If you cannot avoid violence - relax and try to have fun. This is, perhaps, too much, but any therapist would say that a terrible experience will ruin you - unless you learn to accept terror as a given. Moreover, to distantly admire it. This psychotherapy is actually effective. V. Stasyunas painted pretty flowers on a pair of rough tarpaulin boots, which tortured Russian soldiers’ feet no less than all the butchers and investigators taken together. It seems that he is going to put these boots on his sideboard next to vases and elephants. Charming F. Burland made a whole barn of little amusing cannons, aeroplanes and submarine boats. Well done, no doubt. It is easy to criticise these Stasyunases and Burlands, that they are infantile and fool around when it comes to things more than serious. I won’t say anything bad to them. They are trying to heal us a little bit, which means - to remind about our childhood, when we were making ships and guns, and when we were absolutely not afraid of death.
To accept, and reconcile oneself to this out of ignorance? Or to learn how to turn the hard knowledge off, and to turn the joy of life on? Let the orders ring, let the submarines shine, let the soldiers’ boots sparkle with little pink flowers. Nice and pleasant.
The bullet of a painful quasi-memory cannot be cured; the healing bullet anaesthetises an inflammation. The third hole - is the most serious: this is the hole from a ‘confirming kill’.
O. Tyrkin depicted the world from the perspective of a rifleman or a fire spotter. He is sitting in his shelter, looking into his device and providing data for shooting. Its field of view is limited by a target, but there is no target in the aiming cross. Or there is no target yet. Or maybe a target evaded. Whether the target will be caught by the aiming cross, whether the rifleman not, whether he hits the target or misses it, - we do not know. Who will be in sight, if they will be at all, is completely unknown either. In other words, this is not essential. Whether they will look like the Others or not, which language our (so far) unknown target will speak, and why this target needs to be shot - these are not our questions. Let’s note that it’s not about a memory or its imperfections, it’s not about pain or anaesthesia. A spotter and a sniper do their job. To find the target, to aim, to hit. The rest doesn’t matter.
Traces of bullets (figuratively speaking) run through the entire exhibition, but the images of the existing ammunition, which was sent well and reached the target, appear only once, in the work by K.Khudyakov. A virtual battle, which resides in an interactive computer dimension. The Super technological large-calibre bullet penetrates the bodies of the virtual Harlequins, painted with coloured rectangles. There is also a thick (too thick, like a red engine oil) blood on the fingers. Two androids, as similar to each other as children from one tube, were either going to form a union, or intended to meet each other in mortal combat. It was then they were caught in sight, and shot from different angles. One from the right, the other from the left. The meaning of this scene from a virtual theatre, as it seems to me, is similar to Shakespeare’s Plague on both your houses. Each android has his own death - sparkling, ballisticly irreproachable, and technically perfect.
But enough about the bullets, let’s talk about explosives, and that means - about terrorism. The striking naked female shahid, a work by Denisov and Kolesnikov, looking like a thin creature of uncertain sex, although still with some signs of a woman, is going to elegantly and stylishly blow herself up (along with us, the viewers), pushing the mechanical clitoris of her explosive device. She is not that terrible, and she doesn’t really want to hurt us. A terror in the era of postmodernism is bringing us a universal orgasm, that will ruin all and everything, and then any will, any sense, and any difference, will be lost in the vortex of energies. This is not that the Muslim East is threatening us, but rather the West got ready to have its final, and now we all will be in a complete Derrida.
Finally, the Shahid by O. Kulik (the official name of which is The Holy Family, With A Hole in The Head) also makes the viewer think about our modern world, stirring up new fears in the innermost recesses of our still unbroken heads. Today Alla Gloria Militar is starting to sound with the Arab guttural aspiration in the first word. Similar to Allahu Akbar. The Almighty and his host surreptitiously and quietly appeared among us. Their ancient steppe enthusiasm, their idea of the eternal glory and paradise bliss at the cost of a moment - this could not been foreseen neither by the Nazis nor by the red vampires, samurai, cool-headed riflemen, or Terminators.
Why do we need of this? Yesterday’s dust - is today’s mud, says a ruthless Spanish proverb. Those who don’t want to think about it are doomed to repeat the circle of life once again. And again. And again. The political conclusion of the exhibition is simple and hardly pleasant, because we see a clear picture of misery, but how to avoid it - no one knows. An artistic meaning is more inspiration. While photographing, drawing, filming videos, making or appropriating artefacts, the artists show that they exist, and want to continue to think, work, invent, and create meanings.
Aleksandr Yakimovich