The Mousetrap. Tatlin

Each "big name" is represented in the Kozinsky pantheon by a mousetrap homage, which preserves sometimes a direct and sometimes associative connection with the legacy or the author's style of the star prototype. The artist himself explains his gesture as follows: Russian art, due to material circumstances, lacks scale. A domestic viewer should imagine that he has shrunk to the size of a mouse in order to experience the magnitude and grandeur of contemporary art while looking at giant mousetraps.
 

The image of a mouse, fearfully scratching somewhere behind the baseboard, and apparently setting up its museum there, reveals itself in an unexpected way in the new configuration of Russian culture. Modern art and, at the same time, all modernity are regaining the status of a suspicious, semi-underground territory, a risk zone. The heretic mouse, who has hung her homemade contemporary icons, demonstrates a quiet feat of loyalty to the international artistic process. And making Demien Hirst out of gnawed wooden balls in such a situation is not perceived as a cargo-cultural practice or ritual self-spitting. Now it is the most important effort of memory, an act of resistance, the preservation and defense of one's value system. Including spiritual ones.

Text: Alexander Dashevsky