Vladimir Martynov. Autoarchaeology. Space of autoarchaeology. Dmitry Poshvin.

Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, entrance Н8

10.22 — 12.12.2024

On October 22, the a—s—t—r—a gallery of contemporary art opens an exhibition of Vladimir Martynov, composer, philosopher, artist, author of one of the main musical compositions of Paolo Sorrentino's masterpiece "The Great Beauty" and artist Dmitry Poshvin.

The following events are planned as part of the exhibition:

• November 6 — a closed presentation of Vladimir Martynov's book "Apology of Epimetheus" in the a—s—t—r—a gallery. Admission by prior registration.
• On November 18, Vladimir Martynov will give a solo concert in the White Workshop at Winzavod. You can buy tickets at the link.

Vladimir Ivanovich Martynov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in composition and piano. From 1973 to 1980 he was a member of the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music. He studied the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He performed at various festivals, performing medieval, avant-garde, electronic and minimalist music. In 1999, together with Tatyana Grindenko, he created the instrumental ensemble Opus Posth. It is based on the composer's and philosophical concept of Vladimir Martynov, which determines both the name of the ensemble (opus posthumum - posthumous publication of a musical work) and the current state of culture. He carried out joint projects with Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Leonid Fedorov (AuktsЫon). He taught the history of liturgical singing at the Moscow Theological Academy, taught a course in musical anthropology at the Philosophy Department of Moscow State University. Lomonosov. He is the author of numerous philosophical and musicological texts.

The exhibition "Vladimir Martynov. Autoarcheology. Space of Autoarcheology. Dmitry Poshvin." combines philosophical, musical and visual intuitions that Vladimir Martynov has been developing for many years. The American philosopher Ian Bogost was the first to seriously introduce the term "ontography", defining it as "an aesthetic theory of sets". Ontography celebrates any configuration of objects, phenomena, facts, regardless of their meaning, accepting it as it is.

In Martynov's reading, the ontogram becomes an art object, which is a pure enumeration devoid of human hierarchies and classifications, fundamentally refusing to introduce meaning into the living fabric of life. Here, meaning is identified as violence against reality. Moreover, by accepting the artist's rules, we ourselves become part of this process of annihilation of meanings.

Unlike the space of autobiography, where the emphasis is on the individual "I", the space of autoarchaeology allows one to inscribe one's "I" into the surrounding reality. Here, the personal becomes part of the general, a person is perceived as the sum of the facts surrounding him. A closure occurs: autoarchaeology as a method finds its practical application in ontography.

Ontography and autoarchaeology unite any facts and phenomena that have come into the field of vision of a certain person: "grandmothers, teapots, paleolithic palms or a child looking out the window." According to Martynov, the less we try to impose meaning on what we see and hear today, the more chances we have to penetrate the mystery of life.

The gallery space will become a place where the viewer becomes the viewed, a place where a person has no power over objects, and love for life is more important than its meaning.

The exhibition gives us a chance

to return to the state of being in reality,

to become an equal participant in everything that exists,

to stop being who we tried to be just now.

Vera Polyakova, research fellow at the a—s—t—r—a gallery

TEXT FOR THE EXHIBITION

"Face-to-face with Space".

Author Sergey Khachaturov

The famous master of the Romantic era, the creator of the painting "The Appearance of Christ to the People" Alexander Ivanov once said while contemplating medieval frescoes: "the painting is excellent to the point of the artist's anonymity." Romanticism, as is known, gave two strategies for the individual's communication with the world. One of them is extremely voluntaristic: the artist is a demiurge, godlike, puts himself on a pedestal, feeds his ego and manipulates reality. The other strategy: to humble himself to pure contemplation of the bounty of the universe, to be a transparent vessel through which the light of divine grace shines. Karl Bryullov belonged to the first type of romantic egocentrics. Alexander Ivanov belonged to the second type of an ideal contemplator and sensitive "attentive".

Vladimir Martynov interprets this “attentive” idea in the context of postmodern and metamodern reality in his visual art. The experience of creating a new exhibition is proof of this. The project begins with the creation of a beautiful, almost ethereal model of the gallery space, which will host the exhibition, by Martynov’s co-author, artist Dmitry Poshvin. The white cardboard model becomes a cast of architecture. The gallery itself (a—s—t—r—a) acquires an unprecedented status, almost sacred in its essence. It begins to resemble the modernist chapels of Le Corbusier or Mark Rothko. Inside this white space, Vladimir Martynov’s canvases and collages live in a clear rhythmic organization. He calls the collages ontograms. The main idea of the exhibition is to awaken Space, to make it breathe and look at us. The visitor finds himself in a confrontation with it. Space examines him like an exhibit. All sorts of allusions to masterpieces, manipulative flirting with one's own ego, and imposing one's genius on the viewer are excluded immediately. Not a modernist text, but a postmodernist context is meant. Martynov and Poshvin want to fit into the space, not subjugate it. This method is called "autoarcheology." Unlike autobiography, it implies humility and trust in the world in all its elusive and forgotten details.

This strategy has historical prerequisites. The main character of Space was considered by the avant-garde artists of the VKHUTEMAS school of the 1920s. I mean the workshop of the so-called rationalists, the ASNOVA association of Nikolai Ladovsky. Ladovsky accepted Space as the primary idea of architecture. All other subjects, from formal qualities, material to practical purpose, were considered secondary. To reveal the architectonic qualities of space (dynamics, proportions, scale, lightness and transparency) was for Ladovsky the key to harmonious communication between man and the house.

In exhibition activities, Space and the culture of exhibiting will become a self-valuable idea of artistic expression in the English "Independent Group" of the first half of the 1950s. The Independent Group was a research collective that included pop artists (Richard Hamilton), theorists (Reyner Banham) and practitioners (Alison and Peter Smithson) of neo-brutalist architecture. Thus, at the exhibition Parallels of Life and Art in 1953, the role of the artists themselves was reduced to that of directors of spatial connections in a gigantic collage of all sorts of random images. Reproductions of works of primitive art were adjacent to fragments of paintings by modernists (Kandinsky, Picasso, Dubuffet). Children's drawings and hieroglyphs, anthropological and natural science photographs created a situation in which the viewer was forced to construct his own complex navigation. He himself became an exhibit, which he observes life in all its manifestations, surpassing the ambitious claims of a particular artist.

Vladimir Martynov and Dmitry Poshvin also install collages-ontograms and canvases with a fantastically beautiful ligature of lines and circles in white space, which are collected in automatic writing and refer to the archetypes of graffiti of the Paleolithic era ("Paleolithic macaroni"). Collages-ontograms mix various images that are not inscribed in some meaningful rows. These images are devoid of violence of meaning and are related to the modular art of American minimalists of the level of Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, as well as to the subject rows of expositions of the anarchic international association of the 1950s - 1960s Fluxus. Martynov - Composer. Musical rhythm unites paintings, collages. A unique space-time continuum is created, in which the viewer can dissolve in streams of various plastic, light vibrations. Parallel ideas were embodied by the American minimalist composer Alvin Lucier. He was sitting in the room. Speaking. Recording the echo of the voice resonating in the room. The recording was played many times. And gradually the voice faded away. The reverberation effect grew stronger. Only the audio texture of space remained.

The archaic culture of trust in the line, the horizon, the ability to fit oneself into the flow of life by ascetic means inspired, inspires minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Vladimir Martynov himself. Today, this careful appeal to archetypes is not perceived as a postmodern pastiche and a game of quotations. The latest times, the metaposition of the observer, presupposes the search for meaning even in the gaping emptiness. Reality is not controlled by human ambitions, reason and ego. It is autonomous and looks at us. And in a face-to-face confrontation with it, devoid of the affectation of imported emotions, we find light and wisdom.

 

TEXT FOR THE EXHIBITION

Touching the Apocalypse

(Vladimir Martynov as an agent of an unknown time)

Author Oleg Aronson

We are accustomed to the fact that Vladimir Ivanovich Martynov, a composer who proclaimed and glorified the end of composers' time, a brilliant musician who performs his own compositions solo, together with Tatyana Grindenko, with the Opus Posth ensemble, with contemporary musicians, academic and not only, is not just a composer and a musician. He invades various adjacent spheres, where he weaves his reflections on the fate of music into memories, into philosophical reflections on contemporary art and into theological interpretations of the current moment, publishes one book after another, creating a kind of private intellectual archive of a turning point in the era. He himself calls this practice autoarcheology, which he contrasts with autobiography, which usually outlines only the expansion of the author's "I". Martynov's autoarcheology is a kind of attempt to level the "I", to consider it as a complex of key affects of time, as a local space of global transformation of the world.

This activity of Martynov, parallel to his musical experiments and in many ways resonating with them, requires special attention, because if we habitually see in it a biographical dominant (and this is very easy, natural and pleasant to do), then we will miss an important detail, namely, the intensity of intention, the desire to come into contact with an experience not given to an individual human being. The task that Martynov solves is ambitious and exquisitely complex. It is to manifest an impossible human experience (the experience of the non-human) in the private practice of life, where childhood, upbringing, culture, art, knowledge and even faith are only separate ways of human existence and self-determination, each of which separates him from the world, but does not include him in it. Before us is one of the most important questions of modern philosophy (how is an impersonal experience, an experience of the immanence of life, possible?), which Martynov solves practically, creating a kind of collider from the various practices available to him. Until recently, music, philosophy, religion, literature collided in it, and recently exhibition activity has been added to them. From sound and word, Vladimir Ivanovich gradually migrates to the sphere of plastic images, where graphic and pictorial characteristics dissolve in the iconosphere of modern media.

If we ask ourselves the standard question "what makes a composer write books, paint pictures, invade the gallery space?", then we already mean the composer as an author, including the author of everything else that is sanctified by the experience of his composer's fame. But Martynov's task is different. I would venture to suggest that his intention is precisely to understand through other practices, intellectual and artistic (or more precisely, "quasi-intellectual" and "quasi-artistic", since all the usual words are plagued by the indisputable value of art), what he does as a composer in a time when it is not appropriate to be a composer. To be a composer in the composer's era is to be a creator and imitate the Creator, to appeal to worship or at least to a decent fee. To be a composer in a non-composer's era means either not to notice the changes taking place in the world, or to try to catch in composership itself some other side than power over notes and the public.

How many times have I heard the ironic reproach addressed to Martynov, that, supposedly, having diagnosed the end of composers' time, he himself continues this practice, composing works, signing scores with his name, without renouncing authorship. The naivety of such statements is their best side, the other side is fear... fear of encountering the limit of certain established ideas about the world, embodied in the values of the dominant culture, such a familiar fear of change.

It is changes that interest Martynov above all. For him, changes are not just changes, but changes so radical that they cannot be related to the time of human life. They belong to another time, which is not even historical (still grasped by the human capacity for cognition), but rather geohistorical, that is, the time of processes that people and living beings do not notice. Time of “too long duration” (la très longue durée), Fernand Braudel calls it, finding its grains in the simply “long duration” of socio-historical formations, paradigms and epistemes.

Ultimately, the point is not that the composer writes music, declaring the doom of this very undertaking. The point is that the practice of composition itself is a special case of a fundamental separation of oneself from the world. Other versions of such opposition are a painting, a stage, an exhibition space (if we are talking about art practices). In a more general sense, we can, following Heidegger, speak of the transformation of the reality at hand, when things are not separated from the practice of existence, into neutral objects suitable for a disinterested look, knowledge and contemplation. This is what the German philosopher draws attention to in paragraph 15 of Being and Time, where this important word appears - die Zuhandenheit, being at hand, that in things which seems to us to be an auxiliary means, but is not, that which constitutes the area of primary inclusion in the world, direct contact with it.

Thus, from afar, we come to the question: is it possible not to compose music, but to extract it from the world, just as DJs do with an existing archive of sound recordings? And developing this theme: are art and science possible not as practices of representation (imagination and knowledge), not as modes of existence of truth (affective or rational), but as an experience of discovering inhuman elements in things? The simple answer to the last question is of course not, since it is precisely this - the ability to duplicate the world mimetically, creating its copy in the form of artistic or scientific "reality" - that allows us to distinguish art and science from magic. But what if we underestimate the magical component of our current existence? What if the action of composition is not only in the authorship of music, but also in the creation of a field of contact with noise, the fear of which is embedded not only in its physical and informational understanding, but has even settled in encyclopedic articles. When speaking of “magic” or “noise,” one wants to be extremely specific, since the banality of metaphorical reading is very close. The phrases “magic of art” or “information noise” are ready to come to mind, replacing delight and irritation. At the same time, specificity and directness often associate magic exclusively with charlatan healers or false prophets, and noise with the tiring chaotic sounds of everyday life or the whistling in the ears of a hypertensive patient... Noise in its givenness presupposes its elimination. This is why the overwhelming majority of listeners of the “White Album,” even inveterate Beatlemaniacs, skip the composition “Revolution 9.”

But another concreteness is also possible: to consider magic and noise as fragments of the inhuman experience of receptivity to the fullness of the world, as moments of participation in too great a duration.

This is exactly how, extremely concretely, and not metaphorically or even allegorically, Martynov tries to think about the apocalypse. For him, this is not a rhetorical lamentation or providence, but a way of relating to things.

To stop seeing things as “needed” for oneself or humanity is a variant of the apocalyptic vision. To make unnecessary things (musical, literary and exhibition compositions) is the prerogative of the apocalyptic vision. There is no point here even in trying to correlate uselessness with Kant’s “purposefulness without the idea of a goal” (this is how the German philosopher defines the beautiful), since in Martynov’s case any stable form is a deception, a way of not noticing one’s presence in an apocalyptic stream, and Kant’s “purposefulness” is precisely a form of giving the affective dimension (to which belong the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime) a cognitive character.

In his works (musical, memoir, and plastic), Martynov tries to create a monad of apocalyptic time, a time that does not come, but lasts. For him, the apocalypse is not a moment, but a stream of transformations within time itself. This peculiar "noise of time" is recorded by him in the images of his "Book of Changes", where he tries to replace a set of Chinese hexagrams that allow for situational magical (montage) manipulations with texts and images accessible to us, excommunicated from Chinese wisdom. Each of these images is meaningless, but their rhythms and combinations create - no, not meaning - just resonance, a kind of excess noise, a plastic design of the apocalypse.

Finding an opportunity to be immanent to this noise is not easy. Everything gets in the way - traditions, musical upbringing, education, abilities, passions, friends and colleagues, one's own insights and even faith. What saves is what you want to think about last, what is stigmatized and despised – graphomania. Passion for writing. Any kind. Musical, literary, graphic. This is what Martynov himself notes in himself as a mania, when it is impossible not to write. He takes Goethe as an accomplice, quoting his statement that drawing for him is akin to a smoker's addiction. One can also recall Eisenstein, with his irrepressible passion for drawing, a real fascination with the movement of the line, and Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, a friend and constant interlocutor of Vladimir Ivanovich, who became a kind of perpetuum mobile for the production of poetry and drawings. Martynov tries to expand the meaning of such dependencies as much as possible. For him, the practice of musical notation, writing text and drawing on paper have a common nature. And this mania for writing manifests itself not only as graphomania, but also as an opening up of the handiness of sound, word, image. What is also important here is that notes on paper are associated with the touch of keys, words with a fountain pen or a typewriter keyboard, and images with the hand’s ability to draw a line, to leave an imprint.

Usually graphomania is considered as a deviation, an inability to meet the requirements of completeness of form, to create a work within certain institutional frameworks, that is, a work as an object of consumption. In the mania for writing, another type of economy prevails, one that opposes the political economy of literature or art.

But what does it offer in the form of its own economy, which does not fit into the one within which literature and art have developed as social institutions?

Someone who writes an endless text-stream is usually defined as a “bad” author, producing a text that has no addressee. Indeed, who is the addressee of a graphomaniac letter? Does it have an addressee at all? Does it have a reader, and if so, what is he like? Having endowed such a letter with an addressee in the form of an ordinary reader (which is quite natural from a psychological point of view), we thus place graphomania in the sphere of the political economy of literature, where it functions purely negatively. The subject of literature is, one way or another, the functioning of a work in culture plus the form of the work with its techniques, literary style, etc. The subject of graphomania is writing itself. Writing both as a record and as a process, as an act in which the work (literary and otherwise) has not yet acquired its form. Such writing is always repressed, and the form of the work always tries to level out the traces of writing, in which the formlessness and defenselessness of graphomania is preserved.

And here it is not enough, even having acknowledged this mania in oneself, to turn one's supposedly weak side into a strong one. Another thing is to discover a different type of economy, oriented not toward a shortage (of goods, works, masterpieces), but toward pure excess. The organic mania of writing gives any text (musical or verbal) and image something superfluous, unnecessary and meaningless. This is precisely what irritates a person of culture, oriented toward meaning. He is still ready to accept nonsense as an existential absurdity, but he has difficulty accepting its vital necessity. That is why the joy of the OBERIUTs' absurdity so obviously opposes the oppressive absurdism of Kafka (with his eternal lack of Law). But what is even more important is that writing (writing) itself is not only a technique for producing and preserving information, but also a tactile model of communication with the world, a kind of imprinting, when peripheral sensations shape you no less than the Cartesian palpation of things with the eye. Thus, “glimpsing” (recall Martynov’s book “Jacob’s Variegated Rods”) becomes a tactile imprint of the world, a direct (magical) contact with it, and not a way of doubling the world through signs scribbled on paper or canvas. In the mania of writing, we find ourselves immanent to the world, not separated from it, and writing itself involuntarily refers to the first traces left in the caves of the Paleolithic era. It is no coincidence that Martynov puts a palm print from the Chauvet cave on the cover of his “Book of Changes”. In this imprint, as in other ancient rock paintings, historians see the origin of art, the discovery of man's ability to duplicate the world with images. But perhaps what is fascinating about this imprint is its very "givenness." More precisely, in what we perceive in these images as "present" and "ordinary," there is always an additional echo of the gift. This is expressed with particular clarity in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, for whom "givenness" (donné) is the "gift" (le don), saturating things with a certain excess in which the possibility of faith is hidden. 

When Werner Herzog shot his film (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) in the Chauvet Cave, the 3D technology he used allowed him to overcome the flat character of these drawings, thereby transferring them from the contemplative world of the viewer to the realm of maximum closeness, almost tactile, where they cease to play the role of images, but absorb the dynamics of an unknown distant life. But if Herzog discovers proto-cinematographic elements in the cave drawings, emphasizing (thanks to 3D) the difference between the flat space of representation and the volumetric nature of life, then for Martynov the very act of touching, a meaningless imprint that has not yet become an image, is important. For him, any line carries the experience of this touch, any grapheme refers to a magical involvement with the world. Many researchers believe that it is precisely as an overcoming of this magical connection that the religious ban on images in monotheism appears, and with the weakening of this connection and its loss, we find ourselves absorbed in the space of images, generating imagination, ideas and concepts. André Leroi-Gourhan even comes to the conclusion that it is in cave paintings that homo sapiens first appears as a species, the motor functions of whose organism are gradually lost and separated from the intellect. This is the first step in the future separation of theory and practice, as well as the dominance of imitative imitative practices (politics, science, art). Martynov's thoughts are similar. He sees in the line drawn by a bear's claw on the uneven rock of a cave more than thirty thousand years ago an act of interruption of pre-human history and the entry of man into the history that we recognize as the history of humanity. But also, being involved in the art of the twentieth century, he likens this gesture to Malevich's famous square, Duchamp's urinal, and Cage's 4'33'', works, each of which in its own way interrupts the history of art, overcoming the spaces of painting, exposition, sound composition, respectively, leaving the viewer alone with himself, in an uncomfortable loneliness and confusion. All of these are particular cases of a general interruption of history, a global transformation of the world that is happening before our eyes, or rather, is felt by us through disparate signs of the loss of familiar and valued things, which are read as signs of entropy, or an apocalypse that has swallowed up, among other things, the second law of thermodynamics... However, along with the melancholy of loss, these signs reveal a completely different involvement with the world, which the mind cannot come to terms with, for which this is nothing more than nonsense, that is, a game or a provocation.

But nonsense can also be perceived as that very excess of life, a kind of “gift of the world” that provokes a special economy – an economy of excess (abundance and generosity), opposed to the economy of exchange and the idea of property. To give (to present, to love) and to be in harmony with what is given, that is, bestowed by the world – this is the inexorable logic of generosity, no matter how meager the supply. It is described in part by Marcel Mauss in the famous “Essay on the Gift” and by Marshall Sahlins in his works on the economy of Stone Age societies, which he calls “affluent societies”. Following this logic, the first rock prints of people did not belong to people, but were traces of their magical inclusion in the world, were a gift of the world, which we perceive today as magic, as forces of desire immanent to the generosity of life itself. Generosity and joy are sisters, their signs are the same. The real gift of graphomania is in its extravagance and involvement of infinity (the fullness of the world) in every moment of writing. This touch of infinity cannot be conveyed through a completed form (of a work), but it coexists quite well with a form that disappears or slips away, thinning any content to a minimum of affect.

And here it is impossible not to recall Martynov the composer's passion for minimalism. Leaving aside musicological descriptions of this trend, let us pay attention only to the fact that minimalism provides the key to being-in-the-flow: an artificial (almost ritual) meaningless repetition that allows not to make changes, but to submit to them. The motor function of the hand (you can just see Vladimir Ivanovich at the piano when he says these words) at this moment senses both the sonorous and visual sides of the world, extracting sound from noise, and an image from the chaos of images. And these are no longer themes and variations, but repetitions and displacements. Not signs, but relationships. Instead of sounds - resonances, instead of meaning - paradoxes. And no twists and turns or climaxes. They are a tribute to mimesis, an imitation of life according to the canons of tragedy. For Martynov, there is no tragedy in the apocalypse, which we are always ready to turn into a dystopia or melodrama, but what he modestly sometimes calls an “anthropological shift,” a change in the world that does not presuppose the continued existence of man in his previous form as a rational man or a man of culture. Is this not paradise, where noise and music are indistinguishable? Certainly not a catastrophe, perhaps a repetition. A repetition of what once was, when the trace became an image. We can assume that this was accompanied by joy, similar to the joy of repetition in children's babble, or - participation in the fullness of the world. That's right: a product, a work of art and a masterpiece come from the idea of ​​lack, and repetition asserts the uselessness of the superfluous, the givenness of the given. (How can one not recall Martynov's Requiem, so filled with naive melodic delight and the acoustic euphoria of polyphonic singing that death itself becomes nonsense).

The joy of a slain animal's claw leaving a mark on stone, and a finger's imprint on clay, is a step in the formation of a world where the digitus Dei (finger of God) rules, not pointing, but touching, transmitting the instinct of touch. And today Vladimir Ivanovich Martynov is trying to find a way to draw a line that will become a happy trace of the ongoing apocalypse, the last touch on the threshold of digital vita.