Artistic coop "Cupidon". Metamorpheus
Stella Art Foundation in Skaryatinsky Pereulok
December 1, 2011 - January 29, 2012
Stella Art Foundation presents the second part of a “triptych” of
exhibitions by the Cupidon artistic coop. The first part – Show and
tell. The artist and his model. Still waters run deep – was held in
Autumn 2009 and its culminating section consisted of works by Andrei Filippov
and Victor Skersis. On this occasion the group project Metamorpheus centres on the work of Yuri Albert, who has recently
paid much attention to his own dreams about art, and has produced a book with a
detailed record of his dreams over several years. Metamorpheus is a small sample of his dreams, illustrated by the
group in a documentary-oneiroid spirit.
This
installation by the Cupidon group consists of three exhibits of differing
scale. The first – the spatial nucleus of the installation – is a row of
thirteen cubicles, imitating a Soviet-era public office for long-distance phone
calls. Each of the cubicles is devoted to a dream and the abbreviation of the
dream is marked on its door. Upon entering the cubicle, the viewer sees a drawing-illustration
by Victor Skersis to Albert’s dream, and he can then pick up a telephone
receiver and hear Albert’s voice recounting the dream.
Exhibition view
Meanwhile
the second exhibition object, or rather subject-personality – the artist Yuri
Albert – will sleep peacefully next to the cubicles in an old bed from his country
house. It should be noted that he only sleeps at the private view. The rest of
the time this exhibit consists of the bed alone, which somewhat changes the
intonation of the project.
Exhibition view
Finally, the
third object is an old stainless-steel bucket of water, on which the name of
the exhibition is roughly inscribed. It hangs from the ceiling of the next room
at the level of the viewer’s knees, obstructing the passage to offices. The
water in the bucket might be intended for waking up from the dream, and thereby
mark the spatial border of the installation. If so, the inscription – “Metamorpheus“
– is a sign of such awakening. Or of a false awakening, which turns out to be the
next dream.
Exhibition view
According
to the dictionary, “’meta’ is used in compound words to denote intervening
temporality, following after something, transition to something else”. In the given instance the transition is to a
new dream (in which the preceding dream is inserted), into the embraces of a
new Morpheus, which will certainly not be the last – a meta-Morpheus. And since
this is a project by three conceptualists, a basic conceptual correlation is
appropriate with the term, which is of central importance to the conceptualist
movement, of ”meta-position” – a position outside the observed object.
Exhibition view
In Metamorpheus we observe the return from
“inside” to “between” or, put differently, from the rational ideal of western
conceptualism to the irrational poetic of dreams, which is characteristic of
surrealism. Moscow conceptualism has always been described as romantic and is
origins lie in Russian surrealism. Just as children grow more like their
parents with age, so an artistic movement refers back to its roots ever more insistently
as time goes on. And thereby emphasizes the originality of its own persona.
Photo-report
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