18.11 - 27.11.2010
Marina Joukowa
"Nichesoje"
/objects, drawings/
The cloackroom, the installation from four pieces of clothes,
swen from the canvas with the remains of a painting,
200 x 300 x 80, 1995.
The Petersburg main-stream is structured very rigorously: a step to the left or to the right are equated to a flight. However, in a formation, in a single line breathing at the back of the preceding person's back of the head it was possible, though poorly to exist, to feel themseives in a movement, in an attack. The majority goes on to follow the same principle. In fact, we are not aware that if a leader of the column awaiting for new revelations sidetracks, the whole column will face the barbed wire. Therefore one has to appreciate any attempts of an independent strategy. One needs not to use a magnifying glass to notice such an independence at Marina Joukowa. Of course, its genesis is unusual for our present main-stream. Likely, she is a unique artist of her generation who entered the path of the actual art having passed in full through the academic tradition with professors who had almost the same natural reflexes towards feeding and sponsoring by the state as the famous dogs at Pavlov, that resulted with the situation 'between a wolf and dog' as has often happened with those devoid of both aforementioned privileges. The dissatisfaction with a similar situation in ninety-nine cases of a hundred propels them directly to a purely commercial saloon or to an escapism of Vasisualy Lokhankin with its reflection on the eternal and imperishable ideals. Joukowa chose an unconventional way: she has tried to conceptualize her dissatisfaction and unclaimad-ness. It demanded from her great efforts: to reflect on the place of an artist and his works in the contemporary world, on the crisis of reproduction of conventional pieces and on the nonsense of unreflective increase of the art production. Her repudiation from the automatisation of professional existence has resulted in refusal of painting as such reluctance to established ways. It is true, that nowadays, when reproduction of video-installations became the same routine as painting with a brush, the act looks neither novel nor revolutionary. Were it not the quality, it could be called the personal choice of the author. However, the realization turned to be not typical, but very personal, moreover intimate and feminine. It has no gestures or declarations. On the contrary, a painting with its subject-space setting (a stretcher, a canvas, nails) seems to have been turned over. Its reverse, back-side filled with certain images is actualized. The right side seems as if it were sewed up. It brings forth a particular effect: it is not a refusal from painting, because it goes on to exist and even may be beautiful and important for the author (otherwise it would make no sense to sew it up). Nevertheless, if is a classical 'Dinge-in-sich' and we are not able to watch it. Such an implied presence of the painting makes the situation even more complicated and acculturated when looking at the reverse side as, for example its simplest substantiality, the watching of the a sewn-round sponge fixed to the reverse side. A boarding is the canvas as well, though keeping remnants of a paint. It would be hardly productive to look for concealed subjects like 'noble in its spots', or 'ascetic in its composition'. It would be useless to construct a specific conceptuality, too. The imtrigueness of the things (Joukowa calls them 'soft paintings') is their unquestionable autobiographic nature, that since Boyce has
rarely been manifested in the modern art. "It was me who completed the painted message and concealed it from the outsiders' views, because it had no addressee. It was me who had hemmed the stretcher, had glued, cut... It has been created by me and is as a result handmade, feminine. If you had not liked us while we were white, now you should love us black, without any school, mastery, buskins, just with a needle, waxed thread, bloody canvas.. "At least, myself hear something like it. Many people tried to turn the painting's space into the place of action. Only those who really sutvived a drama, like Yves Klein orLucio Fontana, have succeeded to do it. It seems that Joukowa has found the level of a mature, achieved through suffering autobiographic realization, that makes them fascinating 'turn-overs'.
The measure contained in her soft-paintings allows to look forward for further developing of the artist. There are objects - sewed up books, that actualize the message to an non-existent addressee, or rather provide to him an indirect, hardly verbalized, but perhaps, not less important information. At least, repeating the Joukowa's words 'about humble actions, like cutting, tacking together or sewing'. Such a modesty beyond pride is very valuable. It is focused not on searches of feminism, but of gender. It deals with searching of an identity by an artist who uses feminine means to solve a very serious artistic task to change codes of a routine art-practice. It lacks a feminine arrogance is humble. Parallel to it are experiments in scraping away, washing away peeling off the own painting. It must be for certain the own painting, because it has an aura of autobiographic trait, a 'conventional', but not a contemporary, or unrealized message is necessary. A person may change his skin - a school, culture, audience. To be true, he does not change, but rather washes it away, scraps it off.
What is the purpose of that artistic Purification? Perhaps, to reveal the very foundations of painting that is self-sufficient and self-reproducing (the idea of veritable germination of the art had fascinated both Pasternak and Malevich). Nevertheless, it was made not for the sake of that rather general idea. It implied a demonstration of those sophisticated devices of the female art that brings into an art-gesture some organic and home-like naturalness. Not without a reason, ragged and quilted frames do appear that serves like a blanket covering naked zones of a semi-destroyed painting. Then follows the subject of clothes - monumental shirts tacked together in a clumsy way, dresses, huge collars. Not a single hint to folklore is here, because the piece of canvas is covered by the same semi-washed away author's painting. There is not a single hint to the fashion, design, etc., no ambitions of stile formation. There is just a hint to the function - domestic, everyday from the same feminine arsenal: trie ancient, organic, warm arsenal that even nowadays allows to diversify the art-practice. To make a step to the right or to the left.
Alexander Borovsky
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Born in 1960 in Kurgan. In 1987 graduated from the Faculty of Painting of the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after I.Repin. Since 1991 has been a member of the St.Petersburg Union of Artists. Has exhibited since 1985. Since 1993 has been developing the concept of the "passed-by painting". It includes the clearing of her own works from the layers of paint, using the modified materials for producing at first of paintings-objects, then of abstract reliefs and at the end of three-dimensina! objects (clothes). In 1995 received the annual grant from the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, St.Petersburg. Lives and works in St.Petersburg.