About the Film “Porugan’e Patsifika” In Brief

(2006) These are some general thesis comments as introduction: 1. One should differ the pre-reconstruction period of the end of the 80s considered as a thaw with encouraging tendencies and properly that reconstruction of early 90s which appeared to be a real drama of historical scale. It became a phenomenon of tragic dissonance between reality and total stand-in in comprehension that was enforced as positive attitude towards the tragedy happening in the scale of both the whole country disintegration and human personal chances. An attempt to depict the events as positive victory march of progress and humanism has successfully come to an end passing the way of the 90s when at least public opinion institution existed as well as oppositional discussions which have been finally swept down the present day. 2. The main propaganda trick of “perestroika” is the following. It is a pure speculation of idea of “glastnost” wholly conquered at the charge of the nervous work of the Soviet people – the work that was extruded from official context. The “perestroika” itself could not be possible without those people who spoke, created, felt – as I did – without any support from the official structures. The “glastnost” was their merit but not Gorbachiov’s who appropriated such a breakthrough and later used “glastnost” as an instrument of manipulation. Nobel Committee made stare by acceptance such a governor whose worth was not in making the country good running but in voluntary breakdown and territory loss of the whole country. At the same time the myth of Soviet intelligentsia was blown out as intelligentsia being earlier always ready to make fun of Brezhnev received suddenly tongue-tied Gorbachiov with hat in hand and applause. One can’t leave unsaid about a precedent of the attitude towards Russian spoken language resulted in permissiveness of spoken language vulgarization in the state television live programs. It’s excusable if there is a workman in front of you but it becomes beyond hope when a university graduate-TV speaker pronounces words incorrectly having lots of special image-makers around... 3. The main propaganda trick of “perestroika” was built also on the basis of disclosure of the communist past. But the nonsense was initially in that fact that accusers were those very people who had represented the senior official and Party establishment of the USSR. Here comes the phenomenon of stand-in. The real opposition heroes turned to be unwanted and even dangerous for those who had once represented nomenclature – from policy to art doers – and who began to dress in yesterday’s hunted ones. Such opposition people were offered more lowly place than the dressed yesterday’s members of the state creative unions of the USSR. The latter spoke about the Soviet regime that had cramped their activities and thus provoked corruption. Having kept more than modest position in the past they soon became advertised as leaders. Here and there glastnost of perestroika presented examples of overblow ordinary amateur activities up to the status of national significance. It was supported by KGB at the end of the 80s under the guise of allegedly underground rock-movement. It brought to displacement of the recognized contemporary art leaders well-known at the end of the 80s and in the beginning of the 90s – for example advanced and intellectual television frequently shot reportages and even solo programs dedicated, in particular, to my activities, to say nothing about offscreen execution of my compositions in various TV programs. Sometimes though it happen behind authors’ back. These are some comments: One of the springs to create such a film-album is an accumulated and all-in disappointing feeling arising from the fact that one of the most important page in the underground history of 80s Moscow life was lost and suppressed in the period of the 90s. This is my history as well. It’s become clear only recently that the underground history of the 80s is being lost from the sight of official mass-media. I suppose it is not circumstantial today but a result of intentional policy of stand-in and suppression of performed cultural contexts which were acknowledged and legitimate in the beginning of the 90s. These contexts were at first narrowed down to elite category (that is “not for everybody”) and later were cut out of new Russian culture and, stripped of fine names, out of demand if we compare with the scale according to which modern art culture recess was identified a short time ago together with the personality representing it. At first I wanted to realize my idea in quite another way. I wanted to create a retrospective expositional painting row under some of my compositions of early 80s which really sounded at the exhibitions that time. It may explain a reasonable existential pathos of my motion to address to art period of my biography lost as it may seem in the past. But then I changed my mind and decided to create a new original composition certainly with a right to some post-apocalypse general pathos. That is the way of appearance of “Poruganie Patsifika”. I am acquainted with the most of the represented artists – the fact that easily comes from my biography of the 80s – or was acquainted as many of them are no more. I also knew some representatives of the first wave of the 60s and not at a distance, from books or from public – so to say interposal – on the ground that they were friend of my friends and so on. No. I didn’t meet them by chance. The artists’ fortunes are highly different. Nevertheless in a varying degree but without exception their paintings have been included in the international catalogues or represented in the world galleries including the most famous ones. There are some which were at Sothby’s. To say in one word all these names are in the first row of Soviet nonconformist art. And though the represented list is not exhaustive it is in general the most part of all participial to nonconformist descriptive art of Russia of the last quarter of the 20th century. All works presented in my film are exclusively paintings only some of them are mixed technique including collage or graphics components. As all the works are well-known there are no catalogue references to their names. It was done under the advice of the painters. It is also important that the artists counter from the point of view of their aesthetic concepts ant technique preferences constituted that very taboo context of unofficial art unrecognized in the USSR. That fact supports the main idea that the purpose of modern art as well as the philosophy of the contemporary thinking process is the composition of inconsonant items. Such composition becomes not a metaphorical aim but real necessity existentially vital. As for my address to video-row it is not new for me not only due to my participation in the annual exhibition of Twenty Moscow Artists in the 80s that provoked that very film grounded on my first video-debut. It is not a debut in audiovisual field and is not much a claim for director’s ambitions in traditional reading. I performed my first audio-visual programs in the 80s in combination with multiple projection slideshow with various tricks experimental in the 70s-80s. I also applied original light and music equipment existed that time at my “Experimental Studio of Electronic Music and Dynamic Light Graphics”– quite essential part of my biography. Of course there is a difference as the performances were alive and without any computer methods from the future. We applied multiple projections from several projectors both traditional and specially constructed. And though the light and dynamic shows prevailed over slideshows one can certainly say that in the 80s nobody implemented something like that. In the 90s my Studio disintegrated, our placement was taken up in 87. We managed to hold on the float some years more when at last everything was over and I hardly reconciled myself to that loss. At once I had to turn to video shooting and cooperate with animators from time to time. So after a long period I decided to realize something in a computer version to reflect the felling of the 80s’ slide performances avoiding at the same time any computer associations. Here comes deliberate nervous aesthetics of jerk shots, visible joints, provocations of synchronic clip structure and somewhere – on the contrary – timing turndown in order to reach psychodelic effect and shake up onlookers according to Kandinsky’s appeal to provoke grassroots. To the point, I published photofragments from my light and music performances of the 80s in those three CD booklets which were sent earlier with vynil reissues of "SYMPHONY- PHONOGRAM", "GREEN SYMPHONY", “BETWEEN SPRING AND AUTUMN...". Hence it should be understandable where the springs of this deliberately nervous and in certain parts careless style of the film come from – lively but not still computerized method of demonstration. Some paintings are represented from the slides with errors – visible sweeps on the slide. These slides made in the 70s-80s were sometime presented directly by the artists while original paintings were traveling somewhere in the world and the artist didn’t have any other copy as for example in the case of V. Linitsky’s paintings of Apocalypse… But I remember these works in original when they were exposed at the Exhibition with my music sounded, later these works were taken by someone abroad. That time the artists were easily gotten by those who understood what they created. Kusstkiss did it in such a way that an uncommon in the 70s – 80s slide shooting allowed to part easily with original works going away to oversea collectors while the artist was left with a slide. So the small flaws of the images are saved intentionally as vintage and metaphysics of concept of an original object existed in the past reality and enjoining now the historical value. In other cases when I could call the artist and ask him for the original neat shot I preferred - again deliberately - the reproduction from the very first exclusive half-official catalogue edition of the 84s that was rare and out-of-print even that time. About the name "Desecration Of A Pacific Sign"(20 Moscow Artists at Malaya Gruzinskaya Street) The film name calls to give birth to the search of associations and reflections of personal and global contexts in their inevitable conglutination with that critical age we are living in. The name should provoke providence inherent to the art context of the end of the century. I mean first of all and mainly those works the artists of which accepted the burden and learned the cost of outcast generation – generation that is not measured by age. Outcast generation is a special outside group in the whole generation of the 70s – 80s. Artists came in these years alone one by one and then they met founding together an art and public appearance. These artists presented an explosive event as if they were not a dozen of ordinary people as many other who were also not protected by life and recognition or any circumstances. They were not protected even by the modern order of that day of general challenge which distanced even more the fake work from the honest one. These artists were in the search of notional values and by the cost of emotional break-downs conceived the heating of that time period and the equivalents of such heating. That was the period when the theme of Apocalypses couldn’t be a trivial reference to the war in Vietnam as it was presented by Coppola or to “In the Memory of Hiroshima Victims” by Knishtoff Pendereysky – there was something that prompted: everything was not so evident. The horrors of Wars are the tragedy a priori and identified as a tragedy by distinction. But there are also new other pain compounds which come from inside a person and split him – they are not so vivid and direct as catastrophes or Shakespeare’s heart passions but they already exist and waylay people and do not happen according to expected stereotypes. Here is even a consistent pattern. When the tragedy – the Second World War – broke and one could think it was really a very moment to create a tragic masterpiece, nothing happened. The tragedy had been expressed earlier in, for example, the Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony but not at the end of the 40s. In order to equivalents of significant reality commotions could happen in the art there should be one more loop to turn on the memory and genetic disturbance but not shock reaction which hurry to prescind the situation, to leave and hide to suffer the pain. Such shock reaction is above its bend to express the pain in the art works. We can’t say that the most penetrating things happen quietly. On the contrary they may happen loudly but inaudible to the majority, apparent to them. Later when the world itself was changed, those people, who happened to be in it, didn’t notice any changes, didn’t distinguish the loss behind the outer renewal of decorations, a stand-in behind the facade of changes and even the loss of themselves. And now there are, for example, such artists as Hartung, or Pollack, or Mathieu, or De Kooning and the others of the 40 – 50s – and I like them as I definitely like abstract nonfigurative row – who were creating their works in the period when my parents were suffering from the real horrors of war. These artists painted saying nothing about the Second Word War itself. And there a question immediately appears – how can I like the creative work of those who didn’t seem notice the Second World War tragedy, who painted abstract? But it is not as simple as one may suppose. The works of these artists enjoy – what I call – the time equivalent that is the experience pathos of personal and epoch meaning. There is a special tense, depression clot, penetrating signal in all the works and these attributes have an effect, they inform. They are not simply interior Philistine babble on the canvas… Here is one more thing. One can always see a master in non-figurative work – a master who has parted with his traditional skills as if he has sacrificed his good-commanded figurative image for the sake of sense extremity. But after the abstract and radical period, say, of the 50s – the period of Pollack, or Robert Motherwell, or Mark Rothko and De Kooning and etc. the return to an object became more intense psychedelically. Even those works of contemporary artists that might seem at the first sight as a lateral recovery of the springs, say, Dadaism which exactly analyzed a figurative real image, appeared to be quite another experience of a new search that isn’t direct, naive and imitable. For example these are the works standing in between figurative and radical abstract directions. That concerns the context of the artists of the 70s – 80s which were presented in the film. Best regards, Mikhail Chekalin

 

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