A AND B SAT ON THE PIPE
Collage, montage and assemblage in contemporary St. Petersburg art
Curator Olesya Turkina
The regional directorate presents a new exhibition of the North-West branch of ROSIZO - an exposition of artists working in the technique of collage, montage and assemblage. The name "A and B sat on a pipe" refers to a well-known children's riddle and reflects a new principle that revolutionized the art of the twentieth century. Collage, montage and assemblage techniques have transformed the attitude towards reality. The relationship between figure and background, text and context, real and imaginary - all this and much more is embodied in the very principle of combining various fragments into a single whole. Having emerged in the 1910s-1920s and became an effective means of propaganda, this artistic technique gradually transformed into a service one, migrated to the design of books and magazines, housing estates and city firewalls.
At the same time, technique was used as a formal medium by non-conformist artists in the 1960s and 70s. Mass interest in this principle revived in the 1980s in the art of the New Artists, especially in the work of the group's founder, Timur Novikov. During perestroika, collage, editing and assemblage became a means of decontextualizing ideology in Pop Mechanics by Sergei Kuryokhin, in the works of New Composers and Oleg Kotelnikov, Inal Savchenkov and the School of Engineers of Arts, and many others. This technique again becomes relevant in the art of the 2000s, when, thanks to new media, another round of art dematerialization takes place.
The exhibition is attended by: Manya Alekseeva, Tatiana Akhmetgalieva, Peter Bely, Valery Grikovsky, Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, the School of Engineers of Arts, Boris Kazakov, Vladimir Kozin, Semyon Motolyanets, the New Composers group, Andrey Rudiev, Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai.