Special project of the 1st Moscow Biennale of the Contemporary Art |  |
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The new seriousness is being discussed for 15 years already. However it still does not exist. Well, of course there were some artists ready to break their minds to public: pothering, sobbing, effusively and without any reservations. The deviant few. Most artists couldn't shed a single tear. True taste preferred scepsis to pathos. Public regarded a know-all ironical smile and erudite cool-headed observations. It was advantageous to pose as a pseudo-politician, pseudo-analyst or pseudo-idiot. Ethical and esthetical became an optional accessory. Passion was almost unseemly. Sentimentality was indecent. Human still seemed to be all too human.
Strange as it may seem, the blame lies on democracy. Democracy requires criticism, instead of declarations of love or hate. Critical is by definition unpleasant and in fact ugly. Beauty and majesty come along with apologetic (Caesar's) or prophetic (God's) art. Contemporary society gives to artists obscure but more and more intense signals - isn't is high time to fall into line, enlist and start manufacturing something kingly and divine.
Those whom we call artists will firmly refuse. Human, and only human
Marina Koldobskaya |
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Optics means an induced view, and its quality is more important than what it sees. Direct perspective invented in Renaissance times becomes the equivalent of classic humanism. XX century carried humanist per-spectiveness and pro-jectiveness to apogee and absurdity, simultaneously suggesting a variety of alternatives from the return to reverse perspective and postmodern retrospective to psychoanalytic introspective. Non-perspectiveness of some vanguard attempts became equal to hopelessness.
The Human Project artists open up a new optic state comparable to watching through a mist or dense atmosphere layers. The view can't come through; it gets stuck in elements and substances. In spite of and possibly owing to technical equipment it can't make distance and reach an observation point to see the world as a whole. Farsightedness of classical humanism is replaced by nearsightedness of new humanism. Human optics tries to approach animal optics, receptive system of plants, so that to replace an image by a sensor experience, a mode of behavior, psychosomatics. What if A. Koroliev, the writer who stated in his famous essay that an ideal man is a butterfly, is right?
Liubov Saprykina |
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This project brings up the issue of the possibility of an artist's humanist position, what problems it can solve and what problems it in the same time raises.
Contemporary art is a continuation of philosophy by other means. For a long time it has been discussing people, their gender, sexual, social, national and historic characteristics. Today speaking about humanity means stating that the notion of "human" has its self-consistent meaning, that a positive value will remain after the removal of social, cultural, biological and political layers. Nowadays art approaches to this value, this irrational blank spot, located on the crossing of all outer human features, but not equal to them and non-analyzable. The art simply can't pass it by. This blank spot covers people in their delicate and affecting nature, in squalor and in unlimited passion. And those people wish to be discussed.
Anna Matveeva |
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The moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work.of art.
J-P Sartre.
Triumphal offensive of the New Order makes people seek for isolation in their private areas, which seems as natural as the wish to stay at home in cold weather. But the initial instinctive striving for building one's own fortress raises the question of its foundation. Every person disappointed in global illusions is looking for his own foothold. Thus return forgotten and derided ideas of sense, values, choice and our responsibility for the choice. We are urged to be serious and we really become serious in our idealistic and vain attempt to protect existence, so delicate and defenseless, and to realize our human project. Maria Korosteliova |
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We stop to admire enchantedly with our work, we try to understand how to live with what we have done. Living in the midst of the "second nature" created by the mankind and now devouring it, artists make incredible physical and mental efforts to accommodate, tame and humanize this Frankenstein and to become not virtual, but real god of the created reality. As the war with oneself is despairing, the first step is to become the masters of themselves, to change the perspective, to use the possibility of other vision, to look at oneself from the outside or from above, from new artificial reality means to look ex machina.
An artist is a "deus ex machina", restituting the status quo of the human and the humanity. Art is an instrument of the tamed "second nature", which enables us to see the most important for us "first nature", the human one.
Arceny Sergueev |
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Modern society becomes more and more uncertain, leaving many types of interaction without standards and regulations; it rather marginalizes us than introduces in a new community. War as a way of arranging conflicts, euthanasia and cloning as a symbol of liberation, interdiction on interpretation of religion and resulting from it dissidence and new inquisition - this is only a short list of achievements of the contemporary society at the boundary of centuries. Art, which represents reality and at the same time denies it, is a powerful instrument of psychological adaptation, so contemporary return to the humanity and to the demiurgic mission of art and revival of the traditions of the Movable Art Exhibitions Association is the evidence of stagnation and loss of guiding line among the art community. So, today artists and curators rather defend than oracle. This return to the humanity, to corporal pain and soul disease is nationally characteristic by all-absorbing eternal naivety and universal anguish.
Elena Tsvetaieva |