PROGRAM Olivie 9 september -11 october 2010 REAL ART Сurators: Bogdan Mamonov, Sergey Popov Vladimir Salnikov, Nina Kotel, Bogdan Mamonov, Sasha Leech, Boris Smelov, Nikolay Kasatkin, Ivan Lukinyh, Olga Chernyshova, Sasha Sokolov, Tasia Korotkova, Alexander Pogorgelsky, Katya Rogkova. Gruntovka 9-20 september 2010 GOLDEN POT Petr Maslov Curator - Bogdan Mamonov   14-26 may 2010 COMMUNICATING VESSELS "The Excursus Group" The bottle as a means of artistic communication The Excursus Group was created in 1992 on the basis of a course at the Academy of the Press. The group included students attracted by A.A. Livanov, a wonderful graphic artist, who is still the unofficial spiritual leader of the group. The composition of the group has never been stable, but its nucleus includes O. Iordan, V. Tsepilov, V. Tsepilova, K. Rayevskaya, B. Prokhin, E. Kruchkov, R. Polyakov and A. Parushina, who are the originators and participants of the “Communicating vessels” project. The aesthetic agenda of Excursus goes back to the early ideas of Favorsky and VHUTEMAS. The group members aspire to rehabilitate the value of the form and the plastic foundations of modern art as a whole. The laws of visual perception, in our view, are given as obvious, they are universal. However we are against rules in arts. There are laws of nature. But they can be surmounted. The law of gravity can be overcome by flying in a rocket. We try to solve the present-day problems in arts on the basis of plastic forms. The group functions as a club, practicing weekly meetings of the group members for joint drawing, discussion and just for communication. The Ideology The “Communicating vessels” project employs the form of the bottle as its basic “pattern”, using it as the universal cultural archetype, connecting a simple form with a wealth of cultural connotations. The image of the bottle is notable for its exceptional ambiguity. On the one hand, this form has an extraordinarily rich content, and in these terms one can say that the bottle as a vessel contains not just a liquid (wine), but also abundant cultural meanings, primarily connected with communication gestures. This gave rise to the name of the project, implicative of a continuous flow of meanings and, at the same time, implying collective creative work. On the other hand, we also aim to reject the meaning for the sake of the pure presence of the form. In this sense, the bottle appears to be an optimal object, because, after all, to assume its form, the bottle must be drunk (losing its content). The Methodology The exhibition is a laboratory space. It is not complete in its form. The group members position themselves as “eternal students”, and this is their fundamental position. The exhibition is designed as a series of studies on the topic of the form, with the bottle chosen as a module. It is proposed to accompany the exhibition with master classes and work shops, organized by the exhibition participants. It should be pointed out that all of them are not only graduates of the Printing Art Institute, but they themselves work with students and future entrants. The Display The display is designed as a series of various installations, each using the bottle as a module. Light plays a significant role in the display, as, according to the authors’ conception, it creates shadows of the installations on the walls, bringing heterogeneous objects together in a single field. The Excursus Group 2010 Postscript: Installations – inpolations – instenations An object (bottle) as a means of artistic communication Destruction of the form (cliché) + Contact between the visual form of the object – and the life of the existentially-lonely person in a socially unconscious community. Destruction of the form as content: Destruction of the object as a sign, as a conceived visual grapheme of material culture. Destruction of the object’s functionality (one cannot pour out and drink from works of art). Reflections on the individual in terms of that person’s attitude to an object of life through the life of this object The anthropological dimension of the object Spectators become personages (objects) of the exhibition (they participate in the shadow theatre), the bottle becomes a subject. Personalizing the object in the objective world Making the object intimate The existential diary