Pavel Arsenev on VOLNA art collective
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Michel Foucault. The Order of Things[1]
More and more often lately, we’ve been forced to witness “new waves” of one legendary event or another. In most cases, the original precedent keeps escaping our attention while being verified by nothing but its own iteration: If something has a new wave, it must have a preceding one as well. It is a mutually beneficial cooperation of the old and the new: The first one acquires its rightful place (being left in peace), and the second one, meaning the new one, acquires a jumping-off point that – thanks to the ambiguity of this expression – combines the best of succession and rupture, discrepancy and replication (of the very same thing), the emergence of something ultimately different and the return of the repressed.
Not that many art initiatives are ready to withdraw from this tedious rhythm of rolling over one another: The new over the old, the second over the first one. One way or another, you have to enter idea trading and negotiations with tradition when you start feeling that your emergence was not only illegitimate but also went pretty much unnoticed. In the end, this mutual vitalization of the new and the old turns out to be a prudent (self-)mortification as well. If there was Necrorealism, then Necroactivism should rise (“on its bones”). If there was the Chto Delat (What Is to Be Done) group,[2] then there should be research institutes studying what is to be done. Even if cyberfeminism has already emerged (a record-breakingly early manifestation of the prefix), an upgrade to cyberfeminism 2.0 should be launched making it even more advanced and complete. As a rule, new waves no less eagerly bear testimony to their own non-novelty.
Against this background, compounded by lack of recognition and institutional amnesia,[3] with its all too common St. Petersburg views and skyline, the emergence of the art collective whose name – VOLNA – in Russian means “wave” appears to be a remarkable event, at least on the level of the play of signifiers. In the absence of big budgets and institutes of contemporary arts, the latter has always been one of the St. Petersburg favorites that the city is famous for. Here, where literary magazines have been named after so-called “places of power” (some of which were aquatic what’s more), say, 37 or Obvodny Canal, and art groups have often been tied to specific toponymies, for instance, Nepokorennie Studio[4] or Ozerki Artists’ Village, not to mention poets from the Malaya Sadovaya Street and artists from the Pushkinskaya-10 Art Center, choosing such an addressless name and yet taking up residence in the very heart of the St. Petersburg cityscape appears as radical as renouncing one’s affiliations with a particular movement or tradition. But leaving its name aside (let it keep rolling), it is not so easy to find precedents in the St. Petersburg cityscape for the VOLNA artists (it is noteworthy that I have no desire to specify any genre predicates for this art collective? Activist group? Media cooperative?) VOLNA is neither new, nor second: It is in and of itself.
Instead, we have to seek these precedents outside St. Petersburg (and yet somehow connected to it), but let’s start first with some facts. VOLNA’s first appearances could be noticed in 2016 when the last fractions of street actionism, which had once been remarkably full-flowing (beginning with poetry and ending with dance) but then turned into scorched earth[5] with Muscovites entering the field, were still burning themselves down – or smoldering rather. While Voina[6] had flamed on before the genre burned out, VOLNA claims to have the opposite revitalizing influence, with both elements being of a similar magnitude. The VOLNA collective’s team has also seen some members come and go, their site-specific works lay claim to being pieces of monumental art, and their artistic methods are of an interdisciplinary nature, but instead of the protest rhetoric, they embrace new technologies and “the language of numbers.” If “exploiting a rhetoric” (which is why performances were accompanied by wordy comments of the editor[7] of a Russian mat[8] dictionary) and impersonating unmercenaries (which, of course, was nothing but a massive hoax and a moral ultimatum) was considered good style in the early 2010s, then by the end of the decade most “creators of artworks” were people of very few words[9] but exceptionally well qualified technical producers and commercial directors of their own projects. Which – as the artists have to explain nowhere but in the context of St. Petersburg destitution – allows to maintain “financial and aesthetic independence.” And, I should add, to avoid all kinds of murky situations in the gray zone of patronship and curatorship that have nothing to do with exhibitions.
VOLNA, Online Exhibition “Keep Yourself Clean”, 2020, Gameplay video. Image courtesy VOLNA.
So, the exhibition in question reconstructs the audiovisual installations NEUBAU (2016), Powerline (2017), Rotor (2018), the light installation Octave (2018), the installation Vague (2019), and the kinetic light installations Duel (2019) and Nymphéas (2020). A more evident genealogy of the audio, light, and kinetic installations listed above shows through the genres and project names, which almost never resort to Cyrillic characters.[10] If VOLNA could be called a new wave of something, then it would – obviously adjusted to the local context – be nothing less than the German Bauhaus. The phraseology of the texts accompanying VOLNA’s works only strengthens this hypothesis: “Despite the site-specific nature of the works, the overarching artistic principle behind all of them is the search for a universal language of pure forms. These forms, which correspond to the abstract subjects of the installations, are freed of excessive details, minimalistic in their expressiveness and often even have a functional nature.”[11]
Video: VOLNA, Light installation “Octave”, 2018, LED stripes, steel tubes, suspension system, LED controller, custom-designed software. Image courtesy VOLNA.
The very possibility of such a breaking away from the history of art, which the functionalist aesthetics represents, traces back to the German tradition of Kunstgewerbe. It is hard to translate the word into the Russian context since the practice it signifies has no exact equivalent here (“art craftsmanship?” “applied arts?” “decorative arts?”) Accurately translating it into French is even more complicated, which can be explained by fundamental differences in the institutional histories of art of the two countries. Indeed, in France, crafts have on the one hand always coexisted with arts (see Arts et métiers) but on the other hand there has been a clear line of demarcation established between them institutionally,[12] and this is why a breakthrough to utilitarian, hand crafted, and then industrial manufacturing was not seen as a vector for the avant-garde shift. Meanwhile in Germany and the Soviet Union, artists often considered themselves merely the most qualified craftsmen in their guild.[13]
Naturally, there is less artistic narcissism in arts that deal with material substances – in architecture, for instance – but the German emphasis on physically making something material goes well beyond it by bringing forward a new type of art workers or Gestalter (“conceiver of forms.”)[14] Both the German and Soviet avant-gardes aspired to dissolve the autonomy and uniqueness of art in the common practice of creating an environment that paradoxically manifests all ambitions of “pure” art but is not concerned with its institutional value. As is clear already, VOLNA also insists on “a universal language of pure forms,” and these forms “often even have a functional nature that corresponds to the abstract subjects of the installations.”
Video: VOLNA, Audiovisual installation “Powerline”, 2017, Electrolumeniscent wire, steel frames, custom-designed electronics and software, drum machine. Image courtesy VOLNA.
If at the beginning of the 20th century “the nodal and most controversial point of the functionalist ideology was the abandonment of artisanal values in favor of industrial values, the substitution of an aesthetics of standardization for an aesthetics of the “hand crafted,”[15] then a similar suspicion might arise due to the transition from industrial to post-industrial values and from an ambiguity in procedure for documenting performances (in “street” actionism) that has not yet fully revealed itself toward the decisive role of virtual space in installations.
That said, among all the artists granted access to former industrial spaces (usually, in order to capitalize these spaces and then sell them)[16] VOLNA is one of the few who do not ignore the industrial powers that are now out of the running and do not simply pay a tribute to them thematically, but rather trace a line – albeit dashed and curving[17] – of what the function of these rooms, spaces, and environs could be if it were faithful to their history and geometry (Powerline). Moreover, some of their works (Rotor) engage directly with the technological melancholy of these “time machines.” However, instead of promising – or tediously debunking – prospects of a bright future, VOLNA focuses on the prompt installation of artificial (and often neon) light of post-industrial everyday life (NEUBAU).
Video: VOLNA, Audiovisual installation “Rotor”, 2019, RGB laser modules, steel frame, custom-designed electronics and software. Image courtesy VOLNA.
Finally, the fact that, as the artists themselves note, “the primary expressive element in VOLNA’s work is light and…its interaction with space, as well as its movement” links these kinetic and “chiaroscuro scenarios” that “unfold in relation to time” not only to German functionalism, but also to the German science of perception,[18] which in its time also influenced many Soviet artists. In the middle of the 1920s, the connection between the Soviet Leningrad and the Weimar Berlin was so close it was almost as if there were a straight metro line between them. Punin, for example, insisted on opposing (the artistic) Culture to Civilization, which, for those with a sense for such tonal nuances, implies his obvious commitment to the German, not French, mindset.
Striving to influence people’s minds through form, sound, and color is typical for all of the 1920s, but it actually originates from the 1910s. Shklovsky’s psychotechnical formula stating that “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself” that “must be prolonged,”[19] which he proclaimed in the year of the revolution, can be considered to be the first example of this. However, constructivism would give this psychophysiology of avant-garde a new technological/rational twist. One can trace the geography how this interest spread as follows: Ladovsky got interested in the science of perception through Kandinsky[20] (and thus through him and Wundt in gestalt psychology), but at the same time he would often visit the Department of “Organic Culture”[21] run by Matyushin, who experimented with vision in augmented reality by using nothing but organic vision “tools.” While aiming to open their “doors of perception,” people in St. Petersburg were simply wandering around, whereas in Moscow, they developed an institutional and also material and technical base for it, prepared cost estimates and then filed reports, which allowed Ladovsky to establish his own laboratory and begin his experiments.[22]
For Ladovksy, psychics was a function of vision and movement, which is why, first, he forced recipients of his architecture to move and, second, urged people to withdraw from their anthropocentric optics. Yet again, this widespread avant-garde motif refers to St. Petersburg perceptive millenarianism and the formalist call to see the world beyond learned analogies. But in Moscow constructivist laboratories, the focus shifted from measuring the world by human standards to a psychotechnically measurable man. Each time a person’s vision is amplified to a new level with the help of technology, it makes them very small at the same time. Copernicus was probably the first person to experience this with his telescope, which is why such shifts are often called “Copernican Turns” after him.
And yet, while constructivists advocated for a manufacturer’s perspective and a technician’s culture, Ladovsky would rather place the perception of the “user” at the center of his experiments, making space, and not materiality of a structure, his “medium,” which is precisely what makes his architecture absolutely indistinguishable from the social and technical tools used in cinema and, as a matter of fact, makes it vaguely resemble something from the 1960s – when space was not really produced anymore but rather was consumed and had a psycho-geographical influence on people. All of the above is very close to VOLNA’s emphasis on light and the way it moves through space as their main expressive means.
Over the past century and up to the “new twenties” (let’s see how roaring they will be), art has been attempting once again to enter its dynamic phase through the use of light, kinetic scenarios and minimalistic forms combined with a practical approach to things, but with that it has transferred to a space that is more virtual – even more so than it already was in the 1960s and was predicted to be in the 1920s. This might seem artificial and constrained to anyone but the artists themselves, who from the very beginning have used light and space as settings for their psychotechnical experiments with perception. It seems like the VOLNA artists have always conceived their installations with a certain gameplay in mind, which also makes them heirs to the avant-garde utopianism and visionariness. The utopia of streets that shall be “our brushes” and squares that shall be “our palettes”[23] is, however, brought to life without even the slightest hint of passéism, transforming the real psychomotor conditions of today’s quarantine “imprisonment” into its materials, instruments and the space it originates from.
Switching to space and video games development tools with a self-explanatory name Unreal Engine not only makes it possible to “simulate real-time scenes” and make visitors free to “choose any observation point,” but also makes the position of the recipients of VOLNA’s artwork paradigmatic for the entire art crowd and puts their installations into an even better position than the one they used to have in the “real world” that once existed.[24]
Video: VOLNA, Installation “Vague”, 2019, PDLC glass, steel construction, solar energy collecting panel, custom-designed electronics and software. Image courtesy VOLNA.
This invasion of the institutional space, already marked by the name VOLNA, which does not have any sort of prehistory (unless we consider the entire German tradition of Kunstgewerbe and the entire history of avant-garde’s interaction with science of perception), is now evolving into a full-flowing psychotechnical odyssey. While other artists are being tormented by quarantine apathy and “talking heads” are passing from one “virtual room” to another, VOLNA is – just in case – contemplating the possibility of such a catacomb-like existence for art. In any case, we’ll have to keep ourselves clean no matter what light and kinetic scenario unfolds. Whether it’s the end of the world or the beginning of a movement towards something new.
Translated from the original Russian text by Olga Bulatova.
[1] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Tailor & Francis e-Library, 2005, p. 422.
[2] Clarification: there still is, sort of, but instead they’ve established their own School of Engaged Art, where the collective mentioned next originates from.
[3] For further details see my Letters on Institutional Futility and Amnesia, soon available in Russian as part of the project by syg.ma and the Portal blog. Their English version is expected to be published in a book from the Isolarii series by Common Era Books, NY.
[4] My text written for the collective’s exhibition catalogue published by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art is available online in Russian: “Nepokoryonnye, no povzroslevshie” [“Unvanquished but Matured”]. The group is still active after having celebrated its landmark 10th anniversary.
[5] For further details see the chronicle of the last days of street actionism in my podcast made for Radio Svoboda.
[6] Translator’s note: for more information about the Voina art group see https://en.free-voina.org/about.
[7] Translator’s note: Alexei Plutser-Sarno, Voina’s media artist.
[8] Translator’s note: Russian obscenities.
[9] As the artists put themselves it, “The practice of collective creativity allows us to form a more objective view of the topic we are working on and to avoid excesses of individual reflection.”
[10] Translator’s note: the only work whose original title is written in Cyrillic letters is Powerline («ЛĐП»).
[11] Website of the Keep Yourself Clean exhibition.
[12] “…the Louvre and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers split up the name of art around a division that is not surprising in the West…: on the one hand, art as thought, model, example; on the other hand, art as technique, process, sleight of hand. Technicity, artisanal skill, and everything in the artist that alluded to the worker, even if to a worker of art, found itself inscribed in the French social system, in its institutions and in its ideologies, in a site other than that designated for art “properly speaking.”” Duve, Thierry de. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 112.
[13] For further details concerning the program of Soviet productionist art see Arvatov, Boris. Art and Production. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
[14] Translator’s note: see Duve, Thierry de, p. 109.
[16] The aforesaid article “Nepokoryonnye, no povzroslevshie” [“Unvanquished but Matured”] mentions an episode of this kind from the history of the Kransnoye Znamya (lit. Red Banner) factory, which was built by the constructivist Mendelson, as a real estate asset as well as a story of fighting against such “interpretation”.
[17] Depending on which pole of the wave-particle duality we prefer.
[18] For further details concerning it and its mutual coordination with art see Paul C. Vitz, Arnold B. Glimcher. Modern Art and Modern Science: The Parallel Analysis of Vision. New York: Praeger, 1984.
[19] Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique” in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Longmans, 1988.
[20] Actually, after having been forced out of the VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios), Kandinsky opened the Department of Physics and Psychology at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences.
[21] For further details concerning the history and various departments of the Leningrad State Institute of Artistic Culture, where artistic and material cultures were involved as well, see Kukui, Ilya. “Arkheologiya avangarda: o proiskhozhdenii materialnoi kultury iz yazyka” [Archeology of Avant-Garde: On Material Culture’s Deriving from Language]. Translit No. 23, Materialnye kultury avangarda [Material Cultures of Avant-Garde], 2020.
[22] In 2017, the exhibition Ladovsky’s Experiment opened at the Gallery on Shabolovka. The project reconstructed the famous VKhUTEIN psychotechnical laboratory and devices for measuring students’ “spatial aptitude”, such as Liglazometr (“line-eye-meter”), Ploglazometr (“plane-eye-meter”), Oglazometr (“volume-eye-meter”), Uglazometr (“corner-eye-meter”), and Prostrometr (“space-eye-meter”). For more information about Ladovsky’s devices and experiments see Vöhringer, Margarete. Avantgarde and Psychotechnics. On the Convergence of Science, Art and Technology in the Russian 1920s. PhD dissertation, 2003.
[23] Translator’s note: as proclaimed by Vladimir Mayakovsky in his poem An Order to the Art Army, 1918.
[24] The artists’ comments on the reconstruction are notable as well: “The space of the virtual exhibition itself is heterotopic and at the same time proportional to the original exhibition locations. The model exhibits displayed inside it are as close as possible to their real prototypes and preserve their structural details, including the nature of the lighting and scenarios behind each of the live installations…For this reason, only works that were realized in the material world were selected for display. The exhibition is characterized by the presence of real space, living according to its own laws in another (virtual) space, as well as the merging of virtual and real spaces,” while “VOLNA’s preoccupation with seeking out reality and production processes is reflected in a simulated world.”
Pavel Arsenev (b. 1986, Leningrad, Russia) is an artist, poet and theorist. He works with the graphic aspects and materialisation of (poetic) text. Participant in such international venues as Manifesta10, Matadero (Madrid), Disobedient objects (Victoria and Albert Museum), Büro für kulturelle Übersetzungen (Leipzig), Kunstraum Dreiviertel (Bern), Nova Synagoga (Zilina), III Moscow Biennale of Young Artists, and subvision.kunst.festival (Hamburg). His poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian. His books include: Things that won’t fit inside your head (AnnaNova, 2005), Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Kraft, 2011), and Spasm of Accommodation (Berkeley: Commune Editions, 2017). His poems have been published by ARCADE project (Stanford University). Articles have appeared in the New Literary Observer, the Moscow Art Magazine, Logos, Political Critique, and the newspaper of the Chto Delat collective. Editor-in-chief of the magazine Translit and recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize (2012).
VOLNA art collective formed in St. Petersburg in 2016 and dedicates itself to light art and interdisciplinary art practices using new technologies. Waves as phenomena, including the wave nature of light, function as a key theme for the artists—in fact our very name means “wave” in Russian. VOLNA consists of 6 creative individuals: Nikita Golyshev, Snezhana Vinogradova, Yana Cheklina, Dmitrii Gavkaliuk, Ekaterina Morzobitova, and Aleksei Beliakov all coming from different backgrounds in the fields of architecture, construction, design, engineering, art, and cultural management. VOLNA prioritizes clean forms and clear images in artistic practice, as well as incorporating the real-world specifics of a site into their production. VOLNA has consistently maintained financial and aesthetic independence by creating 17 light installations and 30 stage designs for festivals and performances.