On 13.12.07, the first meeting of the poetic club of Stella Art Foundation was held at the exhibition premises at Skariatinsky Pereulok, chaired by Kirill Kovaldzhi. The meeting took place in the context of the exhibition “Contemporary art supports the rights of children living with HIV”, which is one of the results of the charitable activity of the Foundation in cooperation with UNESCO. The meeting was attended by Kirill Kovaldzhi, Alexander Rytov, Eugeny Nikitin, Alexander Pereverzin, Igor Karaulov, Gennady Kanevsky, Alexei Korolev, Elena Lapshina, Vitaly Patsiukov, Vladimir Raiberg, Mark Shatunovsky, Elena Dorogavtseva, Valentin Reznik and other invitees. Poet Alexander Rytov, director of the the Foundation, told the participants about the activities of the Foundationа and the ongoing exhibition, while the art director of the Foundation Anastasia Dokuchaeva spoke on the subject “Contemporary Art and Text”. Project coordinator, poet Eugeny Nikitin told the attendees in more detail about the concept of the club. The participants of the meeting were shown a film about master-classes of artists in orphanages relating to the theme of the exhibition, then the invited poets spoke.

All the origins of all the assumptions relating to this subject can be traced back to Aristotle who noticed the different nature of the visualisation means. Voltaire addressed the issue in a more abstract way, saying that painting is voiceless poetry and the poetry is speaking painting. One textbook example of a work on this subject is “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” by Lessing. “The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him. Both, he felt, represent absent things as being present and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing.” However, below Lessing focuses on the substantial differences between these phenomena: “Painting uses signs existing in space, poetry signs succeeding each other in time.” In other words, poetry is dynamic, painting is static. Gerder, criticizing this statement, suggested another formula: the painting is perceived directly, in all its entirety, while the poetry is only perceived indirectly, as it uses a language, i. e. a system of conventional signs. Of course, we should make mention of the fact that the word “poetry” is used here in the most general sense, as litrature as a whole. If one takes the poetry in the narrow sense, so much more so, if the area under review was narrowed to lyrics, we would see that the opportunities for a dialogue and communication are immeasurably wider, which is due to the fact that poetry, by itself, is the most monologous of all the literary genres. When two people are involved in two different dialogues, it is more difficult for them to hear each other. It was not without reason that various experiments emerged, seeking to achieve a synthesis of the text and the picture, such as the “visual poetry”. These are experiments with typesets, icons, the very well-known projects of the so-called “figurative poetry” by Voznesensky and other works of this kind. And the poetic club as we see it is also one type of a dialogue, even though an unostentatious one, between the painting and the poetry. And here we come to the essentials, i. e., to the discussion about the way of structuring the poetic club of Stella Art Foundation.

Before explaining where we are going to differ with Prologue, we should touch in more detail on how the Kovaldzhi Club worked so far (and here I am not only talking to the new participants, I’d like to liven up the image of the club in the minds of its old-timers). Usually the assembly began with an author interested in a live and immediate response reciting his or her works and with the “opponents” who did their homework in advance opening a discussion about them. This traditional form, that of a seminar, will undergo some changes that will be mentioned below. For us, however, it is important to keep the “living seed” that was present in Prologue’s meetings, specifically, the ongoing and ever-present dialogue. Poets of entirely different generations were taking part in the discussion, which was bringing forth a dialogue between those generations; and the participation of poets representing different movements, sometimes absolutely opposed to each other, was also sparking a dialogue — let’s call it “a dialogue of schools”.

Now all these forms of the dialogue will be complemented by a dialogue of the contemporary art and poetry. The meetings will be held against the backdrop of exhibitions, and, apart from discussing the poems themselves we will be offering for discussion a particular theme bearing on the concept of the exhibition. Thus, the meetings will consist of two parts: a thematic part and a poetic part per se. The thematic part is intended in form of a conference, where the participants express their opinions and engage in a discussion. To give you one example, we have recently had an exhibition by Yuri Avvakumov entitled “Games”. The architectural and sculptural objects displayed were made from elements of games: dominoes, gorodki, chess, playing cards. The artist built a huge mausoleum out of dominoes and an open-work tower able to change its form out of playing cards. If a meeting of the club was held on the occasion of that exhibition, its participants could talk about the manifestations of the game phenomenon in poetry. It would not only apply to the game symbols and attributes, the “image system” of games, but the game principle in the poetry as such, the game of words. All these subjects open ample room for reflection. Poetry without the wordplay is impossible even where it is not emphasized so definitely, as in the case of oberiuts or, say, our contemporary Alexander Kabanov. In many philosophical systems the game is perceived as an impulse of art generation, and the game origins of the art is seen as one of the facets of its existence. One could say that at the level of the world of ideas, dialogue is possible not only between art and literature, but also between any social phenomena, as they are based on the same archetypes.