Milena ORLOVA
PINOCCHIO'S MATURITY
In 1994, when analyzing "Life on the Snow",
a big project made by Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich at the State Russian
Museum, Mikhail Ryklin assumed their work as an attempt to stand against
the "dominating tendency of art brutalization". Since then distinctive
opposition of "Conceptualist canon (petrified) vs. body (brutal) practices"
has blurred. XL Gallery, once given a serious support to "physicalists",
recently closed the theme, having declared disavowal from the "pubis-shavers,
tongue-puncturers and other guts-die-harders". So what? Right after
this the gallery is showing an exhibition by Igor Makarevich, as much "brutal",
if not stronger than all the previous exercise of the kind, due to its
refined age acuteness. Makarevich's show testifies the dismissal of the
aforementioned opposition gone in two ways. An explicit body gesticulation
becomes more metaphoric thus turning into a pseudonym for some abstract
terms (when you see an erected penis in a photo, forget about body, actually
it's about Russia's fate); on the other hand, "symbols and emblems"
of Conceptual canon are getting hot blood and flesh.
The current exhibition is linked to the previous project through the
wandering phantasm of Pinocchio, that grew up from a genderless log into
a clinical Gumbert-like "anonym", his confession supplied. This
perfect psychoanalytic story makes an antimony with the photographic series,
where text stands for "daylight", enlightened and sentimental
consciousness while photography goes as a dark sublimation or a "night-time"
unconscious. The "childish" Pinoccio-styled poetic description
of sexual experience not only makes it difficult to define the "patient's"
age, but also shows up in a "tortured" surface of the photographs
through explicit traces of orgasms reached by hard work. The brave paper
foolscap made by papa Carlo looks more like a dreary nightcap with age.
The same happens to a dummy-face that becomes older and closer to its prototype,
the beak of a plague overall. Masquerade results in a merry reunion with
a true object of desire, a sturdy and comfortable pinewood box.