“The future is but the obsolete in reverse” (Vladimir Nabokov).
Alexandra Gart gained fame thanks to printed graphics as a co-founder of the New Print Studio, curator of the Graphic Cabinet in the Maly Manezh, and the author of disturbingly melancholic and visually meager works that ratte like entrance windows. Like Alice falling into a rabbit hole, the viewer is completely immersed in the liminal spaces of the works abandoned by man, assembled by the artist from drastically broken lines and black and gray spots in the windows and doors of typical high-rise buildings, details of the urban landscape, forests, chain-link fencing, blank fences and courtyard walls, lamp posts, and frames of destroyed or never completed buildings. Despite the recognizability of the details, the nature of these spaces remained unclear, transitional, elusive, and oscillating between extremes: between calm and anxiety, stability and instability, relaxation and tension, past and future.
A strange hypnotic state of being in limbo, a feeling of surreal dreamlike suspension in timelessness and inaction, is reflected in the work “The Constancy of Fun and Dirt” exhibited at Cosmoscow. The title is borrowed from Daniil Kharms. His poem of the same name is a poetic text about the slipping away of time, its annihilation under the influence of two energies: carefree fun and undivided despair from contact with the darkest sides of life and the human soul, which occurs with the constancy of a single figure — a spy, a god, a demiurge.
The poem is dated 1933, when Kharms responded to the events of those years with absurdism and (proto-)existentialism, which surprisingly brought the Soviet avant-garde poet and the St. Petersburg artist together. “The Constancy of Fun and Dirt” by Alexandra Gart is an installation in the form of a massive, round-sectioned metal structure covered with wooden boards, the heavy frame of which supports the figures of horses placed around the perimeter. The geometry of the structure and its elements form the image of a carousel, supported by the central location of the installation at the fair’s venue and the format of the event itself. It seems that any minute now a marketplace barker will appear, inviting people to the rides and promising fun, laughter, and childishly naive carefree happiness that everyone who climbs onto the bright glossy backs of the horses will experience. But this promise is not fulfilled, the attraction turns out to be a silent crumbling ruin, a fragile testimony of who knows what. Instead of action-movement there are barely noticeable flickering, ripples, entropic processes and white noise, a monotonous drawn-out hum of millions of voices, each of which manifests its life and strives to endow it with more fun and less dirt.
Gart’s aesthetic utopia is also inactive, but its inherent lack of action seems closer to the famous monologue of a man walking to the river (1), combined with a photograph of a playground among Khrushchev-era buildings with swings torn out of the ground and a carousel standing almost vertically, accompanied by the caption “Cause life is pain.” And perhaps this pain stems not from the need to feel and depict the “world-without-us,” but from the idea that comparing any activity — human life, and especially an individual gesture, deed, action — with life as such in all the diversity of its manifestations, with living and nonliving life, is simply meaningless. As the text on one of Gart’s works reads, “This was the worst possible idea,” all that was left was to find the best possible idea.
(1) “I have become so full of knowledge that it is as if I have been living for a hundred trillion billion years on trillions and trillions of planets like this Earth, this world is absolutely clear to me, and I am looking for only one thing here — peace, tranquility and this harmony, from merging with the infinitely eternal, from contemplating the great fractal similarity and from this wonderful all-unity.”