Let us briefly recall what happened in May: a year before the opening of its space at GES-2, the V-A-C Foundation organizes a large-scale review of its own collection, attracting big names from the friendly collections of the Moscow MMOMA and the French-American Kadist Foundation. 200 works occupy the entire mansion of the Moscow Museum contemporary art on Petrovka, 25, all summer and are shuffled three times by fifteen curators. The first issue was centered around Chekhov's "The Seagull", and the second was collected around the key 11 philosophical concepts of modernity according to the Austrian philosopher Armen Avanesyan - from the right turn in politics to changing the categories of time in the era of Facebook and eternal life in digital. Now Maria Stepanova, speaking as a guest curator, invites us to think about the category of thing itself. She rhymes objects from the collections with her own - for example, a vintage suitcase and old lace appear next to Warhol and Bourgeois at the exhibition. A large public program with concerts and Volkostrelov's director's laboratory is attached.

The V-A-C Foundation and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) are opening a grandiose exhibition-play of contemporary art, the exhibition and composition of which will be constantly changing over the course of five months






The “Dress Rehearsal” project at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) on Petrovka was conceived as theatrical production in three acts, which will help reconsider established methods of exhibition and the impression they give to modern viewers. Accordingly, the composition of the project will change three times: the first “act” will open on April 26, the next ones on June 16 and July 26. In addition to the fact that the work on the arrangement of more than 200 works from the collection of MMOMA, the V-A-C Foundation (Victoria - the Art of Being Modern) and the French Kadist Foundation is carried out throughout the entire project by a group of 16 curators under the supervision of , each part of the project has its own guest directors. In the first part, these are the participants of the “Theater of Mutual Actions” (Shifra Kazhdan, Lesha Lobanov, Alexandra Moon, Ksenia Peretrukhina), who wrote the text of the libretto for the exhibition based on Anton Chekhov’s play “The Seagull”. This text, according to their plan, should become the key to understanding what is happening.

The first part of the “Dress Rehearsal” consists of three sections, each of them has its own floor. The lower one will be occupied by the sculptural installation “More Things Again” by British artist and Turner Prize nominee Mike Nelson. This is a kind of prologue to the project and a demonstration of the principle of its assembly, only in miniature. The installation is made up of sculptures by artists of different movements and eras - modernist works by Constantin Brancusi, Albert Giacometti, Henry Moore, traditional African sculpture and modern sculpture, from Louise Bourgeois to Sherry Levin, are mixed on one plane.

The second floor is the main part of the project, the “stage”. It will house sculpture, video, painting, photography and graphics according to a well-thought-out dramaturgy. Among the exhibits are works by Jeff Koons, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Philip Parreno, Pavel Pepperstein, Wolfgang Tillmans, Chiara Fumai and Andy Warhol.

The third floor is reserved for a “storage”, conceived as an archive of works that can become potential participants in the “main action”, and before that, like backup actors, they will wait their turn. The archive includes 200 works by contemporary foreign and Russian artists, of which there are a total of more than a hundred in the project.

As the curators promise, the structure of the exhibition should focus the viewer's attention on temporal rather than spatial comprehension. Therefore, the work of Conrad Dedobbeler, a Belgian artist who became the architect of the project, was important. His arrangement method is similar to what Mike Nelson came up with for the first floor, only the Belgian has long and successfully used it at personal exhibitions, including in the German museum of the Esther family house, built according to the design of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

V-A-C notes that the “Dress Rehearsal” is a manifesto of the foundation’s work, which will be developed at its own site at GES-2 (currently being reconstructed according to a project by the bureau of the author of the Center Pompidou).

During the exhibition, the museum will host a large public program with discussions, reading groups, film screenings and even meditation classes, where they promise to help the viewer understand how today we communicate with space and perceive art.

Most of the exhibits (70 works) for the first “act” of the “Dress Rehearsal” were brought to Moscow by the curator and director of the Kadist Foundation, Emily Villiers. TANR asked her about the meaning of the project and working in an international team.

Curated by Emily Wille. Photo: V-A-C Foundation

What was it like working with such a large curatorial team? What was your role?

Different points of view give more opportunities, everyone contributed something to the project. This type of work is reminiscent of a biennale and, in my opinion, gives the curator more in terms of personal experience. In Dress Rehearsal, we also turned to specialists who were not curators, such as screenwriters. Therefore, we managed to avoid excessive self-reflection and talk exclusively about art. If we talk about my responsibilities, I participated in the creation of the general concept, as well as the selection of works for the third floor, the so-called storage room, which included many things from the collection of the Kadist Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Emily Villiers

Curator

Since 2013, she has been director of the Kadist Foundation, based in Paris and San Francisco, where she began working in 2008. Initiated the online publication Qalqalah in collaboration with the research center Bétonsalon. Co-founder of the curatorial group Le Bureau. In 2017, she participated in the international conference of the Garage museum dedicated to personal archives artists and the archiving process.

Which ones and how do they combine with the V-A-C and MMOMA collections?

There will be 70 works from our fund. These are great international artists Eleanor Antin, Ian Wu, Walid Raad, Simon Starling, as well as the increasingly popular Pio Abad, Jessica Warboys, Ian Yuchen. The Kadist collection was founded in 2001 and has been international from the very beginning. The exhibits selected for the exhibition reflect this diversity in geography, generations, and media used. We support artists who dedicate their work to current political and social issues. On the main stage there will be 18 video works, many installations, photographs, as well as performance.

One of the general goals of Dress Rehearsal is to think about how we look at certain objects today. Can you explain how? And why do we need such a complex exhibition with a separate “stage” and “storage”?

The “storage” on the third floor is an option for displaying works of art as a database. This is a game: for a work to exist, it must first be put into action. The idea will become clear after viewers watch the videos on plasma screens. When I described the principle to the artists, I said that the exhibition would take the form of a kind of library. The viewer will see an archive of works. You can approach them, but also consider them separately. Another interpretation option is to perceive the works as characters in a theatrical play, especially since their composition will change within the exhibition. Some works have a fairly clear “statement” (English statement - “statement, statement, message.” - TANR), but the viewer is always subjective. I would like to add that the project very well shows that any exhibition, like a collection, is a living organism and any work included in it is performative.

You also oversee part of the public program. Please tell us what we can expect?

The first participant will be the Romanian artist Alexandra Pirich with the performance “Parthenon Marbles” (from June 9 to 12). Her technique is based on bringing to life the narratives of art history through the body. This time the plot is as follows: the Parthenon marble from the British Museum tells its own story, sad that it cannot return to its homeland, Greece. This performance resonates with many colonial histories.

One of the goals of your foundation is to support discussion about the problems of contemporary art. In your opinion, which of them are the most relevant? And what other plans does the foundation have at the moment?

We support artists thinking about the world they live in. And yet this is a difficult question: what can art really do? Sometimes work of art presents the problem in such a way that it really attracts attention. Activism works well. But in general, I think the influence of modern art is not that great. Of course, because our foundation collects art from all over the world, this view becomes less Eurocentric, we offer other perspectives, and this practice should expand. For three years now, I have been working on a European project with Slovenian curator Natasha Petrosin-Bachelis on the dehumanization of views on mass migration, but it is still in development.

Dress rehearsal

Dress rehearsal GENERAL, oh, oh.

Dictionary Ozhegova. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949-1992 .


See what “Dress rehearsal” is in other dictionaries:

    The last one, the final one. Dictionary foreign words, included in the Russian language. Chudinov A.N., 1910 ...

    dress rehearsal- last rehearsal before the performance...

    Razg. The last check of readiness before which l. decisive matter. BMS 1998, 491 ...

    full operational dress rehearsal- Each site team conducts a full operational dress rehearsal under the direction of the site manager. [Department of Linguistic Services of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee. Glossary of terms] EN full operational dress rehearsal Each... ... Directory technical translator

    - (Latin, from repetere repeat). 1) repetition. 2) trial of a theatrical or musical play, ballet, etc., preliminary performance by a joint effort. 3) repeating lessons with students. Dress rehearsal. Rehearsal before the performance. Hours from... ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

    REHEARSAL, rehearsals, women. (lat. repetitio repetition). 1. Exercises, preliminary work, learning in preparation for staging a play, for performing something, for a performance. The rehearsal for the play was successful. “Katya wrote to me that her... ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

    Dress rehearsal. Razg. The last check of readiness before which l. decisive matter. BMS 1998, 491 ... Big dictionary Russian sayings

    rehearsal- and, f. 1) Preliminary execution of what l. dramatic, musical work in preparation for a performance. The play is being rehearsed. A quiet rehearsal in an empty, dimly lit theater is a pleasant, calm sight (Gippius). Synonyms: pro/ba… … Popular dictionary of the Russian language

    rehearsal- , ii, w. ** Dress rehearsal October Revolution. // An expression from V.I. Lenin’s book “The Infantile Disease of “Leftism” in Communism” (1920): “Without the “dress rehearsal” of 1905, the victory of the October Revolution of 1917 would have been impossible” ... Explanatory dictionary of the language of the Council of Deputies

    REHEARSAL, and, women. 1. Preliminary performance of a performance, performance, whatever. spectacular event, parade during their preparation. R. concert. R. parade. General district 2. transfer Event, actions as preparation for something. in the future. R.... ... Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary

Books

  • Dress rehearsal, Galich Alexander Arkadievich. The plot of Alexander Galich's story "Dress Rehearsal" (1973) is the preparation and dress rehearsal of a performance based on his play "Sailor's Silence". The story includes full text most...
  • Dress Rehearsal, Galich A.. The plot of Alexander Galich’s story “General Rehearsal” (1973) is the preparation and dress rehearsal of a performance based on his play “Sailor’s Silence”. The story includes the full text of the...

In preparation for the launch of the site at GES-2 in 2019, the V-A-C Foundation risked diluting the team of professional curators with outside intellectuals. And while the third floor of MMOMA housed 200 classic works of the 20th century from Andy Warhol and Alighiero Boetti to Eric Bulatov and Vadim Sidur, the exhibition on the second floor changed three times. In April, theater artists from "" showed Chekhov's cheerful "The Seagull" with works of art starring Treplev and Arkadina. In June, Austrian Armen Avanesyan turned art objects into illustrations for an ultra-intelligent essay about the projects of the future that define our present.

The final act of the exhibition opened on July 27. Its author was Maria Stepanova, poet and editor-in-chief Colta.ru, author of the documentary prose “In Memory of Memory” released at the end of last year. Stepanova diluted the works of art with everyday objects from her attic, turning the exhibition into a poetic text about the dissolution of memory and history. The Village talks about “Nobody” - and sums up the entire V-A-C and MMOMA project.

Market and Marketing

The orthodox sculptures of Zurab Tsereteli always create an awkward counterpoint to the exhibitions in the building on Petrovka, 25. But at the opening of the third act of the Dress Rehearsal, the imperial emptiness of the MMOMA courtyard was replaced by the bustle of city life. The crowd of impressive size cheerfully walked between the stalls with crocodile leather shoes, neon-colored sports jackets and artificially aged handmade jewelry.

The decision to combine the intellectualist project's vernissage with the seasonal Vintage Marketplace says a lot about the V-A-C Foundation. Although the market, in principle, runs between venues like MMOMA and the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, the collapses could seem like a clear profanation of Stepanova’s ideas.

“What does an object gain and what does it lose once it is in a museum collection? He receives an extended life, of course, and even a kind of immortality - which comes down to the very idea of ​​being chosen: now a painting or a comb officially belongs to the vault of the unforgettable, is withdrawn from everyday circulation - they were gizmos, they became objects,” Stepanova wrote in the introductory essay to the exhibition . What does an object gain and lose when it finds itself at a flea market under the windows of a museum?

In radical artistic circles, the oligarch Leonid Mikhelson’s foundation is criticized for the opacity of relations with the authorities, the duality of the political agenda and the privatization of young artists who, when starting to collaborate with V-A-C, often abandon all projects on the side. But V-A-C certainly plays a significant role in the popularization of contemporary art that Garage began ten years ago.

A two-day vintage market supported by a public program of film screenings, contemporary music concerts, open courses according to Sovrisk for teenagers and pensioners, - another marketing ploy. The magic here is that along the way he develops not only the concept from Stepanova’s essay, but also the fixed idea of ​​the entire “Dress Rehearsal” - an orientation towards horizontal work and distrust of hierarchies. The point is not that there is no difference between clothes and art objects, but rather that the essence of this difference should be constantly formulated anew for oneself.

Things and people

Three translucent shirtfronts, a cloudy two-meter mirror, a huge light bulb polished to a shine - in the first room it is striking that the main motive for comparing art objects with each other and with everyday things for Stepanova were purely sensual parameters. The texture of the material, transparency, color - all this turned out to be more important than the political content of the works or the historical context.

In the next room, “Displacement” by Lise Deschenes and “Annual Lamp” by Alighiero Boetti are replaced by “Bread” by Anatoly Osmolovsky. A heavy beige “knitted envelope” rhymes with a set of massive sculptures that repeat the structure of pieces of Borodino bread. The principle of free rhymes is preserved in all 12 rooms - except that sometimes it turns not to sensuality, but to other parameters. For example, in one of the halls, a colorful and very shabby costume for an amateur ballet is combined with “Anago Costume” by the same Boetti and “Concerto for New York” by Shemovich.

Stepanova views such speculation as an attempt to equalize things, to make each of them worthy of attention. “[What happens] if functionality, history and value are taken away from things? [Then they will surround] us with a crowd, a forest of meanings, lined up for the first time in a colonnade of complete, selfless equality.”

A deep, sometimes even hysterical love for things from the past was the dominant message of the 90-minute public conversation between curators from V-A-C and Stepanova. “I’m sitting and fidgeting: when will I be able to go look for a T-shirt?” - she answered a viewer’s question about whether the market under the windows was confusing.

But relationships with memory are a running theme throughout Stepanova’s work, which has recently begun to be compiled into final projects. At the end of last year, after the collection selected poems“Against Lyricism,” the book “In Memory of Memory” was published - the result of 20 years of attempts to get used to the history of one’s own family since the beginning of the last century and attentive polemics with other essayists and artists from Susan Sontag to Winfried Sebald. The result was “the best Russian prose of the year (and, perhaps, not only that)” (Lev Oborin on Meduza), “a book that has never really been written in Russian before. And in other languages, there aren’t that many of them” (Anna Narinskaya in Novaya Gazeta).

Those who have read romance (this is the author’s designation of the genre) will recognize items from Stepanova’s great-grandmother’s suitcases or her own purchases at the exhibition. But in the book, each of the gizmos is given a couple of lines, sometimes a paragraph. They always turn out to be only evidence of people's lives.

The format of the exhibition puts all the attention on things, and the attempt to fit into the general orientation of the “Dress Rehearsal” towards object-oriented thinking, in which the value of things and even their ability to act independently do not depend on connections with people, allows one more semantic layer to be added to Stepanova’s idea of ​​fixe . However, it is not painless: “These things that had owners are now very alien, or no one’s. They are now legally called “Japanese kimono, 1910s,” and not “so-and-so’s kimono, purchased at that time.” This is a separation process...” says Stepanova.

Object-oriented poetry

I entered the sixth room - almost the equator of the composition, which is divided into two parallel lines of rooms - with a long-determined intention. Immediately at the entrance, you had to turn around to look across the entire corridor from the openings into that same “Displacement” mirror and see, instead of a slightly blurry reflection of yourself, a black spot of a crowd of visitors.

Even at the beginning of the exhibition, the curators of “Dress Rehearsal” identified their main task as “introducing a temporal dimension into the process of presenting art in the museum.” Then the metaphor of the theater seemed to be the key. Then it became clear that the structure of the museum still does not lend itself to pure theatricality, where the passage of time is strictly set by the director, and the philosopher and poet simply did not write the play.

But Stepanova’s act seems to be the most important work precisely with the time dimension. There is no consistent development of reasoning, as in Avanesyan, or a set of sketches-comments on the play, as in TVD. Stepanova raised her favorite thesis as a principle: “everything rhymes with everything.” “Nobody’s” unfolds in time and space, like a good poetic text: each new room changes the meaning of the previous one, forcing you to return and check your memory for truth.

Perhaps this actually happens at any exhibition. But this is the magic of interdisciplinarity: it is Stepanova’s attitude towards poetry that makes it possible to clearly understand this feature. And if in matters of “restoring justice” in the life of things, the agenda of object-oriented ontology seemed far-fetched, then the poem, where objects and their properties took the place of words, is an impressive discovery.

Two halls that represent the most interesting of Stepanova’s intuitions about museums would like to be compared with the most vivid and succinct phrases that are usually found in every worthy poetic text.

At the entrance to the tenth - the largest, it became the culmination of the two previous acts - visitors are greeted by the reverse sides of eight massive abstract paintings: chips, inscriptions, author's autographs. Senior curator of V-A-C Katerina Chuchalina said that from this idea of ​​Stepanova a whole research project fund. For each of the paintings, its history was written as things: movements, owners, life in storage. These short and rather poetic essays, clearly edited by Stepanova herself, are accompanied here by traditional curatorial explications.

And the fifth room, which contains six well-known portraits, turned out to be the most theatrical. Valentina Matvienko performed by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe and Beatrice Hastings by Modigliani are invited to be viewed in individual booths.

“A museum visitor is in a contractual relationship with his Mona Lisa: he comes, he pays, he spends some (limited, etiquette-based) time with her, hoping to get an impression and make it as intense as possible.<...>The intimate space that can be built between a person and a painting is narrowed to the limit, reduced to a ten-minute glance over someone else’s shoulder,” Stepanova comments on the idea of ​​this hall in the libretto. After half a minute of my contact with “Marella Agnelli” by Richard Avedon, for some reason the caretaker looked behind the heavy pink blinds, and I discovered that my gaze was directed not at the photograph behind the glass, but at the messenger.

First run

When I reached the last room in “Nobody” for the third time, an impressive group of visitors stood between the human figures from the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (“Child. Woman”) installed opposite each other. One of them bombarded the mediator with questions, gradually moving from clarifications about the fate of the unfinished knitting exhibited in this room to general skepticism about the curatorial concept.

The “dress rehearsal” really encourages doubt. In the second half of the act, Stepanova’s intuition is clearly exhausted, repeating ideas from the first halls with almost no variations. The central idea of ​​interest in things in themselves, regardless of their owner and history, collides with at least the labels, each of which is signed: “Collection of Maria Stepanova.”

And the general obvious amateurism in “Nobody” immediately recalls the first act: Modigliani’s painting in the role of Arkadina and Jeff Koons’s huge kitschy animals as a manifestation of “lions, eagles and partridges” also raised ironic questions then. Both Stepanova and the “Theater of Mutual Actions” quite boldly opposed themselves to the conceptual coldness of Sovriska.

“Do artists know in what role their work is exhibited?” - they were constantly asked at the public program and in interviews with V-A-C curators. Many artists know. But what is more important is that the exhibition, thanks to its dense explications, also preserves the usual mode of perception. So, in the end, the choice is up to the visitor himself. The mantra of producing freedom, which is often repeated in artistic circles, is embodied in a very concrete way. And, by the way, this is why the first and third acts seem much more alive than Avanesyan’s “Metaphysics from the Future,” who, having elevated art objects to the status of an argument to philosophical idea, only increased the degree of general abstraction.

Towards the semi-annual final V-A-C project and MMOMA begins to seem like an enlarged copy of one of its parts. The third floor, a storage room, where in a small space, works that were not included in the act are literally piled up in a heap - a set of masterpieces, which are frankly cramped in the chaotically and sometimes controversially organized eight sections. A set of disparate intuitions about different modes of perception of sovriska, about new curatorial methods, about the revitalization of public programs can only be dealt with by the very “introduced time dimension” - the gradual unfolding of acts of the project, and not a one-time shock injection.

Therefore, “Dress Rehearsal” is more like a first run-through: a lot of ambitious ideas that just need to be sorted out. Discard the unsuccessful ones, and grow an interdisciplinary museum of the future from the best ones.

Photos: cover, 2 - 7 – Mark Sery / MMOMA, 1 – Ivan Novikov-Dvinsky / MMOMA