Beethoven 9/125.
Artists | |
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Year | 2023 |
Material | Shellac, acrylic, mixed media |
Size | 80 × 80 cm |
The main characters of the exhibition are outdated media, dying media – mail stamps, vinyl and shellac records, books printed on paper. The artist uses a favorite St. Petersburg technique – salvation through museification: dear to the author, but vulnerable things and phenomena are withdrawn from circulation, change their status and function, and placed in a time capsule. Growing up next to such an object, a child involuntarily studies the objects of material culture of the past that have been displaced by progress, gets into their aesthetics, deciphers and actualizes meanings, gets used to perceiving them as a collector – from the standpoint of beauty, context and uniqueness, beyond functionality and pragmatism. Using Beethoven's tropes, using philately, magic squares, necromancy, alchemy, the history of psychology and pedagogy, the artist leads the viewer to the place where the souls of the dead live and where art comes from.
Legend has it that the composer who wrote his ninth symphony is about to die. In his speech dedicated to Mahler's memory, Arnold Schoenberg said that those who wrote their ninth (symphony) come too close to the otherworldly. The biographies of Bruckner, Mahler, Schnittke and many others seem to confirm the authenticity of the legend. The first one to be cursed was Beethoven. His death mask appears in the first frames of the video. The cover of a set of records with a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony lies on the lectern in the middle of the exhibition hall. The circular holes, which will be seen by the viewer who opens the cover, repeat the structure of Dante's inferno with its nine circles. Kustov perceives Beethoven's music as a portal to the next world, a place where the artist-shaman, and after him the viewer, can begin a journey to the necromancer.