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Viktor Misiano
Olga Chernysheva. Catalogue Biennale of Sydney 2006.
One of Olga Chernysheva's
recent projects, Panorama (2005), is presented
as a cycle of pictorial canvases that recreate
the frames of a famous 1960s cinema attraction
- a documentary film about the land of the Soviets,
which was projected from different sides onto
the walls of a cylindrically closed space. Presented
in a range of muddy colours, these canvases
represent nostalgia for that public wholeness,
the loss of which has turned into (in the words
of the artist) "phantom pain" for
several generations. Ilya Kabakov, for instance,
overcomes this pain with his "total installations",
which are stenographic reconstructions of the
former socialist order, and also panoramas of
a kind. Chernysheva has taken another road:
since the end of the 1990s, like Walter Benjamin's
flaneur but with a video camera in her hands,
she has been recording everyday situations in
her surroundings that suggest "profane
illumination".
The "heroes" of
Chernysheva's video diptych, Anonyms (2004),
are two elderly people she has spied on in public
parks: a man who opens and then drinks a whole
bottle of vodka for the entire duration of the
film, and a woman who, half-dressed and standing
on a white towel spread out upon the ground,
breathes in the fresh summer air.
Oblivious to what's going
on around them, they are completely self-absorbed.
With the perspicacity of a sociologist, the
artist reveals a new type of person who has
sprung from the wreckage of the Soviet order:
the asocial and self-contained individual.
The "hero" of her
first documentary video work, Marmot (1999),
has joined a Communist demonstration, walking
beneath red flags to the sounds of slogans and
songs of the Soviet era. However, the heroine
is filmed during a pause when, having fought
her way out of the procession, she stands at
a parapet and counts the small change of her
pitiful pension in her palm. She then rejoins
the march, a photo of Stalin in her hand; however,
obviously the era of masses and social movement
apparently over. Everyone in that crowd is motivated
by the same personal "phantom pain"
that moved Chernysheva when she first took the
video camera into her hands.
In post-Soviet society, alongside
the nostalgic demonstrations, there is another
but just as illusory type of social community
that has been created by bio-politics of power.
Chernysheva's video film, March (2005), shows
us some public holiday celebration with flags,
balloons, an orchestra playing marches, and
rows of small boys in military uniform alongside
pretty, half-dressed, dancing girls. There is
no hint of the former authoritarianism: here,
military strictness merges with the impossibly
early eroticism of the dancers, and the balloons
swaying in the wind move first to the slogan
"Hurrah" and then to the slogan "Panasonic/Ideas
for life". As the camera glides along the
participants in the festival, the focus is upon
the mechanical nature of the movements and the
vacant looks.
Chernysheva's focus however,
is free of the objective documentary approach
inherent in so much contemporary video art.
Hers is not a static, uninvolved camera, but
a dynamic and selective one. Her films are constructed
like a montage, accompanied by soundtracks that,
at times, suggest a classic musical. Finally,
what moves the spectator in these works is the
artist's ability to perceive the humanity in
her everyday "heroes". This ability
links Chernysheva's work with the best examples
of classical Russian literature. Russian Museum
(2003-05), for instance, plays wittily with
perspective: the artist photographed pictures
in the museum in such a way that the figures
in them look like living people. Catching the
reflections of the viewers in the glass covering
the pictures, she stages their "meeting"
with classical European characters of the humanist
tradition. Hence Chernysheva's reinterpretation
of the role of the flaneur: her "profane
illuminations", linked with the discovery
of the "other", are to be found within
fragments of contemporary experience. But hers
is an ethical and inevitably political response.
It is a movement towards what could be called,
in the words of Giorgio Agamben, "the coming
community".
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