Sergei Shutov. Phosphenes and You
Stella Art Foundation in Skaryatinsky Pereulok
September 15 – October 30, 2011
The exhibition project is held as part of the Special Projects Program of the
4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Shutov’s installation appears to be a
freehand reproduction of Sigmund Freud’s office, complete with his famous couch
and armchair. However, the story Sergei Shutov has spatially “framed” here is
derived neither from psychoanalysis nor science art, although it may well
reproduce the logic of that very genre.
Exhibition view
Key to the project is the role played by
the electro-opthalmic stimulator – an instrument for diagnosing and stimulating
a visual analyzer with electric currents. This instrument causes so-called phosphenes
to appear – visual sensations that, without light entering a person’s eyes,
arise as shining dots, figures appearing independently in the dark. Visitors to
the exhibition can try out the instrument and undergo their very own
para-psychedelic experience. The exposition also includes six monitors on which
six Moscow art critics, or, as the artist puts it, “specialists in
verbalizing artistic images,” describe their experience observing
phosphenes in real time. The artist faithfully reproduces their
descriptions as abstract paintings.
Exhibition view
The viewer’s attention is drawn by the
project’s many inversions. Shutov’s image production process is begun for him
by the art critics; he simply completes it. The unfettered imagination is
replaced by electro-stimulatory effects. Popular science takes the place of
art. And all that is artistic and subjective gives way to the scientific and
objective. Yet the action is set not in a modern medicine museum, but the
office of the father of psychoanalysis, who made frequent recourse to
free-association methods. And in Shutov's work, this method loses its speciifc
association with psychiatry and turns out to be an exclusive mandate for
infintely free, subjective association.
Exhibition view
Sergei Shutov's art typically features
eclectic excess alongside categorical anti-dogmatism: “My work is shining
futurist cyber-punk archaism, a dance of phosphenes. I once asked Timur
Novikov, who by then had already gone blind, what he saw in front of him. His
reply was that he saw all sorts of Shutov paintings, as a sort of punishment.
But that means that I am constantly in a state of
genuine blindness, which is my reward.”
Exhibition view
Awarded with “shining blindness,” Shutov
is equally prepared to pour a whole number of different ideas into his
new project, from Beuys’ idea about the artist inside all of us and the
esoteric image of an “inner Shambhala,” to the utopia when art-making will be
accessible to all and a dialogue between people from different branches of
creativity. All these ideas turn into each other with blessed ease. And even
the title of the exhibition, Phosphenes and You, referring to the era of
“physicists and lyricists” in the 1960s, the artist turns these antagonistic
figures into a single image of a romantic artist-scientist, at once both
archaic and futuristic.
Photo-report
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