Crossroads 2018

20.12.2022

Danita Pushkareva & Dmitry Pilikin The project "Crossroads" grew out of a discussion of the role and significance of individual works by Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte. These were objects (hommage + puns) in which we crossed ideas from different authors. In 2018, for example, there was a sculptural object called "The III International Dryer", which combined images of famous works by Duchamp's bottle dryer and Tatlin's tower.

The installation consists of three works:

1. Object «Drier of the Third International» (aluminum)

The International is not only an international movement to spread the ideas of the socialist revolution, but also a new format of artistic movements that unite artists from different countries. For example, Dadaists or Surrealists were also international. For Tatlin and his time, the victory of the world revolution seemed inevitable. The model of the "Tower of the Third International" he created in 1919 in the mosaic workshop of the Academy of Fine Arts. The object of Marcel Duchamp "Bottle Rack" was created 5 years earlier, in 1914, but the idea of this object is also connected with the revolution, which ended the habitual imitative function of art chasing after reality. This revolutionism allows us to combine both works in a single sculptural object.

2. Object «SHKR (Morning shovel)» (ready-made)

Attention to the word and language is one of the fundamental practices of modernism. Surrealism, as is known, began as a literary and poetic movement. The revolutionary reformation of the word and meaning outstripped the visual arts. The word itself was considered a work of art. "Zaum", as a new literary language, allowed poets to assign meaning to the sound complexes and verbal combinations that are absent in the language. It abolished the accepted rules for combining words, destroying the preceding meanings. For Aleksei Kruchenykh, the famous line "Dyr Bul Shulk" from a poem written in 1912 was associated with "imitation of the noise of the streets." The object of Marcel Duchamp "In Advance of the Broken Arm (Shovel)" was made in 1915 after moving to New York, where, for the first time, the artist encountered an instrument unknown to him - a snow shovel and played one of his branded language games with him. That is, in both cases we observe how the word becomes an object. And in this case, an object familiar to all people who woke up early in the morning in a snow-covered city under the sound of "shkr – shkr".

3. Serial object «Ceci n'est pas une boîte de conserve» (4 tin cans on a stand, acrylic painting on tin)

Two super-icons of modernism are combined in this object: «the non-tube» René Magritte, which we know from his painting «Tragedy of images» («La trahison des images», 1928-29) and the scandalous serial object of Piero Manzoni «Artist's Shit» («Merda d'artista», 1961). Each of these works is cultic and each of them contains a statement concerning the form and content, which allows combining both of these statements in one serial object «Ceci n'est pas une boîte de conserve» («This is not a can», 2018). Like Piero Manzoni, I equate the price of my work with the exchange rate of value. In the case of my facility, this is the price of a smoking pipe of the famous French brand BUTZ-CHOQUIN. This smoking pipe company was opened in France in 1818 by Gustav Betz and Etienne Schocken, whose names gave the brand the name. Today under this name are issued a variety of tubes, and the best samples have a proprietary gold label "VS". Now the average price of the pipes of this company is 150 euros.