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The PRO ARTE Foundation
The State Museum of the History of St Petersburg
Moscow State Conservatory, Theremin Center
With the support from the Ford Foundation
Present the exhibition
GENERATION Z. RUSSIAN PIONEERS OF SOUND ART IN THE 1920s.
26 February – 20 April, 2010
Peter and Paul Fortress, Nevskaya Kurtina – Pravaya Storona
Exhibition opening: February 25th at 5 PM.
GENERATION Z
An intense period of the 1910-30s with its revolutions, wars and totalitarian regime was a time of complex and inconsistent social and political upheavals equal to the whole epoch. Living in famine, cold and poverty, creative people were dreaming about the future country, where everything will be DIFFERENT– a perfect man, universal language, amazing machines and genuine creativity. We call them Generation Z.
The letter Z is in many ways emblematic of the period. Z is for zigzag, the spark; it is the symbol of energy, radio transmission, electric charge and lightning. One could always find it on book covers, posters and paint¬ings from the 1920s. At the same time, there emerged anarchical, adventurous ideas and projects, impossi¬ble in other times, often anonymous and almost forgotten nowa¬days. Artists, poets, musicians, architects were rushing enthusiastically into the new reality, studying mathematics, sciences about the nature of light and sound, developing theories about the Art of the Future. Their ideal becomes the analytical mind of the Renaissance.
In 1918 the People’s Commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, officially proclaims that underlying any creative process should be ex¬periment. “You are revolutio¬nary in music while we are revo¬lutionary in life – we should work together”, he once told the composer Sergey Prokofiev,
In 1919 the artist Solomon Nikritin develops the fundamental theory of Projectionism asserting that «the Artist is not a manufacturer of objects of con¬sumption (a painting), but of PROJECTIONS of the METHOD - organization of materials." The method invented by the artist becomes the purpose of cre¬ative process. In the context of projection of the method even faults and pa¬radoxes regain a new constructive sense and value.
Meanwhile numerous research projects were arising, including Alexey Gastev’s “The Art of Movement” exhibitions, “Concerts-Lectures” by Leo Theremin, Evgeny Sholpo and others, Arseny Avraamov’s concerts «MUSIC of the FUTURE», etc. New ar¬tistic groups sprang up united by bright individuality of their members rather than a common vision; there emerged a whole range of artistic languages from futurism to realism; everyone sought to acquire the UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE, as if planning to live on a different planet. The results of their endeavors were astounding and ahead of their time by dec¬ades. However, collision with the state was fatal. By the late 1930s, the cul¬tural and intellectual elite of the previous two decades had effectively been consigned to oblivion, wiped out from the text books and substituted for by the surro¬gate of the "Soviet Culture". Meanwhile, life has confirmed correctness of their foresight. Many ideas and inventions previously viewed as utopian were re-discovered and re-invented decades later; some of them we use today unaware of their origin while many more are still waiting for their rebirth.
Exhibition “Generation Z. Russian Pioneers of Sound Art in the 1920s” presents materials about scientists, engineers, inventors, composers, musicians and poets of the avant-garde period who were active in the field of sound art.
Exhibition materials come from the private archives of Marina Sholpo, Hanna Reichenshtein, Andrey Smirnov, Leon Bolotsky as well as from the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive, Museum of Musical Culture named after Mikhail Glinka, State Tretiakov Gallery Archive, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.
The author of the project – Andrey Smirnov. In collaboration with Lubov Pchelkina, Nikolai Izvolov, Konstantin Dudakov, Jon Appleton and Mathew Price.
The first version of the exhibition under the title „Sound in Z“ was presented in 2008 in Paris at the Museum of Modern Art Pa¬lais De Tokyo in the framework of the project by Jeremy Deller “From One Rev¬olution To Another”.
In St Petersburg the exhibition is produced by the St Petersburg PRO ARTE Foundation for Culture and Arts with the support from the Ford Foundation in collaboration with the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg and Theremin Center of the Moscow State Conservatory.
The St Petersburg edition of the exhibition features many newly dis¬covered documents.
“Generation Z. Russian Pioneers of Sound Art of the 1920s”
Open daily from 11 AM till 6 PM except Wednesdays and public holidays
(Tuesday 11AM till 5 PM)
Information:
PRO ARTE Foundation + 7 (812) 233 0040 www.proarte.ru
Museum of the History of St Petersburg + 7 (812) 230 6431 www.spbmuseum.ru
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2010 • [July]
Russian 197046,
Saint-Petersburg,
Petropavlovskaya Fortress,
Nevsky Curtina,
Left side
Pro Arte
Foundation
[map]
Phones:
+7 (812) 233-0040,
+7 (812) 233-0553,
Fax:
+7 (812) 233-0040
e-mail:
office@proarte.ru
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