Hostages of empty space. Exhibition-survey of the life and death of urban spaces.

Emptiness conceals an infinite space of possibilities. One of them allows you to use it as a visual method. Emptiness occupies most of the space of the city, and gradually becomes an independent object for the artist.

The intention of the project is to trace the development of aesthetics empty (urban) spaces. Detect internal structures of "emptiness" in the context of the transition from traditional art to new media art, from illusory paintings and graphic spaces to perceptual spaces of installations and projections.

We may discourse about the liking and tawdriness (kitsch) of graffiti, relation with traditional calligraphy and hieroglyphics, comics, advertising, obscene abuse (graffiti is a descendant of vulgar literature), rock culture or decorative excesses of neo-Baroque.

But to me seems more important to try to see those promising trends that remain hidden in urban graffiti undercover bright appearance. Namely - the symptoms of the decline of urban culture and its destruction from within. Not difficult to see that the very idea of ​​the wall transformed from a defensive structure into a kind of blank slate or screen. Metamorphosis too symbolically significant not to become one of the central themes of the analysis of visual culture. Graffiti, in a certain sense, is a guerrilla reaction to high art. It is socio-cultural challenge to the city, which is even stronger in that he was born by city, and interpreted only within its boundaries, and is only supported by the same city. His unselfishness defies to commercialization of same initiatives in the avant-garde art. His insolence denies architectonic value of urban space, he blasphemously uses the face of the city as a blank space for new messages about his existence in its pores. In a sense, this phenomenon resembles the result of biting invisible to the naked eye insects when you can see only redness of the skin. Moreover, graffiti doesn't germinate in special created infinite space of the Internet, they are aggressively intruding to visual aesthetics of the city and his inhabitants. They are looking for the old forms of dramatization of urban space, reviving the tradition of the itinerant musicians and jugglers. Their poetics based not on ideology, but on the technique, virtuosity, which in the high art has long been devalued in favor of a purely political concepts.

Graffiti is not devoid of intellectual claims, but trying subordinate their own ideas to ornamentation, and in the end - indistinguishable.

This ornamentality not for decoration, but transcendence beyond his borders. Its brings to mind the idea of ​​buzz inarticulate voices that becomes from "white noise" of the urban environment to "rainbow noise".

That rainbow noise acts as a sign of pure vitality, in opposition to the necrosis of the museum spaces of pure art. As infantile rage of life, as impulsively reactive spasm of life in the dying bureaucratized metropolis. So when high art ignoring graffiti it perceived as disgust, hygienic care, and even more so - as the fear of contagion. In other words, a negative Sympathetic magic.