Yuri Zlotnikov’s exhibition “Signal System” opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery

An exhibition of the classic of unofficial art Yuri Zlotnikov (1930–2016) “Signal System” has opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery: for the first time, fifty gouaches from his series of the same name from the turn of the 1950s–1960s are independently shown. They became the first example of abstract art after decades of the dominance of socialist realism, and now they also appear as part of an unprecedented project: with their help, the artist studied the laws of perception and the impact of art. For the exhibition, for the first time, Zlotnikov’s manuscripts have been collected in a book, in which he substantiates his “system”: what these multi-colored circles, lines, rectangles mean and how their countless combinations “work”. I looked closely at the signals Igor Grebelnikov.

You get to the spacious hall with Yuri Zlotnikov’s exhibition after going through the entire exhibition “Art of the 20th Century,” which is an exhausting task to watch in its own way. No matter how much the exhibits are outweighed in it, reducing the number of works of socialist realism and adding its various alternatives, you look at this display with a strong feeling that, contrary to declarations, Soviet art was the servant of many different masters, that many works are tightly tied to their time, that figurative art with more than covers up the abstract, and at some point you just get tired of the verbosity of the first.

It is not surprising that after this the hall with the “Signal System” (1957-1962) feels like a breath of fresh air. Along the perimeter of the walls hang large sheets of yellowed cardboard with various kinds of abstract compositions, the works are grouped typologically: somewhere – almost empty sheets with single multi-colored circles, the number of which is gradually added, thickens, somewhere – only lines, blue and red, at first they are parallel, then they begin to intersect, somewhere – polysyllabic compositions of different figures. In any case, the images are perceived precisely as signals – sometimes you even respond to them physically, leaning forward to find yourself face-to-face with a separate sheet; on some, on the contrary, you calmly glance over them.

In fact, these works are the result of Zlotnikov’s analysis of the audience’s reactions to different figures and combinations, that is, here we are talking not so much about external signals coming from the artist, but about internal ones sent by our consciousness when we find ourselves in front of these works. The “signal system” is a whole theory of perception and the impact of art on the viewer, and the abstractions themselves are like a visual aid on a completely new subject discovered by the artist in 1957. He began with abstract compositions in black ink (the “Protosignals” series), which, along with the artist’s manuscripts explaining the exhibits hanging on the walls, are shown in glass cases on a white podium in the center of the room. According to the organizers, this environment is designed to resemble a laboratory.

Here, of course, you can feel like a participant in an experiment, although the curator of the exhibition, Irina Gorlova, emphasizes that Zlotnikov would never agree with such a hanging, or with such a selection of works. For him, “The Signal System” was, albeit important, but still a stage of his artistic development: next to these sheets at exhibitions, he showed his figurative works – portraits, city scenes, as well as works from the “Biblical Cycle”. It certainly influenced his subsequent work, and researchers have yet to figure this out. According to the artist’s grandchildren, it took more than four years to sort through his manuscripts related to the “Signal System”: they managed to put things in order in the scattered papers and publish them in the form of a book – a kind of textbook on the influence of signs and their combinations on the viewer.

This is not to say that these texts, even if they are illustrated in detail by the artist, are easy to read, although it is clear that the author clearly tried to be understood. “I draw two red lines, crossing one another so that it seems that you are being put on a corset… To get out of the dominant influence of this effect, I place blue lines on the margin of the sheet, as if sprayed on its surface…” – drawing, Zlotnikov constantly switches to the psychophysiological sensations and motor skills of the “subject” (as he sometimes calls the viewer), his “muscle sensations”, then again returns to the “signals”, separately analyzing the behavior of the “object” in front of the picture. Sometimes the flow of reasoning becomes so free that it already smacks of esotericism.

There were many similar and much more harmoniously presented theories during the avant-garde times: just remember the treatises of Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, where points, lines, geometric figures became elements of a new perception and reconstruction of the world.

Zlotnikov’s ambitions are of a different kind. They are more humane and, in their own way, romantic, in the spirit of the times – a short period of thaw, when one could observe with one’s own eyes how a person changes in changing circumstances. And changes were also rapid in the field of art: soon after Stalin’s death, the exhibition of gifts to the leader, which had lasted for four years, was removed from the Pushkin Museum; in 1955, paintings by French impressionists and post-impressionists were shown in the museum’s halls for the first time after a long break (Cézanne was Zlotnikov’s idol for many years), in In 1956, a Picasso exhibition was held there. In 1957 and 1959, exhibitions of American art were brought to Moscow, including paintings by the main overseas rebel Jackson Pollock – the very embodiment of uncontrollable artistic energy, splashed with paint on the canvas. Yuri Zlotnikov and his artist friend Vladimir Slepyan at the same time organized “simultaneous painting sessions”, covering a sheet with painting on both sides. The end of the 1950s was also the beginning of space exploration, the emergence of new sciences, semiotics and cybernetics, in which Zlotnikov was passionately interested and attended lectures and seminars at Moscow State University. His “Signal System” became a kind of development of these studies at the intersection of art and exact sciences. However, even during the short period of weakening of the state-ideological grip, these sheets failed to influence the general audience – the main “test subject” of the “system” was the artist himself. These sheets began to be exhibited only in the 1990s, and even then they took their important place in the history of our art of the twentieth century. The current show will definitely strengthen this position.