10.06 - 04.07.2010

Vladimir Kozin

"Eternal values"

/objects from automobile rubber and wire/

Now that nobody needs you and you are cast aside in the midst of nowhere, 

I will be your keeper”.

Andrei Platonov

            In our lives we are surrounded with a myriad of objects. All kinds of objects. But the older they get, the stronger feelings they evoke. Objects gradually lose their impersonality, their value of commodity, their technological novelty to become a telltale part of man to be cherished by him. Why, a property has a faculty of telling tales. Forever does it bear a mark of its previous owner; it is animated by his private life and always determines the extent of this belongingness since, if it has been transformed into a property, it belongs to someone. It acquires a queer capacity to accumulate something human for its future use. Maybe, it accounts for our fondness of antiques, which shared the lot of their owners, who had a mightier human potential than we who live in the epoch of production and consumption of impersonal, disposable goods. Things not only surround us but they also require our attention. This mutual attraction makes us feel worthy of being in this world and becomes the course of life itself, while the road to death is marked by a series of goodbyes to the telltale tangible world. 

Objects, since they are not a product of nature, are designed and made by people. By empowering them with his intelligence, man automatically casts them into the course of evolution. From the very outset, a thing bears the mark of its owner, becomes his part and develops a sort of humanness. Forgetting about them means disregarding the inner sense of humanness pertaining to things, and stopping feeling their warmth means forgetting the man as such. Every little thing has been made by man and, like children who arrest the attention of their parents, things have to behave likewise. And we, we have to respond, again and again, to the call.

Vladimir Kozin’s project entitled “Eternal Values” is about simple, casual things in our everyday life, things that are so inconspicuous and common that we have started taking them for granted. Yet without them the world would be different, for the least meaningful things are best at justifying the world.

Made of rubber tyres, Kozin’s utensils – a tin opener, a kettle – are larger than their actual counterparts. They are a kind of monuments to these things and, confined to a small space of the KvadraT Gallery, they constitute something similar to a museum of domestic life whose exhibits justify the whole human world by their quiet telltale solidness.