Guitar with Lenin, tin chair: Sergei Chernov’s exhibition as reflections on destiny

A garden of lost meanings has grown at the Factory

“Everything is lost!” — this is the name given to Sergei Chernov’s exhibition, which he prepared for several years and where he collected his works (or rather, their replicas) over the course of his entire creative life. This metaphor, which occupies the largest Olivier hall of the Fabrika center for creative industries, has historical and personal specificity. Most of Chernov’s installations and sculptures were destroyed, lost or broken for various reasons and under various circumstances. This is the fate of sculptures by many authors, especially those who are exhibited on the street. For the sake of the project, Sergei re-created a number of art objects and presented them as a reflection on the purpose and fate of a work of art in public space.

The central installation at the exhibition is assembled from documents telling the history of Sergei Chernov’s art objects, which were exhibited at the art center in Nemchinovka. Kazimir Malevich once lived in this village near Moscow, and decades later a group of art historians and artists hoped to perpetuate the memory of the author of “Black Square” there. The art center displayed models of monuments to the Suprematist and installations inspired by his ideas. But one morning, in the summer of 2018, a truck arrived and took all the art objects straight to the trash heap, and the art center was demolished. Along with photos and sketches of Sergei Chernov’s works destroyed in Nemchinovka, copies of applications to the prosecutor’s office and replies were exhibited. The case never got off the ground; one department transferred responsibility to another. It also happens. But more often the works are simply lost or broken.

“80% of my works have sunk into oblivion,” says Sergei Chernov. — What is exhibited in the open air disappears all the time. Other works end up in private or museum collections, that is, they are preserved, but also leave me. This is a fact of life. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing ever really goes missing. We just go through life, we lose something, we find something, this is a road, a certain point of existence, and only time will tell whether we are going correctly and where. But the movement cannot be canceled.

At this moment, the personal story of loss grows into a general and public one. In reflection on the path in the broadest sense of the word. Opposite the story of the loss of works dedicated to Malevich is an installation called “Garden of Lost Meanings” (created in 2010, lost, restored in 2014). Before us is a forest, printed on photographic paper in muted sepia, with beams with dilapidated Soviet slogans attached on top. The “Five Year Plan” hung on its side; all that was left of the “Revolutionary Keep Step” poster was “one step.” On another manifesto, the letters were erased so that it read: “Check with Max…” The sign “Left” points to the right, and “Down” points up. The Soviet code is part of our history, and many of Chernov’s works are inspired by it. Each one needs to be guessed like an absurdist puzzle: the author does not offer answers, but asks questions. Not literally, but with irony mixed with optimism, tragedy and cosmism.

For example, here is the installation “Beep-Beep” – a satellite in the form of a tin can with three “legs”. Next to him is a small figurine of a man with a companion instead of a head. And here is the “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” monument, where instead of the usual Mukhina figures there are conventional metal men, made as if from old chairs: the seats turn into torsos, there are no heads, and in the “hands” there is a sickle and a hammer. But there’s a tin chair with a button that you can’t sit on. Not far away, the Kremlin toy tower floats in the air, taking root in the air; the installation is called “The Leader’s Dream.” The exhibition includes a fictitious Lenin on an armored car, the cruiser Aurora, and a map of the USSR, on top of which three plywood guitars are attached – with profiles of Lenin, Marx and Engels. “I made such instruments back in Soviet times, and once I made a guitar with the profile of Vladimir Ilyich and called it “My first Lenin,” recalls Sergei Chernov nostalgically.

Most of these works were shown more than once at museum exhibitions or in open-air public spaces, received ovations and awards – and… disappeared. But not without a trace. They remained part of the artist’s philosophy and have now risen from oblivion. But there is a conclusion, which the author states together with the exhibition curator Irina Konyukhova: the artist’s opportunity for self-expression on the street is increasingly narrowing. “Public art” is nothing more than a chimera created to calm our minds. Perhaps the desire for equal interaction with the public in an open and unprotected space has always been just an unattainable dream, conclude the creators of the “Everything is Lost!” project.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29210 dated February 6, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Guitar with Lenin and a tin chair