“Apocalypse in Art” by Vitaliy and Elena Vasilieva

It is difficult to escape the feeling that “Apocalypse in Art” really shows the world, standing on the edge, barren, falling in decay like a story line of a picture that is braking into fragments. People can not postpone the crash, they’ve lost an ability to create – all they can really do is to seek and fix.

We are trying to find a refuge from the impending chaos in the rules of etiquette, explaining how to behave at the funeral ceremonies, that only accenting the feeling of fatality, similar to art, emotions turn into mindless imitation.

Today we are witnessing the collapse of the basic cultural patterns and mechanisms that determine a spiritual and material civilization over the last century. Perhaps, desperation and pessimism, overwhelming majority of our society

Of course, I have questioned myself if me being engaged in this semi-intellectual apocalypse hysteria and doubt concerning future of contemporary art,  is related to transformation of art system where not everyone can find place to be.

I have always been an artist, even when I refused to produce art projects and motions.  I couldn’t and still can’t think about destiny of the art as an isolated part of my own fate.

So how art is going to exist now? In what way it will be expressed? We have to be objective and accept that old institutes and cultural models are being destroyed by new, still not quite clear, but obviously other worlds.

Dynamics of inertial movement in public space clearly indicates the rapid disintegration of society , its members and the atomization of marginalization of public institutions . If this crisis is projected onto the sphere of art, and there we see the same process , except that difference is even greater convexity .If we refer to uneven rises in history of contemporary art it’s easy to see dynamic blurring of distinctions between different cultural models.

World had already faced it in 20th  in Russia and Germany, in 60th – in America and France, at the end in 80th in already downfallen  Soviet Empire. In contrast, crisis of modern art ideology is clearly exposed by gratuitous self-isolation of artists, who pathetically try to define boundaries of their own language. And here they lose a battle again – today we can not consider art scope as homogeneous object, and art system itself trying to hold on from split to numerous elements and modules.

How to reveal insight and sense of Modern Art Museum that turned into enormous art supermarket? How to exceed the bounds of total consumption, if art almost became a symbol of this massive process? Do we have answers to these questions?

The paradox of our time  is that two genius variations of future – progressive and apocalyptic – suddenly start to assimilate and duplicate each other. Followers of the theory about upcoming end of the world admit fascinating technological progress, yet believe that this is exact reason of Armageddon to-be.

Spirit of apocalypses holds sway over modern culture and slowly infecting everything around. How will this virus affect art? Will there still be a place for an art in society? Those are the questions that bother me more and more. It feels like we are about to reconsider meaning of the art. Today is the time of fast living, but the process of switching from old to new culture format can be really sustained.  This procedure is decelerated by society, people feel related to slowly dying cultural models, traditional relations.

Recent conditions can cause genesis of art meaning and role, that would be completely different from one we have got on the edge of XX century. Back there art was an innovative and progressive symbol, and now it started to loose positions. I believe that art is key to renewal, button that will slow the progress – just exactly what we do really need. But where will the art reincarnate? Museums and government institutions both commercial and not, would speculate on the process and give fake feeling that art and progress is something equal.

Each time latest  social stereotype imposes new goods, shops, commercial centers, independent radio stations, advertising networks. Thus, we can hardly claim that the emergence of new areas of creative life , regardless of whether they will be able to position themselves  as an artistic reality or not -  can dramatically affect the current situation . As 2012 years ago, we are faced with the need to justify a new universalism that can take us beyond the personal little worlds and beyond capitalist totality.

To make a difference we have to be an art, to live art , we have to turn our existing into art.

 

2012-2014