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Public Urban Visual Communication and Art
by Tania Goryucheva

"Debates&Credits" explored ways for a direct intervention into public urban spaces, by integrating critical artistic ideas about the purpose and sense of public visual communication, directly into the city's outdoors channels that distribute these messages, such as billboards, walls, monuments, and any surface where signs and images might appear. Four artists and collectives from The Netherlands and Russia were invited to develop their projects, either as reactions and reflections on the problems standing behind the lack of real public communication, i.e. the visibility of public interests and their incorporation in urban environments, or to raise their own publicly relevant issues, omitted in the course of wrapping up modern cities and their habitants with different sorts of propaganda.
 
In Russia there is a really deep confusion about the dramatic transformation of the cities' visual environments over the last fifteen years: from boring dim hardly noticeable symbols and slogans of soviet propaganda against the background of Stalin-style neo-classicist monumental buildings, or Khruschev-style ascetic low living boxes, now the city is adorned with insanely huge, bright, aggressive commercial advertising massively presented on the streets, ground flours of which now are covered with colour plastic panels of shop windows, while between old grey houses you find typically new-Russian-postmodernist-style granite or marble (real or fake), pinky-blue-yellow-green, mirror-glass architecture, implanted as by a sudden intervention of somebody's giant powerful hand. Mixed altogether advertising on tops of historical buildings, monuments suppressed by commercial logos and slogans, nouveau-riche architectural and design fantasies, along dirty streets with beggars, modern hypermarkets surrounded by spontaneous babushki-trading-rows and small wooden churches nearby, which occupy the central squares of Moscow 'bedroom-regions', - provide quite a frustrating grotesque postmodernist kitsch image of a transformative society in a deep social crisis. To intervene with artistically subversive ideas in such an aggressive context - add to this the inhuman scale of city planning, and the flow-like rhythm of street life - means to find an appropriate way to disturb the "normality" of this daily visual reality with something that would halt the pedestrian's mind, just enough for him to start to question what all this is about.
What's the agenda of public urban art today? Amazingly, the Moscow city government still thinks that it's about a big national idea and the representation of power. Even despite public protests (on behalf of which these monstrous projects are executed and financed), they continue to fetishise cultural memory in a Frankenstein style reanimating dead heroes' bodies, and subsidising ineradicable successors of the former soviet art mafia, sorry, art unions, whose power is due to solely "good connections". Taking as a counter-point situation with art for public spaces in the Netherlands, where already in Schiphol airport one can find contemporary art objects and images, I still find the understanding of the meaning and function of public art in general today quite limited. Quite often "strange objects" which we find on streets, squares, in parks, are just gallery art pieces alien to the people who pass them every day, as well as to the city spaces they are placed in. I like the idea of integrative role of art and start to think about how artists can contribute to the development or appearance of public urban spaces, when they are considered to belong to public domain in terms of providing adequate messages and forms for dialogue strategies of open public visual communication. To find ways how to integrate diverse ideas, opinions, cultural and art forms, into public space and public discourse means to open channels for unrestricted self expression.
The artists involved in our project encountered the rather challenging necessity to compete both with the aggressive environment and their own image of the "other" (whether Eastern or Western) culture, influenced by mass media representations of either side. So it was double interesting to see how they would build up communication bridges with spaces and audiences through their art projects. All participants are representatives of a young generation of artists pursuing hybrid methods and expansionist tactics dealing with different cultural phenomena, and different means of content production.
The group Machine and Leo van Munster (together formerly known as Dept) /NL as professional designers are used to work at the edge of art objectives and design forms, exploiting both for the benefit of the idea. They are interested in the soviet tradition of appealing slogans as well as Russian avant-garde font design in a historical perspective, and their replacement with slogans of advertising campaigns. They developed their projects based on reversing the meaning and functions of narrative messages in the city. Quite spectacularly appearing on different surfaces in the form of mirror-mosaic letters (Leo van Munster), specially designed fonts of huge scale in red colour (Machine), light projected moving remarks ("BeamMobile(tm)" a joint project), they intimately addressed everybody passing by, or commented on the state of things in a personalised way.
"Activator" of Leo van Munster was reminiscent of a hi-tech kind of reappearance of the old-fashioned mechanical music-box used by beggars on the streets. From the very beginning the artist had an idea to build a sound responsive environment, thus he made an interactive music box whose means of playing were human bodies. People passing by trigger an infra-red ray and generate short fragments of a music piece. So the flow of people can play the whole song. The story about adventures of Leo-sharmanschik and his Activator in Russia you'd better find on the web site and in the catalogue:)
The artist group "Archaeopteryx" from Izhevsk /RU was suggested to further develop their project in progress "Packing". The idea of putting protective symbols: "Handle with care", on standard living houses-boxes in bedroom-regions of Russian cities appeared after series of explosions of such houses in Moscow and other Russian cities. But of course the meanings of the project, based on association of people with goods, goes much further in their connotations. For that reason, preceding any realised project, the artists conduct campaigns to investigate peoples' opinion, whether they like or not to live in the house protected by such a symbol. These campaigns that were conducted in the Amsterdam Bijlmer region populated by mostly immigrants and the Moscow bedroom-region Bibirevo were successful: the majority of respondents voted "yes".
Arno Coenen /NL whose artistic activities are quite often connected to extreme and subcultural practices, came up with an idea to reinvent ('update') of heroism as an art theme and form. Impressed with the monumental propaganda of soviet times and the aggressiveness of the local Russian context, he used an opportunity to do an exploratory tour to a championship of cage fighting between Russian and Dutch teams, held at St.Petersburg. On the basis of photo and video documentation made by him and his assistant Klaartje Pander, he developed digitally designed images, representing heroes of this rough show, both, sportsmen and audience - real-life characters of popular anecdotes about "new Russians". Content and aesthetics of this series of posters for a metro station, called "Demolition Man", altogether in a quite remarkable way symbolise the essence of conflict-driven relationships within contemporary society.
Galina Myznikova & Serguey Provorov from Nizhniy Novgorod /RU made a multiple-screen video installation "Falls and Rises" which represented a metaphorical reflection on the 9/11 events. A 5-windows video composition was shown on the fa?ade of the Amsterdam Centre for Culture and Politics "De Balie", every night during one week, starting from September 11, 2002.
Oleg Kireev from Moscow /RU was preoccupied with the subject of "legality-illegality". For the Moscow part of D&C he organised a 4-days open internet forum "Legal-Illegal" with participation of invited experts, dedicated to 4 discussions on the following topics: marijuana, prostitution, abortion, and immigration. All opinions pro and contra could be expressed, discussed and defended freely beyond the limits of the confusing scenarios which producers of popular talk-shows in mass-media involve participants in, for their entertaining simulations of public forums. In Amsterdam during his 2-days street performance, Kyreev, in the uniform of Moscow militsioner (i.e. policeman), was checking IDs of people passing by. Remarkably, and at the same time predictably, in Bijlmer bedroom-region inhabited by immigrants, both legal and illegal, nobody of the people he approached showed his ID, while in the city centre of Amsterdam, overcrowded with tourists, almost nobody refused to do it.
The P.A.R.K. group /NL prepared programs of television-art, which they broadcast quite regularly on cable tv channels. In Moscow and Yekaterinburg they were shown at local tv stations during several nights. In Yekaterinburg, thanks to efforts of Yekaterinburg branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art, they were shown also on a big city screen at a crossroad in the city centre.
The Yekaterinburg artists Arseniy Sergueev /RU did a fake promotion campaign of the "Black Hand" corporation, which was based on an ironical use of a Russian black folklore theme. It became a parody on the exploitation of fear as a basic instinct in mass-media, pop-culture, and politics.
 
(c) Tania Goryucheva, 2003