ELAGINA, Elena Vladimirovna

What the critics say - The brand of contemporary artistic thinking represented not only by Makarevich and Elagina, but also the writer Vladimir Sorokin, seems to aim not at a rational description or analysis, but at a certain cultural mission which is still unfulfilled: things like a book by an elderly and crippled peasant woman, or an instruction for the Red Army soldiers on how to bury the fallen in action in the snow belong to that marginal layer between professional culture and life itself which has engendered in the XXth century most amazing and bizarre fruits to rouse the envy of post-totalitarian artists. That certainly brings to mind a comparison with such a master as Platonov whose writing comes to life in the atmosphere of the exhibition. Makarevich and Elagina are mythologists in art, their installations have a heavy air of a romantic fairy tale with an unhappy end. They show an ideological world, but at such a fundamental level where it boils down to the problem of survival. The exotic implements of various localities (buck-rakes, snow-shoes) are felt to be universal primitive artefacts.
The three words most widely used by Makarevich and Elagina to describe "the nature of things" are "wood, snow, and fish". The odd, irregular, and exceptional are taken as the most essential of all. That combination of the universal and marginal, the important and fleeting, made the charm and the glory of the reflexive art of the 1970s from which Makarevich and Elagina take their origin as members of once legendary conceptual grouping "Collective Action". After most of its leaders have left Russia (de-jure or de-facto) and the rest feel as demobbed into the reserve, Makarevich and Elagina stick by their guns as sentinels in expectation of a new historic guard commander who is not yet in view. Their installations show signs of strain and fatigue, but this is the decadence of a great epoch to which they are bidding a lingering and deeply pessimistic adieu. 

E.Dyogot "Life in the Snow Ends Tragically". Commersant-DAILY, 6 June 1994