VLADIMIR KUSTOV
Experimental and pedagogical exhibition
"... and Love"
28.04.2023-26.08.2023
The experimental space — Marina Gisich Projects
Monday - Saturday
11:00 - 20:00
Registration is not needed
Free entrance.
VLADIMIR KUSTOV / 1959 / Leningrad
Vladimir Kustov has been working as contemporary artist since the early 80s using various mediums such as performance, cinema, painting, photography, literature and installation.
Contemporary art theorist, curator. Since 1984, together with Evgeny Yufit, he has been working on the formation of the aesthetics of necrorealism. In 1999, together with Viktor Mazin, he created the Sigmund Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg.
In 2002, together with Professor E.S. Mishin, he initiated the creation of the Thanatology Center at the Museum of Forensic Medicine of the St. Petersburg State Medical Academy named after I.I. Mechnikov. Organizes and oversees the artistic and thanatological projects of the Thanatology Center.
Nominee of the Kandinsky Prize 2010 (“Project of the Year”). Currently, he continues to develop the author's artistic practices. Lives and works in St. Petersburg.
The works are in permanent collections:
o The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg),
o the Museum of Dreams Z. Freud (St. Petersburg),
o of the Museum of Forensic Medicine of the I.I. Mechnikov State Medical Academy (St. Petersburg),
o Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow),
o Lenin Museum (Tampere)
o Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam)
Vladimir Kustov is a necrorealist, vinyl collector, philatelist, mystic and legend of the Russian art scene. It's not easy to write about his projects: over the years, Vladimir has developed a complex, suggestive language arranged like an obsession. Therefore, the best option seems to be to briefly describe the coordinate system and the concepts important for the project, and their assembly, as the author would like, should be done by the viewer's effort.
Vladimir Kustov's project "Experimental and pedagogical exhibition "... AND LOVE"" looks like an essay about education and maturing. It is both a dedication, and a message to descendants, and inheritance, and edification, and divination. Moving from one exhibition area to another, the visitor follows the path of forming the inner world of the child. At the same time, the artist secretly tests the audience's intellectual abilities, finds out how they coped with personality-forming conflicts, whether he received enough love, whether they are ready to enter the great tomb of culture.
Technically, the main characters of the exhibition are outdated media, dying media – postage stamps, vinyl and shellac records, books printed on paper. The artist uses a favorite St. Petersburg technique – salvation through museification: dear to the author, but vulnerable things and phenomena are withdrawn from circulation, change their status and function, placed in a time capsule. So, according to Kustov, they gain a second life and a ticket to the future: in a private collection, becoming part of a work of modern art.
Growing up next to such an object, a child involuntarily studies the objects of material culture of the past displaced by progress, gets into their aesthetics, deciphers and actualizes meanings, gets used to perceiving them as a collector – from the standpoint of beauty, context and uniqueness, beyond functionality and pragmatism. At every stage of manhood, a work of art serves simultaneously as a teasing rebus, a teaching aid and a reward for overcoming another age crisis. Using Beethoven's tropes, using philately, magic squares, necrometry, alchemy, the history of psychology and pedagogy, the artist leads the viewer to the place where the souls of the dead media live and where art comes from.
The Curse of the Ninth Symphony
The legend according to which, the composer who wrote his ninth symphony, should soon die. In his speech dedicated to Mahler's memory, Arnold Schoenberg said that those who wrote their ninth (symphony) come too close to the otherworldly. Biographies of Bruckner, Mahler, Schnittke and many others seem to confirm the authenticity of the legend. The first to be cursed was Beethoven. His death mask appears in the first frames of the video. The cover of a set of records with a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony lies on the pulpit in the middle of the exhibition hall. The circular holes that the viewer who opens the cover will see repeat the structure of Dante's hell with its nine circles. Kustov perceives Beethoven's music as a portal to the next world, a place where the shaman artist, and after him the viewer, can begin a journey to the necromancer.
An Ode to Joy
Music written by Beethoven to the text of Schiller's ode, and included in the Ninth Symphony. In 1972 it became the anthem of the Council of Europe, in 1993 – the European Union. The jubilant altruistic intonation and choral performance made this melody one of the most popular pieces of music on the planet. Nevertheless, Schiller's text makes us doubt that the unity, joy, redemption and fraternization referred to in the ode belong to our world. Kustov, of course, could not ignore the call to embrace on the other side of the coffin, addressed to millions, and which became the anthem of a huge political alliance. Among the stamps of the EU countries flashing on the screen to Beethoven's music, there is, for example, the image of Vlad III the Impaler (the prototype of Count Dracula), whose appearance in the visual series additionally heightens horror and enhances the flavor of conspiracy theory. On the other hand, the performance that the artist took for the video was recorded in the GDR by an American singer of leftist beliefs, a great friend of the Soviet Union, Dean Reed in Spanish. The fact is that the ode has also become the unofficial anthem of the Chilean resistance. This is the text performed by the communist, pacifist and fighter against nuclear weapons Dean Reed. The sacrifice of the Chilean radicals, the death of the socialist project, seem to show the attraction to death as the basis of any large political project.
