'Akklimаtizatsia' Open Studio's first exhibit in St Petersburg
Akklimаtizatsia--curated by Emily Newman and Olga Jitlina, and marking the beginning an ongoing collaboration between the Comics Gallery and closely situated Smolny College--pairs works made by artists steeped in the phenomenological realities of two distant cities—St Petersburg and Los Angeles. Both cities stand as experimental extremes, outposts on the western perimeters of sprawling Nations. While St Petersburg’s center was built for horse-carriages, it’s outer districts were laid with motorways so wide they seem to have anticipated the car-crazy California individualism of the Post Soviet generation--the result is a smog so dense that, in both cities, it hangs in the air like an object. This, among other connections drawn, tentatively link the cities by their inverse but similarly otherworldly landscapes and climates. The show opens on the third of May at the C.A.G. Gallery, 33 Galernaya Ulitsa, St Petersburg and is up until the 17th.
Participating artists include: Alina Belishkina, Stas Bags, Maria Domogatskaya, Victoria Fu, Hadley Holliday, Alice Konitz, Gian Martin Joller, Julie Orser, John Pearson, Evgenia Mukhina, Jed Lind, Michael Queenland, Masha Sha, Jen Schwarting, Adam Schwartz, Konstantin Ushakov, Irina Valkova, Jan Vormann and Bari Zipperstein and Igor Vasiliev.
'Акклиматизация'
Эмили Ньюман и Ольга Житлина, кураторы выставки «Акклимитизация», с которой начинается сотрудничество между галереей Comics и находящимся по соседству Смольным Институтом Свободных Наук и Искусств, поместили рядом работы художников из Санкт-Петербурга и Лос-Анджелеса - двух мегаполисов, стоящих на страже западных границ своих необъятных стран. Смог висит в воздухе Петербурга и Лос-Анджелеса, как топор, хотя оба города были специально созданы для райской жизни в прежде необитаемых, потусторонних пустошах – на сырых камнях и в раскаленной пустыне. Эта искусственность и пугает, и манит безлюдными зданиями, нечеловеческими пропорциями, выплескивающимся на поверхность подпольем. «Лед и пламень» - два города - притягивающие друг друга.
left: Jan Vormann
Clockwise from top left: John Pearson, Hadley Holliday and Gian-Martin Joller, Olga Jitlina, Installation shot, Alice Konitz, Adam Schwartz and Hadley Holliday
On the occasion of the exhibition "Akklimitizatsia", Open Studio revisits the show's first mounting in Helsinki last summer
Notes from the Overpass: New Art from Los Angeles and St. Petersburg
at Galleriet G18, August 21, 2007
by Adam Schwartz
“-Since I was a little girl, I dreamed of the West.
-In Sweden?
-Yes! Oh yes. I used to have visions about it.
-Visions.
-Vistas would appear.
-Where did you hear about the West in Sweden?
-Movies. American movies. We see that great landscape in our dreams. It haunts us.”
-excerpt from “Gary Cooper, or the landscape”, by Sam Shepard, 1996
In the summer of 2007, several very large and very broad art exhibitions dominated the European art landscape including the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Art Basel and Skulptur Projekte Munster. While these shows all occur at regular intervals, to have them all in one summer laid the ground for a general critical referendum on shows of this type – large, culturally and ideologically diverse exhibitions whose guiding principals tend to have their roots in earlier eras, when a more narrow definition of art existed. The critical reaction to the majority of them was almost uniformly grim, suggesting the future of such shows may be limited. While this may seem like a generally poor thing for art as a whole, the summer was full of strong shows throughout the art world, shows that set much more realistic agendas and largely succeeded. While many were less accessible, or perhaps less marketed, a savvy viewer could discern much more about the currents and trends of the European art world by carefully choosing among these, and they might walk away not as fatalistic as the reviewers leaving Germany or Italy.
TWO ARTISTS FROM 'AKKLIMITIZATSIA' IN TRANSCONTINENTAL CONVERSATION
BARI. How could two artists who live half way across the world, St. Petersburg and Los Angeles - one living under post-industrialization and the other post-communism, have an artistic practice which manifests with such similar aesthetic and conceptual concerns? Perhaps, it’s our consideration of the psychology of space/architecture in relationship to our locations, which have lead us both to transform our living spaces into quirky sculptural environments. Often by adding stark white site-specific sculptures that protrude from our apartments and documenting the process through photography.
IRINA. I have actually lived both in St. Petersburg and in Los Angeles, two years in each city. In both cities I felt a sort of estrangement from the architectural culture of residential buildings. In Los Angeles, there are many houses made of very lightweight materials, which are cheap and adjusted to the local natural conditions such as the high possibility of an earthquake or warm weather all year round. This type of architecture corresponds, in my opinion, both to the materials you have chosen for your project and to the project itself. What I found absolutely astonishing in Saint-Petersburg was walls, floors and the plumbing system which were just painted over so many times instead of being redone that they almost got a new shape - more rounded and at the same time kind of ‘formless’.
BARI. In order for a real-estate investment to pay off, decisions must be cost affective, practical, and idiosyncratic when remodeling a flat for a new tenant. Recently, fabricated Styrofoam molding was attached with glue to window ledges of my apartment complex. The economy of materials makes sense for Los Angeles. In both of our projects, decisions about building materials becomes crucial to the authenticity of the photograph. An aesthetic of seamlessness, cleanliness, and whiteness becomes normalized by the sculptures integration into its environment through photography.
I am curious how you think about your more organic shapes, do you think of them as parasites? Perhaps making a psychological or architectural problem more visible?
IRINA. Both in your work and mine I find crucial the idea of continuation and growth.
Personally, I was thinking about the abnormal growth. The architectural problem is expressed through the reference to a sickness, morbidity. This sickness could entail parasitism (as cancer does).
BARI. Similar to your work, my stark white architectural beams, made of foam core and plaster, mutate out of functional and decorative objects, rendering an environment that is overgrown, monumental, illusionary and artificial. I conceptually distinguish between which sculptures are props for the photographs and which sculptures are on display in the gallery, ultimately adding to the set quality of the final images. When simultaneously exhibiting both sculpture and photography, there is never a one to one ratio between either. If a sculpture makes an appearance in a photograph it acts as a mere prop and is discarded upon the completion of the shoot.
Do you display the objects that appear in your photographs? For the installation in Helsinki, you did have both the photograph and the displaced white sculpture displayed in relation to one another. At the time, I recall you asking whether it was necessary to actually display the sculpture, which had a discrepancy to the slick photograph. In person, the sculpture was cracking and the color was aging. Have you come to any conclusion?
IRINA. At first, the photograph was taken as a documentation to my work. The actual context in which this particular piece was made was crucial: the sculpture is not simply adjusted to the particular wall, it is cast into it, so that the sculpture ideally coincides with the wall, floor and furniture. It is literally a part of the actual domestic setting, but at the same time it can be separated. So it’s pretty obvious: if the sculpture suits one wall or environment, it won’t suit another. It will look foreign and sort of restless, which is a conscious strategy. In other words, I see these sculptures as two Russian ‘travelers’ who come to Helsinki from Saint Petersburg and appear to feel a bit awkward in a totally different context, whereas in Saint Petersburg one can hardly discern them among other objects. In fact, I recall locals coming to our flat and not noticing the sculpture.
C 7 по 21 января в Манеже, в рамках юбилейной 15-ой ежегодной выставки новых произведений петербургских художников "ПЕТЕРБУРГ-2007" , прошла, устроенная Фотодепартаментом, масштабная выставка "МОЛОДАЯ РОССИЙСКАЯ ФОТОГРАФИЯ/2007".
Петр Ловыгин
Дарья Ястребова
Концепция всего проекта, реакция публики, и, собственно, творчество авторов показали, что молодое поколение фотографии в нашей стране существует, развивается и ничем не уступает общемировым тенденциям.
В «левой» галерее манежа, под названием «Молодая Российская Фотография» располагались серии всех участников первого сезона выставочного проекта "Имя собственное", организованного Информационным центром/бюро «ФотоДепартамент». Целью этого проекта, явилась с одной стороны, – поддержка молодых авторов, с другой стороны – поиск новых имён в фотографии, а в общем - налаживание механизма взаимодействиякуратора и фотографа.
This week an artist came to speak to the senior class who made work a lot like mine, out of accumulations of waste products: paper, plastic, tires, ceramics. Mostly used newspaper, which I also am working with.
I thought his work was beautiful. Knowing his materials so intimately, I felt deeply moved by the slides of his work. The sculptures were simple and elegant in a way I have not managed, have not even really attempted. I am trying to make art about being overwhelmed by ecological crisis. The installation I am spending the year on, my senior project, is messy and multi-faceted. I am hoping that this approach will convey my panic to the viewer, and that it will also help me feel less scared about the world I am living in. In contrast to my work, the visiting artist’s seemed almost sparse, but his slides evoked exactly the reaction from me that I dream people will have in response to my work.
However, he was an asshole. His artist talk was painful; he was rude to the students and self-righteous. He fell in to all of the pitfalls of talking about ecological art that I am working hard to avoid. He sited half-relevant statistics about consumption and included images of dumps and parking lots meant to illustrate how appalled he was by today's world. To his credit, in my eyes, he did not claim that his art was a solution to ecological problems, he acknowledged his complicity in waste. However, this pissed most people in the room off. By using his artist's talk as a platform to discuss ecological issues outside of his work, he primed his audience to look at him as 'part of the solution'. When inconsistencies between his work and talk became apparent, most notably that he also makes work out of store-bought materials and sometimes cuts down small trees to use in sculptures, people got angry. They saw him as a hypocrite. He responded dismissively and defensively, which made it much worse. I cringed, knowing that his terrible handling of the subject matter we share could well predispose my peers to see all ecologically oriented artwork more cynically, and to be more judgmental of my work.
Since his lecture, though, I've had a couple of really interesting exchanges about what was wrong with the talk. Our shared frustration leads us to talk about his content, and I end up sharing a lot of my opinions about consumption, waste, and my art's engagement with these issues. This result is exciting.
This artist talk crystallized some thoughts I’ve been having about art as education. I understand art as basically a teaching tool, a way by which individuals learn about the world by making things, and a way in which any number of skill sets can be synthesized to creative ends. I have designed my art work this year to teach me about consumption patterns and my complicity in them, because this is something I want to know with the intimacy that art makes me understand things. Talking about my work is the main opportunity I have to share this learning, and so it makes sense to think of it as an act of teaching. I try think I am being a good teacher by letting people have their own experience of my work and by offering up a lot of information about my thinking when asked. By pissing us all off, the artist inspired us all to dwell on his talk a lot more than we would have if he were pleasant, and so maybe his artists talk was effective, even though I left hating him.
Mostly, I think of confrontational teaching as counterproductive and fundamentally bad, but some of the anti-racist workshops I've attended in the past few years have made me rethink this. These workshops ask me to confront the ways in which I unjustly benefit from being a white person in America. I leave feeling terrible. I respect the facilitator a whole lot but am definitely scared of him, because his work calls me on all my bullshit.. It would be wrong for me to leave happily motivated, though, because the delusional over-empowerment of liberal white folks like me is part of the problem. Thus it is honest for the leader of an anti-racist workshop to make me leave feeling powerless, guilty, confused. The aggressive pedagogy evokes an appropriately difficult emotional response.
I think ecological self-reflection should also make people feel bad, because it is a just sadness (In fact sometimes I feel kind of weird about the fact that I am making art about ecological crisis, because I derive so much joy from the process of making, and so am kind of deriving joy from crisis?) However, I don't think anyone talking about ecology, especially not in an arts context, has the right to preach, because what human can claim the moral high ground? We are all suffering from and contributing to planet trash soup. I am trying to find a way to talk about my art work and life choices non-judgmentally, non-condescendingly as a way to compassionately increase other’s thinking about ecological crisis. I think I'm getting good and gauging the appropriate tone, but it’s definitely been a struggle for me. This visiting artist did not do this. Instead, he set himself up as outside of his work and the problems it deals with, provoking an oppositional response that called for conversation, much more so than my work does. I sometimes think that my work must be the only way to approach my subject matter, but of course its not, and of course I am not doing it perfectly, either. I am one attempt.