Sergei Khachaturov, Jan Tamkovich
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia; ich Institute of Contemporary Art, Russia
An artist of modern and contemporary period (since the 19th century) in the study of art (Mikhail Yampolsky, Jonathan Crary) is often related to a type of a collector, archivist, a flaneur, a travesty. It is obvious if we consider the world view of the modern and contemporary periods in comparison to the classical one. Jonathan Crary wrote in his book “Techniques of an observer”: “…destroying the classical field of vision, the imperatives of capitalist modernization created a technique of imposing visual care, rationalization of sensation and perception management. These disciplinary techniques requested creation of an idea of a visual experience as something instrumental, modifiable and essentially abstract, and never giving the world the opportunity to become whole or eternal. Once the vision was localized in the empirical immediacy of the body of the observer, it was owned by time, the stream of death”. Constant circulation of visual images similar to circulation of market value of goods depreciates the truth of the artistic vision. According to Mikhail Yampolsky, a junk shop is similar to such vision called after Sartre “panoramic”. This consciousness is “failing to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, fixing everything around (junk shop is a cultural product of this non-discriminating consciousness)”.
To drop out of circulation of the market inauthenticity of the seen objects helps the distance, which can be created as a total archive of meanings “walking” in the market. Then this is a strategy of a conceptualist archivist. It can be incorporated into a kind of a travesty play about an artist-junkman, who discovers the grains of truth under a layer of media and consumer rubbish. Then this is a strategy of tactile recreation of art aloof from us by dogmas and cliches of art. This strategy is successfully used by the young artist Jan Tamkovich.