The project "Millstones of Time", kept in neoclassic trend, the splashes of which with certain regularity happened both in modernism and postmodernism, can not but arouse associations with "Lord's Supper" by Leonardo. First of all the noticeable is similarity of compositional schemes. However, this is the only point at which the typological affinity might be found. In his Milan masterpiece the great genius followed his own principle that might be formulated as "one wall, one space, one scene". The special feature of the project "Millstones of Time" (though it doesn't contradict overall contemporary tendencies) – is its work in process. This in particular becomes obvious in its ability to gain different modifications depending from concrete exhibitional space without losing its main concept, as well as in presupposed consistent flexibility of perception of all its media components. For example, the view of its Venice version is greatly dictated by spatial discreteness – it is located in two autonomous halls, at different levels. This supports the fair thesis that the integrity of Optics of the "current moment" is rather the totality of fragments understood in the process, in movement of feelings, and modeled by thinking, imagination, nostalgically seeking the unity and coherency. That's why the examination of semantic dramatic composition of this project through the prism of triad "space-time-movement", as well as through complicity, contiguity of different media seems quite natural.
All categories of such triad and all specific components of this synthesized formation are mutually compelled. Let's remind that as far back as Plato, time was interpreted by him as "motionless eternity in mobile mode", while his student Aristotle also connected the being of time with movement, coming to conclusion that time is the measure of movement. Generally, the philosophical interpretation of time has been continuously changing, sometimes fundamentally, revolutionarily, especially in the 20th century. Besides the theory of relativity also emerged other conceptions, impugning the absoluteness, objectivity, metric and one-direction character of this notion. For example, it was proposed to measure "logarithmic time" not by number of turns of the Earth around its axis, but by "density of events". Synergetic models of time made common the possibility of the processes of its reversibility. Postmodern quite dismissed the linear concept of time, which supposed the notions of past and future and consequent linear understanding of history as irreversibly unfolded from the past through the present into the future. It equally seized the idea of linear progress. Postmodernism thinks itself as post-contemporaneity, a process, which develops "after time", "re-writes time", turning and breaking the linear vector of history.
The foregoing brief survey of time is by no means accidental, because it is precisely Time, Memory, and History that are the central idea of the project by Ukrainian artist, which extrapolated their poly-variance and different readings into the language of visual images and constructions. Hereby time is thought as the energy of collapse; as pressed metaphysical clot; as continuity, which is moving, changing, fluctuating; as stopped fragment, moment; as something reversible, revolving. The latter is especially consonant with the idea and title of the project – Russian word "vertet" (to turn) descend from Indo-European radical "vertmen", which was also later transformed into Russian word "vremya" (time). Millstones are not only the symbol of all-grinding machine, destructive mechanism, even though the project is greatly focused on fixation of destructive state of time and space and on chronotope, e.g. certain temporal apogee, into which we are today immersed. Millstones, similarly to circle or round clock-face, can be interpreted as the symbol of eternal return (it would be appropriate to remember that this was a metaphor of time introduced by Nizsche).
The main collision of the project is the perishable and the imperishable, the dying and the reviviscent, the artificial and the organic, the visible and the imaginative.
The one or another image of time might be convincing and suggestive, it might be enforced and sharpened or, on the contrary, to be unclear and sluggish, weakened, annihilated depending on different kinds, genres, technologies used by contemporary art to express it. In "Millstones of time" the case in point is the large-scale painting à la taken off from the wall dying fresco, as well as film animation, photography, installations, objects, and sound.
As far as in the twenties of the past century the well-known painter Theo van Dujtsburg formulated the tremendous dream of an artist: "to open to people the path to reality, instead of closing them within the boundaries of painting". Such impermeability almost deprived this kind of art of the place in new cultural situation at the edge of the centuries. However, no matter how paradoxical it is, cultural globalization, which is realized primarily through the expansion of mass media and became the initial trauma, compensation of which resulted into appearance of "intermedia" painting of the epoch of Millennium. Media revolution has principally changed forms and ways of transmitting of reflected world and pronounced the priority of screen vector in contemporary visual culture. Today the painted image becomes growingly variable, interactive, systematic. It is modified from "still window" – as defined in Renaissance times by Leon Battista Alberti – into mobile event-triggered field. The statics is replaced by dynamics and the process.
In the new conditions painting also undergoes mutational changes, mimicries into webpage design and computer games, film frames and animation, video clip and advertising, striving to mark its place in contemporary communicative space. The place of painting, the place of visual today is not only the canvas, but also film canvas, TV screen, vinyl banner and many other things.
Another nuance is related to the tendency of art to be … not art, above all stating and announcing "death of the author" – this, in particular was remarkable for almost the whole second part of the past century. Interesting observations on this matter can be found in the article "Painting after painting" by Andrey Fomenko. It is considered that photography, video or film are broader than their aesthetic function: they are not art apriori, which can not be said about painting. However, from the moment of its progressive devaluation, painting also more and more obtains the quality of out-of-aesthetic neutrality, which inevitably brings it again to the initial – revalorization. Nevertheless, when the artists today turn to the painting, it is usually either a "painting-reproduction" or a painting-readymade, deprived of independent value and autonomous quality. The painting in this case appears to be the instrument for thematization of different media, usually the one, which is more "interesting" and "contrasting" – contemporary, actual, technological. These might be film, photography, performance, computer graphics etc. Their translation into format of the painting, that is traditional, organic, handmade, unique art, creates necessary effect of distance, e.g. of other media.
All this in a varying degree is expressed also in the project "Millstones of time". As noted above, it also pretends to create multi-plane, multi-level, truly multimedia visual system. This system uses, on the one hand, possibilities of painting, in which time is condensed, accumulated, imagined, and on the other hand – film, which is unfolded, extensive in time, continuously and internally struggling with the limited nature of its own space of representation. It also uses documentary anonymous photography as specific readymade, and reflective mirror surface, as well as "sculptural" crystalline object, which all have their own temporal, spatial, and finally, visual specifics. It is also necessary to consider that the object-lens sees differently from the eye, that's why, let's say, the nature of film image is principally different from that of the painting. The painting is already organized within itself, its composition is strictly fixed by the internal structure of perspective lines and planes, and also by framing. It is self-sufficient. The specifics of film image, on the contrary, is that it is photographically precise and exists in motion. Besides, as Andre Bazin suggested, it "doesn't has a frame and is centrifugal", while the film frame is a "part" of as if "cut-out" reality.
Let us give another idea in the context of the project. The film, accordingly to already cited Bazin, is not so much an earthy projection of some idealistic "platonic" eidos, as it is the embodiment of eternal human aspiration for conjuration of time, which means to save things and live beings from its omnipresent all-destructive course. One of the possibilities of their rescue is to create ideal double of the real world, what precisely is done by film; the double possesses all parameters and characteristics of the original except of one thing – subjection to the course of time.
Film, as no other kind of art, is able to document reality, however this document can appear authentic falsification, mirage, apparition. The fundamental peculiarity of filmic language, which noticeably appeared in "Millstones of time" is the game at the edge of illusion and reality, aiming to convey the state, evoked by "irreal modalities" – fantasy, dream, memory…
In addition to the great amount of specific effects developed and used by film, the computer era introduced morphing, the essence of which is in transformation of selected object through "miraculous" distortion, deformation of initial form. This expressive, moreover, "enlivening" technique quite defensibly and without excess is included to film and animation part of the Venice project.
The semantic and installation field of the whole work also minimally incorporates "album" photography, at first sight even appearing as its marginal component. However, it is on the one hand a certain counterpoint of monumental intention of the project, and on the other plays important and active expressive role, enriching and contrasting its main content. The trustworthiness of photography has been always based on the unique property to signify relation to reality, which it portrays. Rosalind Krauss describes it as "depository of the real". As if the things, figures, faces stretched out and touched the surface of the picture, having left their own traces, as proper in relation to the original as death-mask is to the face of the dead. Right after emergence at the beginning of the 19th century of photography, it was very image-bearingly noted that it "gave us the possibility to pass to future generations yesterday's sunlight". Apart from its object photography was and will be the visual fixation of complicated, non-linear course of time. Photography provided the possibility to return what's gone, hereby predicting the return of the future. Later, already in the 20th century, Roland Barthes in his famous work "Camera Lucida" further developed this idea with the surmise that this strangeness, characteristic of combination "past in present", in the long run is the very foundation of photographic authenticity.
And few more notes about the attributes of photography, which are important in the context of media symbiosis of discussed project. Photography, unlikely to film, is discrete, which allows it from the point of view of different art theorists to remain incommensurably much more expressive translator of visual images: similarly to painting, it concentrates the "only moment", it gathers all surrounding meanings, which the film (and this is its strength), on the contrary, disperses in continuity of frames. Photography not only took the function of documentary, but also, as suggested by Oleg Kireyev, "took away the function of fantasmatic essence from art, which is healing the wounds of reality. It is the place, where the soul of painting has moved, carrying not only the idea of reflection of reality, but also of its annihilation, destruction".
There exists an axiom: the crisis of reality always confirms the reality of reflection, which extends beyond its own boundaries. Besides the moving and the still, "Millstones of time" also include the image reflected in mirror plane, in which are simultaneously present the static and the dynamic, where the figure and face of apprehending viewer are split, making the very perception an optical interaction, and broadening, opening the limits of space in which this perception takes place.
The mirror in art, as it is well known, often serves as a passage into other fantasmatic dimension – "the world behind the looking-glass". That's why it is necessary to emphasise the importance of mirror as the source of virtual apparitions. We should note that in this project the optical effect of reflection is further complicated and becomes more psychedellic, because here the mirror is the darkened, half-transparent shopwindow glass, through which unclearly appears one more installational plane.
Coming back to the main idea of the project – the time – it makes sense to quote philosophical reasoning of Valeriy Podoroga regarding the connection time-perception-reflection-memory: "Because the mirror is located at the core of time, I, for example, can not introduce the difference between the actual moment of perception and the memory. At equal distance between my present and my future is the past, which due to its reflective possibilities so immediately transfers perception into memory that the very perception becomes just one of the forms of memory. I perceive only because I remember; perception is reflected, becoming a memory".
The key symbol, which might be considered the compositional peak, "navel-string", semantic correlate, "philosophical stone" in the project, is the Crystal. Here it is a cone-shaped object, an artificial crystal, created by Ukrainian technology luminophor, scintillator, which under ultra-violet lamps shines with some unusual magic light. From ancient times crystal is related to purity, perfection, foretelling, cosmogony, something supernatural and mysterious. Crystal concentrates the beams of light and human look similar to these beams. It gathers disconcentrated mind into bunch similarly to the way it gathers and enforces light beams. That's why the image of crystal always symbolized power and clarity of thought, able to find the idea of unity in chaos of every possible forms. Symmetry is laid at the foundation of the crystall's structure. This is the principle on which separate parts of the project are built. The symmetry is also the basis of conversation as such. Crystal might be interpreted with the help of such Husserl's notion as "horizon of time", in which all punctuations of time merge, where all moments of time coincide. Crystal is also the "reservoir of memory". However, it a special memory, about which George Didi-Juberman said that it "doesn't convey, but rather veils its content". The emanation of crystalline light here inevitably actualizes the global and undeniable fact that Light is eternal idea of disappearance and fixation of being. It is often in work that light is only the "source of light". However, in "Millstones of time" its function, besides other things, is to serve a connective material, montage gluing between the perishing and the present. It is light that disperses darkness and gives birth to hope.
Alexander Soloviov
