be a scam. Thus, in the installation “Megapolis” by Vladimir Seleznev, the lights of a large city, seen at night from a bird’s eye view, become a garbage dump during the day.
There is also a museum here – a total installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “An Incident in the Museum or Music on the Water”. This is a kind of episode of “Alternative Art History”, mainly alternative to the one shown at the exhibition. Here, the main masterpieces of the Russian 20th century are not the “Black Square”, but sunny pictures of collective farm life, well and skillfully painted by a certain Stepan Koshelev. They are represented in museums around the world alongside Van Gogh, Cézanne and Rodchenko. The further the history of the artist Koshelev progresses, the more picturesque details it acquires. In addition to the biography of the fictional artist, there are his paintings, exhibition posters, an indispensable scientific monograph about him and, of course, authentic things, the role of which is played by the master’s pencil drawings. This mockumentary genre exhibition is complemented by the museum setting. Noble cherry-coloured walls, a set of narrow rooms. It is true that water drips musically from the ceiling onto the pots and basins placed there, and the chairs in the corners are covered in plastic. But the cozy sofa in the center of the room leaves no doubt that this problem is about to disappear.
This former installation by the Kabakovs, “An Incident in a Museum or Music in a Hall,” successfully preserves the aura of a futurological project. As for the curators of the exhibition, they prefer media archeology. And although the center of his attention is the metamorphosis in the 20th century of a painting, including a newspaper and the back (as in the diptych “Malevich Square” by Dmitry Prigov), a theater in a city square, a power plant in a work of art. , the main character in the end turns out to be a museum, his destiny in an era of change. Therefore, the installation “An Incident in the Museum…” by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov does not seem like an end point, but rather a question mark. And – a reason to go back to the beginning of the exhibition…
