The thing is that we could hardly generalize the artistic strategies of
a hundred of artists who seat in front of the computer screens
on the territory named by language, history and cultural development
as Russia. The artistic position presented by Lev Manovich
might be true for some keepers of the Russian
religious philosophy in 19 centuries, or to followers of Malevich. But
the probability of this fact is miserable, for the artists who are addicted
to the computers images themselves are sufficient enough to be inspired.
And, more an artist is in computer less he is in Russia.
> "The emphasis on the screen as a space that opens onto an
> alternative reality is echoed in much modern Russian art which remains
> firmly committed to the tradition of easel painting. In contrast to the
> West, where artists gave up on illusionistic pictorial space in favor of
> the notion of a painting as a self-sufficient material object, many
> Russian
> artists, both representational and abstract, continue to conceive of a
> painting ('kartina') as a parallel reality which begins at the picture
> frame and extends towards infinity. Thus, Eric Bulatov has described his
> paintings as windows onto another, spiritual universe, while Ilya
> Kabakov
> conceptualizes his installations as a logical expansion of pictorial
> traditions into the third dimension -- a materialization of reality
> models
> previously presented by painting.
Actually Ilia Kabakov wrote about an installation as a fourth dimention
of visual art (Ilya Kabakov. Das Leben der Fliegen. Edition Cantz. 1992).
When first artists started to use computers, Kabakov and Bulatov were
already known as artists. And a great artist Andrey Monastyrsky who is a
bit
younger is well known for his total absence on the so
called real art scene since the end of 1980-s when the first computer
screen opened him the virtual world. His body moves between Moscow
and Koeln, but where is his mind. In Russia? Or, perhaps, in Germany?
> "Young Russian media artists are using the computer as an excuse to
> re-think basic categories and mechanisms of screen culture, such as
> frame,
> montage, and illusionistic space. Thus, rather than representing a
> radical
> break with the past, the computer screen becomes, for them, a
> re-articulation of the models which have defined screen consciousness
> for
> centuries."
And again, we would not generalize the strategie of "young Russian media
artists" who are not eternal slaves of one Russian tradition, even if the
tradition gives a profit, but a part of Univers which is held by
gravitational
hands of stars.
Olessia Tourkina and Viktor Mazin