Riding a cherry picker to the skylight in Raduga with curator Olga Jitlina
ReCostume & Commune being socialized in the Bobrinsky Gallery, Smolny College
Transportation to the site
Installation shotThere is something incredibly strange about the current infrastructure for the dissemination of our visual creative output. Art, the manifestation of our most intimate visceral impulses, is being held in universally interchangeable white boxes for viewing – no attention is paid to art’s individual needs or appetites. This captivity not only destroys art that exists: art works are made nonspecifically to be interchangeable and thus become absolutely and totally generic. The Art Museum is a zoo for the products of our imaginations! The Art Museum is dehumanizing and absurd! The Art Museum is facilitating Art-Wreckage! Art is being neglected through insufficient physical contact. As children must be held, hugged and kissed to develop proper social skills, so must art be cared for. Do Not Touch is child abuse!
Our social conditioning and museum-visiting practice severely inhibits our art appreciation. We visit museums as voyeurs, merely looking, surveilling art without human tenderness. We look at art to supervise (a mode of control), forgetting that our collective progeny need nurturing. This pervasive practice must be stopped! This is an urgent call for an Art-Witnessing Revolution!
If you cannot avoid the Art Museum, subvert its practices and limitations. Ignore all placards indicating physical restraint. Sculpture is three dimensional because it is a product of the body and relates to the body. As bodies (accompanied by souls, or what have you), we are responsible for our offspring (alternate forms of bodies) – we are responsible even for those which are mistakes. Contrary to popular opinion (an overwhelmingly devastating force), art is not destroyed by fingers (by being touched): it is nurtured.
Like human beings, art is mortal. Art’s lifespan is determined by how long it will last being touched. The more it is touched (loved), the shorter, and happier, and more informative, its lifespan. Our chief reservation in art-touching is our total paralysis in the face of mortality. Art addresses this fear, because art must be touched to socialize normally. It is our fear that destroys art, not our touching it. If we do not touch art, it will withdraw from human contact. It will become cold and asocial. It will last forever, but lack meaning. To evoke human truths and address social issues, art must exist in a physical dialogue with its audience and progenitors. Distance is too alienating; distance undermines the critical tension inspired by fear of death that offers the only impetus for our continuing survival. If the Apocalypse were not imminent, art would not exist.
The Art-Witnessing Revolution must arise through a re-categorization of art. Art is destroyed when we restrict ourselves to looking at it. Art, particularly sculpture (both the most dangerous and most human form of art), exists outside of traditional typologies such as figure, readymade, kinetic, relief and installation. Art-Witnessing Revolutionaries (the few we have identified thus far) are making and experiencing art in more humanizing ways. Art is reconfigured not by its materials, the process required to make it or its subject matter, but by its physical relevance. Approaching art, ask yourself basic questions about its behavior and evocations. What does the art work inspire in you? What visceral feelings does it induce? When you feel it, is it soft to your touch? This is Art-that-is-soft-to-the-touch. Is it grotesque? Art-to-gross-you-out. Does it make you shudder through overwhelming textural intrigue? Art-that-causes-shuddering. Will it support your body weight? Art-that-supports-you. Art-to-climb-over. How else can you relate to it? Art-to-walk-around. Art-to-put-your-hands-through. Art-that-blocks-your-view-into-the-other-room. Art-to-crouch-underneath. How does it relate to you?
