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Articles
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Amnesia: View from the Top
// Sergey Safonov, Gazeta, vol. 39 of March 5, 2007
5 march 2007
The main project of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art has been opened.
As it was promised, both venues allocated for the display of the main project of the regular Moscow art event titled Footnotes: Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia welcomed first curious visitors with the start of the spring. The organizers of the art festival took an effort to broadcast the words of their commissioner, Joseph Backstein, saying that “the declared theme of Footnotes refers, first and foremost, to the issue of the search for the place contemporary art strives to occupy in contemporary world, that of the universal commentary to the developments in the reality around us”.
As a matter of fact, this “search for a place” came down to the exploration of territories that has not been marked yet in the context of the Moscow exhibitional activity, even the fact of their physical existence was concealed from the general public. The first territory is the back wing of the TSUM shopping center facing the Kuznetsky Most street that has been built recently. Visitors reach it from the Neglinnaya street, but they shouldn’t use the door featuring a clumsy inscription: “opin” (open) made by the hand of an unknown gastarbeiter, they should go through an almost civilized entrance. Then the viewers pass through the salesroom and take an elevator to the upper storey. This is where several projectors, screens and displays are exhibited in the dusk and concrete dust, displaying a collective artwork titled USA: American Video Art at the Start of the Third Millennium. Three invited curators, Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist, worked hard on this fuzzy display.
I am afraid to recommend this anemic spectacle to anybody except the particularly zealous champions of low-budget video art which has worked out a number of canons during the short time of its existence, the main of which demands that the action on screen is not to be entertaining. Yet, here one can also view a video installation titled Eight Reports Delivered at the Creating Thinking Worlds International Conference on Philosophy, Politics and Aesthetical Theory. All the art here comes down to the simple fact that the speeches by Boris Kagarlitsky, Mikhail Ryklin, Molly Nesbit, Jacques Ranciere and other participants of the conference anticipating the present biennale can be watched on a group of displays “at three levels of perception”: in the ordinary, rapid and even reverse modes.
More archaic exhibits of the main project, like 3-D installations, objects and even large-scale acryl painting, are concentrated on the 19th-21st storeys of the Federation Tower which is being built in the Moscow City complex. This was the theme cultivated by such invited curators, such as Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosa Martinez and Fuliya Erdemchi, their displays are respectively titled History in the Present Tense, Foundation Zero, or the Icy Water of Egoistic Calculations, and After Everything. Even some Russian Century Foundation and Marina Goncharenko, its curator, display a set of paintings looking more or less like easel ones at the Federation Tower – it is titled Through the “Painting”. The participation of Russian artists is minimal in all of these projects, and we will hardly hear most names of Western authors in future. But a trip to real construction site featuring an ascent with construction workers on the external elevator (internal elevators are not functioning there) and the panorama of the Moscow airscape may provide great entertainment. Here you can see the view of the city which is going to take an effort and fall in love with contemporary art in its international conditions during the coming month.
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