The Death of Modernism in Russia

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2015

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The project by Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alexander Kutovoy was created for the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which itself marked a rejection of the dictatorship of representation in favour of dialogue, process and incompleteness.

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During the first two weeks of the Biennale, the artists modelled a five-metre-long body of the dead Vladimir Mayakovsky, copying the image from the poet’s posthumous photograph. The sculpture was made of unfired clay and therefore, by the end of the exhibition, inevitably began to deteriorate and fall apart — a direct consequence of the material chosen.

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By openly presenting the process of the artwork’s decay (and, on a symbolic level, the end of modernism, embodied in Mayakovsky’s death on 14 April 1930), the artists reduced the artefactual status of the work to a striking spectacle of the disintegration of the clay sculpture.

6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
How to Live Together: Views from the Centre of the City at the Heart of the Eurasian Island, 2015
Central Pavilion, VDNH, Moscow

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Biennale curators: Bart De Baere, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art M HKA (MUHKA), Antwerp; Defne Ayas, Director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Nicolaus Schafhausen, Director of Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

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