Ĺęŕňĺđčíŕ Äĺăîňü - "Ęčíî ćčâîďčńč"
Ekaterina Degot - "Film der Malerei"
MOSCOW SUMMER
From: Ekaterina Degot – “The Cinema Of Painting”
In: Groys B., et al., Zuruck aus der Zukunft. Osteuropaischer Kulturen im
Zeitalter des Postkommunismus [Back from the Future. East European Cultures in
the Era of Post-Communism], Frankfurt a/M, 2005.
Dmitri Gutov works in the space between video and painting. In his film Moscow
Summer we see, one after another, on the steps of an ascending escalator in the
metro, mini-skirts (plus the little clothing that is concealed beneath them).
The film is accompanied by a thieves’ chanson sung by Arkadi Severny that was
popular in the seventies. His gravelly masculine voice combined with the gaily
floating mini-skirts in the metro ¬– the symbolic church of Soviet community –
transports the viewer into the current of love, friendship and endless free time
that existed in the USSR in the years pre-perestroika.
This effect is reinforced in a series of small paintings in which the artist has
repeated frames from the film; they are painted “Soviet-style” in the spirit of
that time, in the spirit that followed the denunciation of Stalin’s cult of
personality – that is to say, with a freedom that veils a limitless belief in
the goodness of human nature: after all, they seem to say, the viewer is one of
us, not an enemy [# 6].
The erotic effect of looking beneath the skirt is here directly linked with the
aesthetic project of the Moscow metro, its ceiling mosaics bringing about (if
you attempt to pay them proper attention) dizziness, or even, as the architects
hoped, ecstasy. The memoirs of Varvara Stepanova give us Mayakovski’s thoughts
of 1927: he felt the only way to compensate for the absence, in mass
demonstrations, of the enthusiasms of 1919 […] was to launch aircraft into the
sky, in order to create “redundant movement – the craning of the head upwards”.