moscow art
critic andrey kovalev
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On the nature of illusion and the illusion of nature.(Francisco Infante, Nonna Goryunova. “Between sky and earth”, Krokin-gallery, Moscow). Francisco Infante and Nonna Goryunova are indisputable classics of Moscow art, whose status is justified not only by international fame, but also by state prize and a personal exhibition in Tretyakovskaya gallery. In the upper part of the installation one can see polar images of the sky, and in the lower part snow-covered land. In between there are black and white documentary shots, which show how plain small sticks, pieces of paper, snowballs and other things can form surprisingly impressive illusions. The artists themselves call the final product “artifacts”. The impression seems to be a compromise between performance invisible to outsiders and land-art, which does not break the environment’s integrity. This time we can see the “artist’s kitchen”, the images that never get into museums shows or gallery exhibitions. Although Francisco Infante-Arana, the offspring of Spanish emigrants, was reckoned among nonconformists in the USSR, he never produced any “underground man” experience like that of Komar and Melamid’s soc-art or Kabakov’s communal depression. The “Movement” (“Dvizheniye”) group, in which Francisco Infante participated, was virtually the only one to attempt adapting the early avant-garde ideas to public conscience. The titans of early modernism featured no escapism, and instead of serving the society or the regime they intended to transform not only the society itself, but also the Nature, and even Cosmos. Boris Groys, the cunning historiographer of “the second avant-garde” included Infante in the golden roster of “Moscow romantic conceptualism”, although the latter leaned towards manipulating with languages and always seemed to operate visual images recalled from his own memory. Besides that Infante also had his own audience, the supporters of the technocratic utopia, which was quite a popular thing back in the sixties and was gently smothered later in the seventies. The annihilation of that utopia resulted in escaping to the realm of Nature a la Henry Thoreau. In 1968 Francisco Infante and Nonna Goryunova laid out the glancing snow with coloured cards of various forms. The spots formed into suprematic elements uncovering the mystery of the Great White Nothing encrypted by Kazimir Malevich. Geometrical abstraction implicates the possibility of a totally harmonic Cosmos without the contradiction of the “green world of flesh and blood” mentioned by Malevich (an utter antagonist of everything natural and elementary). But for people who had experienced living in a totally controlled society the matter was only about virtual alterations of visual reality, the regulation and harmonization of one’s own eyesight and conscience. The extirpation of the pathos of total world reconstruction undertaken by the second Russian modernism gave birth to visual Confucianism (reshaping of guises = amendment of names). As the result of these ascetic actions the defenders of the last stronghold of modernism have convincingly verified the fact that the artist himself is the main Artefact of modern art. But now art has completely forgotten the illusion of modernist discovery and only claims to be telling stories. That’s why the non-illusionary aspect of the exhibition is amazing and romantic love story of two hermits who have abandoned the social and technological utopia for the sake of wild nature in search for the great Illusion. |
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Andey Kovalev - [email protected], [email protected] |