Day after day / День за днем

Maxim Ksuta is one of the few Russian artists whose art passes the test in terms of the scale and grandness
of the ideas behind it. With an almost Borges-like facility, Ksuta commands the facts of human history,
displaying an integrity of vision and completeness of knowledge. With an enviable scrupulousness
and thoroughness, he catalogues and systematizes humanity's spiritual experience, in the process calling to mind
such magnificent experiments as Dante's Divine Comedy and Balzac's Human Comedy. Like Ksuta's other
intellectual-artistic adventures, the emphatically modestly titled project Day after Day endeavors not only
to make an exhaustive description of the evolution of culture, but also (and, it seems, more essentially) to reveal
the symmetry in the processes of universal and personal history, to bring together macro- and microworlds,
to experience the specific human presence within the abstract "history of the spirit." Each of the nine
panels that constitute Day after Day is comprised of a multitude of icon-like images, fragments of artworks
that Ksuta quite liberally ascribes to one age or another (antiquity, the Renaissance, romanticism, etc.).
Moreover, in this case it is not a matter of chronology or stylistic unity, but rather a hypersensitive
appreciation of each period, which is comprehended in the wholeness of its manifestations and aftermaths.
Ksuta expands and elaborates Spengler's metaphor about the "childhood, youth, manhood, and old age"
of culture by arranging these little pictures in such a way that at a certain distance they form human portraits —
of a girl, a young woman, a young man, an old man, and so forth. And these are not abstract or allegorical
characters, but wholly real people, the artist's relatives and friends. With an apparent unobtrusiveness, Ksuta
overcomes the entropy of contemporary consciousness, burdened by the "cold," hyper-rational experience
of postmodernism, which aimlessly shuffles the facts of cultural history. Ksuta restores to art its intimate
human dimension. He justifies and affirms the value of popular formats and the accessibility of culture:
the most fitting comparison to Day after Day would be to a concise history of the arts permeated by a quite
personal, confiding tone toward the viewer. In this connection one other circumstance bears mentioning.
In assembling his "aesthetic data base," Ksuta combines images found on the Web and scanned from
art history books with "travel notes" — that is, with photographs that he has taken with a digital camera
during his travels. He definitively equalizes all these information flows and dismisses the photographic
document's claims to exclusivity, its alleged capacity for objectively recording reality. Ksuta thus makes a total
break with the "age of mechanical reproduction," pretending not to notice as it were the regrets of the post-
Benjaminian generation over the loss of the artwork's uniqueness, of its celebrated aura. The uniqueness
of cultural artifacts is now acquired exclusively via the personal and the human. They are now as it were
filtered and purified of extraneous layers, and the purity of the primordial artistic gesture is reborn.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Russia-Moscow-Art
• in
• Russia-Contemporaru
• art
• Moscow