Greenaway Immerses Viewers in Art

By Tim Misir

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: April 23, 2014 (Issue # 1807)

Greenaway entertains the press at the opening of his exhibition with Dutch director Saskia Boddeke in Moscow last week. Photo: Valeriy Belobeev / British Council Russia

The Soviet Union in early 20th century, a time of social and political upheaval, was also an artistic utopia, and saw the interplay of suprematism, constructivism and futurism separate but connected art movements.

Collectively known as the Russian avant-garde, theater directors like Sergei Eisenstein, poets like Mayakovsky and designers such as Alexander Rodchenko, composers, architects and artists like Kandinsky, Malevich and Lizzitsky were just a few of the many who tried to pushed the boundaries of culture and its possibilities.

A new exhibition in Moscow by Dutch theater director Saskia Boddeke and British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde dramatizes these characters and immerses viewers in the context of that period, exploring the lives and works of its key figures through the language of theater and cinema. Twelve pivotal figures from the period of 1910 to 1930, played by Russian actors, are used to tell the story of this period of cultural experimentation and innovation.

More than 1,000 artworks, sourced from galleries and private collections around the world, are displayed as part of the exhibit, but Greenaway and Boddeke add to that by showing the context in which these masterpieces were created, the exchange of ideas between artists and the debates that surrounded them, pieced together from memoirs, manifestos, newspaper articles, published works and personal artifacts.

The characters are shown on multi-screen projections fused with photos, film reels and film clips. They interact with each other, speaking and arguing across screens, and move from one screen to another. They are not presented in a fixed order, running in 15-minute loops, and one can move randomly from viewing one platform to another.

You may be surprised by this exhibition. It is very subjective, Greenaway said at a news conference prior to its opening on Apr. 15, adding that he hoped presenting the works this way would allow them to be viewed in a new light, and that other, previously hidden dimensions of well-known pieces, would be discovered.

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Greenaway Immerses Viewers in Art