Rodchenko’s School. A Selection

Rodchenko’s School. A Selection
Part of the cycle ‘The Rodchenko School at MAMM’

In the twelve years that it has existed, the Alexander Rodchenko School, a sub-department of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, has gone a long way to forming the landscape of new Russian art. The exhibition includes photographs, videos and installations that students and graduates of the Alexander Rodchenko School have used to study a reality that is rapidly changing before our eyes, as well as to consider the nature of art, which is changing and being transformed under the influence of information technologies.

A characteristic of modern art is its multifaceted nature. New technologies don’t do away with traditional forms and genres, and yet they allow us to examine the issues that confront society today from an unusual point of view.

Vik Lashchonov’s video ‘On the floor above they sing until someone swims with dolphins’ is an ironic consideration of the phenomenon that has become known as ‘office plankton’, an international class of white-collar workers who aren’t linked to any production processes, being ‘stuck’ somewhere between on-line and off-line. Laced with humor, Lashchonov’s project refers viewers back to the absurdist art of the Russian futurist Union of Real Art (OBERIU).

Absurdism as an aesthetic and conceptual approach is also used by Igor Samolet and Sveta Isaeva, each of them working with their family histories.

The black box (that is in fact the title of Isaeva’s video), is a device constructed by the artist’s grandmother that helps to understand the cause of a plane crash. In a frozen and enclosed space, the author herself and members of her family (grandmother, mother, aunt) relate to one another extracts from stories of collective and personal flights and catastrophes.

Igor Samolet’s photographic series ‘Breakfast for Artem’ is a reflection on whether man can create competition for gadgets in an attempt to attract the attention of a new generation of children. The artist’s aim is to invent a game in reality that will be more interesting than an electronic game. Igor Samolet creates a live performance which he gets his young nephew involved in. The live game and human interaction, at least temporarily, win out over the computer games.

The competition between the real and the simulated is also the focus of attention in Anton Andrienko’s photographic project ‘Environment’, which is devoted to modern shopping malls. In striving to make this environment comfortable for consumption, the owners fill it with grotesque and at times absurd decorations depicting living nature. Society, divorced from nature, constructs a space around itself that is only similar to the ‘natural’ environment that has been lost.

The study of another — intellectual — space is undertaken by Sasha Pirogova in her project. Today, when words are increasingly being replaced with actions or representations, and physical books are being pushed out by digital technologies, a new conception of the library as a social institute is required. The project ‘Biblimlen’ (a shortened form of ‘the Lenin Library’) is a physical, playful incursion into the traditional, austere, disciplined space of the Lenin, Russia’s main library.

In her video installation ‘Real Weapon’, Anna Rotaenko applies the visual language of GTA V. The artist transfers real situations into the game world, which, for her, is analogous to the capitalist system, which merely avows the possibility of action, whilst in fact all the scenarios have already been pre-programmed. With the ‘Real Weapon’ project, the author illustrates a situation where critical reflection is locked into the closed loop that is the vacuum of escapism.