Interview with art collective AES+F
courtesy of AES+F collective
Interview was originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (October 2015 issue)
AES Group was originally formed in 1987 by the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich and the multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky in Russia. Exhibiting abroad from 1989, the group expanded its personnel and name with the addition of the photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1995. AES+F’s recent work has developed at the intersection of photography, video and digital technologies, although it is nurtured by a persistent interest in more traditional media — sculpture especially, but also painting, drawing and architecture. Deploying a dialogue among these media, and plumbing the depths of art history and other cultural canons, AES+F’s grand visual narratives explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere. By now the subject of almost 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations that have come to define the AES+F aesthetics. In 2015 AES+F presented the new project Inverso Mundus at 56th Biennale di Venezia. AES+F visited Brussels in September for the opening of the solo show ‘THE TRILOGY plus’ in Aeroplastics Contemporary gallery and the opening of the exhibition ‘2050. A brief history of the future’ at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts [which Denis will review in the next issue of poliaesthetica], where their work is also exhibited.
Denis (DM) met with Lev Evzovich (LE), the ‘E’ of the group, to discuss collective’s work and it’s context.
DM: How do you define the medium in which you work?
LE: I think ‘-isms’ are passé. We don’t want to find ourselves in ‘boxes’, transdisciplinarity is the key today. We started from blending neo-Baroque rich imagery with realism and certainly have special relations with surrealism - which someone once told in our case can be called ‘social surrealism’.
DM: Is writing important for contextualisation of your creations on the vast territory of contemporary culture?
LE: Texts, that accompany our exhibitions or shows, are generally speaking unimportant to us. We focus on the image as the ‘discourse generator’. Interpretation of the image by viewers can be quite far from what we actually were thinking while producing the video - but this is something that we definitely enjoy. The role of the artist, in our view, is not to deliver perfectly articulated message.
DM: And what about response from ‘the art world’ - critics, curators, etc.?
LE: Critics and curators for us are less interesting than response we get through Facebook, Instagram. That’s where ‘the life’ is now. We saw over lunch in Venice Australian collector David Walsh, who recently built museum in Tasmania, and he said about our work that it is specifically interesting for him because half of the audience find it just visually ‘beautiful’ and don’t think of reflecting on it’s symbology, while the other half start to reflect on what we tried to hide behind this ‘beautiful surface’. I think he correctly noticed the foundation of what we intend to do: it’s somehow a game of aesthetics.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: So you prefer not to occupy the audience with the context?
LE: We don’t want to explain anything. We are beyond political activism. We offer freedom of interpretation of our work and embrace it.
DM: Have you thought of directing a full-featured length movie?
LE: Some of our works reach as long as 1 hours 10 minutes in length, so it’s already quite close to cinematographic format. At the moment we would have considered seriously the offer to work on the full-featured movie, however it of course requires considerations about budgets and another level of collaboration.
DM: I bet you were certainly compared before to Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster Cycle’ series. Renaissance and to some extent Baroque share this spirit of the idea of ‘the ultimate object of art’, the great masterpiece. Do you have an ambition to create it?
LE: We don’t think in this category at all. We are situated in the process of critical analysis and react on the world ‘as it happens’. For now we made a trilogy, our own ‘La Divina Comedia’ so to say. But Inverso Mundus [one of the latest video works], that is now exhibited in 56th Venice Biennale in as a part of collateral project, is rather different, unconnected chapter in our work both thematically and technologically.
DM: Does mysticism occupy special place on the background of your aesthetics? Would you side with Freud or Jung in conversation about the nature and sources of unconscious sensations?
LE: We side with Jung. Mass ideology, mass mythologies are very interesting subjects for us. Religion for us is more interesting as the system of signs. For example when the shape of beard is more important than Surahs of Quran and this pure symbolic feature becomes the reason enough to ‘validate’ justification of a murder. When the visual codes and symbols in religion, for example, overpower it’s scripts. We see it Russia now - the current ‘revival’ of Orthodoxy is not the revival of intellectual and spiritual anti-Soviet existential philosophy, but rather ‘white trash’ dogmatism that serves as the reason enough to justify violence and stupidity. This ‘rituality’, that becomes the basis of the idea for new identity building, concerns us very much. In Inverso Mundus for example, we take on the subject of bizarre subcultures of the suburbs in the big Western cities, setting the scene of orgy of those rioters, that were smashing windows and burning cars in London and Stockholm recently, with police in the royal Versailles-like huge bed, covered with sheets made with Fortuny fabrics, the most expensive in the world now.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: Strong aesthetic absurdity is very powerful when it’s full of complex, but easily recognisable symbolism.
LE: Indeed.
DM: The ‘political’ in aesthetics is important for your work.
LE: Politics is very important for us. The art that doesn’t contain politics to some extent is just not relevant. But at the same time, keeping the approach to politics on certain level of criticism in arts is no less important. We avoid by any means vulgar propaganda that sometimes is named ‘art’ - when the political message is on the surface and becomes the very reason behind the ‘production’ of so-called art.
DM: Is AES+F is open for ‘+’ someone else?
LE: We are a collaboration now and certainly will never close the door for engaging and working with other interesting people.