ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Orel Art

in collaboration with
Galerie Iragui (Moscou)

'The Adventure of the Dancing Men'

ARTISTS :

Pavel Pepperstein
Ivan Razumov
Dmitry Fain
Denis Salautin
Sergey Anufriev
Katia Kameneva
Arcady Nasonov
Anton Chernyak

In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, one of the short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1903), Sherlock Holmes, the detective, unriddles a message hidden in the childlike drawings and clears a crime. The primitive pattern of the dancing men holding the flags, unexpectedly appearing scribbled on a park path, on a windowsill or at any other place inside of the main character’s estate, turn out to compose a code. One thing hides another, and what seemed to be an innocent drawing creates a mystery and causes a tragedy.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men exhibition is devoted to the post-conceptual drawing. The generation of the artists represented at the exhibition succeeds the famous Moscow conceptualists – Ilya Kabakov, Victor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatov, Andrey Monastirsky. Pavel Pepperstein, the artist directly influenced by the work of his father Victor Pivovarov as well as by Ilya Kabakov, in 1987 organizes the Inspection Medical Hermeneutics art group together with Sergei Anufriev and Yuri Leiderman. The young conceptualists not only develop their predecessors’ conceptualist practice based on the critics of the soviet total text, but they also describe the Moscow conceptual circle and give it a name of NOMA.
Apart from the Medical Hermeneutics founders Pepperstein’s and Anufriev’s works, there are also represented the drawings of the other artists who took up the same tradition. Arcady Nasonov, Ivan Razumov, Anton Chernyak, Denis Salautin, Dmitry Fain, Ekaterina Kameneva, members of the Fenso, Cloud Commission and Forth Height art groups are defined by Pepperstein as psychedelic conceptualists in distinction from the precedent Moscow romantic conceptualists who received their name from Boris Groys. At that time the things that seemed casual and customary instantaneously change their meaning, character and image and the process which can be called the collective experience of extended consciousness takes its place, which demonstrates its certain psychedelic character. At the same time the artists following the conceptual tradition raise a question of how the art work and the culture functions during the transitional period when disappear all the former words and objects connections. They start using the tradition of the (socialist) realism lost in front of their eyes together with its fundamental literariness as well as with the Big story of ideology.
The naive nature of the drawings reminds of the soviet illustrated children books and magazines such as Murzilka and Veselye Kartinky magazines, as well as it brings to mind the realistic paintings or the peculiar dream reality. Reference to the past reveals the ability of art to revive dead languages. Drawing serves the ecological purpose protecting old symbolic environment being cruelly destroyed in reality.
The drawings showed at The Adventure of the Dancing Men exhibition mean to have a certain double code the same way as the naive Conan Doyle’s figures have one. First of all, most of the times drawing here is an illustration of the non-existing literature. Even if a precise writing is being illustrated, the result is still far from the common sense of illustration. Second, the drawing itself normally includes a commentary which put aside the author or defamiliarise him according to Victor Shklovsky, one of the founders of Russian Formalism. The concept of ostranenie or defamiliarisation, of going around an object and not naming it develops among the parent Moscow conceptual artists who take refuge in illustration hiding from the pervasive ideological verification. It inspired creation of such phenomena as Ilya Kobakov’s and Victor Pivovarov’s albums.
The succeeding post-conceptual art gives a new sense to the drawing. It seems that the artists are obsessed with the illustrating idea and their art is penetrated with the libido of illustration or illuste, (term by Pavel Pepperstein). This is where shows the erotic nature of drawing. Since then the drawing is not that much an automatic writing but an end-running to the field of Great Defeat (term by Medical Hermeneutics). The drawing becomes a commentary to «the Big Rotten Novel», a term invented by Pavel Pepperstein which stands for the hyper narration of literature that demonstrates its importance for the Russian culture.
The exhibited drawings can also be called oneiroid or dream-like. The artists create a kind of puzzles which are not to be solved. They use the methods of condensation and displacement characteristic for jokes and dreams and described by Sigmund Freud in his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. By reducing two meanings of an expression to one, by substitution of the whole for its part and by using the inside commentary, the artists show the gap between the text and the image, the form and the content.
Their drawings create a secret partisan code opposed to the ideology of the modern mass media where the past soviet ideological total text realized in slogans is substituted for the total image that culminates in publicity. Avoiding the aggressive highways of the modern visual culture the drawing carries on its quiet blasting work.

Olesya Turkina