On December 20, 2019, the exhibition “The Good Old 2020s. Final Avant-Garde” at the workshop of the Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation in Moscow.
Following is the text of art critic Konstantin Zatsepin, one of the authors of the project.
“In the swirling gloom of the passing decade, only now are the outlines of the archives of the avant-garde of the future beginning to emerge. It is “final” (the word “final” is too old and worn out), like all that came before it. One that denies all that has gone before, but also encloses it within itself.
The twenties… The magic of numbers, the binary of units, two zeros, double zeroing – and double the speed of change. A century ago, this era was marked by an unprecedented passionary surge in all spheres of life, thought and art: the pleiades of Great Contemporaries multiplied, succeeding each other, leaving deep traces in culture for centuries to come.
And now the third millennium, the first third of which is almost over: the satiated irony of the zero years is finally forgotten, apathy and hysteria in agonizing anticipation of the apocalypse, under the sign of which the tenths passed, are also in the past.
Exposition view. Works by Vladimir Logutov (center) and Artyom Go (right)
At the finish line, the New Twenties – ten years of global overproduction of information madness, triumph of the formless, revelations of a new mysticism, ecological revolts, biological interventions.
Exposition view. Works by Vladimir Logutov (center) and Vladimir Omutov (right)
Interplanetary art of intelligent plant-machines, crystals, cloud archives, enlightened cyborgs, controlled insects, elements, trances, digital ghosts, clones, extinct animals and birds. This art makes its material dark matter, hyperobjects, neuropatterns, big data, cryptocurrencies, slime; it operates with the immeasurably large or the equally invisibly small; it has control over cyberspace and cybertime, the invisible and the inaudible, what cannot be distinguished and what cannot be counted.
Andrei Syailev’s work
The figure of the “artist” has finally given way to the energy of nameless life forms, fluid matter, streams of self-generating entities that do not yet have a name.
Form is gone, but unstructured experience, shimmering superpositions of chaos and order, nothing and something.
Alexandr Zaitsev’s happening
The content has also disappeared, dissolving into the gaps of the multiplicity of post-truths.
Work of Misha Most
But is it impossible to dream of a time when “avant-garde” meant “breakthrough”? Is it not possible to wish for the avant-garde as one hundred and more years ago? What is “new” in 2030?
Work of Anna Rotaenko
There is no more “beauty,” but there is corporeality. There is no authorship, but there is energy. There is no identity, but there is a planet. There is no “truth,” but there is life. It seems that it is time to speak freely on behalf of “life itself” as such, non-linear and chaotic.
Work of Vladimir Omutov
In this exhibition, of course, there is no individuality. By the end of the twenties, anonymity and collectivity had finally replaced it. Creators are no longer so much confused by artificial intelligence as interested in the possibility of breaking through to “natural” intelligence. They are attracted to natural objects, organized performative trips to mountains, fields and forests.
Work of Roman Minaev
To catch the movement of the world as a-intelligent and a-human – in its blurring, stretching, deep, far, and wide. To merge with life: with a flower, a fish, an anteater, a parrot, a bacterium. Become a cave, a tree, snow.
The point of convergence of intellectual vectors (because no other way “subject” can be labeled now) of the exhibition was “The World without Differences”.
Work of Artyom Go
The transgressive dialectic of the avant-garde of the twenties knows no “boundaries” – there is no male/female, no subject/object, no accumulation/waste, high/low, animate/inanimate. There is only the conflict of the simultaneity of keeping separated forms of life in a paradoxical and fragile wholeness. But without one pole there is no other pole – thus, without the inanimate, the animate is impossible.
Work of Artyom Go
Life is this conflict, to reveal it on behalf of life itself, cleansing it from the layers of “man” – this is what the new artists are waiting for.
The avant-garde of the twenties resists interpretation; rather, it introduces the viewer to inclusive forms of coexistence in creation. To “understand” it, it must be recreated.
Work of Andrey Syailev
To collectively and anonymously bear witness to the chaos of reality on her behalf. In fact, it’s fun.”
Authors: Artyom Go, Alexander Zaitsev, Konstantin Zatsepin, Lidia Katashuk, Vladimir Logutov, Roman Minaev, Misha Most, Vladimir Omutov, Anna Rotaenko, Andrey Syailev.