Michela Rizzo gallery, Venice
Michela Rizzo gallery, Venice
General view
Two pegases, 2006, object
Arcimboldo, 2006, object
Rose Cross, 2006, object
La Flora, 2006, object
Black water, 2006, object
General view
Icastica
2006
Exhibition at Michela Rizzo gallery, Venice, 4.03-23.04.2006
NEW THOUGHTS ABOUT BOOKS
Towards the apokatastasis of the industrial book
Sergey Shutov
The book as a bird can fly about all the world.
The book tsarina, can enjoin to hearts.
The book - the goddess, sometimes makes a miracle,
the Book - the slave, - often as bread feeds.
Utkin Dorofej Nikolaevich (1879-1957), "The Curriculum vitae or an axiom. My life, my adventure and my legend and memoirs mine"
Today, when manipulative forms of the information (Internet, newspapers, magazines, promotional materials) have finally won the industrial book, a problem of search and returning of the true information and real knowledge of the world arises. The hand-written book, unlike industrial, undoubtedly is the carrier of this information and, certainly, is the true document opening wide prospects of development of the real world. But publishing in itself opens ample opportunities for percipient. The spiritual practive of the Chinese monks led opening of publishing, allows the layman to come nearer to true. But whether vulgar publishing is the worthy contender of the hand-written book? You can find the answer to this question in my work "Towards the Apokatastasis of the hand-written book ".
Therefore here we shall not pay any special attention to this question. Today we consider a problematics of the industrial book as long as only few consecrated individuals have access to the unconditional document of the hand-written book. Distribution of the industrial book in connection with infringement of direct and direct transfer of the information to the percipient has led to that the information became accessible to the layman and as consequence information itself became lay, not inspiring trust.
"Communication means' growth, dramatically accrueing stream of manipulative communications speculating on basic human emotions is the system, intended to not entertain and inform only at all, but to infect individuals by (false – Sergey Shutov ) values, (incorrect - Sergey Shutov) beliefs and (dangerous - Sergey Shutov) behavioural codes".
The quantity of "authors", the "publishing houses" caused by a publishing policy, marketing strategy and censorship, deforms a role of a printed word as responsible knowledge and translates it in the category of irresponsible lack of information.
Rescue of the industrial book, restoration of cultural memory and priorities of the true symbolical order lays in sphere of art practice, reincarnating the very industrial book, and lifting it (alongside with hand-written one) up to the sacral level and the museum status. Today only artist by means of the spiritual practice can return to the cheap mass book the status of archival treasure, the true document. The meeting of the pulp fiction and the artist's tool cuts the monument of the book which have been lit up by a spark of creative transformation, allowing to leave an infinite wheel of regeneration of a paper in the book, books - in paper for recycling, and papers for recycling - again in a paper, etc. and to appear, thus, in boundless open spaces of a second-hand nirvana. So the Book loses unflattering definition “industrial' and gets a proud name of the Certificate.
ICASTICA
Natasha Bordiglia
Sergey Shutov is an artist worldwide known and in particular in Venice. He represented Russia in the Biennale 2001, where he showed the now famous installation Abakus and he participated to the collective exhibition Orient Inn that took place at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in 2004.
His first solo exhibition in Italy shows a selection of recent artworks and a site-specific project called Books project.
There is no disguise, in his artworks ornament is banished. The object is replaced “as it is”. The series of paintings Sky…Sky evoke unavoidable associations with the typical iconography of the Soviet era with its fetish-objects. Images of planes, missiles, helicopters pulse on backgrounds where the geometrical composition of lines recall propaganda manifestos.
The symbols displayed on the canvas are not only the ones of the Soviet Union; in another cycle of paintings, Russian Pop Art , Shutov portraits John Lennon, Andy Warhol following a method to be found in the pop figurative language: use of non-mixed colours, use of technical drawing and of advertising graphics.
The act shifts from the “creation” to the “editing”. In the installation A.K.M./Association of Karma Modifications he inserts in the barrel of five Kalaschnikows hung on the wall religious and cultural symbols such as the cross or the Star of David: the targets to hit or to be hit.
The translation and the transformation of signs and symbols - removed from politics, society and customs - come to occupy the art territory, through different techniques – de-contextualitation, combination and re-signification – by co-opting the avant-gardes and the iconography of socialist realism. The most effective synthesis of the different impulses, which animate his art and which find their roots in the different artistic movements of the Twentieth Century, resides in Books Project , a site-specific project where the books replaced “as they are”, treated as sculpture-objects hung on the wall, approach and intersect, creating a composition where the ultra-economic figures of the Euclidean geometry acquire a physical dimension.
Sergey Shutov uses anonymous gestures to re-organize pre-existent materials. Floating in the immense universe of vocabulary, of the lexicon, he conceives new forms of alliances breaking away from expressiveness intended as a category. The gesture is never veiled but declared with force and contemporary icons are returned with icastic coldness.