Photos from the opening of the Thaw exhibition. The exhibition “Thaw” opens at the Tretyakov Gallery
The Tretyakov Gallery presents another large-scale conceptual exhibition dedicated to the period of Russian history, traditionally designated by researchers as the “Thaw Era.” It is no coincidence that the relatively short period of time, which included about 10 years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, received the loud name “era”. The density of time, its saturation with the most important events for all mankind, were incredibly high. The weakening of state control and the democratization of the way culture is managed has greatly revitalized the creative process. The “Thaw” style has pronounced characteristics and represents an original version of Soviet modernism of the 1960s, which was stimulated by scientific advances in the field of space and nuclear energy. Space and the atom - as the largest and smallest quantities determine the range of the “universal” thinking of the “sixties”, looking into the future.
The Thaw exhibition is a curatorial interpretation of the processes that took place in culture and society in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The goal of the project is not only to show the achievements of the “thaw”, but also to articulate the problems and conflicts of this era. The comprehensive exhibition includes works by artists, sculptors, and directors who witnessed the decisive changes taking place at that time in the most important areas of the life of Soviet people. Their opinions are polemical on a number of issues, which makes the exhibition more objective.
The pervasive feeling of something great and new happening literally “before our eyes” could not help but be reflected in art. All participants in the creative process - artists, architects, sculptors, poets, writers - worked to find a new language that could express their time. Literature responded first and most vividly to the changing situation. Great importance had the rehabilitation of some cultural figures repressed under Stalin. Soviet readers and viewers rediscovered many names that were taboo in the 1930s and 1940s. IN fine arts a “severe style” appeared. Architecture and design received a new impetus for development.
The exhibition space will be divided into thematic sections, such as “Conversation with Father”, “The Best City on Earth”, “ International relationships", "New way of life", "Development", "Atom - space", "To communism!"
The exhibition will be a single installation into which a variety of artifacts will be integrated: works of painting and graphics, sculpture, household items, design samples, video projections with fragments of feature films and documentary footage.
The exhibition will include works by such artists as G. Korzhev, T. Salakhov, V. Popkov, A. Zverev, P. Ossovsky, V. Nemukhin, Yu. Pimenov, A. Deineka, O. Rabin, E. Bulatov, F. . Infante-Arana, I. Kabakov, as well as sculptors - E. Neizvestny, V. Sidur.
The Thaw era is full of contradictions, and the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery represents an attempt to systematically study its cultural heritage.
Address: Krymsky Val, 10, halls 60-62
Dedicated to the era of Soviet history, which lasted 15 years. the site talks about the most important events, heroes and ideas of the time, which are reflected in the exhibition. The exhibition will open on February 16 and will last until June 11.
Yuri Pimenov. Wedding on Tomorrow Street.1962
What will I see at the Thaw exhibition?
Yuri Mogilevsky. Portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky
The Tretyakov Gallery team worked on the “Thaw” project for four years, and approached the preparations so carefully that, according to the general director of educational and publishing activities of the museum, Marina Elsesser, they even managed to “order special weather for the opening day of the exhibition.” Indeed, it has become warmer in Moscow and the sun is shining for the second day. As for the exhibition, 500 works of art are presented here - paintings, graphics, sculpture, objects of decorative and applied art, photographs, household items symbolizing the era, inventions of scientists, documents, fragments of films. The works were collected from 23 museums and 11 private collections. That is, the “Thaw” exhibition is an unprecedented project only in its scale.
The architecture of the exhibition is also beautiful: the 60th hall (where Aivazovsky was recently shown, and before that Serov) is divided into separate thematic zones, invented by curator Kirill Svetlyakov ("Conversation with Father", "The Best City on Earth", "New Life", "Development ", "Atom - space" and "To communism!"), and in the center there is a large round square with a bust of Mayakovsky. It was on Mayakovsky Square in Moscow that the poets of the sixties once read their poems.
Why did the Tretyakov Gallery decide to hold this exhibition right now?
Tair Salakhov. Gladioli
The exhibition covers the period from 1953, when the first changes in Soviet society took place after Stalin's death, until 1968, when the introduction of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia finally dispelled the illusion of freedom. This time was as critical as it was indicative. On the one hand, the first post-war generation grew up in the USSR, which did not understand why to fence itself off from the whole world and did not know the truth about Stalin’s camps, what older generation out of habit, he preferred to remain silent. On the other hand, it was an era of great discoveries. Space, the splitting of the atom, the icebreaker "Lenin", Belka and Strelka, Yuri Gagarin - that's what this new society was talking about. Be that as it may, 50 years have passed since then, and now we must look back, understand what path the world has traveled during this time, and reassess values.
In her website, director of the Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova said that “there is a definite need for such an exhibition today.” “This is evidenced by the number of projects on this topic that are being done today in Europe and the USA. MoMA has just opened a large exhibition dedicated to the 1960s; the exhibition “1945–68” opened in Brussels, which presents the art of this period without division iron curtain, which is very correct. The Museum of Moscow and the Pushkin Museum will also host exhibitions dedicated to the corresponding time. Perhaps this was the last powerful creative revolution of the 20th century, which took place in conditions of incredible freedom of those who created. ", she concluded.
Where can I learn more about this era?
Yuri Pimenov. Running across the street
Together with the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin, Gorky Park and the Moscow Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery will hold the “Thaw: Facing the Future” festival, which will be a continuation of the exhibition program. Until the end of April, lectures will be given at the Tretyakov Gallery on various aspects of the era: parallels in Soviet and Western art, reflection of Soviet life in painting (“Pop Art and Communal Modernism”), connections between science and art (“Art of the Scientific-Era”) technical revolution"). Lectures will be given by project curator Kirill Svetlyakov, one of the main Soviet-trained art critics Vitaly Patsyukov, director of the MediaArtLab Center for Culture and Art and curator of the international symposium Pro&Contra Olga Shishko and other specialists.
At the opening of the exhibition, Marina Elsesser presented a 700-page catalogue. It contains a large number of articles and research on the history of art of the Thaw era, which will be available for purchase in the gallery's bookstore.
What are the most interesting exhibits at the exhibition?
Victor Akhlomov. Dawn. Young people at GUM. Moscow, 1964
In fact, the “Thaw” exhibition is beautiful in its integrity: here cinema, photography and painting complement each other. The curators managed to present this era as overly optimistic. The art of this period is indeed particularly diverse: there are abstract sculptures by Vadim Sidur (whose exhibition “Sculptures We Don’t See” at the Manege), figurative socialist realism by Yuri Pimenov, and socialist art by Mikhail Roginsky - each of the 500 exhibits is worthy of mention.
Also on “The Thaw” there is a series of photographs by Viktor Akhlomov - wonderful photographs of Moscow and Moscow youth, fragments of one of the main films of the era “July Rain” by Marlen Khutsiev, abstract expressionism of Nikolai Vechtomov, whose paintings looked too “Western” (a comparison with Jackson Pollock or , whose exhibition was recently held at the Jewish Museum), and the “luminous” works of Francisco Infante-Aran, an artist-engineer working in the border zone between art and science.
What else will happen within the framework of the Thaw project?
Victor Popkov. Two
In addition to the exhibition itself and the educational lecture program, the Tretyakov Gallery will host film screenings and poetry evenings, where poems of the sixties will be read by Sovremennik theater actors Artur Smolyaninov, Daria Belousova, Polina Pakhomova, Dmitry Girev, Evgeny Pavlov and Chulpan Khamatova. Chulpan will read the poems of Bella Akhmadullina, whose image the actress created in the series based on the latest novel by Vasily Aksenov.
Yuri Pimenov. "Running Across the Street", 1963
The curators, who have been preparing the exhibition for several years,
tried to create as complete a picture as possible of polyphonic time, with its artistic searches, uncomfortable questions about war, euphoria from scientific discoveries and the first man in space, virgin romance and the arms race.
The exhibition included about five hundred exhibits from more than two dozen public and private collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian and Historical Museums and the Institute of Russian Realistic Art.
In the Khrushchev Thaw it is impossible to identify clear dominants of artistic, intellectual or political life. The Thaw is an entire era and state of mind, and therefore cannot be reduced to a few names or phenomena - this is exactly how the curators, who have done enormous work, look at it research work. That is why there is no single center in the exhibition architecture. More precisely, it exists, but it is an open space - “Mayakovsky Square”, around which there are six thematic sections: “Conversation with Father”, “The Best City on Earth”, “International Relations”, “New Life”, “Development”, “Atom - Space”, “To Communism!”.
The opening of the exhibition, “Conversation with Father,” touches on two sore topics of that time, which were not accepted to be discussed: the truth about the war and the camps. This section presents not only artwork of that time, such as “Auschwitz” by Alexander Kryukov or the portrait of Varlam Shalamov by Boris Birger, but also footage from iconic films: “Silence”, “Nine Days of One Year”, “The Cranes Are Flying”, as well as photographs of performances of the Sovremennik Theater ", which became one of the voices of the era. The second half of the 1950s was a time of rehabilitation processes for political prisoners, which began immediately after Stalin's death, but began to gradually fade away in the early 1960s. Thus, Grigory Chukhrai’s 1961 film “Clear Sky,” about a pilot in German captivity who receives a government award after several years of obstruction and public censure, would have been impossible in the late 1960s.
The section “The Best City on Earth” is dedicated not so much to Moscow (although, undoubtedly, it is its main character), but to the city as a public space in which private and public intersect. The city of the Thaw era wants to meet world standards; it abandons the strict hierarchy and pomp of the Stalinist Empire style in favor of a free layout and vast spaces (the Palace of Congresses in the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow swimming pool, Kalinin Avenue). And artists - like, for example, Vladimir Gavrilov and Yuri Pimenov - watch with interest the life of ordinary people unfolding on the street.
“New Life” complements the urban theme with artifacts and illustrations of the private life of Soviet people, including many designer interior items (and they, by the way, would rightfully decorate a modern home today).
International relations of the Thaw period are not only about the build-up of the arms race and the escalation of the Cold War between Soviet Union and America, but also cultural exchange, unthinkable during Stalin’s lifetime. In 1955, Soviet musicians began to go on tour in the United States for the first time after a thirty-year break, and George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess” was brought to Leningrad, performed by the African-American troupe Everyman Opera. A little later, the Soviet capital will enthusiastically welcome the artist Rockwell Kent and pianist Van Cliburn. In 1959, the American Exhibition will be held in Moscow, where for the first time in the USSR the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper and many others will be shown. Works in this section of the exhibition include views of New York by Oleg Vereisky and watercolors by Vitaly Goryaev from the series “Americans at Home.” And a little further - abstract painting from the studio " New reality"Eliya Belyutina, as a roll call with the Western avant-garde artists invisibly present here.
In the “Exploration” section we find ourselves among the main characters of the Soviet heroic epic - polar explorers, participants in large-scale construction projects and virgin lands shock workers, and in the adjacent section “Atom - Space” - surrounded by students and scientists, in the atmosphere of the famous dispute between “physicists” and “lyricists” . Here are photographs of huge demonstrations in honor of the first man in space.
Eric Bulatov. "Cut", 1965-1966.
Section “Into communism!” ironically opens with Eliya Belyutin’s large-scale painting “Lenin’s Funeral” (“Requiem”). Interpreting the classic plot of Soviet mythology in modernist aesthetics, it turns out to be a kind of visual oxymoron and symbol social project, doomed to remain a utopia.
Walking through the “districts” of the city built in the exhibition halls, you invariably return to the central square - a space of free expression, artistic experimentation and new meanings that the thaw takes on from a historical distance.
Details from Posta-Magazine
The exhibition is open February 16-June 11
Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val
St. Krymsky Val, 10
https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/
The exhibition "Thaw" opens at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val - one of the three main events in the program of the all-Moscow festival "Thaw: Facing the Future". The festival perfectly shows what kind of past and future Moscow is nostalgic about and why it is more convenient to celebrate the thaw than the revolution
Fresh colors and fluffy skirts - the dresses of new Muscovites bloom like gladioli in the paintings of Yuri Pimenov, an avant-garde artist of the 1920s, who thawed and bloomed again in the 1960s. Ivan Stepanov’s “constructors” stood at the drawing boards and designed cities growing in compact constructivist blocks on a service made in the shape of Anna Leporskaya, a student of Malevich: almost Suprematist porcelain, but with gold borders - not all excesses had been overcome by 1967. The windows of the best city on Earth reflect fashionistas dressed by their peer - the young fashion designer Vyacheslav Zaitsev. And naked Adam and Eve, having left the Soviet paradise, fly like Strugatsky “progressors” through the cosmic void, stretching out their hands with the suns of the peaceful atom - “To you, humanity!”, as the grandiose panel by Tair Salakhov was called in its size and Komsomol naivety.
Do not think that the curatorial group of the Tretyakov Gallery under the leadership of Kirill Svetlyakov turned on the next march of enthusiasts at full volume. The exhibition also includes the “return of fathers,” and the viewer is left in no doubt that Pavel Nikonov’s “Father” returned not only from the front, but also from the camp. And the memory of the war and the Gulag - with the dehumanized hero of the front-line sculptors Vadim Sidur and Ernst Neizvestny, and the formula of grief - the torn blockade ring - of Konstantin Simun. Both dissidence and the confrontation between the “severe style” and the no less harsh underground, which divided the art world into official and unofficial, although the boundaries between both in many cases were unclear and passed through the living. An excellent catalog will be published for the Tretyakov exhibition, which, in addition to articles on the history of Thaw art, architecture and design, includes essays by Marietta Chudakova on Thaw prose, Andrei Plakhov on Thaw cinema, Alexander Markov on the neo-Marxism of Ilyenkov and Mamardashvili, as well as many historical, sociological and anthropological essays. This book seems to absorb all the meanings of the festival.
The chronological boundaries of the Thaw at the festival are broadly defined - 1953-1968, from the death of Stalin to the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. Which, of course, does not coincide with the boundaries of the Thaw either in political history - from the 20th Congress to the resumption of the practice of public political trials of dissidents, primarily the creative intelligentsia, or in the history of art, where the beginning of the Thaw is considered to be the VI World Festival of Youth and Students, and the end - Khrushchev pogrom in Manege. But in the context of cultural history, and all three exhibitions in one way or another have such a context in mind, the dating can be considered fair - from the first signs to the last echoes.
The first exhibition to open was at the Museum of Moscow, and, like everything that curator Alexandra Selivanova is involved with, “The Moscow Thaw: 1953-1968” is a project of exceptional quality. The spiritual and material culture of the Thaw - architecture, design, fashion, cinema, music, literature, art - is described using general concepts, in which formal, historical-cultural and sociological approaches seem to converge: “lattice”, “capsule”, “new”, “rhythm”, “mobility”, “transparency”, “synthesis”, “organic”, “emptiness” . For example, the “lattice” - the structural principle of modernism, presupposing the “loss of the middle”, uniformity and equivalence, standardization and reproducibility - manifests itself in the facades of block high-rise buildings, and in the striped-checkered patterns of fabric for dresses, and in abstraction drawn into even squares "Tiled floor" by Mikhail Roginsky. It seems that almost all of the Thaw “general concepts” proposed by the curatorial team of the exhibition are in fact only halves of Wölflinian binary oppositions, but their pairs, as expected, remained in the previous era. The figure of silence from the past with the same “grid” should be the “pyramid” with all its hierarchical imperial values, the embodiment of which were Stalin’s high-rise buildings. And there is no doubt that the Thaw half of the binary oppositions is marked with a “plus” sign in all - aesthetic and ethical - senses.
The last to open will be the exhibition “Facing the Future: The Art of Europe 1945-1968” at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which was set up for the Thaw Festival, but initially did not have any Thaw in mind. The ideologist of the project was the director of the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Technologies in Karlsruhe), artist and curator Peter Weibel: his exhibition, already shown in Brussels and Karlsruhe, is dedicated to Europe as a single artistic space, whose unity in the period between the end of World War II and the revolutions of 1968- This is due to general military trauma. From Soviet art at the Weibel exhibition, with a few exceptions, there was nothing official - semi-forbidden and underground predominated, and it grows not thanks to the Thaw liberalization, as is commonly believed in our country, but rather in spite of the communist regime. What the Soviet Thaw is is very clearly visible at the Weibel exhibition in the works of Hungarians, Czechs and their sympathizers, dedicated to 1956 and 1968. They, however, show how strong the Soviet state and cultural-ideological border ran across a supposedly united post-war Europe. But the curators of the Pushkin Museum must adapt the Moscow version of the exhibition to the festival, and the emphasis will undoubtedly shift.
Alexander Deineka. Sketch of the mosaic "Peaceful Construction Sites", 1959. "Facing the Future: European Art 1945-1968" at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
This all-Moscow thaw festival fortunately fell on 2017 - the year of the 60th anniversary of the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, from which, at least in the history of art, the thaw began in full force, and which, in turn, successfully coincided with another anniversary - the 40th anniversary, as they said then, of the Great October Revolution. World festivals began to be held shortly after the end of World War II on the initiative of a pair of pro-communist international youth organizations that were carefully patronized by the USSR during the Cold War. Festivals, with the exception of two - in Vienna and Helsinki, and even then, apparently due to proximity to the big Soviet brother, - were not held in Western capitalist countries - this was a holiday for the Warsaw Pact countries, Latin America and Africa, those where, at least in official rhetoric, the victory of the Great October Revolution was regarded as an event on a planetary scale.
The Moscow festival of 1957 turned out to be the largest in history, gathering - in a closed country - 34 thousand participants from 131 countries. The youth festival in Moscow was organized again - in 1985, but somehow it is not usually associated with the dawn of perestroika - rather, on the contrary, with the decline of stagnation. And lo and behold! — this year the festival, the 19th in a row, returns again to the best city on Earth: in mid-October a festive parade of delegates will take place in Moscow, then the world’s youth will move to Sochi. And there is no doubt that in October 2017 in Moscow, “under the auspices of Rosmolodezh,” new Komsomol internationalists will celebrate the 60th anniversary of that legendary Moscow festival, but not the 100th anniversary of another red date in Russian and world history.
Interestingly, the “mysterious passion” for the thaw that gripped last years The Moscow creative class, or, as they once would have said, the creative intelligentsia, involuntarily falls into the general wave of nostalgia for the Soviet, experienced by the people, the party, the government and almost the church. And it is the Thaw - in contrast to Stalin’s terror or Brezhnev’s stagnation, and there are plenty of nostalgists for both - that becomes the subject of general consensus: it was a good time, albeit a difficult one. In fact, the most important task of the good times, coming both from above and from below, was the rehabilitation of the revolution, but, oddly enough, the revolution is where, in fact, the Soviet began, for which everyone, some abstractly and some quite concretely, is nostalgic , so inflamed, is by no means a subject of public consensus. Of course, all Moscow museums will put on some kind of exhibition for the 100th anniversary of 1917 - after all, the Soviet avant-garde, the main export brand of Russian art, which the thaw, by the way, was never able to rehabilitate, begins with the revolution. But it’s hard to imagine them uniting with such enthusiasm in the “Revolution: Facing the Future” festival.
The texts for the "thaw" exhibitions are surprisingly good and subtle - in explications and catalogues. They analyze, without illusions, what is called the conflicts and contradictions of the era: the compromise nature of de-Stalinization and the half-heartedness of reforms, compensated by the first joy from the promised, but never materialized, consumer abundance; doublethink and forced cooperation with the authorities, disguised as a conscious need; freedom, the overwhelming majority exchanged for ideological guardianship, social security and relative equality without brotherhood, that is, for well-being, as it was understood then - after so many years of Stalinist hardening and reforging. And although no one seems to have any illusions about the thaw, this inter-museum celebration of 1957, in some way replacing the celebration of the year 1917, says a lot about our time. When you so want to expose your face to the July rain - and, God forbid, the wind, the wind, all over God's world.
"Moscow Thaw: 1953-1968". Museum of Moscow, until March 31
"Thaw". Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, February 14 - June 11
"Facing the Future: The Art of Europe 1945-1968." Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, March 7 - May 21
Large-scale inter-museum research project“The Thaw,” which is shown by the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, was created according to the rules of that controversial era, which had more hopes than it could justify. The exhibition appeals to the modern viewer, seeks a foothold in the past, and invites a debate about time and oneself. Its sections “Conversation with Father”, “The Best City on Earth”, “International Relations”, “New Life”, “Development”, “Atom - Space”, “Into Communism!” taken out into the open space of the forum. The forum is conventional, like a theater stage, and no less real than Mayakovsky Square, which became an open-air poetry club in the 1960s.
Exhibition curator Kirill Svetlyakov talks about the new project of the Tretyakov Gallery.
Three museums at once: the Museum of Moscow, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin - they make projects dedicated to the thaw. What need of the time is behind this coincidence?
Kirill Svetlyakov: In part, this is the need to return to those problems that the “thaw” did not solve and which have not yet been resolved. To understand why we step on the same rake about once every quarter of a century. I think this is what gives rise to heated debates about that era and its heroes, be it Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn or Okudzhava... Actually, these debates began back in the 1990s. On the other hand, it was precisely in that era, with its first flights into space, with the first nuclear power plants, - the origins of today's time.
Finally, when the twentieth century finally becomes history, questions arise regarding the preservation of the artistic heritage and its study. And in the case of the legacy of the 1960s, this is not at all obvious. One can at least recall the history of the demolition of the old international terminal of Sheremetyevo Airport, built in the early 1960s. People called it a “shot glass,” although in fact it more closely resembled a “flying saucer.”
An existing airport is probably difficult to preserve as an architectural monument...
Kirill Svetlyakov: The archeology of the "thaw" in general turned out to be complex. Precisely because the art was “light”, functional, often made from new materials. So, for example, back in the 1990s I saw the puppets of the play “I-go-go” at the Obraztsov Theater museum. Then the performance was no longer on. It was a wonderful production, such an extravaganza of the NTR era, originally from the 1960s, where the action takes place at the Homunculus Institute... The dolls were made of modern materials: latex, plastic... This just let us down. When we wanted to take the characters from the play to the exhibition, it turned out that they were not there. They shrank and shriveled up, like mummies. But at least they tried to preserve the dolls, and, say, furniture from the 1960s, laconic and expressive, has practically disappeared. It was inexpensive, easy to take apart, and ultimately easy to part with.
What time frame do you limit The Thaw to?
Kirill Svetlyakov: The beginning is 1953, since the rehabilitation processes began not with Khrushchev, but much earlier. After Stalin's death, Beria launches them. But Nikita Sergeevich headed some processes and made them intensive, while others he initiated. It is clear that there was a struggle within the party leadership. But Khrushchev not only won at a certain stage, he desacralized power. He had a moment of hypocrisy, spectacular political clowning, like Trump is having now. He understood many things perfectly. Another thing is that for the political scene he chose the role of a “simple guy.”
That did not stop him from authorizing the execution of workers in Novocherkassk in June 1962...
Kirill Svetlyakov: We talk about this, of course, in explications, but it is difficult to show it at the exhibition. There are several photos in the FSB archive. The upper limit of the thaw was August 1968, when tanks from the Warsaw Pact countries entered Prague.
If we talk about the works of artists presented at the exhibition, what determined the choice?
Kirill Svetlyakov: We tried to correlate the artists' works with the ideas that were in the air. But if in literature and cinema the thaw is associated with the emergence of a new intonation, new plots, new heroes (be it Ivan Denisovich from Solzhenitsyn’s story, scientists from Granin’s novel “I’m Going into the Storm” or a history teacher from the film “The Big Change”), then artists looked for first of all new language. One that could provide insight into the ultimate existential experience experienced by the generation of fathers. Take, for example, Ernst Neizvestny or Vadim Sidur, who combined modernism and archaism. Nikolai Vechtomov, who also fought, for example, appears in disturbing, strange abstract forms.
Naturally, they started from the art of socialist realism, which was perceived as a set of dead formulas. Where could they be heading? Filmmakers have followed this path towards opening up a lyrical, private space. And the artists tried to rethink the experience of the avant-garde...
MEPhI had a legendary choir of physicists. And in the selection committee there sat...the choirmaster
Another source of inspiration is the discoveries of scientists. Abstract works by Vladimir Slepyan, Yuri Zlotnikov, Boris Turetsky were associated with an interest in cybernetics. Zlotnikov even attended cybernetics seminars and developed his own “signal system” in art.
Even when the connections with scientific research are not obvious, we decided to draw parallels. So, in the section “Atom - Space” we included an early abstraction by Eric Bulatov, and compared it with photographs of “traces” of elementary particles in the synchrophasotron. Bulatov said that there is no need to tie his abstraction to the synchrophasotron, but nevertheless. Two small paintings by Lev Krapivnitsky, from Talochkin’s collection, are included in the same section. Of course, there are works by Francisco Infante, in general - by the Movement group...
We also show illustrations by Hulot Sooster and Ilya Kabakov, which they did for the magazine “Knowledge is Power”. But, let’s say, in the magazine “Technology for Youth” there were no artists; scientists painted there.
Are we talking about amateur art?
Kirill Svetlyakov: I would talk about the movement of enthusiasts, which was supported by the magazine “Technology for Youth”. He organized exhibitions of works created by scientists. This is a special subculture. For example, at the exhibition we are showing materials from the archives of the Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, the museum of the Kurchatov Institute... The hobbies of scientists were largely connected with the idea of raising a perfect person: a scientist, an intellectual, an artist, an athlete. At MEPhI, for example, there was a legendary choir of physicists. And in the selection committee there sat...the choirmaster, strange as it may sound.
That’s why the meetings between “physicists and lyricists” and various arts - from cinema to painting, from magazine graphics to design - are so organic in your project.
Kirill Svetlyakov: Certainly. Add a splint to this set, and the picture will become more complete. Yes, at that time everyone was passionate about modernism. But modernism in mass production easily coexisted with products stylized as folklore, which should have been accessible and understandable to the masses. The ensemble "Beryozka" dances against the backdrop of a rocket. This “on a sleigh into outer space” style, of course, refers to a fairy tale that has become reality.
This motif of a fairy tale come true can also be found in films of the 1930s...
Kirill Svetlyakov: Maybe. By the way, the first thing the viewer sees at the exhibition is a film depicting a peasant paradise on earth. Paradise has the exact address - VDNKh. And then the viewer enters a space where on the screens there are scenes from films of the 1960s. The hero of Anatoly Papanov breaks his sculptures in the film “Come Tomorrow”. Oleg Tabakov's young character chops down furniture in the film "Noisy Day." And in the film "Give complaint book"Young architects, students, journalists are dismantling the Dandelion cafe.
Having gone through this rebellion, we come to "Conversation with Father." In Thaw films this is an almost obligatory genre element. Indicative is the film by Marlen Khutsiev “I am 20 years old,” where a young man asks his father, emerging from the darkness of the past war, how he should live. And he, who died a long time ago, replies that he is younger than his son... He must think for himself. And after this farewell to the past, the viewer finds himself in the space of the city, in the center, from where he can move to any section of the exhibition, be it “Atom - Space” or “To Communism!”
To get to “Into Communism!”, you need to go up the ramp. There you can find, in particular, a futurological table from the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted what discoveries await humanity by 2050. It was published by the magazine “Technology for Youth”. You can see what has come true and what has not yet.
During the thaw, the “Iron Curtain,” if not lifted, becomes more transparent in places. Were the parallels with the era of the youth revolution in the West important to you?
Kirill Svetlyakov: We didn't have a youth revolution in the 1960s. In the West, this revolution begins with children asking their fathers about fascism. You were collaborators, you were silent during Hitler’s time, you lied to us children, and now you teach us how to live. What right do you have to this? Our situation was different. The authority of the front-line soldiers was indisputable. And the hero of Viktor Popkov’s painting tries on his father’s overcoat. In fact, Vladimir Vysotsky tries on this same front-line overcoat for his heroes.
One can, of course, recall the conflicts between young people and bureaucrats in the films “Carnival Night” and “Welcome, or No Trespassing.” But this has nothing to do with the youth revolution, but with the rotation of personnel. Youth culture is created by young people for young people. In our country it appears only during perestroika.;