GES-2 showed art without an author, without a viewer and without a work

At the same time, Putin gave advice on designing an interuniversity campus based on the buildings of the former Bolshoi Ivanovo Manufactory: “Here, not far from the Kremlin, there is a very good space. See how it’s done.” Voskresensky promised to “study the experience.” So, who knows, maybe Houses of Culture a la GES-2 will now go to the regions. Meanwhile, three new exhibitions have opened at an art venue near the Kremlin – A Brief History of Absence, Cloud Storage, and Wizards. The MK observer appreciated the premieres.

Each of the new projects develops, in its own way, the research begun in the three-part cycle “Supplements”, which could be listened to in the House of Culture all last year. Since April 2022, GES-2 has been showing projects where the focus was on sound, not images.

The first “Supplement” had to be listened to in absolute emptiness, but each subsequent project was more and more overgrown with visuals. The music itself was the most unusual. The task of that study was to understand what happens when interference occurs, communication is broken, is it possible to reconfigure your consciousness and subconscious? New projects again turn to the theme of emptiness, gaps and pauses that inevitably fill up – random sounds, unreal dreams, imaginary myths.

The journey through the “filled void” begins with the “Cloud Storage” exhibition. In front of the viewer are grids for paintings – which can be found in the funds of museums and galleries. They are densely hung with works, only in the very center there is a gaping gap. And through it, through the bars, you can see a black-and-white movement somewhere in the distance.

At the end of the journey through the repository, a video is waiting for us, dedicated, as its author, artist Arkady Nasonov, puts it, “the fluidity of time.” In the frame is a classic still life – a ball, a tetrahedron and a polyhedron (three figures, on which students of art universities usually work out the skill of transferring light-shadow). We will see objects in statics, but a rapidly invisible sun is moving above them, which is why their shadows from the figures, as if alive, circle around static objects. Time is slipping away before our eyes.

The vault itself is filled with works that have been created since 1992 by the Cloud Commission art group. It got its name from a randomly found artifact – “Guidelines for determining cloud forms”, published in Leningrad in 1930. The founder of the group, artist Arkady Nasonov, together with dozens of authors who joined later, including Pavel Pepperstein, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe and Olga Chernysheva, often used accidentally found things to create their works. For example, Nasonov’s series, based on old books from a flea market in Amsterdam.

– What did not sell was simply left on the pavement when the market closed, and I picked it up. At first I didn’t know what I would do with the books, and then I drove into the Dutch outback, where one local resident told me: it seems to you that everything here is boring, calm and unhurried, but in fact everyone here has their own terrible secret. Then I came up with sentimental stories about books – something between a Brazilian TV series and Dostoevsky’s hardcore, – says Arkady.

The artist attached handles and legs to the book covers and played sentimental stories among the rural landscapes. Here are the books playing blind man’s blind man and – as the typewritten caption under the picture says – “they still do not know what an insidious plan is brewing in the head of the Trenki who has left the game.” But a living book burns something in the basin. “Bankruptcy and deferred payments” during a cleansing ritual in the Kazakh steppes in the spring of 1952,” the caption explains.

Another series was made on the forms of an ophthalmologist, in the center of which conditional glasses with a scale of visual defects are drawn. These letterheads of the 1920s Nasonov again got by chance, when a neighbor of an artist friend, a well-known professor, died, they were thrown away. Arkady speculated on the sheets with the doctor’s notes: for example, he painted over his glasses with black and signed: “These eyes saw the light at the end of the tunnel …” In other circles from the glasses, he drew clear eyes and commented: “These eyes have just opened … “.

Another series was made on gold foil, which the artist also accidentally inherited from a late employee of a chocolate factory. On this thin material, Nasonov painted exciting and at the same time sweet dreams: in every dream there are children’s toys and a little drama.

In general, most of the work here resembles a hallucinogenic dream. Whether it is portraits of sleeping people, on which objects-symbols that they dreamed of are inscribed in red, or a series painted after visiting Bennett Island in the Arctic. There Nasonov was under the influence of auditory hallucinations and turned each of them into a fantastic portrait of the composer.

The journey into the subconscious is very dense: one “hallucination” hangs on top of another, the vault is so tightly hung. But, as the author says, even more works were lost. Some were stolen, others ended up in curators’ collections, and some were tagged by an artist’s cat named Pushkin. The history of art is not only the history of discoveries, but the history of losses.

“Cloud storage” is also a story of a stormy, playful, full of dashing irony with a bit of sadness of the past, but Moscow’s conceptualism in GES-2 continues with a look into the future. The second “cloud” is virtual, its creators – young artists Polina Abina and Alexei Sebyakin – offer to go on a journey through the digital world. It starts from a destroyed house, from where the viewer passes through various fantastic mirages, experiencing different emotions, and again finds himself in the same ruins. The virtual gallery takes us in circles – from the past to the future and back.

The next chapter in GES-2 is the exhibition “Magicians”, which is based on myths in their various manifestations. Here is a gallery of watercolor portraits from the artist Mika Plutitskaya, a guest from the future Alisa Selezneva, which either resembles a mirage from a dream, or turns into a completely realistic image. The series begins with a sheet from the passport, where little Mika, like two drops of water, looks like the heroine of the film.

The similarity of the accidentally found old document seemed striking and a little creepy to Plutitskaya, so she decided to create a “group self-portrait”, where the Soviet utopia is intertwined with reflection on her own childhood. Visualize “a voice from a beautiful distance.”

Mika’s neighbors in space look for different facets of the fantastic, supernatural and terrible in folk mysticism. Slava Nesterov shows a series of wooden objects in which creepy and wonderful images from Slavic, Ural and Scandinavian fairy tales and legends are guessed. Mikhail Maksimov in the New Game Over project invites the public to play in a nativity scene and torture a virtual doll. In a word, here young sorcerers combine modern technologies with ancient nightmares.

And the final exhibition, entitled A Brief History of Absence, addresses the theme of emptiness and its significance in the history of art in recent decades. The epigraph is the visualization of John Cage’s “silent play” “4’33” – in the form of a piano, next to which, at the top under the ceiling, sits a figure in the field of Rodin’s “The Thinker”.

Next, the viewer will find an exposition very saturated with objects and artifacts, where the central place is given to “nothing” and “no one”, whether it be the legendary “Object Zero” of the New Reality group by Timur Novikov (which is a hole in the stand) or abstract paintings by Günther Ferg.

There are three sections with subtitles – without the author, without the viewer and without the work. All works speak of a revision of the concept of art and its functions, of blurring the line between real life and a visual work. At least, this is what is stated in the detailed and verbose program printed for the exhibition. The impression is different – before us is an oversaturated emptiness, where the present is not found, there is only a multi-layered past and a ghostly future.