ANYTHING ELSE? Collective project. 2019
Elektrozavod gallery. Moscow, Russia
A painting is, conventionally, an autonomous artistic medium and is able to contain practically anything that’s beyond its boundaries. At the same time it seems to be historically outdated and is often considered no more than a spatial object. It has lost its dominant role in art and passed into the state of post-media. Installation as an artistic medium created conditions for an artist to operate with the concept of an exhibition within an exhibition. Today, there is no need to protect the rights of a painting to have a place in art but its status as an object provides a straight way for criticism from different standpoints. The aim of this exhibition is to highlight the ambivalent role of a painting today. A text, like a painting, can contain a whole world that should not be limited by some formal framework.
The main point is that painting in contemporary art is viewed from a discriminatory position of medialism, in which some artistic media are seen superior to others due to their conceived (non-)concordance with contemporaneity. Thus, outdated methods have to be integrated into a concept in order to overcome the accusation of fawning over commerce or even criminal apoliticality. There are many ways to conceptualize something. Often, it’s done in hindsight, in somebody’s behalf.
The process of creating the final statements took place in stages:
1) each participant provides one work (a painting);
2) each participant gets a painting of another author and writes a text that brings it into some conceptual field, regardless of the actual author’s thinking behind the painting;
3) paintings are exhibited alongside with these conceptualizations.
The exhibition title is based on a part of a famous quote by the American artist Ed Reinhardt: ART IS ART - ANYTHING ELSE IS ANYTHING ELSE.
Participants: Anton Andrienko, Ksenia Bashmakova, Mikhail Dolyanovsky, Habbilen, Ilya Kolesnikov, Stasia Grishina, Irina Lenkova, Roman Minaev, Herman Orekhov, Eugenia Panina, Anastasia Rasmaniva, Kirill Romanov, Maria Sviridova, Viktor Zhdanov, Natalia Zotikova
