Nezesudik’s Journey to the Land of the Brobdin
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Catalogue of Russian-Dutch project "Exchange"
1993, september

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The beginning of Osmolovsky's artistic career coincided with the glorification of the underground art during "perestroika". Being a member of the notorious group "ETI" (Expropriation of the Territory of Art) he tries intellectuals and aesthesists, patience as well as tests the surface of the very canonized style. But in the conditions of dependency on the conventional art language, Osmolovsky is forced to justify every step by clearly formulated theoretical construction which helps him to escape the senselessness of the nihilistic contra-cultural action, and, actually, is the subjective code of speech shifted from the sphere of visiuality.

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Osmolovsky adresses himself to the left-radical ideology, a type of ideology which is the most discredited in the consciousness of Russians. Here her re-produces the mechanism of setting up "a new" described B. Groys as a process of "valorization of the profane". The artist combines in that mental collage all kinds of the notions of Revolution existing in the history of thinking. Doing so he lead in the "valorised" context of the visual arts the "profane" which is concidered as the most dangerous by the contemporary pluralistic culture of democracies. Ideological "ready-mades" save in their delicate appearance a semantic structure of the original source and therefore reproduce all its available catalog of signs - from images of Mayakovski and Breton to the tuft of ruffled hairs stuck together by bubble-gum, - that immediately evokes in memory of a stream of nostalgic author's references: the negation of bourgeois by cubo-futurism, the surrealists, dream of the world revolution, an the antisocial brutality of punk-rock.

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Reanimation the leftist categories also could be concidered as the relaps of the uneliminate "Dada complex", many times noted in the thick case history of the Russian art. The inner "critic" analyses, calculates and directs an action. The performer of a diversional act creating by «critic» is the «artist», capable to manipulate with form of expression with the aid of free artistic will inherent to him, capable to the uncominable.

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Perhaps, only once the «critic» was satisfied enough with the «artist», who should not make a compromise working in the space of reality that wasn't occupied by art. The performance on the Red Square (april 1991) demonstrated that even now "the Madness" of avant-garde can get an adequate form - in that case it was a short word for "fuck".

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