Artist Antonina Baever about corruption, television shows and socialism
December 27 in Moscow "Manege" the exhibition "Great Expectations" will open - it contains works by young Russian media artists. During 2014, in the "Manezh" personal exhibitions were held by 13 authors who explore the surrounding reality and fix it with video, photos and installations, and at the end of December they will show the work of all the project participants in the exhibition hall. We talked to one of the most famous young video artists participating in Great Hope - Antonina Baever. Graduate School. Rodchenko, participant of the XXXV MIFF and XII Cannes Video Festival and curator told Wonderzine why there is no corruption and sexism in art and how video art is inspired by television and videos on YouTube.
At first it seemed to me that I wanted to make a movie. When I got to the courses at VGIK, I realized that it does not interest me at all. It was not my world, and the ideas and problems of the characters who acted in this environment did not bother me at all. I was lucky that I found out about the school. Rodchenko and went to study to the artist Cyril Preobrazhensky. There I found my environment: at school there were students who I wanted to communicate with, work with and share something important. And this is still happening - for example, recently with students and graduates of the school we made the exhibition “Troublemakers” at the design factory FLACON.
I like to watch movies as a consumer and usually choose the most popular, high budget and entertaining films. As an artist, I am not interested in the problems of relationships, the experiences of an individual who is torn between work and relationships - in general, all the stories of one person, which are often shown in the cinema. Art, in my opinion, solves other problems, such as social or aesthetic. I wonder how art is created, and I don’t want to engage in film production.
The process of creating a thesis at the school. Rodchenko took me a whole year. It is based on real research - now this word has become very hackneyed, but in this case field intelligence was indeed carried out. I wanted to know if I could buy a diploma for an art school in a business firm, and I went through all the first few pages of Google that appear when I’ve asked to buy a thesis. I talked with dozens of employees of companies that offer their services, and tried to order a diploma - if everything went well, you could defend yourself with him at school. Rodchenko. All the results and highlights of my research are reflected in the film, which was made later. It shows that in Russia there is a market for diplomas, term papers and dissertations that is no secret to anyone. Depending on the amount of the sum, you can defend yourself with a purchased job with more or less success. But I was never able to offer something adequate to the request - fortunately, in art it is not yet possible.
Problems of gender inequality exist in other territories, and artists should talk about it
When I decided on the idea and started the market research, I didn’t know what form I would represent the result because it was not clear how the research would end. I did not want to do the installation, because it would be a sluggish form for this work. She wouldn't be mobile enough to show her to a lot of people, and I wanted to talk about this issue. Only based on the results of the study, a film script was drawn up, in which among the characters there is my diploma supervisor Alexander Evangeli and my colleagues who gave me advice. Since all the material had already been collected, it would be pointless to go again with a hidden camera, and making a film with the actors would be ridiculous. Artist Dmitry Venkov advised me to create an Xtranormal animation service. I liked this platform, because there were funny characters that give extra irony to the work. The result was actually a documentary - all the dialogues and what I was offered to buy were real.
At the exhibition "High Expectations" I will show the work "Socialism in a dream", this is an installation from a video and a series of photos. It is also associated with social problems, although it is not based on research. In it, my heroine talks about her three dreams, which are connected with the reality surrounding her. In a dream, she tries to correct things that do not suit me. For example, I lived in a house where there was an advertisement that workers in workwear could not use an elevator, and it seemed to me that this was wildly unfair, but I didn’t do anything about it and walked past, like all the other residents of this house. All my motives remained at the level of conversations, like many intentions of my comrades and other people who want to change something for the better. In this video, it was important for me to point the finger not towards others, but towards myself, and, I hope, I succeeded.
It is almost impossible to simply fix reality - there is no genuine documentary, the image is always manipulated, and the question is what the person wants to say. The fact that some of my works are based on real events does not mean that I am a documentary. When I was doing my diploma, my task was to find out how much corruption, which exists in all spheres of life, got to modern art. It turned out that in the field of education in contemporary art it is not. School diploma them. Rodchenko does not give special prestige, it is impossible to get a high-paying job with him. What you are doing comes to the fore and if it’s interesting, education doesn’t matter.
I naively want to think that in the modern art environment there is not only corruption, but also sexism and homophobia. It seems to me that horizontal ties and equality should prevail in the artistic environment. Problems of gender inequality exist in other territories, and artists should talk about it. For example, recently at the design factory FLACON Sasha Priymachenko showed work that is connected with the scandalous persecution of Canadian game journalist Anita Sargsyan - he made a "selfie" of Mario brothers against the background of famous paintings depicting women ("#savingprincess").
I am interested in the history of relations between television and video art. This is a big topic in the history of the genre, because in the 60s everything just started from reflection on television. At some point, my interests and the interests of art critic Valentin Dyakonov and artist Dmitry Venkov agreed, and we shot a show about contemporary art. We invented it when we were at the Bergen Triennial, which was supervised by Catherine Degot and David Riff. There we talked and realized that everyone loved the American late night shows of John Stewart, Colbert and others. We decided to do something similar, but about contemporary art. At first it was only at the level of jokes and intoxication, but then we embodied it in the filmed videos. There were two issues and a special issue, which we showed at "Great Hopes" - the program "Not Time".
New ways of conveying information are of great interest to many artists, whatever the fact that many are interested in, “what art is” are some very common questions. I wonder what Albert Soldatov, Polina Kanis, Dmitry Venkov, Dmitry Fedorov, Lyosha Taruts are doing. As for foreign authors, I like Hennessy Youngman, who became famous for his YouTube channel, and Ryan Trekarten. It was also interesting for me to do the work that is shown only on YouTube, and the show with Valentin Dyakonov was made specifically for the Internet, these issues were not shown in the exhibition halls, because modern television is online TV.