DENIS MAKSIMOV

Storming

Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai. “The Storming”, total installation outside of the Shtager Gallery/Elephant & Castle Experimental Space, London, 2017. 

The mass spectacle “The Storming of the Winter Palace”, directed by dramatist Nikolai Evreinov, took place on the third anniversary of the October Revolution. It was staged outside of the former Tsarist Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government before Bolsheviks’ power grab. The performers reportedly included 125 ballet dancers, 100 circus artists, 200 women, 260 secondary actors, 150 assistants and 1750 supernumeraries. The spectacle took the form of ritual theatre, a Symbolist utopia that was born out of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. It is also peculiar that “The Storming” is often taken as an historical event in public consciousness and bears even more symbolic weight in the context of the 100 years anniversary of “the ten days that shook the world”, or Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917.

The act of storming as the symbolic gesture of emancipation has ontological character in anthropology, cultural and political history. Herostratus, the 4th century BC arsonist, sought eternal fame and historical immortality by destroying one of the Seven Wonder of the Ancient World, the great Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. Firdos Square statue of Saddam Hussein destruction, “the toppling”, became an iconic symbol of a controversial turn in Iraqi history. The power of storming had been a universal and transcultural strategy of political legitimisation.

The total installation “Storming” by Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai follows the development of St Petersburg theatre and opera stage design aesthetics, in which the artist was professionally trained and work for many years. 43 figures in the total installation are sculptural materialisations of the simple drawings on the plywood cut outs, two dimensional and therefore flat, just like the appearance of the props on a theatre stage. The enactment of mass spectacle requires the stage and perfect viewing arrangement for the public, as the impact of the event has the ideological function of historical legitimisation. The installation features life-sized soldiers, sailors, naked women and other characters frozen still in a multiplicity of action scenes, which correspond to the original composition of the mass spectacle. The critical nature of their aesthetic appearance is a key for entering the multi-dimensional nature of Shishkin-Hokusai oeuvre: objectification of women and other oppressed groups in the society, ontological dichotomy, and dialectics of the nature of any historical event that caused the necessity to stage “storming” in the first place, are embedded in the narrative of the total installation. The installation will travel around London and adapt itself to each space that will be stormed by the diverse symbolic protagonists. It is far from the first total installation of the artist - he staged “Practices of Growing Up” in Ufa and St Petersburg, “A Pillared Incubator” in Helsinki, specially commissioned “Looking” at 2017 Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art in Moscow among others.

Beyond the critical deciphering of the heavy subjects there are languages of Socratic irony and strategic humor, that play a paramount role in the style of the artist. The figures appear to communicate strong emotions: some of them are ruthless, empowered, full of rigor and determination while others are terrified, desperate and helpless. The oppositional nature of anthropology is a recurrent subject in artist’s work: the ongoing series of “The Naked against The Dressed” plywood sculptures are a symbolic and bold representation of normalised ontological brutality of dialectics in being.

Shishkin-Hokusai practice is as enticing from the technical perspective as in its conceptual essence. The illustrations obtain sculptural shapes while remaining flat and further blur, almost until it disappears, the fundamental boundary between a sketch and an object. The hybrid nature of the practice of the artist is the result of his professional activity as both set designer for large theatrical production, where he uses his birth name “Alexander Shushkin” and contemporary artist, who goes by the name “Shishkin-Hokusai”. As the artist explains himself: “[famous Russian painter Ivan] Shishkin worked with nature. But I’ve added to that the antagonist “Shishkin-Hokusai”. Hokusai with the figurative plasticity in some sense. In this way, I encode two vectors for myself: Shishkin as environmental component and Hokusai as the psycho-dramatic in relation to homo sapiens”. One can hardly be positioned better to reflect on the nature of mass spectacles.

The whole drama of the spectacle of the total installation revolves around the Elephant & Castle Experimental Space on the South of London, a seemingly insignificant location for re-staging grand spectacles that change the course of history. However the story of one of London’s “Newingtons” is very enticing: it was transformed from a no-go-area into the experiment of urban utopian planning after the Second World War and then went back to be one the most dangerous parts of the city after the experiment failed. At the moment it again lives through the controversial “storm” of the new Renaissance, brought by neoliberal capital flows from elsewhere during the London real estate boom, which in itself can go to ashes according to the expected by some catastrophic socio-economic consequences of Brexit. History seems, both on macro and micro levels, to go in cycles: does it actually matter what one storm in order to feel emancipated, at least for a moment? Does this moment of feeling the true energy of life cost all the suffering of its consequence? Is it the only way to rupture the rigid structures of “normal”, with all its inequalities, violence and oppression? The answer is up to each and any but at the same time all of us.

(text by Denis Maksimov)

—- русский —-

Массовый спектакль “Штурм Зимнего Дворца” под руководством драматурга Николая Евреинова был поставлен в канун третьей годовщины Октябрьской революции. Действо произошло снаружи бывшего царского Зимнего дворца, где  базировалось Временное правительство перед захватом власти в Петрограде большевиками. В труппе были 125 танцоров балета, 100 цирковых актеров, 200 женщин, 260 второстепенных персонажей, 150 ассистентов и 1750 членов “массовки”. Постановка была организована в формате “ритуального театра”, категории символической утопии, которая родилась как форма после неуспешной революции 1905 года. Достаточно занимательным является тот факт, что “Штурм” часто попадает во внимание как базирующийся на реальных событиях - и приобретает еще больше символического веса в контексте векового юбилея “10 дней, который потрясли мир”.

Акт “штурма” как символа эмансипации несет онтологический характер в социально-политической истории и антропологии. Герострат, поджигатель из 4 века до н.э., стремился внести свое имя в хроники навечно путем уничтожения одного из Семи Чудес Света античности - Храма Артемида Эфесской. “Опрокидывание” статуи Саддама Хуссейна на площади Фирдос стало иконографическим символом противоречивого поворота в истории Ирака. “Штурм” является универсальной и транскультурной стратегией политической легитимизации новой реальности.

Тотальная инсталляция “Штурм” Александра Шишкина-Хокусая отвечает эстетике Санкт-Петербургской традиции театрального и оперного дизайна, профессиональной отрасли художника помимо его практики в современном искусстве. 43  фигуры из фанеры являются скульптурной материализацией рисунков-вырезок из бумаги в двухмерной плоскости, аналогично формату традиционных театральных декораций. Активация массового спектакля требует сцены и идеального угла обзора для зрителей, поскольку задача мероприятия носит идеологический характер и заключается в исторической легитимизации. Инсталляция включает скульптуры солдат, моряков, обнаженных женщин и других участников “спектакля” на границе реальности и воображения, которые предстают перед смотрящим как компоненты остановленной во времени драматической сцены. Критическая сущность их эстетической формы является ключом для входа в разностороннюю природу практики Шишкина-Хокусая: “овеществление” женщин и других традиционно угнетаемых социально-политических групп в обществе, онтологические дихотомии и диалектика сущности исторического контекста, который становится причиной “штурма”, являются элементами тотальной инсталляции. Инсталляция будет представлена в нескольких пространствах в Лондоне, где сцена каждый раз будет адаптирована под новый “штурм” символическими протагонистами-скульптурами. Шишкин-Хокусай работает в медиуме тотальных инсталляций далеко не впервые - “Практики Взросления” были представлены в Уфе и Санкт-Петербурге, “Колонный инкубатор” в Хельсинки и специально произведенная для Триеннале российского современного искусства в Музее Гараж инсталляция “Смотрящий” в Москве.

Помимо критической дешифровки культурной реальности, язык сократической иронии и стратегический юмор играют важную роль в стилистике художника. Фигуры в тотальной инсталляции коммуницируют сильные эмоции: некоторые из них беспощадны, властны и полны уверенности в себе, в то время как другие выглядят устрашенными и беззащитными. Оппозиционная природа антропологии является постоянной темой работы художника: серия скульптурных работ “Голые против одетых” ярко и просто подчеркивает брутальный характер онтологической диалектики.

Практика Шишкина-Хокусая не менее интересна с технической точки зрения. Иллюстрации приобретают скульптурную форму в то время как остаются плоскими и таким образом дальше “размывают”, практически до исчезновения, фундаментальную границу между скетчем и материальным объектом. Гибридная природа практики художника является результатом смежности его профессиональной работы в качестве дизайнера театральных и оперных декораций с собственной художественной практикой, в которой он использует псевдоним “Шишкин-Хокусай”. Как художник объясняет сам “Шишкин работал с природой. Но к ней я добавил антагониста Шишкина-Хокусая. Хокусай с персонажами, с фигуративной пластикой, актерской в каком-то смысле. Таким образом я для себя зашифровываю два вектора: Шишкин как средовой момент, а Хокусай как психодрама, работа с гомо сапиенсом”. Сложно найти кого-то более подходящего для анализа природы массовых спектаклей.

Полноценная драма массового спектакля в тотальной инсталляции разворачивается вокруг экспериментального пространства Elephant & Castle на юге Лондона, казалось бы неважной локации для постановки революционных событий, которые стали причиной тектонических исторических изменений. Однако история одного из лондонских “Ньюингтонов” крайне занимательна: район был трансформирован из опаснейшего в городе в экспериментальное пространство урбанистической утопии после Второй мировой войны и затем, после провала эксперимента, снова стал сложным криминогенным центром. В данный момент он снова переживает противоречивый “шторм” изменений или новый Ренессанс, который был привнесен сюда Лондонским бумом градостроительства за счет инвесторов со всего мира - бумом, который может стать горсткой пепла согласно предсказаниям некоторых аналитиков последствий Брекзита. История на макро и микро уровнях ходит по кругу: важно ли, что кто-то “штурмует” для того, чтобы почувствовать бриз свободы и эмансипации, хотя на который промежуток времени? Является ли этот момент той истинной энергией жизни, которая стоит всех страданий для его достижения и возможных катастрофических последствий после него? Является ли “штурм” единственным способом “разрыва” структур “нормальности”, со всеми ее неравенствами, насилием и угнетениями? Ответ на эти вопросы является задачей как “индивидуального” для каждого, так и “общего” для всех нас.

(текст: Денис Максимов)

—- 

Shtager Gallery/Elephant & Castle Experimental Space is pleased to present the total installation of the seminal Russian artist Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai (b. 1969, St. Petersburg, Russia), 2016 laureate of Sergey Kurekhin Award, nominee of the INNOVATION PRIZE Award and 2011 nominee of the Kandinsky Prize (“Project of the Year”) for the first time in London. The exhibition is curated by Marina Shtager and Denis Maksimov / Shtager Gallery/Elephant & Castle Experimental Space рады представить проект тотальной инсталляции российского художника Александра Шишкина-Хокусая (род. 1969, Санкт-Петербург, Россия), лауреата Премии Сергея Курехина в 2016, номинанта на премию “Инновация” в 2011 и Премию Кандинского (“Проект года”) впервые в Лондоне. Кураторы выставки - Марина Штагер и Денис Максимов

“Science for the Masses” by Marius Ritiu at Verbeke Foundation

public sculpture “Science for the Masses” by Marius Ritiu; plexiglas, led lights, wood, iron bars, iron pipe, 3 330 x 90 x 333 cm (images - courtesy of the artist and Verbeke Foundation)

Historiography of icons is a peculiar subject: their appropriation hardly can be deemed off ideology. Marius Ritiu’s public sculpture at Verbeke Foundation originates from the chance, when the collector found three incomplete McDonalds light signs at a lightbox repair shop in Belgium. Strong iconography of one of the most recognisable commercial signs in the world creates very particular visual, social and political associations. In the linguistic tradition of conceptual art and following the subject of the artist’s current research of the abandonment, memory and symbology in his native Romania, Ritiu strips the actual semantics of the sign and demonstrates the bare propagating power using the strategy of re-appropriation. In this gesture he achieves to stay in a fine position on the line of neutrality in regard to surface-laying ideological and activist struggles and exposes invisible layer of the power of language, symbology and association in visual culture: to watch is not enough to see. 

Transformation of “MMM” into “E = mc^2” talks to the thousands casual passers-by via highway in a complex way and at the same time in a direct form. First, they are attracted by the recognisable symbol of feeding the masses with high nutritional (and questionable dietary) value at the low price. In the end of the day, we humans have a lot in common with Pavlov’s dog. But a closer look at the familiar symbols reveals that their initial association had been subverted by something that is so much more fundamental and universally revelational, but at the same time taken for granted and therefore almost invisible. Albert Einstein genius turned the world upside down less than a century ago and laid the foundation to the world we are living in now. Equalisation of “food for the masses” with “science for the masses” is one of the core promises of revolutionary avant-garde, both then and now. Ritiu’s sculpture brings this proximity to a climax and does what the art ought to do: disturbs the comfort of the mundane normality of the horizon of Antwerp’s neighbourhood.  

There is nothing beyond language, said Jacques Derrida. But there is a limitless flow of potentiality to be unlocked in the language codes by those who dare to challenge the familiar and have the courage to question conventional meaning and become creators of the alternatives.

text by Denis Maksimov

too much as not enough, vol. 1

a group exhibition feat. feat. Marina Alexeeva, Maria Arendt, Ludmila Belova, Vita Buivid, Alexandr Dashevsky, Laura Dekker, Lee Edwards, Andrey Gorbunov, Amir-Nasr Kamgooyan, Boris Kazakov, Alexandra Mazur-Knyazeva, Ivan Plusch, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Alexandr Shishkin-Hokhusai, Ivan Tuzov

Artist, curator, dealer, provocateur and polymath Marcel Duchamp is a Pandora of art history for some and John the Baptist of modern and contemporary art for others. Among many disruptions of the order and normality of what was set to be called ‘art’, in 1935 he created Boîte-en-valise, or box in a suitcase, a portable miniature monograph including sixty-nine reproductions of the artist’s own work. In the following years, he created other editions of the boxes, with varying content and luxurious touch, including a special edition for long time friend Peggy Guggenheim. Is it a portfolio of artist’s work or an individual piece of work, or maybe both? As enigmatic as ever, Duchamp was not meaning to provide a definite answer.

An inaugural exhibition at Shtager Gallery in London unites under the same roof in a compact space not only one, but multiple group and solo ‘exhibitions’. The conceptual gesture of Duchamp is peculiar in the contemporary context of commercialisation, gentrification and scarcity. How many narratives and stories can strategically fit in a small experimental space?

Duchamp anticipated and contributed to the institutionalisation of many forms of presentation within and beyond artistic fields with his radical and daring innovations. Curriculum Vitae and a personal statement are the standard of self-presentation now. The radical nature of his heritage is timeless and in the currents of crises in contemporaneity, becomes actual and even urgent.

Attention deficit alongside the culture of acceleration lead to us to necessity to be more effective in literally all aspects of modern life. The functions of the museum, gallery, artist-run and independent project spaces are merging with each other in search of new meaning as the social and political conditions of artistic production are evolving towards new, seemingly tougher, but possible just different frontiers. Revisiting in this context the most influential ideas of the age of manifestos is more than necessary.

A portable exhibition is presented here in the form of an intellectual vortex: it drags the viewer into its own laws of matter, gravity and light. Just like it is in the space of contemporary media, where the increasing number of simultaneous voices create more autonomous images of subjective real.

By placing the artists in an experimental, multiversal and hardly comprehensible conversation, a strategic cacophony, there is an emergence of the question about what we observe in the constantly accelerating societies: is too much the new not enough?

'too much as not enough’, curated by Denis Maksimov, is the first exhibition in an upcoming yearly cycle of research in contemporary miniature art practices in Shtager Gallery (Studio 24, 87 Crampton Street, London, SE17 3AZ ). Vol. 1 will run from May 18 till May 30 with the opening on May 18, 19.00, by the lecture by Denis Maksimov on Duchamp, acceleration, radical forms of presentation, experimentation & ‘too much as not enough’ series (RSVP: shtagergallery@gmail.com). 

Shtager Gallery moved from the cultural capital of Russia, St Petersburg, to one of the global art capitals, London, the UK, in 2017. Founder of the gallery Marina Shtager has been working in professional art world since 2006 in the roles of director and curator. She founded Shtager Gallery in 2014.  Elephant & Castle is an experimental art space conceived by Shtager Gallery in cooperation with Morris & Associates in 2017.

Contemporary art in a dialogue with socio-political realities

Dichotomy of Vorstellung/Darstellung in Gadamer’s hermeneutics was a point of departure in analysing art market, financial & stock market, political ideology and regimes of aesthetics in relation to “political”.

The lecture was given for The Modern Education and Research Institute in Brussels in December 2016.

Berlin Biennale 9: shiny, but not deep

Sculptural element ‘L'Avalee des avales (The Swallower Swallowed) Iguana/Sloth’ of Jon Rafman’s 'View of Parizer Platz’ (2016)

I was going to Berlin with some degree of anticipation to see the strong statement: philosophies in total visuality are irrelevant. But DIS, curatorial collective/fashion online magazine team went half-way there: being not radical enough to emphasise the nakedness of the king and at the same time providing seemingly unnecessary layer of pseudo-intellectualism. It appears to breath the same cold air as 'connecting with your inner self’ iPhone covers, produced in South Asian sweatshops in 'limited edition’ royal navy blue colour to be sold in Colette at Parisian Rue St Honore.

While society of spectacle is in urgent need of strong slap on the face amidst growing apathy and absenteeism, the Biennial doesn’t go further than demonstrate or, at its strongest moments, proclaim what we have been seeing for more than decade: continuous mass delusion and enchantment with carpet bombardment of shiny, glossy and hyperreal imagery. I had hard time to distinguish difference between 'visual things’ shown at the Biennale from my Instagram feed.

Another unrealised expectation: the issue of digital identification and the gap between 'digital me’ and 'empirical me’ haven’t been addressed critically. Rather, like in Jon Rafman installation on the terrace of Akademie der Kunste, it was spectacularly demonstrated. Attention wasn’t paid as well to reflecting on the possible consequences of further evolvement of identity politics, actualisation of possible space for thinking and placing you in position of environmental discomfort, where the expected magic of immersing into the world of contemporary art could actually happen. Criticism of reality in this context is not criticism per se: it falls in the trap of being part of ideologised environment while trying to appear outside of it.

Camille Henrot, installation view of 'Office of Unreplied Animals’, 2016

Biennale, which I expected to be a slap on the face of the hierarchies of contemporary (f)art world, in fact tried to sit on several chairs at the same time. 'Fuck you we are not even curators’ attitude doesn’t go far enough when those pronouncing rock-and-roll spirited mantras words are entering the very same mode of talking with the audience. Philosophic inquiry seems like it was based on purchased in the Urban Outfitters tome of 'All Philosophy in Cat Pictures’.

Absence of the theme or any point is felt in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Akademie der Kunst the most. Adrian Piper familiar critical reflections on 'everything being taken away’ are shown next to poorly produced AirBnB-lifestyle devoted installation. Rather neutral in their appeal (and therefore not very much provoking in any sense) but very Instagram-friendly Anna Uddenberg hommages to self-obsession and packable light travel lifestyle talk to less than 1% of bubble-inhabiting jet-set golden youth. Hito Steyerl video installation which is shedding the light and dissecting Saddam Hussein project of building modern tower of Babel in Akademie der Kunste fall somehow out of the general LOLism and emojis, but because of it’s outstanding quality and depth seems to be out of place.

What appears to be strategic, however, is the choice of the locations for the exhibition. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin European School of Management, The Feuerle Collection and touristic Blue Boat ensemble suggest a proper dialogue about overarching penetration by the fashionable 'contemporary art’ into anything and everything - in many cases to hide emptiness, ridicule and unjustified hierarchies. The Fuerle Collection appears to be the most coherent in terms of addressing the subject of advancing 'pastichisation’ in contemporaneity. The former military bunker as the space of escapism and complete abandonment is the only platform that is available for critical reflection and thinking in today’s environment of over-arching totality.

All in all, Berlin Biennale succeeds to demonstrate how 'Present’ appears like, just like the spread of fashion magazine. However, for instance, 'Martha Rosler reads Vogue’ (1982) is standalone the work and not only encompasses what the Biennale should have, but suggests much more. Visiting sites feels like browsing through Instagram or Facebook feed - rather an activity to 'kill the time’ in the public transport commute or queue in supermarket to the cashier, than a space to formulate actual inquiries about the problematics within modern way of living. 

Underneath the socio-political matter of perceived reality: ‘video sculptures’

courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

Interview with Emmanuel Van der Auwera (EVDA) by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (February 2016 issue)

Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a recent HISK graduate, and the winner of the 2015 Langui Prize awarded during the Young Belgian Artist Award exhibition. In Van der Auwera’s series of Video Sculptures, the notion of screen as window to reality is literally stripped of its flatness, symbolically revealing the underlying mechanics of the media through deconstruction by the artist’s hand. Prior to sculpting the hardware, Van der Auwera continues his extensive research of contemporary video content and identifies those he feels accurately reflect cultural currents in the flux of postmodern bizarreness. These range from all-encompassing, full of manipulative symbols messianic political events to cultural events and intimate confessional moments.

DM: Can you describe the process of making ‘video sculptures’?

EVDA: The screen, technically, composed of LED lights that lit up liquid crystal glass, two sheets of it. On the top of the screen there is an LCD filter. If you remove this filter, all you can see is a white screen - to catch the image you need to apply this filter somehow externally, for example by applying glasses with this filter. Depending on the brand of the screen the filter reacts very differently. Samsung screen is easy to tear off, takes half an hour, while Sony one takes a full day. I don’t pre-cut in advance - it’s not about creating the designed solution. I can only have a relative control over the process. In this way it reminds me of painting and drawing. I am organising it until I feel I reach sort of an equilibrium. It sometimes quite painful - right now I’m building the new sculpture and it’s Sony screen (the decision of buying which I almost now regret, for the reason given before), so the process is very complicated, kind of violent. I am shredding the LCD filter in separate pieces. I keep all of the remaining materials, this outer layers.

DM: Do you see that unpredictability of the result makes the process sort of impressionistic?

EVDA: Indeed. It’s an experiment all the time - I don’t feel control over the process of making. It’s reassuring, because it’s not an automatic gesture. There is no intention and possibility therefore of mass producing the sculptures, despite the fact that material is quite ‘industrial’ in a way. The magical in way transformation from the regular screen into the conceptual sculptural screen is done through the artistic process. There is an ambiguous border in the format of the work.

DM: Is there rituality in process?

EVDA: Yes, I always start from the around the screen with very precise cut. I quickly switch blades for cutting, depending on how the screen is reacting. There is something autopsic in it. An ambiguous border between painting and sculpture in my work is something that I’m still figuring out in the process of continuous work on the new pieces.

courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

DM: Do you have ‘the bank’ of the videos or the list of the subjects which you are choosing from?

EVDA: I don’t have a precise idea of how I put the videos and screens together, it’s quite empiric. For example with the video of President Obama first inauguration. Initially I received a lot of criticism from people that they don’t want to see this image, so embedded in reality of today. Instead of being reminded and pushed towards self-reflection, they would rather want to see some aesthetic abstract images, beautiful and completely open for the widest angles of interpretation.  

DM:  Have you ever made live performances?

EVDA: I am thinking of doing a performances again, with cutting the screen in front of the audience. The one I made where I was cutting the screen while it way playing scenes of the first night the American invasion in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, specifically the CNN cover of the intense bombing. I heard the gasp of people in the audience who didn’t realise what was happening. The tearing in Samsung was very easy and you could have heard these sounds of static electricity, those kind of broken radio waves sounds. It’s almost humanising and definitely relates to the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, while the human body is replaced with the ‘moving pictures machine’, that is so mystified in contemporaneity.

courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

DM: How do you reflect on symbolism in your researches?

EVDA: There is sort of iconographic analysis. For example Kasimir Malevich, who was a spiritual man, was aiming to create the icon beyond representation. In my case of the white screen, the image is still there, but whiteness of the screen after the LCD layer removed and presents this cleanness of the surface. This what I connect to Suprematism of Malevich. You sort of see the magic and the awfulness of artificiality of the image which is represented to you on this screen - as soon as the top layer removed, you are confronted by bare whiteness of the surface. The image is still there - however to see it you need to apply LSD glasses.

John Carpenter’s demonstrates it interestingly in the cult movie ‘They Live’ - when the protagonist finds the box with glasses, that reveal him the nature of the control society around him. All the advertisements suddenly appear as ‘orders’ - obey, buy, consume, behave, etc. My work is the criticism of iconoclastic approach towards the everyday objects which we are surrounded with - I am bringing back the physics in the technology through the deconstruction of this ‘machine of illusion’, sort of an awful power of control over our vision of reality. Through it’s important to mention that I don’t have an ambition of patronising or teaching anyone - this is rather a critical assessment of the immensity of it’s impact on our perception of reality and everyday behaviour in modernity.

The Art of Sightseeing

Denis Maksimov. “The truth us a question of the standpoint”, business card for booking guided tour-performance, ‘The Game of Roles’ at ParisTexasAntwerp, June 2015.

Interview with curatorial team of Marres Currents #3 © by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (December 2015 issue) and catalogue of Marres Currents #3 (in English and Dutch)

Marres Currents #3 was the third edition of the annual exhibition series titled Marres Currents. With this series, Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, presents recent graduates from art academies in the Southern Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. While offering emerging artists and curators a platform, Marres also aims to build an international infrastructure for talent development. Agata Jaworska was invited as guest curator for this year. Her exhibition In No Particular Order during the Dutch Design Week last year showed work of young designers. For Marres Currents #3, Jaworska gathered a team of curators around her. Ina Hollmann, Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand, (former) students of the Design Academy Eindhoven. Denis exhibited two conceptual artworks in this show and spoke with curators about their intentions and strategy.

DM: Why did you select these artists?

C: Sightseeing offers a series of probes and modes of inquiry into how to look at the world. We sought work that strove to understand what is happening in society, and manifested this through artistic practice. The participating artists manifest a multitude of ways of doing so - ranging from a simulated flight across the Earth to digging out a cubic metre of the ground. The works raise fundamental questions: how it is we come to get to know the world, and in this, what are the paradigms we take for granted. There is also a sense of adventure - from Fanny Hagmeier’s exhilarating experiments with her own body, to Stef van Dungen’s climbers that scale the Opel garage (painted white to evoke an icy mountain), and the installation by Jan van den Bosch that dares visitors to climb a scaffolding construction. Thrill, self-confrontation and risk are palpable. The works ask us to travel to unknown lands, to re-look at the past, to put ourselves in challenging positions, to question dominant ways of seeing, and through this, to inscribe our voices into the future history of the world.

DM: What role does story telling play?

C: There is a strong communicative aspect to the works. Darcey Bennett presents a story in the form of forensic evidence after the occurrence of an event. He deconstructs a tragedy, laying out all the evidence and asking us to piece it together. The message is fragmented and results in multiple inevitably incomplete versions. Struck by propagandistic accounts of national parks of Congo written during Belgian’s colonial rule, Alessandra Ghiringhelli embarked on her own investigation in the national archives. She presents her own account of history in a series of texts and illustrations. Well aware of the embedded bias of the author, she struggles with the impossibility of achieving objective representation.This exhibition is about embracing the instability of a journey - its narratives are not always proposing solutions or one immutable truth. The travel through Sightseeing is fragmented, sometimes incomplete and at other times confrontational. Visitors navigate between continents, virtual and physical experiences, past and future. They inevitably will compose their own version of the exhibition.

courtesy of Mikael Groc

DM: How did you approach the notion of ‘currents’?    

C: The present is a compilation; it co-exists with our knowledge of the past, our memories, our ideas of the future and our life plans. Working with this definition, we view Sightseeing as a snapshot of the present. Some works are speculative - for instance in Treasure Island, Skye Sun envisions an island tax haven populated by extinct species. It is an isolated land designed to attract the world’s wealthiest elite, where, as Skye says, “they can rebuild their world in the image of their investment”. Though these islands are fictional, their power to provoke relies on the fact that they offer a critique of present-day reality. Another work that simultaneously plays with the present and the future is The Dutch Mountain by Mirte van Duppen. Van Duppen makes a documentary of a mountain that could arise in the flat land of the Netherlands. She does this by filming real scenes in the country, fragments of reality that gradually build an image of the mountain in our minds. These visuals are augmented with interviews with experts on the topics of tourism, urbanism and nature. Their specialised comments on how to make and deal with such a mountain in this country ensure the viewer that this future fiction could just as easily be a present day reality. Skye and Van Duppen use different means to construct speculative geographies. The value of their scenarios lies not in their capacity to actually predict the future, but rather, to enable us to see ourselves in a clearer light today. They offer us a mirror of the here and now.

DM: You were asked to make an exhibition of selected graduation projects from art academies. Why did you bring in design and architecture?

C: The interesting thing in projects such as Skye Sun’s Treasure Island or Anja Kempa’s Remembering Spring is that the emphasis is not on the architectural design of the buildings, but rather on the narratives that they carry. These projects are ultimately about how buildings and their surroundings can manifest our hopes and fears about the future, and in a broader sense, how our material world ultimately fulfils a psychological and social function. People are working with narrative structures regardless of their formal training and discipline. We felt it was not only our role to convey what is happening at art academies but also what connections we could make to the works we encountered. This is not a discussion that is solely relevant to the art or design field. It is simply about being human and responding to the world.

DM: Could you give us a sense of the experience you aim to create for the show?

C: The first image that will confront the visitors is We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right by Roel Neuraij. It is a photograph of a globe that he has rotated so that the location of where the photo was taken is touching the ground. Normally we orient ourselves in relation to where we are in the world, but this image asks us to consider how the world is positioned in relation to us. We hope this image sets the tone, introducing a bit of disorientation at the outset.Near the entry there is a film of Neuraij’s father, a physicist who takes us through an equation in order to calculate not our weight on the planet, but rather the force of the planet upon us. In Neuraij’s words: “The scientific method has been designed to discover rules and laws that operate beyond the human, but because we ourselves are inadvertently human, so is our science.” Neuraij studies the space between the Earth as an astronomical object and as it is understood by humans. The exhibition continues to present an inherently human experience of the world. Fanny Hagmeier subjects her body to extreme conditions, whether manmade or natural. Naked, she stands in a car wash, she swims next to a sea vessel, she lies on frozen ground, all in search of her bodily limits, and the sense of being alive through self-experimentation. She subjects her body to various conditions not unlike a scientist that is testing how one body reacts to various environments and forces.

One area of the exhibition brings together journeys from various places - Iceland, Iran, Congo, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. These stories compile an incomplete atlas of the world. They accept the fact that subjectivity is an inevitable aspect of observation, measurement, analysis, description, and other methods used to understand and depict the world. The sense of experimentation and exploration continues throughout the exhibition both in the approaches of the artists and - we hope - in the state of mind of the viewer. Seeing something familiar with fresh eyes is one of the intentions of the show. The artists we selected have constructed practices that are largely about re-investigations. As a viewer, your investigation of the show (as a sight seer) will also be informed by a willingness to suspend disbelief and explore with fresh eyes.

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.

Interview with Walter Vanhaerents

Walter Vanhaerents

The Vanhaerents Art Collection is a family collection of contemporary art containing works from the 1970s until today. It contains works from emerging young artists with those of more established artists by whom they were inspired. Belgian Art Collector Walter Vanhaerents manages and curates this vast collection of masterpieces.

Denis Maksimov: Do you have a strategy for collecting art? 

Walter Vanhaerents: There was never really any strategy. I just follow my heart. 

DM: Where did you spot the art you wanted to purchase? 

WV: I went to galleries as there were very few art fairs back when I started. There were just Art Cologne and Art Basel. There was no market - private collectors were kind of walking around. 

DM: How did you start to collect? 

WV: It was sort of a hobby. From an early age, I had to be very engaged in the family business. Later I started to look for something different to do in order to find a good balance in my life. Some people do sport for example. I found art collecting to be my “thing”. I was also very interested in architecture and that became a starting point. I started buying a number of pieces, without an investment perspective in mind. Creating a collection was not the purpose in the beginning. I was simply interested in artists who are making pieces that are larger than life. Life is three-dimensional and I wanted to surround myself with embodiments of this idea. I have always loved the medium of film. At the end of a film, I always forget what it was about because I focused so much on how it was directed and created. I was very interested in Warhol movies - many forget that he actually did his society portraits and prints in order to fund movie productions. They never made money themselves and the whole factory was a machine – generating revenue in order to fund film production. 

David Altmejd & Michelangelo Pistoletto works

DM: What is curation for you? 

WV: Due to my technical background, I feel very connected to installation works in open spaces. Placing a show together - that is curation for me. Who is a curator? Everyone can be a curator. There are too many curators, there is no curation standards. I am focused on visual sensations. I never did a curation elsewhere apart from my own space but I love to collaborate on the arrangement of my own collection with other curators. I like the idea of having two pieces next to each other in order to create a certain emotional tension. It is all about how you use the space. I think a lot of curators don’t understand the space enough. They don’t “feel” space well enough. Staying in the space, sitting in the corner there, understanding it - it’s very important for putting on the show. I also like to give the freedom of organising my space to external curators. It creates completely different perspectives on my collection. I don’t want to be a collector who is defined by a particular style. I like to show different facets of my interests and topics that are close to me.

DM: Where do you go to spot new talents? 

WV: I often go to East London in the younger galleries and I go to Paris. I develop a certain program for a trip and personally meet the people. It’s not possible to do that at an art fair. Fairs are just a way of presenting – and there is a lot of pressure. I never go into competition to buy. Once, at a fair in New York, a guy assured me that he gives me first reserve on a piece but then sold the piece before I came back at the agreed time, as he was afraid that I wouldn’t come back. Since then I told to myself that I won’t be doing purchases on fairs anymore. 

DM: How do you see contemporary art and the market now?

WV: There is so much choice in the market. I wouldn’t say there are any particular tendencies in contemporary art now. There is a lot of repetition which is definitely very common. It feels somehow muddy. It’s popular among the street artists for example. Sometimes works are so nihilistic. It’s just boring and it’s not new, these ideas were shown before. For me, it is important to try and find new perspectives and look for more depth. I decided initially that I will never go back in time with my collection. I am always looking for something new. Conceptual art is 60 years old - it’s not new anymore, but people still discuss it. It is not an interesting discussion anymore. DM: In the current climate of increasing cultural budget cuts, do you think private collectors can step in, in order to keep public institutions ‘contemporary’? WV: I am open to work together with museums concerning my collection. Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands has already offered me a cooperation and I look forward to it. But here in Belgium it is difficult. Belgian museums don’t have funds to buy new art - their budgets are too small. At the same time, they don’t have good ideas about privatepublic collaborations yet. Sometimes I lend pieces from my collection, that’s all for now. DM: Do you think Jeff Koons and similar ‘celebrity artists’ still express something actual through their art? WV: That’s difficult to say - Koons is a lifetime career artist. He has said what he had to say. But you know - I thought Damien Hirst was a bubble, but I was wrong. The last pieces Koons made were clay, plasticine towers in Whitney. That is something he has never shown before. But James Ensor for example was drawing the same things after he turned 30. Murakami as well. I got several early sculptures of him for nothing and that’s it, I had no intention of buying more. Now he is still a hit, despite repetitiveness. 

published in The Brussels Times Magazine, February/March 2015