Украина на Венецианской биеннале 2015

Когда я прошлым летом работала на биеннале в Венеции – правда, не искусства, а менее известной, архитектуры, я написала очень длинную заметку относительно украинского павильона. Потом, правда, удалила. Сейчас, когда я смотрю на то, что происходит, могу себе позволить высказаться, я считаю.

Украинский павильон на архитектурной биеннале 2014. Набережная Гран Канала, по которой толпами проходит тысячи туристов. Внутрь не заходят. Во-первых, непонятно, что это такое, во вторых, непонятно, что там открыто. Милитаристическая палатка, оплетеная золотистой (газовой?) трубой, на входе паллеты. Очевидно, последнее достижение украинской архитектуры. Внутри палатки – Малевич и душно. Угольно-черный квадрат и четыре манекена с серпами. И ассистент павильона - мальчик из Молдовы. Явно скучает. Спрашиваю, кто есть еще. Отвечает – один, организаторы все в Украину уехали. А кто организаторы? – Вот там на стене написано. - С другими павильонами общаетесь? - Нет, особенно нас не приглашают, мы же не в Джардини.

Жаль, что не в Джардини. А в 2001 году были – с той же палаткой, правда, без золота. Это я уже потом в Интернете нашла. Вот, она связь времен.

С павильонами, в принципе, не все так гладко. Английский павильон на биеннале, где я работала – бывший чайный домик. Немецкий – здорово отдает третьерейховостью. Павильон Венесуэлы вот который год пустует.  «Бездомными» кроме украинцев были австралийцы , которые установили желтый навес внутри парка Джардини, но в ста метрах они достраивали свой собственный «черный куб» на следующий год. Да, да – заранее готовились к 2015, удивительно, правда?

К чему это я? Уж извините за мнение простого ассистента павильона (research fellow - для солидности), но я изнутри успела увидеть, как что-то работает.

Я видела прекрасные примеры сотрудничества во многих странах: чего стоит совместная экспозиция скандинавских и африканских стран. Чехия и Словакия с общим проектом в чехословацком павильоне. Южнокорейский павильон делающий экспозицию про Северную Корею (ну не совсем сотрудничество, но золотой лев им достался, да).

Если у Украины нет средств на собственную экспозицию на биеннале, а были ресурсы только на «точечные» проекты, и те пропали,  что же стоит согласиться представлять вместе с Польшей? Огромный павильон с гордой надписью Polonia спокойно мог бы вместить всех, а смотреть ходили бы все равно на украинцев. Что поделаешь, тяжелое время, но ведь Украина в топах новостей.  И просто преступление не использовать этот медиа ресурс, я считаю. Закроется ведь портал во времени и пространстве.

Вот бы у Венесуэлы арендовать, они все равно им не пользуются. По соседству с российским –добавит остроты ощущений. Да ладно, можно и под открытым небом, если уже никакое палаццо в городе снять не получится. Делали ведь. Вот я честно не понимаю, что мешает? Что там за коварная такая конъюктура? Министр переквалифицировался из бывшего гуру соцполитики в суперпрофессионала по культуре? Ну и бог с ним. Денег нет? Я не знаю, конечно, какие организационные расходы тянет за собой такое мероприятия, но можно ведь обойтись даже фотопечатью – главное, чтобы аналитическая часть была хорошая, а не очередной «Малевич». Я лично считаю, что самые удачные проекты на биеннале – те, где небольшое количество изображения и много текста. В данной ситуации все поймут бюджетность проекта.  И только украинских художников надо приглашать, потому что именно это сейчас интересно. Но только палаток больше не надо, пожалуйста. Передайте им там, кто-нибудь!

А YBA Сара Лукас, в этом году представляющаю Британию, тем временем шлет всем нам пламенный привет. Я очень надеюсь, что для Украины данный художественный объект не станет символом биеннале 2015.

Sarah Lucas, Eros, 2013. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ.

Geraldo de Barros, Laura Letinsky and eight collage artists at the Photographers' Gallery 

18th Jan- 7th April

Three exhibitions of Geraldo de Barros, Laura Letinsky and other collage artists are now open at the Photographer's Gallery. These exhibitions give a wide overview of the collage practice from 1950s to the contemporary time. 

Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998) is one of the significant figures of Brazilian modernist art scene. In the exhibition 'What Remains’ his photographic and collage works from two series belonging to different periods in the artist's work are presented. After the completion of the first series 'Fotoformas' in 1950, de Barros abandoned photography, and returned to it only in the beginning of nineties. The resulting series 'Sobras' draws a connection between past and present through the period of over forty years.

In Portuguese 'Sobras' means 'Remains', and this series gave the name to the exhibition. What remains - is the artist’s memory of small things and events that once took place in his life. Also it is something that is left from the photograph when it is cut by the artist's hand. De Barros is undoubtedly an artist of the miniatures. While his medium-size photography focuses on visual effects of black and white abstraction, his smaller photographs and collages oscillate between the language of abstraction and figurative images. Geraldo de Barros discovered an interesting phenomenon: miniature photos no longer document reality; they modify the very content of the documented image. The change of scale is used to provoke a specific feeling from a viewer, which resides between attention to details and some kind of nostalgia of insignificant moments of life. The effort, that a viewer makes to see the details, makes him approach closer to an art work, and this ruination of borders requires certain privacy of interaction with a photograph. The artist emphasizes this privacy by adding symbolical frames inside of the picture: sometimes he draws a frame with a ball pen; sometimes he glues the black tape directly on the photo collage. This action has a definite reference to the constructivist works, but the impression produced by this photographs applies rather to emotional than to rational. The motifs that Geraldo de Barros uses are simple and reminiscent of the amateur photos. Every simple object can become an object of his interest: streets, houses, passers-by, windows, or snowdrifts. 

The exhibition of the Canadian artist Laura Letinsky (born 1962) 'Ill Form and Void Full' presents photographic works in a particular technique invented by the artist. It combines a real still life with a photographed collage. The collages of Letinsky explore the boundary between reality and illusion, material objects and their visual representations. The exhibition consists of ten photographs of the mix of modified magazine cuts-out and household objects. The white background is used to eliminate any additional context and to create a feeling of emptiness surrounding these objects. The artist’s work focuses on conceptual opposition of absence and presence. The way of naming the works follows the same aim: all of the photographs are untitled, though each one has its own number. 

In the last floor of the Photographers' Gallery the exhibition 'Perspectives on Collage' by eight collage artists concludes the tour. The participants of the exhibition are C.K. Rajan, Jan Svoboda, Peggy Franck, Nicole Wermers, Batia Suter, Anna Parkina, Roy Arden, Clunie Reid. They presented photo collages in a variety of artistic media, including installation and sculpture.

The journey though the three exhibitions at the Photographers' Gallery gives a fresh and involving perspective on the historical development of the media of collage and various approaches to it. It is a must-see for all people interested in experimental collage and contemporary photography.

The website of the gallery:

The Photographers' Gallery

Breaking the ice: MOSCOW ART, 1960-80s

21 Nov 2012 - 24 Feb 2013 

Saatchi Gallery

The exhibition of the most prominent representatives of Russian underground art of 1960-80s is currently on display at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition gathered the works of such artists, as Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Francisco Infante, Oscar Rabin, Dmitry Prigov, Eric Bulatov and other important figures of Soviet alternative art movement. 

The collection focuses on the artists who worked within political topics, developing the ideological and aesthetic opposition to the ruling regime and at the same time reflecting the symbolic heritage of the Soviet Union. The bright examples are Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid who were the inventors of 'sots-art' style. They developed the conception of sots-art in surrealistic paintings depicting Stalin in paradoxical and impossible situations. One of the works in the exhibition, from the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series, shows Stalin in front of the red-wrapped mirror, admiring his own reflection, in a way that calls to mind Venus by Velasquez. This odd approach to cult of personality was something revolutionary for the art of the period.

Another nonconformist artist, Leonid Sokov in far 1990 arranged a meeting of Lenin's monument and a statue by Giacometti ('Lenin and Giacometti'). These two figures oppose each other in the situation of some absurd yet important dialogue. In other works it is possible to notice an enormous influence by Russian revolutionary avant-garde of 1920s and Western Dada and pop-art movements: pissoirs by Alexander Kosolapov with suprematist black squares and signature: 'Lenin', further can be found a variety of pop-art interpretations of the 'big three' of Soviet ideology: Lenin, Stalin and Marx. 

The works of Moscow Romantic conceptualist Ilya Kabakov presented in the exhibition as usually refer to the idea of creation of an alternative story that has an aim to confuse the viewer, lead him to the wrong path. At the same time, a viewer understands everything and accepts the rules of this intellectual game. Such is his ironically destructive installation that represents three paintings in a typical style of social realism. Once they were put under the glass, but now the glass is broken, the paintings are partly destroyed, and the 'place of accident' is surrounded with a fence. The story tells that the artist did this himself in a moment of madness and disappointment about his creation, and then one of the curators of the exhibition decided to leave this ruined work on the display. 

Oscar Rabin is another representative of Moscow art, is not so well-known in the Western art market. He was a participant of the Bulldozer exhibition in 1974, when the works of artists who organized an open-air unofficial exhibition in one of the parks of Moscow, were destroyed by bulldozers brought by the government forces. In his paintings Rabin explores the questions of identity and existence on the margins. One of his most famous works is 'Passport' which depicts the sacred paper of any Soviet person, the document that established the permanent registration of living as well nationality of a holder.

Photographs of land art installations of Francisco Infante were in made in completely another spirit. They do not carry any ideological expression, but instead they produce a strong visual statement. Infante experimented with the simple geometric shapes that he was integrating into the landscape in order to receive various abstract visual effects.

The works presented in the exhibition 'Breaking the Ice' are focused on the dialogue with the style of social realism, which dominated in the Soviet Union since the times of Stalin's regime. This monopoly of social realism was broken during Khrushchev's thaw, when new underground art started to emerge. However, the power of social realism was so strong that the artists needed to produce their work with a strong focus on the argument with aesthetics and ideology of official art in order to legitimize the existence of other points of view. 

The exhibition occupies the second floor of the Saatchi Gallery. But the feeling is that a viewer is present at a temporal display in the Tretyakov Gallery - so similar is the choice of artists and works. It is not surprising, as the exhibition is curated by Andrei Erofeev, who for a long time was the head of contemporary art section there. The heart of the exhibition is formed by the collection of the Tsukanov Family Foundation, and some works are brought from other private collections. This exhibition is not the first event taking place in London that is focused on Soviet alternative art, but it is especially interesting, because it gathered the most important representatives of Russian art scene.

The exhibition gives an excellent overview of the alternative artistic life in the Soviet Union, which claimed to be out of regulation of the socialist regime. At some moment these works received a good reception in the Western countries, while in Soviet Union they stayed in shadow until the final meltdown of the Soviet iceberg in 1991.

The exhibition 'Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art 1960-80s' is especially interesting in the context of another exhibition 'Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union'. The combination of these two exhibitions gives a clear sense of continuity of tradition in Russian art that prolongs its existence even despite revolutions and changes in the state organization. It would be a good idea to include to the display a selection of Russian avant-garde art of 1920s to have a wider perspective on the artistic processes in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. 

Komar &Melamid. Stalin in Front of the Mirror. Fragment. 1982-83.

Leonid Sokov. Lenin and Giacometti. 1990.

Installation view. Alexander Kosolapov. 

Installation view. Ilya Kabakov.

Installation view. Oscar Rabin. 

Installation view. Fransisco Infante and Oleg Tselkov (right)

Photos by Saatchi Gallery

William Kentridge: I am not me, the horse is not mine

The Tanks, Tate Modern

Until 20 January 2013

The exhibition of William Kentridge at Tate Modern is one of the bright examples of the complete diffusion of techniques and meanings in contemporary visual arts practice. The globalization goes further and further, and so art does: it grasps, it assimilates, it incorporates different styles and traditions. The media project of William Kentridge is a fresh and involving point of view on Russian cultural heritage, or rather, the absurd component of this culture. It is done from some unified international perspective, as it could be expected from the South African artist who exhibits his videos based on the story of Russian-Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol in the British Tate Modern gallery. This is a celebrated victory of postmodern hypertextuality.

In any case, Nikolai Gogol with his irony and certain inattention to limits of the genre is a perfect choice for this loud, chaotic and cheerful project. The great mystic Nikolai Gogol was born in a village Sorochyntsi on the territory of contemporary Ukraine. All his works are permeated with village folklore and fairy-tales, superstitions and some strange animistic mythology. "The Nose" is a tragic story of a man who lost his nose and the nose became an independent person, moreover, a person of a highest rank, a fact that was breaking all the hopes to return it on the place. Kentridge uses not the literary plot, but rather this idea of  a conceptual 'flip' in all his eight videos shown on large screens on the walls of The Tanks premises of Tate Modern. He uses everything: geometric shapes taken from the works of Russian avant-garde, real or invented confessional texts from the session of Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dancing shadow of the Nose or the image of him climbing the ladder again and again, mix of Latin American music, military marches, parts of unrecognizable official speeches. All of these gives a clear sense of  being inside of some well conducted, yet unclear symphony.   

"I am not me, the horse is not mine" is a Russian proverb which is used to deny any guilt or the very fact of participation in some unpleasant event. However, it is just a part of the proverb. The second part adds: "...and I am not a coachman myself". This unnecessary addition is a kind of a ridiculous illogical construction that makes an extra assumption over what is already assumpted: if I am not me and the horse is not mine there is no need to explain that I am not a coachman, because it's just obvious. Kentridge, in his turn, uses this mechanism of extra assumptions, he involves a variety of visual (and literal) texts to make an image of some universal chaos surrounding the viewer.

In the video part containing the image of a horse as well as in other parts William Kentridge uses simple constructivist shapes. However, mostly he focuses on the shapes in black, which gives also a hint to Malevich rather than any other artist of that period. The scene with a horse is accompanied with a quotation from the poem "Kindness to horses" by Russian cubo-futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski: “Horse, there’s no need for this!/ Horse, listen, -/ look at them all, - who has it worse?/ Child,/ we are all, to some extent, horses, -/ everyone here is a bit of a horse” (Trans. Andrey Kneller). These lines appear in Russian so that they might be recognized just by those people who understand the language, but neither understanding nor recognition is the main aim of the artist. His purpose is to use a "shell" of certain related meanings, images, texts and sounds for producing some strange synaesthetic effect. It is impossible to put the eight parts of the videos into a single narrative, instead, it is possible to develop several narratives from a single video, like a spider knits its web. 

The position of a viewer inside of the exhibition reminds another story of Gogol - "Viy". At some point of the story the young  philosopher is locked for three nights in the church with a corpse of a young witch, who upon getting desperate to get him alone calls for help other demons and monsters. The philosopher drew around himself a protective circle in order to stay invisible for monsters surrounding him, but he becomes visible to the main demon called Viy at the moment of their sight contact. For a viewer of Kentbridges' exhibition there is an unclear feeling of being surrounded by some kind of creatures who simultaneously live on the screens, perform some repetitive actions, and have no clue of presence of a viewer, even though he is involved into this contemplative process by the very construction of the exhibition space. 

The desctription of the project mentions also that William Kentridge chose the topic of "The Nose" because previously he stage designed the opera by Shostakovitch at the Met. His relation to a classical genre of the opera is surprising, this project seems to be some kind of individual reflection to this large production that involves many people and responds to restrictions set by the stage. A reflection that is more private and free. Without seeing the opera it is difficult to judge to which extent this project is the 'reuse' of the material and ideas that were produced during the preparation of the opera, and to which extent it is an independent work of art. One thing is clear: except the fact that Kentridge is a good animator, he is also very good in the creation of an overwhelming multimedia effect which cannot be explained by solely the 'exoticism' of the topic from the world-wide perspective. The impression given by the exhibition cannot be explained also by the fashion on Russian art that seems to be flourishing in the UK in the latest years. The success of the project lies completely in its ability to integration and the symphonic effect produced on the viewer. 

His Majesty, the Nose  
(stills), from the installation 
"I am not me, the horse is not mine"

A Lifetime of Enthusiasm 
(stills), from the installation 
"I am not me, the horse is not mine"

The Horse, 

from the installation  

"I am not me, the horse is not mine"

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern-tanks/exhibition/william-kentridge-i-am-not-me-horse-not-mine

Sanja Ivekovic: Unknown Heroine

14 December – 24 February 2013
Calvert 22 and South London Gallery

Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic presented her exhibition "Unknown Heroine" at two London galleries: Calvert 22 and South London Gallery. This retrospective exhibition is an in-depth view into the political and social situation of Yugoslavia and independent Croatia. Sanja Ivekovic works with the topic of limits and restriction, whether applied to female gender identity or to the dictatorship of Josip Broz Tito. Her works are highly intellectualized and require specific knowledge about the circumstances of a particular reflection. In other words, works of Ivakovic are born from a specific context and exist somewhere between the visual work in a form of photography, video or performance, and a particular historical comment in a view of a small literary text. This is the case when an image has the same importance as an explanation to it. 

Except the aesthetic visual experience, recalling some works of American pop-art or Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie-Woogie", the coloured photograph "New Zagreb (People Behind the Windows)" creates a place for discussion on freedom and deviation. It becomes a meeting point between the ideology of mass-media photo of Tito's car being met by happy crowd of people on the edge of the road, and those people who were contemplating this procession from their balconies. While the first action was encouraged, standing on the balcony was forbidden as soon as it could put into risk the life of the invaluable leader. However, the artist highlighted those balconies where she managed to catch the figures of the people hiding behind the curtains and balcony doors. 

This case of the winning curiosity means a lot to the whole concept of existing limits. In any time, even the darkest ones, the human's interest to things happening around in life is much stronger than than any artificial restrictions put by a dictator's hand. This work is optimistic, it gives an idea that sometimes unnoticed and anonymous actions may become the stand points of composition, either of an art work, or the whole social environment. The main is to have a particularly attentive artist who can mark them as a priority.

Sanja Ivekovic. New Zagreb (People Behind the Windows), 1979.http://www.calvert22.org/e/exhibition-programme/unknown-heroine/

Golden Emptiness: Spazio di Luce

Giuseppe Penone at Whitechapel Gallery, London

The exhibition of Giuseppe Penone at Whitechapel Gallery focuses on one installation Spazio di Luce. It presents a bronze cast of a tree, segmented and laid out horizontally in the exhibition space. The trunk rests on its own branches. 

First of all, the work impresses with the dynamism of its shapes and textures. Golden light lures the gaze inside. Then the viewer's attention switches to the complexity of meanings transmitted. The artist himself explains that the use of gold sheets inside the empty bronze cast refers to the idea of gold as the representation of sunlight since ancient times. The telescopic cast of the tree trunk allows a view through the whole installation, revealing the interplay of light and shadow. Penone has intentionally cut out some casts of the branches to let the light in through resulting holes. 

This way, the tree consists of two surfaces: an inner golden layer, the aim of which is to provide aesthetic pleasure and provoke curiosity, and the external bronze 'bark' that carries the traces of natural growth and artistic recast. 

Giuseppe Penone creates a luxurious object that has an obvious aesthetic as well as material value. But this work is also a result of a collaborative activity of the people involved in making of a wax cast from the real tree trunk. As a consequence, the bark of the bronze tree is covered with their fingerprints. The work combines a strong visual statement with an elaborated philosophic expression of interaction between nature and society. 

Only after becoming a cultural object is the tree eligible for appropriation of the gallery space. It needed to overcome its 'raw' stage to become involved into collaboration between the natural and the cultural and to embody the artist's idea of unity.

The installation Spazio di Luce extends through the ascetic exhibition space. Its inner shine attracts the viewer, while the projecting branches do not allow a close approach; in a way they attack him. This work contains a profound contradiction of the relation between humanity and nature, an eternal struggle between a wish to integrate and a lack of contact.

Photo: Whitechapel Gallery

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-bloomberg-commission-giuseppe-penone-spazio-di-luce

Paper Architecture between Glass Walls

An old dream of freedom

'Calvert 22' is an exhibition space for the display of Eastern European art in London. On the 2nd of October it presented the project of a representative of Russian Paper Architecture conceptualists' group, Alexander Brodsky 'White Room/ Black Room'.

The idea of paper architecture is about dreamland, it is an utopian expression of how the world should be constructed out of the borders of our habitual existence (so proper to the routine realities of Soviet Union where the artist started his activity), even if it strongly refers to this habit and gets the source of inspiration from it. The exhibition is a constructive re-interpretation of paper projects. It consists of two rooms: in one you find a line of small plywood beds, empty and ascetic, reminding a sleeping room in the Soviet kindergarten (for more similarity it could be at least two times more beds, though), filled with warm white daylight, produced by the lamps hidden behind the curtains. The second room is black and square, with surprisingly warm darkness in which a viewer finds an amphitheatric circle of clay human figures looking at imitated fire. Everything looks like a big and minimalistic doll house consisting of the two rooms. The artist however, even allowing viewers to his creation, plays with his toys himself, and doesn't desire to interpret his work to the wide public, neither in personal conversation, nor in the catalogue, which is conceptual enough to say much.

Even despite being created recently, such a clean, irrational, idealistic work can be produced as a reflection of a certain isolated environment which had influence in the past. Alexander Brodsky is lucky enough to belong to the generation of Russian artists who were eligible, whether they wanted this or not, for this blessing of solitude. The place of inhabitance was a glass castle, just almost the same, as one of the award-winning paper projects (Crystal  Palace, 1982) of Alexander Brodsky is called, and the walls of this castle were separating  the whole community of artistic intellectuals in the country from the rest of the art movement in the world. The walls were however allowing to see something, if not to interact, carrying this unbeatable transparent qualities since probably Peter's the Great window to Europe, which was not successfully closed even by the Soviet restrictive and censorship policy.

Yes, it was possible to see something, even if the overview was somehow blurry. It was possible to do something: at last, the limits and lacks always made an artist stronger, and his self-contemplation and the reaction over this world  had much more chance to be expressed in the work - on the condition that an art market that could recognize this art as such was just a distant unclear figure. Instead, there were plenty of inspirational sources inside of this sacred circle reserved just for Soviet artists, regardless of their wish for such an exclusive right.

All these ideas were visible in the past works of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin that were presented at the research seminar 'From Paper Arhictecture to Research Architecture' at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Alexander Brodsky made clear his perception of art as personal, he just wanted to do his art and enjoy it. That was not a fight for freedom (even though that could be considered dissidence in the widest interpretation), that was rather a dream of freedom from the collective utopia, by creating the own, personified utopia. Which at the end worked out more effectively than all 'real' political changes in the contemporary Russia.

A thin ephemeral chain connecting Russian artists of paper architecture to their own perceptual experience of the everyday and to the best examples of old masters also ties them to the obligation of working in contrast to the dominant authoritative structures. However, this contrast is as mild and warm as it is the light change between the White and the Black room in Brodsky's project.

Photo: Calvert 22

http://www.calvert22.org/e/exhibition-programme/alexander-brodsky/

Deep into Russia, deep into bog

Oleg Kulik's performance 'Missionary' at Regina Gallery, 09.10.12

On 9th of October Oleg Kulik presented his show 'Deep into Russia' in the Regina Gallery at London. The private view was filled with pseudo-zoophilic photography, scent of expensive perfumes, taste of champagne and Russian language. That was not yet the performance, though it could be considered as such, that was the half-an-hour expectation for an artist to start the in-depth tour to his cultural motherland. The motherland was presented in a poetically-metaphorical, but quite profound view of an aquarium situated in the street in front of the gallery. The aquarium was filled with fishes, who were unlucky enough not to get to the supermarket and be consumed in some usual and worthy way, but to get involved into a hell circle of artistic consumption. However,  they just shared the destiny of the public who came to see the event which was the remake of Kulik's performance of 1995.

The aquarium was full of water. When the artist, enchained, wearing a monk's cassock, dived into it, the emerged waterfall immediately engaged the soaked audience into the performance, creating at the same time the puddle-sized distance between the artist with his fishy collaborators and rest of the people. Kulik was diving into the tank with a Bible-looking book in his hands, and from time to time showing his head over the level of water and prophesying in Russian to the audience and to the fishes. The phrase could be understood as one and the same - approximately 'And every earth's animal is weeping and is awaiting for the revelation from human sons'  (author of this article might be slightly confused in the transmitting of the prophetic word, as it often happens in such cases). Besides, the action of each earth's animal was oscillating between 'weeping', 'calling' and 'yawning' ("stenayet", "vzyvayet", "zevayet"), while the latter was the most responding to the actual mood of the event.  After that, the naked-legged monk was diving back to his shelter in order to look out when the air finishes. Then, in the best Tarkovsky's style, this action was repeated until the viewer gives up and feels involvement into this quasi-meaningful spiritual consequence.

The persistence of the body at the same time in the limit between two environments: water and air, must have called to mind a thought (supposedly, ironic) about the instability of the human position in relation to animal world, an idea that we all went out of the water at least at the moment of birth, an assumption that the communication with god (russian 'bog') requires an existence of boundary, and can be performed just in a moment of actual suffocation and resistance to a nobody's, transitive, territory. Nevertheless, this mask of a trickster, worn by many artists before and after, in case of  inversions of Oleg Kulik rather was used in some kind of a circus action where the most strange and exotic things are in value (such as exported and mythologized 'Russian spirituality' in connection to 'zoophrenia'). This kitsch combination of simulated cultural references and images forms the main interest of this performance, like a room of curiosities in a village fair.

Photo: Regina Gallery