Attempt at a Variable Landscape
“Our city, the city is still the same, but people are different”, – lamented the ancient poet after yet another civil uproar.
Nowadays, people are still the same; it is the city that becomes different – incalculably and implacably.
In traditional societies, generations would come and go much faster than the habitat would change.
Ideally, it would not change at all. A temple, a source, a grove. A forum, a bathhouse, an agora. Or, in the Russian version: a forest, a country road, a field. A church, a parade ground, a tavern.
It took catastrophes to change a landscape, be they natural or humanitarian, like a volcano eruption or a transmigration of peoples. Nobody rejoiced at those changes, much like nobody rejoices at catastrophic changes in one’s own body.
Granted, pictures before one’s eyes changed even in the most traditional of societies: during forays, wars or pilgrimages. The variety was introduced into a landscape by ages of prosperity or adversity, great construction projects, pogroms or fires. But even cultural revolutions like the Renaissance were carried out at particular locations, in a few advanced places, and they took lifetimes of generations.
Granted, there always were people and peoples who were obsessed with wanderlust. The picture before their eyes renewed all the time, and the perception renewed together with it. Nobody expects them, but the world does not change without nomads.
The last century can safely be judged to have been a catastrophe – both natural and humanitarian.
Industrialization, urbanization, a revolution, a world war and yet another one, reconstruction with no end and another revolution – they burned the ground from under one’s feet and turned everybody into a nomad, whether they wanted this or not.
People who started living under certain conditions ended up under totally different ones. They went around the bend and their world view crumbled into a mosaic: a city opulent, a city impoverished, buildings out of glass and steel, architectural ashes, native birch trees, spaceflights in one’s sleep and in one’s waking hours, the meticulously threshed straw.
All this was triumphantly busted by Microsoft and Macintosh.
The exhibition CAPITAL OF NOWHERE is about life among flickering pictures.
Houses, trees, statues, places of worship and graves are still standing, still visible, still occupying a certain place in our life. Or, rather, in our memory. Because, nowadays, the home is smart, the landscape is cultural, and the space is informational.
The walls are no longer stones unturned, ancient city squares, a stronghold and a sanctuary. Nor are they the dream of the futurists – the transparent luminous glass that reflects the whole world.
Today, this is a screen upon which they would project whatever you like. God, devil, your grandmamma, dying children in Africa or polar bears in the Arctic region. If you like to swap them around – grandmamma in Africa, happy children at the North Pole or penguins in paradise.
Our city is everywhere and nowhere, ours and not ours.
What to defend if there is nothing but the solid electronic Fata Morgana around?
What to conquer if the landscape lost it and rode off into the better tomorrow?
Where is a light in the window if there is nothing but windows?
Where are the gates of heaven if heaven no longer has walls?
What’s to be done by an artist who knows the worth of flickering pictures?
To make new pictures. By his will alone, to trace his own coordinates in the electronic chaos that does not contain anything real anymore, and only two things still fill the soul with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.
MARINA KOLDOBSKAYA, CURATOR