Antipersonal personal exhibition of Semyon Motolyants who realized that he understood nothing in contemporary art.
I do not understand anything in contemporary art, and in classical art too. At first I wanted to hide this fact, but then I decided to use it in the title of the exhibition.
When you start any project, you build a plan that you will follow. When choosing a language and a theme, one realizes that by choosing one thing, there will be something left out of the project that will have to be abandoned. This element of choice is a difficult and very important task for every writer. Project thinking reduces one's work to narrow cases, because narrowing the topic and specificity of the task helps one achieve success in a certain area, but at the same time instrumentalizes us, turns us into a function and creates one-dimensionality. It is impossible to embrace the immensity, but this is what one craves, one does not want to ground one's dreams, especially in our time - a time that dictates rationality in the name of survival.
This exhibition is built from observations on the internal methodology of work in the studio. I want to do everything without abandoning any findings, without preferring the media, without choosing from them priority models, because according to my observations in this choice lies self-censorship, degenerating into replicativeness. Personality or other techniques that allow me to work with different languages simultaneously do not interest me in this case. I like to do several projects in parallel, which complement each other - it is a construction of displacement, a work with peripheral ideas, although it is impossible to fully understand who plays the secondary roles in this performance. The project is constructed out of a reliance on the methodology of dispersed attention and a rejection of the "artist as an art production machine" model of work.
Understanding all the weaknesses of this approach to the construction of the exhibition, I called on the help of four curators, who lead exclusively in one direction of the exhibition, without working with the overall story, in this case not so important. The curators help not to build a hierarchy of values in this approach. More often than not, the curator is the conductor in collective exhibitions where individual works have the opportunity to perform in a more complex structure, a project. In this same project, we collaborate with curators from a slightly different angle - it is in a sense an antipersonal exhibition, where the curator works with a fragment of the exhibition. The aim is not to stratify ourselves and not to arrive at multi-instrumentalism, but rather to try to grasp something that, one way or another, sooner or later, will have to be abandoned. Conditions and possibilities very sharply dictate the method of work for any artist. I hope that each of the stated curators, in interaction with me, will help me find that implicit conclusion that will summarize the method of the elements of the exhibition and indicate where the "common" is. The conclusion may lead to a certain rejection, and consequently to a purification of the working method, because reception and language cannot be the artist's genuine interest according to my understanding of the artist's role as such. Language, style, and reception are important elements of the presence of the author, and at the same time, they are the boundaries of the enclosure in which their creator is flailing about. I think it is important to discover these boundaries and then break them, not in the name of expanding the field of art - that is just an empty illusion - but in the name of coming up with complicated tasks for yourself - super ideas. So as not to go into production, not to become a factory for the production of artistic products - which is what the success of the spectator's response must surely lead to. And this is rather a hindrance to both the lauded ability to work, and extreme efficiency, and all the other attributes of a prolific and creative individual.
What each of the curators will see, whether such a working scheme will emerge, it is hard to predict, but hopefully we will see differences in the way we understand art. I am here, in a certain sense, a "slippery man," unwilling to be defined, unwilling to make a choice. Because, in my opinion, there has to be some social meaning in the work of the artist, an opportunity to be an agent of change in the world around us, and if that doesn't open up, then it's time to look. Basically, what I understand is that I am disoriented in finding a methodology for creating art that suits me as an organic form or language. So why can't this dispersion be the leitmotif of the exhibition?