Peacekeeping worker – Weekend – Kommersant

St. Petersburg artist Marina Alekseeva (b. 1959) creates artistic worlds that pretend to be nativity scenes or dollhouses, but whose tiny windows nevertheless reflect the big problems of the real world.

Text: Anna Tolstova

It’s not good to peep, but the artist Marina Alekseeva for two decades has been forcing the viewer to spy on a wonderful, fantastic life in a small, slightly larger than a keyhole, window of boxes, white or black, which she once wittily called “lifeboxes”, “living boxes” . Looking through the window, the viewer sees something like a scene of a fair den or a dollhouse room: a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a doctor’s office, a theater stage, a museum hall, a compartment, a prison cell, a dugout. Moreover, he sees in the smallest details, right down to the brass faucet above the sink, the rolled-up blanket on the top shelf or the cramped stove, where, naturally, fire beats. And he barely has time to admire such a plausible imitation, when the miniature room suddenly comes to life: in Lilliputian interiors, half-ghostly characters appear from nowhere and immediately start acting weird, acquiring bird heads and fish tails, constantly turning into God knows what, a ballerina into a toadstool, a doctor into clyster, woodpecker – into a neurological hammer, as if some malicious sorcerer fed them magic powder and repeats “mutabor”.

Tales told in this hilarious cartoonish language are full of grown-up jokes on the topic of the day. Let’s take, for example, a “lifebox” called “Chorus”, made in 2015: on the stage of the club, between the white columns and red curtains covered with the dust of the Brezhnev era, choristers lined up with choristers and godlessly out of tune the semi-officially pacifist “Fly, pigeons, fly ”, but the pigeons flying over their heads strive to transform into warheads, the ranks of vocalists themselves into the Kremlin wall, and the corpulent lady choirmaster into a king in an ermine mantle. However, no matter how serious the humorous subtexts are, the viewer still wakes up a child who can hardly remember and describe a sequence of two or three transformations, but chokes with delight and cannot tear himself away from the voyeuristic eye. The clash of different types of illusion, material and non-material, when the objective realism of the setting contrasts with the phantasmagoria of a surrealistic performance, incredibly enhances the ah-ah-effect.

You might think that two hands worked on each “living box” – a professional theater layout designer and a professional animator. Alekseeva does everything herself, alone, both the layout and video animation, and her original artistic profession is far from the spectacular arts, theater and cinema: on the eve of perestroika, she graduated from the ceramic department of the Mukhinsky School. The choice of ceramics for a young man striving for freedom of creativity was logical: during the years of stagnation, the “cradle of three revolutions” experienced a “Leningrad ceramic revival” associated with the partisan activities of a group of ceramic artists “One Composition” (Mikhail Kopylkov, Vladimir Tsivin, Alexander Zadorin , Natalya Savinova and others), who managed to smuggle installations and objects into the exhibition halls of the Leningrad Union of Artists under the guise of a decorative “applied woman”. The motif of the creation of the world from dust is built into the mythology of ceramics, but after working a little in her specialty at the Leningrad plant of the DPI and playing a little fool in the group “I love you, life!” their worlds in other ways.

In the mid-1990s, a new point appeared on the artistic map of St. Petersburg – the Rural Life Gallery in the Artists’ Village in Kolomyagi. The role of gallery owners, more precisely, the owners of a large wooden mansion with some symptoms of Art Nouveau on the facade, was played by an artistic couple, Marina Alekseeva and Boris Kazakov. They were looking for a house in Kolomyagi for a workshop where she could paint new waver paintings, close in spirit to the “new artists”, and he, a graphic artist and animation director close to the “parallel cinema” circle, could draw experimental films over old film. But the size of the estate turned out to be so large that they decided to turn the empty spaces into an exhibition hall and a cinema club for like-minded people – neighbors in the Village of Artists, Mitki, “art engineers”, artists of Pushkinskaya 10 and the Borey gallery. In total, about seventy exhibitions were held in a semi-underground gallery on the outskirts of the city, moreover, since 1999, Alekseeva began to publish the literary and artistic almanac Rural Life, dreaming of turning it into a total work of art (for example, a handmade slide was placed in each issue – Igor’s photo object Lebedev). The circle of authors was also predominantly St. Petersburg, with rare but striking exceptions – in Rural Life, a fragment of Angels and Revolution by Denis Osokin was published, almost the first. In a word, by the beginning of the 2000s, Alekseeva had built her own world of art – in the sense of an independent institution and horizontal connections.

At the same time, it became noticeable that her neo-expressionist painting is closely on canvas, that she strives to enter the third and even the fourth dimension – as a collage, polyptych or story in the manner of a comic strip. The first “boxes” appeared in public in 2001 and at first were interiors without video – they were preceded by a series of objects “Secrets”, made according to the principle of a famous children’s game. Oddly enough, the main source of inspiration was not theater models at all, but Soviet panoramas and dioramas (in 2018, Marina Alekseeva made a real “Diorama”: the viewer could enter the painting “Vladimirka” and, sitting in the middle of this Levitan Via Dolorosa, listen to the recording “Snowstorms” by Vladimir Sorokin in the author’s performance). After meeting the optical engineer Sergei Karlov, who remembered the old trick of reflection in glass, Alekseeva was able to move from static dioramas in miniature to even more ancient forms of fairground entertainment. In 2008, “Residence permits” were exhibited, the first series of “live boxes”, videos for which were made by Boris Kazakov, but then, having learned the basics of animation from her husband, Alekseeva undertook to animate her “lifeboxes” on her own. Shoot everyone who comes to hand from among friends and family, without a special scenario plan, drawing incredible metamorphoses on a graphics tablet.

As in the activities of “Country Life”, in the construction of “lifeboxes” a special love for intimate, chamber worlds was felt. It is striking that in the rooms of Alekseeva, far from any “socialism”, like all her peers, people of the last Soviet generation, who from school years had developed a gag reflex to demagogy regarding the public mission of the masters of art, it turned out to be involuntarily peeped into a state of transition – from Soviet communal poverty to new Russian consumer abundance. And the worlds that were assembled from old Soviet garbage, material and visual, were – despite all the hooligan wit of the artist – full of nostalgic charm. But as the garbage declared that it did not want to go to the dustbin of history, the intonation changed, and the video, which became less and less humorous, became crowded inside the “boxes”.

In 2017, video tricks entered the big stage: Marina Alekseeva began working together with the St. Petersburg composer Vladimir Rannev, and their joint debut, the opera Prose at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, where the texts of Chekhov and Mamleev clashed musically and visually, was crowned with all sorts of laurels and awards. The happily formed duo soon left the stage box and turned to free-space audiovisual installations. In 2019, the installation “In Chocolate” was shown in Venice and St. Petersburg with a real chocolate fountain, in the jets of which there were reflections of Soviet symbols and allegories along with echoes of the Soviet anthem — in Moscow at VDNKh, the restoration of the “Stone Flower” was being completed just in those days ” and other architectural monuments of late Stalinism, so that the ironic rhyme arose in the mind of the viewer by itself. At the very beginning of 2021, two installations by Alekseeva and Rannev, All Inclusive and We Can Repeat, were exhibited in parallel at the Marina Gisich Gallery. The first was a cramped room crammed with all kinds of household appliances, electronics, devices and gadgets: monitors, radios, refrigerators, stoves, stoves, fans, lamps, clocks, telephones and other extras of the performance of unbridled consumption vied with each other, producing disgusting sound and visual noise, something like a contented rumbling in a full stomach. The second, on the contrary, was extremely ascetic: you could get your portion of video and audio chewing gum, composed of militant rhetoric, by looking through the slots inside the battered tin garage, as if into a dugout through an embrasure. The diptych, demonstrating the dialectical connection between consumerism and militarism, made one recall the fifth issue of Rural Life, published in the summer of 2002: the entire issue was devoted to the war, its phantom pains and memories that permeate the national culture. The preface said that none of the authors of the war had seen and did not know.

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Masterpiece
“Working village. Details”
Marina Alekseeva, Vladimir Rannev
Audiovisual performance. Perm, December 19, 2021

The windows are covered with translucent tracing paper, projectors are installed inside, a house or a car turns into a multi-screen video installation – this technique was first tested by Marina Alekseeva together with Boris Kazakov, when “Cinema in Three Windows” (2000) was shown in Rural Life, and along the streets of St. Petersburg were going to launch a special art “Minibus” (2011). However, in the Perm project, made thanks to the energy and adventurism of the PERMM museum, the quantity turned into a new quality: a three-story apartment building in the Rabochey settlement, a constructivist housing estate for the workers of the Motovilikha plant, turned into a split screen, an acoustic system and a co-author of the grandiose Gesamtkunstwerk. The libretto, which formed the basis of the musical and visual scores, was compiled from dozens of interviews that the artist took from the residents. The video was projected from the inside out – 38 windows of residential apartments, the owners of which agreed to let video technicians with projectors in, became monitors for a single synchronized broadcast. MASM musicians and N’Caged vocalists, who performed Vladimir Rannev’s cantata, were located on the flights of stairs. Residents-co-authors and outside spectators contemplated the performance, standing in the yard in a twenty-degree frost – all the private stories of the inhabitants of the house fit in forty minutes, told against the backdrop of the great history of the place, the center of the Perm defense industry and the labor movement, from the December 1905 uprising in Motovilikha to anxious expectations of December 2021.

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