The curator of the exhibition “The Third Ear” in the new center of contemporary art on Maroseyka AZ/ART Alexander Dashevsky kept his word: he promised a phantasmagoric exhibition, here it is. But, despite the appearance of lights in the eyes of the classics in portraits by Andrei Rudiev, a photograph of a bear in the ancient bromoille technique at a piano decorated with a bust of Tchaikovsky (this is not a circus act, but the “Children’s Album” by Grigory Mayofis), modern variations on the theme of the violin and cow , who do not hide their intentions to slightly tease, if not Picasso and Malevich, then their fans, the “Third Ear” project is built quite logically. We can say that the structure of the exhibition is built by analogy with the human ear system.
Photo: Press service of AZ/ART/Artem Vindrievsky
Actually, the model of this system performed by Sergei Denikin (Denisov) is the first one that greets viewers upon entering AZ/ART. Denikin’s collage can easily be mistaken for a “child’s drawing.” The little man here is drawn on a piece of graph paper and a checkered school notebook. It is adjacent to the leaves of the herbarium and a clipping from the anatomical atlas of a three-part diagram of the ear with the hemispheres of the brain. But this is a collage that mixes a herbarium, clippings and the image of a pensive tadpole with a protruding ear, while very clearly indicating both the structure of the ear and the connection of the ears with different hemispheres, which share responsibilities: one is responsible for emotions and intuitive thinking, the other is responsible for logical thinking . Likewise, the exhibition space is divided into two wings. You go to the right – logic rules there, strict drills in a music school, there music is calculated, like Cubist paintings, divided, like algebra, or – like hammers from a piano, served on a platter. In Boremir Bakharev’s “Preparation” tiny hammers, losing parts, suddenly turn into an image of “disconnection”, separation from the world. No, this, of course, is not a reference to the biblical image of the head of the prophet on a platter. Rather, here the distance is like a lonely point in the cadence. Well, or like the “sound of a broken string” in a Chekhov play.
Photo: Press Service AZ/ART/Vasily Bulanov
If you go to the left from the entrance, you will find a world of emotions, private collections of music lovers, passions and experiences. Here, the installations of Vladimir Kustov, associated with the circle of Leningrad necrorealists, one of the founders of the Freud Museum of Dreams, present the author as a sophisticated music lover. His collection of vinyl records, representing a gradation of their condition (from sealed and perfect – sealed and mint – to bad), also looks like a personal hierarchy of taste, with the metal-rock group System of a Down at the top, followed by rare Nirvana records, Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and at the bottom (but in the collection, not broken trash) is a Japanese record that is extremely worn out with a portrait of a young Delon with a fresh scar on his cheek. And next to it are the secrets of fate in black record prints. This installation by Kustov is dedicated to the mysticism of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Photo: Press service of AZ/ART/Artem Vindrievsky
This world of underground culture cannot be accused of being chaotic. But the artists represented here work with an unmanifested, disappearing musical world. It can be in a no man’s land, between nature and the noise of the city, as in Katya Isaeva’s project. She recorded “Chorus of Extinct Birds” on vinyl records (among the exotic names there are our own – Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Cozumel Mockingbird), and on another record “12 Songs of Taiwan”. There, the sounds of the Pacific Ocean, the city’s subway and a Buddhist monastery represent the world of the island as an ecosystem in which nature, civilization, and history are inseparable from each other.
But this hidden world can also be the world of the subconscious. As, for example, in Igor Makarevich’s stunning burgundy-colored installation “Sunday Recording Evenings.” There, a black pedestal with a reduced piano lid and golden letters of the name, like on a conservatory poster, become a frame for a bas-relief of a naked back in brutal folds of velvet. A public performance here appears as a public punishment, the solemn surroundings of a concert are an attribute of the horror and defenselessness of the “inner” musician.
However, both the subconscious world and the calculated kingdom of harmony are not separated by an impenetrable wall. And if in a ceremonial portrait, like those that adorn the classrooms of a music school, an unearthly fire suddenly lights up in Mussorgsky’s eyes, in the sheets of watercolors by Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, standing on the music stands, one can hear the solemn chorales of Bach. And in the flashes of light illuminating the blackness of Vladimir Nemukhin’s canvas “Dedication to Bach”, one can recognize the passionate hope and appeal to the Father in the “St. Matthew Passion”.
Photo: Press Service AZ/ART/Vasily Bulanov
Made with theatrical inventiveness, The Third Ear exhibit references the scenography of musical theatre. It is no coincidence that, along with Sergei Denikin’s collage, at the entrance to AZ/ART, viewers are greeted by two miniature “theaters” by Marina Alekseeva. Inside the illuminated “boxes” there are decorations and a stage. In one – an opera, where a number of magical changes in the singer’s appearance are determined by the aria and the plot of the opera. In another, there is a village ruin where a balalaika player performs, and around him both a birch tree and a scientist cat are experiencing fabulous transformations.
Photo: Press service of AZ/ART/Artem Vindrievsky
Between the wonders of the theater, where the impossible is possible, and the scientific scheme of our hearing aid, which in a cunning way connects the external and internal worlds, there is still an ordinary space. It would be boring if it weren’t full of surprises. Like ears that either ostentatiously decorate the walls of the exhibition or delicately hide here and there. The game with linguistic metaphors (like the one that “even walls have ears”), proposed by the curator, turns a journey through the exhibition into a quest, where the winner is the one who finds all 17 ears on the walls of the exhibition. Animation, created by famous artists, appears on the walls of the halls at the whim of a machine algorithm. So the walls have not only ears, but also cartoons. The ones we saw were very good.
Source: rg.ru
