Contemporaries were hooked to the classics – Newspaper Kommersant No. 194 (7395) of 10/19/2022

In four memorial museums in St. Petersburg – the house of Mikhail Matyushin, the workshop of Mikhail Anikushin, the museum-apartment of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the literary and memorial museum of Fyodor Dostoevsky – the project “The Art of Living at Home”, started by the North-Western branch of the Pushkin Museum, was launched. Within a month, the usually inviolable surroundings of these museums will be complemented by specially created works by St. Petersburg artists, as well as video art from the collection of the Pushkin Museum. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

Memorial museums live, as a rule, a special quiet life, which is very different from the life of most museums, striving with all their might to entice, entertain and, of course, enlighten the viewer. They, as a rule, also have rooms for temporary exhibitions, concerts, lectures and other things. But the core of these museums, their main exhibit, is carefully (as far as possible) recreated home surroundings of the life and work of this or that writer, artist, musician. These spaces are being reconstructed according to surviving photographs, memoirs of contemporaries and the advice of heirs. The whole set of things – furniture, books, decor items, dishes, clothes, wallpapers, photographs, paintings – seems to strive to keep, and even return the spirit of those who worked here, loved, ate, slept, received guests.

In general, memorial museums work with rather thin materials and therefore are very demanding on the viewer – God forbid to cross the protective rope, touch the cabinet, sit on a chair! And the curators of the Pushkin Museum Darya Boldyreva and Nicolas Auduro ventured to work with such specially protected spaces, inviting contemporary St. Petersburg artists, as well as using works of video art from the museum’s collection. For memorial museums, this is also a challenge, and so far only four of them have agreed, but the plans of the North-Western branch of the Pushkin Museum to continue the work begun. However, it was started in St. Petersburg at the very beginning of the 2000s, when the Pro Arte Foundation began to hold the annual festival Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum (now suspended): then it was a way to instill in the general public a taste for contemporary art. Today, when artistic life is more and more strictly controlled by the state, the Art of Living at Home project looks like a very cautious attempt to keep the notorious art in the public field, because it is not without reason that this field is, in fact, private spaces.

We must pay tribute to the artists who have tried in a fairly short time and, one might say, on the instructions of the curators to creatively settle down in the chambers of the great. So, in a rented six-room apartment of Dostoevsky in a house in Kuznechny Lane (here the writer lived his last years, wrote The Brothers Karamazov), Alexandra Kokacheva drew attention to zoological motifs in the interior, such as candelabra with lambs or lamps with flamingos, as well as to the abundance of “bird” surnames and titles in his works. The topic has been studied enough in literary criticism, and now it is illustrated. On the walls of the nursery, the artist placed “portraits” of birds, in one of the rooms she placed birdhouses from where bird voices can be heard (this is also a reference to the name of the estate Skvoreshniki in the novel “Demons”), and she hung curtains decorated with bird ornaments on the windows. Another work is shown in a separate hall of the museum: Taus Makhacheva’s video “Effort” is projected onto the entire wall, where a person tries in vain to move a huge rock – how this resonates with the works of the writer, apparently, will be explained at art mediations (such are planned in every museum) .

The furnishings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s apartment in the house on Zagorodny Prospekt (where the composer lived the last 15 years of his life and wrote 11 operas) was recreated as accurately as possible thanks to his descendants, who preserved the furniture and other relics – there is no trace of the fact that for decades after the revolution it was a densely populated communal apartment. Anna Martynenko undertook to fill the once noisy apartments (the composer regularly arranged musical “environments” there) with the voices of famous singers, but in an original way. The artist pays tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov’s ability to see the colors of tonalities – synesthetics – and “embodies” the voices of Mravina, Vrubel-Zabela, Chaliapin and other opera artists of the past in small abstract sculptures. Each of them was created using a digital program that took into account the parameters of a particular voice (sometimes known from detailed descriptions, and sometimes from recordings). These sculptures are located on inviolable museum chairs and really create a feeling of living space. But the video of Alexander Ponomarev – documentation of his performance “The Buffin Figure”, where the artist attached himself to the bow of a ship drifting in the sea (he is shown on the monitor) – looks foreign in the interior, although it is intended to remind that the composer was also naval officer.

In the house of Mikhail Matyushin (now it is the Museum of the St. Petersburg avant-garde), a two-story wooden building on the Petrograd side, the works of Lisa Bobkova settled. She corrects the injustice towards the artist and poet Elena Guro, the wife of an avant-garde artist, whose name is not reflected in the name of the house. Guro’s poems are turned into a swaying sculpture of metal rings, which, according to the artist’s idea, responds to the creak of the house’s wooden floors. And in the interior, where there is a wonderful selection of paintings by the spouses and many memorial items are stored, there are also compositions from found scrap metal, melted down by the artist – they rhyme with the roots of trees that Matyushin collected in the 1920s, turning them into decoration of his apartment.

Some exception in this project is the workshop of the prominent Soviet sculptor Mikhail Anikushin, in which he worked since 1969. Although not a house, but the space is very habitable, inhabited by numerous monuments (now there is also an exhibition-immersion “Anikushin / Chekhov”, dedicated to the 35-year history of the creation of a monument to the writer in Kamergersky Lane). Anna Slobozhanina draws attention to the fact that the name of the sculptor was given to the newly discovered planet during his lifetime, and this “star of luck” motif becomes the main one in her project. The sculptural star is placed under glass in a clay pit, from which the artist took the working material. And the portrait gallery, the showcase of the museum, which contains numerous sketches and finished works by Anikushin, is draped with a fabric with slits in the form of stars: perhaps, these sculptures have not yet looked as impressive as they are now – in the darkness cut through by light. Here, too, there is a monitor with the work of a contemporary artist: Olga Kroitor’s performance “Fulcrum”, where she stands on a high pedestal for two hours, as if perpetuating herself in such a risky way, is another female response to the centuries-old male right to choose an object for herself.