The “shimmering” culture of Timur Novikov and his followers was shown in Suzdal

Clothing with shocking colors floating in the air and ceramic plates with tombstones of artists who “died of laughter.” A primitive synthesizer made of metal irons (iron) and a wooden sculpture of the leader of the Kino group with the inscription “Tsoi is alive” embossed on the back in clusters. Absurd, mocking, often sketchy drawings and empty, holey, blank photo slides. Traces of the vigorous creative activity of the legendary group “New Artists” and its founder Timur Novikov filled the wooden hut to the brim. So the Suzdal gallery “Casket” turned into a fairy-tale palace dedicated to the “zero culture” that Timur Novikov and his comrades created from nothing in 1982, which made a revolution and is alive to this day. The MK art observer explored the museum of the outlandish “allness” and found there works by the successors of the cult movement, two years old.

“Casket” stands on the high bank of Kamenka. From here you can see views of ancient Rus’ with its monasteries, squat houses with intricate platbands and endless open spaces. The gallery of the Suzdal World Center is located in a classic wooden frame and there is little on the outside that gives away its amazing contents. After all, inside there is contemporary art with a great history, which even today is more alive than all living things. The project of art critic, curator, artist, publisher, one of Timur Novikov’s associates Andrei Khlobystin includes more than 180 artifacts that eloquently tell about what “zero culture” is. Formally, its birth can be counted from 1982, when Timur Novikov and Ivan Sotnikov, who became bored and crowded among the ranks of nonconformist artists, declared a hole in the stand a work of art. They called it “Object Zero”, which caused a big scandal in the art world. However, the “zero object” did not arise out of the blue – it also appealed to Malevich’s “Black Square” and to the ideas of nihilism of the 19th century.

– It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1980s there was simply nowhere to go after eight in the evening, there were no youth cafes or clubs. “Everyone was sitting in workshops and communal apartments,” says Andrei Khlobystin. “And people’s hands were itching—they wanted to do something creative.” But, if you were not a member of the Union of Artists, then you simply could not buy canvas and paints. Novikov created a new culture from scratch, literally from nothing. The New Artists group started with eight people and then became mainstream. What is exhibited here are traces of “zero culture”, documents, archives, works, but the result itself is not a specific painting, video or music, but culture itself: art as a way of life. We still live in “zero” today – in the horizon that these guys outlined.

The exhibition is organized according to the heap-to-little principle. Drawings and paintings hang in several rows, tightly adjacent to each other. That’s exactly how they were exhibited, boringly, in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, and then. Here you can also find famous photographs of Timur Novikov – in a frock coat and bowler hat with a cane. Novikov was a dandy and a performer; today he could dress like a real dandy, and tomorrow – like an old prophet. And various images of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe: there is even a rare video where he stands on peas in a dog pose. In the display cases there are photos, documents, issues of the magazine “Artistic Will”, which appeared along with the action of the same name, during which artists burned their works in Kronstadt. Scattered on top of the magazines are blank slides – these are symbols of “zero culture” that the artists exchanged, as if confirming their participation in the brotherhood.

– The new culture had its own cinema and music, Kuryokhin and the Kino group, new composers and a new theater, a new university and new fashion, artistic squats and club-dance culture, and finally, rave. “Zero culture” at some point turned into the mainstream, which does not exist now. It was a revolution, the flickering traces of which are now everywhere: you can dress as you want, go anywhere at any time. You can put on a kokoshnik, go to a football game and eat a hot dog there, and no one will say a word to you. The impossible became possible. Larionov’s holiness has become a common place.

It’s a strange thing, paradoxical artifacts stacked together according to the principle of a bunch of little ones – and here there are finely painted paintings, and angular, almost childish drawings, and a portrait of a pink panda suspended on a spring, and posters in a comic socialist realist style – in each room there were almost like iconostases. Where there is a central image and a story around. They are as mythological as biblical stories. The central exhibit of the first hall, for example, was a cast of the face of Timur Novikov, made during his lifetime. It stands on a wooden pedestal surrounded by drawings by New Artists. The bust even retained the smell of the leader of the New Ones. In another room, the key was the portrait of Mayakovsky with green hair (the work of Georgy Guryanov), who at the beginning of the twentieth century wrote: “I put “nihil” (zero) over everything that has been done. In the third, the central piece was the work of Andrei Bartenev in the form of a wooden sculpture by Viktor Tsoi, decorated with “decor” made of nails. Next to Tsoi is a drawing of the youngest follower of the “New”, who is two years old, and the oldest, who is 86 years old.

The opening of the exhibition of a collection of wonders and wonders took place to the sounds of a rave and reckless dancing in the “New” style. A man in a coat (the well-known Alexander Petrelli) walked among the visitors, who every now and then opened his robe to show new drawings of the “New Ones”. Thus, art as a way of life, in which there are no boundaries and frames, sprouted in the heart of the “Golden Ring” in the fabulous “Casket”. And it, as Andrei Khlobystin noted, is the same zero with a hole in the middle. That is, it rhymes with the legendary “zero object”, from which the culture of uniqueness, eccentricity, and a mixture of styles began. “The main thing in this culture,” adds Andrey, “is that it is based on love and friendship.”