Letters, Codes, Ciphers in Contemporary Russian Art (Based on Materials of the Exhibition “Message” in the Russian State Museum)
Keywords:
The State Russian Museum, Message, visual text, text visuality, writing in art, codes in art, ciphers in art, handwriting of the artist, contemporary pictographs in art, transmission of information in art, contemporary art in the Russian MuseumAbstract
The research is devoted to the problem of the visualization of notional signs in the Russian art of the end of the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st centuries. It is based on the materials of the exhibition “Message”, which was held at the Russian State Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia) from August to November of 2024, in the halls of the Benois Wing building. The section of the exhibition, titled “Writings, Codes, Ciphers”, brought together a significant layer of works by authors, working in this field: ranging from street artists to conceptualists. The analysis of their oeuvre allowed to identify the main directions of their searches in the field of reflecting on the boundaries of conceptual and imaginative thinking. Among the most significant were defined as follows: an appeal to the visuality of early forms of writing (Anatoly Belkin, Vitaly Komar, Alexandra Melamid); to the problem of author’s handwriting and font (Taras Vilkhovsky, Denis Dmitriev, Vadim Kulikov, Nikita Nomerz, Maxim Ima, Vasily Vlasov); to the consideration of the objective (tactile) qualities of the text (Gennady Kornilov, Vasily Livanov, Peter Bely, Sergey Katran); to the peculiarities of modern pictographs and ciphers (Vladimir Abikh, Maxim Svishchev, Leonid Lamm, WEKMAN); to the secret coding and covert surveillance (Leonid Lamm, Evgeny Semenov, Denis Patrakeev, Vladimir Tsigal). The inclination of contemporary artists to comprehend the interrelationships of verbal and visual elements has been recognized as an important cultural phenomenon in the era of the visual turn.
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