HYBRIS IN VENICE 2017 | GARDEN OF MALEVICH by Alexei Kostroma, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov
Posted on May 2, 2017
Alexei Kostroma
GARDEN OF MALEVICH by Alexei Kostroma, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, 1992-2017
CYLAND Media Art Laboratory is pleased to announce an exhibition “HYBRIS - monsters and
hybrids in contemporary art” in CULTURAL FLOW ZONE, Cà Foscari Zattere, Venice, curated by Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri. Scheduled to coincide with the opening of this year's BIENNALE ARTE 2017, the exhibition is the 4th presentation of CYLAND in Venice, Italy.
25th Anniversary of the project “GARDEN OF MALEVICH”.
Reconstruction of the project 1992-2017
1992 HISTORY OF THE PROJECT “GARDEN OF MALEVICH”:
In 1992 the group of artists “TUT I TAM” (“Here and There”), former students and graduates of the Leningrad Academy of Arts Alexei Kostroma, Ivan Govorkov, Elena Gubanova and their friends, organized the action “Garden of Malevich” (17.05.1992). The chief idea was to sow the seeds of new art in the very heart of an orthodox art institution during the new time of nascent democracy in Russia. In May the artists dug a black square in the round courtyard of the Academy of Arts and sowed some carrot seeds. In November they dug up the carrots. Then they walked over the Palace Bridge with 3-meter sculptures of the carrot, having crossed the Neva as a symbolic Rubicon of time. This action was a remake of the futurist manifestation of Morgunov-Malevich on February 8, 1914, in Moscow. The final action was eating the carrots at the exhibition- installation at the Russian Ethnographic Museum as an act of destruction of the “Black Square” itself (05.11.1992).
“The introvert nature of Black Square, its inaccessibility for the uninitiated, which, in its turn, serves as a constant irritant and disturber of peace, turns, after consumption of its fruit, into a quite accessible and ordinary image. In reality, what's happening is a qualitative and quantitative change of the square that illustratively demonstrates parallels of the creative and biological processes whose approximation we dare to declare here. In 1915, in Petrograd, in the first quarter of XX century, the great Master published with his Black Square the final result of his multiyear digestion of Russian and Western Art. But does the final result in art exist? And isn't the final just a new beginning?” - Alexei Kostroma, 1992
"To open ground in the round courtyard of the orthodox Academy of Arts with the Black Square of suprematism, to plant it with seeds and wait until the form, which germinates in a plane, is born and gets eaten in real life" - Ivan Govorkov, 1992
2007 FIRST RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PROJECT “GARDEN OF MALEVICH” in the exhibition “Adventures of the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich” curated by Irina Karasik at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg (28.06 – 15.10.2007)
2017 SECOND RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PROJECT “GARDEN OF MALEVICH” in the exhibition “HYBRIS – monsters and hybrids in contemporary art” at the Cultural Flow Zone, Ca Foscari Zattere, Venice (13.05 – 28.06.2017)
http://cyland.org/files/HYBRIS_catalog_EN.pdf
2017 KAZIMIR MALEVICH AS A VISIONARY OF INFORMATION AND HI-TECHNOLOGY
New vision of Malevich’s Suprematism by Alexei Kostroma:
At the exhibition ‘0.10’ (Petrograd/ Saint Petersburg, 1915), Malevich first publicly introduced his concept of ‘Suprematism’, claiming that ‘it changed into the zero of form and went beyond 0 minus 1’. If we consider ‘0’ as the end of life, then ‘minus 1’ is its non-material continuation in the form of information.
Today we are witnessing rapidly developing information and communication technologies. The digital world is becoming a real rather than virtual reality that controls our consciousness, our social behaviour and our entire life. Each action of the global information network is encrypted with the two digits 0 and 1, which are infinitely variable.
The numbers 1 (on) and 0 (off), which were selected to encode data in computer programming, completely control and dictate the activities of modern man.
Malevich completely dispensed with painting and the artist as a ‘prejudice of the past’ and focused on his ‘black square’, compressing the whole world into one symbol.
As the founding father of a prototype of the first pixel, it is unlikely he thought that he could open the door to the virtual reality of the 21st century and become a harbinger of information technology.
It is interesting that on the first page of ‘Suprematism’ (Vitebsk, 15 December 1920), Malevich indicates the developmental path not of art, but of space travel.
Moreover, he foresees the possibility of the emergence of an artificially created technocratic civilisation in the infinite space of the universe :‘the whole living world ready to fly into space and occupy a special place ... ready to live their personal life in a vast elemental scale of planetary systems...’
Introducing the notion of ‘technical organisms’, he anticipates the advent of cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence so that ‘every Suprematist body will be equipped with reason... will be included in the natural organisation.’
Through the prism of time, Malevich saw the advent of organic nanotechnology, which uses the principles of self-organisation of nature.
From the text «Malevich and Matyushin. Two Visionaries of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 20th Century” / © Alexei Kostroma and Ekaterina Kondranina/ DACS, London
Text 16.08.2016, published in Berlin, 26.04.2017
GARDEN OF MALEVICH by Alexei Kostroma, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, 1992-2017
