Artist Andrey Monastyrsky highlighted the illegible

Observations of today’s reality in the style of Japanese conceptualism

One of the founders of Moscow conceptualism, the artist Andrei Monastyrsky, in tandem with his daughter, a member of the famous art group “MishMash” Masha Sumnina, presented the exhibition “Highlights and illegible” at the XL Gallery at the Winzavod. To create the project, the authors turned to the artistic practices of the Japanese conceptualist Kawara On, who deliberately deprived his works of any personal emotions, reducing them to fixation and observation. Monastyrsky and his daughter also decided to document reality as observers – only this is appropriate in dark times, they are sure.

The exhibition begins with the video “Three Portraits”, which captures Andrey Monastyrsky’s walk with his daughter and friends in Sokolniki Park. During the promenade through the autumn forest, the company leaves on the trees printouts of poems by the 9th-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, translated by Shchutsky, known to the domestic public from the Songs of the Wanderer by the Soviet composer and pianist Georgy Sviridov. And also – portraits of German singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Artists fix cards on trees to the soundtrack of songs to the music of Schubert and Beethoven. “I’m sitting quietly on the top of the hill, You are leaving behind the mountains, High on the top …” – the words are heard carried away by the autumn wind into the distance.

The next series – photographic – was taken not far from the park, at the entrance to the Sokolniki metro station, last winter and this summer. Before us, it seems, is not a picturesque picture at all: metal fences enclosing the construction site, and people hurrying about their business. The frames are darkened, but on each one some detail is highlighted using a circle or a rectangle. Thus, the focus is on everyday life. Either this is a grandmother playing the button accordion, or a disabled homeless person who knelt down, or just passers-by, reading the phone on the go or carrying bags of groceries. In several shots, Monastyrsky himself is in the circle of light. He is part of the crowd, but unlike the others, he does not run, but stands, calmly watching what is happening.

In everyday life, he finds something fantastic, obviously, therefore, among a boring landscape, a gloomy planet suddenly appears, a white circle in the sky, or a date whose meaning remains uninterpreted. The fenced construction area near the Sokolniki metro station turns into a series of Suprematist paintings with highlighted accents, and these points of attention add new implicit and mysterious meanings to reality.

In the center of the gallery is a series of drawings by Masha Sumnina, which depicts the changing reality in its own way. She captured objects that “stopped looking like themselves.” It seems that we have before us some familiar objects from our usual life, and at the same time they resemble the archaeological documentation of some alien expedition. Under each obscure image there is a caption, but it is blurred so that the words cannot be read.

“We are looking for signs in the combination and appearance of objects that will point us to something, but we cannot decipher them, because “each decryption is the creation of a new cipher,” the novel “The Seventh Function of Language” by French writer Laurent Binet quotes the description of the exhibition. , published in 2015 in France and in 2019 in Russia. This satirical detective immerses the reader in the world of Parisian bohemia of the 1980s: political intrigues, secret operations, secret societies, international conspiracies become the background to the author’s main idea about the magical ability of the protagonist – a semiotician – to convince anyone of anything through secret signals.

What obscure secret signs are highlighted by Andrey Monastyrsky together with Masha Sumnina? “It remains to look at everything as if for the first time,” sums up the description of the project. One thing is obvious here: the artist, like the viewer, in the new reality is only an observer. A witness to such a dramatic and exciting novel, like the one that Binet wrote, and we are left to guess the unobvious ciphers in the unintelligible happening.