"Return of the Prodigal son"/action

The next duet exhibition with Anatoly Varvarov was as situational to the touch as the previous ones. Then we did not even think of joining somewhere, joining the Union of Artists, or looking for approaches to the Soros Foundation and the like. Therefore, a career strategy or receiving grants simply did not interest us. Then we were intrigued by an ethical experiment of interaction with new acquaintances in new spaces. Reduction of the audience in the exhibition space, where instead of the still familiar paintings, printouts of the calendar of the future 1996 were hung. Everything was done by coincidence and intersection of interests. We were then amused that the entire exhibition was placed in an A3 daddy format without any censorship from the administration.

Gleb Vysheslavsky, in the mid-90s, the director of the exhibition hall of the Slavutich recreation center, suggested we make an exhibition of contemporary art. We liked the round hall, in which the movement of the clockwise view of each month in two prints was supposed to be reproduced with reproductions of famous masters of modernism of world art in negative color images. Art has traditionally been a ministry: palaces, temples, various religious meanings, life, etc. In the nineteenth century, after a number of reasons (Paris Salon of Independents), new pictorial forms appear that break away from social customers and for the first time acquire an independent purpose. The artist becomes not only free, but also the pendulum of mankind, becoming a figure of an impartial genius. Thus, art acquired the status of a “prodigal son”, which did not answer for anything - it was a period of utopian modernism with its metaphysical aspirations and abstract categories.

After the exhaustion of historical modernism, the “prodigal son” came down to earth, but here he is awaited by a trap of tautomania - the DJ era of postmodernism. Using its own tools, we turn the cultural codes back to the entrance, where before the “wandering”, art served the sublime spiritual interests of people, and not “art for art” itself. At the end of the action, pocket calendars were presented to all those present.

Konovalov I