Cтатьи
Opposition and Reunification
Irina Tchmyreva, 2005
By withdrawing an object from reality, Vadim Gushchin returns it to the viewer, and also a part of that reality, as a generalized
formula or idea without creating a situational context or placing that object in the arbitrary field of “never and nowhere”. Committing an act of counterpoising (opposing) image and reality, the photographer reunites reality and the idea of its being.
Philosophical deliberations of the photographic character send the viewer back to the second nature of photography that is conventionally opposed to the reality we perceive. This opposition between sensual and ideational realities takes the viewer into the realm of eighteenth-century philosophy when it was not possible to conceive that photography stems direct¬ly from the idea of empirical reason. At the time, painting alone, especially that by Chardin, could be considered as the response of an artist`s intuitive perception to a philosophic idea striving to cognize universal law. Photography later came to represent the latest response to this, the latest model of the process by which the world is co-created by the idea.
From the very start, photography fully displayed its conven¬tional opposition to sensual reality, even if it remained on the periphery of public consciousness for several decades. Yet as awareness grew closer to the fact that photography is a rational form of reflection, the less photography retained Talbot`s and Ilippolyte Bayard`s pure experimentation that aimed to see what would happen if photography embraced reality, and the more it turned into a superficial form of tech¬nological recording which acquired the form of a philosophical and creative act only under the influence of the photographer`s personality. Throughout the course of its development in the nineteenth century, photography was increasingly losing its own essential value, which was being replaced by the value of the photographer`s personality, i.e. the value of personal vision. It was as late as the twentieth century, in the age of modernism, that photography, having passed through pictorial individualism, returned to an awareness of its own self-sufficient value connected, among other things, to its empirical genesis.
Conceptualism denoted the coming of age of the generalization of the new arts` experience, and that included photography. Conceptualism helped comprehend the evolution of photography`s axiology in its compressed and reduced form, bringing back early photography as an empirical activity. In Russia, conceptualism, in its semio-logical forms especially, manifested itself in the scientific activities of the 1970s, if we discount Ilya Kabakov`s studio on Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow with its hermetism group.
Vadim Gushchin`s first shows came a decade later and they were already looked at in the light of the scientific knowledge of conceptualism, first as archaistic photography and, secondly, as photography that `objectivizes` reality. Viewers were quick to recognize Gushchin`s probing into the depths of photography and the rootedness of his works IN philosophy, or, more precisely, in that area of cognition that constitutes the concern of philosophy. Intuitively grasped by Gushchin early in his career, this vector of interaction with an object provides the basis for his new projects.
Wood and Bread which continue to objectivize reality through photography. This line has been pursued by the artist over the course of the past two decades. The artist shows a tree stump or a piece of bread as a given, embodying the full scope of the semantic component of tree/bread. He endeavors to replace the whole with a fragment, implementing, together with the viewer, the transfer of meaning and a correlation of values different in scale, i.e. thinking in likelihoods and thus involving the viewer in the atmosphere of the Athenian school.
The purity of the process requires a parallel purity of form. The artist tries to obtain it by showing the object as a relief against a smooth background. This is the truly Chardmesque tradition of presenting an object, a tradition that is itself rooted in the old dispute of painters about how to approach sensual reality through painted imitation. Continuing this tradition, the artist chooses an elegant style of subtle replace¬ment of black and white with intricately graduated tones. A philosopher, Gushchin outlines his teaching in rather refined poetry. He replaces black with noble dark-grey and he replaces white with mild, light-grey tones so that the almost terminological dryness of the philosophic utterance in his works is both sensual and sensitive, relating to sensual reality itself. With Gushchin, the fine art print relates not only to the existence of a still object but to the very nature (idea) of photography.
In Bread, the artist insists on creating a grid by using a table or some surface which supports his object and provides coordinates for the top-bottom and right-left position of the object as well as its three-dimensionality. Taking an object depicted and invested with humanist axiology, the artist creates the geometry of the universal, a supra-human scale. Whatever the series, Gushchin`s photography belongs to the supra-national tradition. Inasmuch as a dispute on the existence of national schools of philosophy is less substantive than a dispute about schools based on some or another conception of being, so Gushchin`s photography should be classed with the school that goes beyond the aesthetic and historical ideas of national photographic schools. The conception of photography embraced by this artist reaches further back than the national schools, and it is supra-national just the way the idea of being is supra-national vis-a-vis the philosophic schools of various countries.
formula or idea without creating a situational context or placing that object in the arbitrary field of “never and nowhere”. Committing an act of counterpoising (opposing) image and reality, the photographer reunites reality and the idea of its being.
Philosophical deliberations of the photographic character send the viewer back to the second nature of photography that is conventionally opposed to the reality we perceive. This opposition between sensual and ideational realities takes the viewer into the realm of eighteenth-century philosophy when it was not possible to conceive that photography stems direct¬ly from the idea of empirical reason. At the time, painting alone, especially that by Chardin, could be considered as the response of an artist`s intuitive perception to a philosophic idea striving to cognize universal law. Photography later came to represent the latest response to this, the latest model of the process by which the world is co-created by the idea.
From the very start, photography fully displayed its conven¬tional opposition to sensual reality, even if it remained on the periphery of public consciousness for several decades. Yet as awareness grew closer to the fact that photography is a rational form of reflection, the less photography retained Talbot`s and Ilippolyte Bayard`s pure experimentation that aimed to see what would happen if photography embraced reality, and the more it turned into a superficial form of tech¬nological recording which acquired the form of a philosophical and creative act only under the influence of the photographer`s personality. Throughout the course of its development in the nineteenth century, photography was increasingly losing its own essential value, which was being replaced by the value of the photographer`s personality, i.e. the value of personal vision. It was as late as the twentieth century, in the age of modernism, that photography, having passed through pictorial individualism, returned to an awareness of its own self-sufficient value connected, among other things, to its empirical genesis.
Conceptualism denoted the coming of age of the generalization of the new arts` experience, and that included photography. Conceptualism helped comprehend the evolution of photography`s axiology in its compressed and reduced form, bringing back early photography as an empirical activity. In Russia, conceptualism, in its semio-logical forms especially, manifested itself in the scientific activities of the 1970s, if we discount Ilya Kabakov`s studio on Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow with its hermetism group.
Vadim Gushchin`s first shows came a decade later and they were already looked at in the light of the scientific knowledge of conceptualism, first as archaistic photography and, secondly, as photography that `objectivizes` reality. Viewers were quick to recognize Gushchin`s probing into the depths of photography and the rootedness of his works IN philosophy, or, more precisely, in that area of cognition that constitutes the concern of philosophy. Intuitively grasped by Gushchin early in his career, this vector of interaction with an object provides the basis for his new projects.
Wood and Bread which continue to objectivize reality through photography. This line has been pursued by the artist over the course of the past two decades. The artist shows a tree stump or a piece of bread as a given, embodying the full scope of the semantic component of tree/bread. He endeavors to replace the whole with a fragment, implementing, together with the viewer, the transfer of meaning and a correlation of values different in scale, i.e. thinking in likelihoods and thus involving the viewer in the atmosphere of the Athenian school.
The purity of the process requires a parallel purity of form. The artist tries to obtain it by showing the object as a relief against a smooth background. This is the truly Chardmesque tradition of presenting an object, a tradition that is itself rooted in the old dispute of painters about how to approach sensual reality through painted imitation. Continuing this tradition, the artist chooses an elegant style of subtle replace¬ment of black and white with intricately graduated tones. A philosopher, Gushchin outlines his teaching in rather refined poetry. He replaces black with noble dark-grey and he replaces white with mild, light-grey tones so that the almost terminological dryness of the philosophic utterance in his works is both sensual and sensitive, relating to sensual reality itself. With Gushchin, the fine art print relates not only to the existence of a still object but to the very nature (idea) of photography.
In Bread, the artist insists on creating a grid by using a table or some surface which supports his object and provides coordinates for the top-bottom and right-left position of the object as well as its three-dimensionality. Taking an object depicted and invested with humanist axiology, the artist creates the geometry of the universal, a supra-human scale. Whatever the series, Gushchin`s photography belongs to the supra-national tradition. Inasmuch as a dispute on the existence of national schools of philosophy is less substantive than a dispute about schools based on some or another conception of being, so Gushchin`s photography should be classed with the school that goes beyond the aesthetic and historical ideas of national photographic schools. The conception of photography embraced by this artist reaches further back than the national schools, and it is supra-national just the way the idea of being is supra-national vis-a-vis the philosophic schools of various countries.