During my time in Moscow in July 2018, I visited an exhibition called Monumental. This work I want to specify separately from the others as at this moment I was working on a theme of Scopic regimes.
A film tour of the three architectural styles of Moscow: the Stalin Empire, Soviet modernism and modern architecture, which is not a specific style, but incorporates the elements of the preceding. The inverted camera slowly floats along familiar constructions, creating an image of a solar city-ghost, drowning in bottomless azure. Abandoned houses turn into a clean, heavenly architecture and fill the streets with their music frozen in stone: the city itself sings a hymn. In it, if you listen, you can hear the echoes of the invariable theme of the Soviet national anthem, stuck among the national symbols, like a ship in ice. (An exhibition's reference to the work.) Though the annotation of the work does not match with my perception of it I think the work is more than that is declared.
Andrey Venkov (2017) Hymns of Muscovy. Single Channel Video 14'24" [VLADEY, Moscow 25.07.2018]
First, this experience itself – to see the world upside down is something you need to experience! Yet Georg Baselitz inverts his portraits in a similar way – to see realistic approach not the same as to see it in painting. I never have thought that all our life we would see the World only this way. Only in a way how gravity is working and our physical body can appreciate space around us, let’s call it “normal” way. But this made me think about questioning the basic essential norms and principals even when it is obvious that it will never are different but what if? Can I apply this idea to the essential principles of drawing?
Second, the understanding of vision and visuality came to me only after this work. As Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier (1977) explained the significance of the distance in between the viewer and the object in theatre and in cinema there are even object itself is not original. Then Jay Foster made this subject more concrete and he applied this thesis not only to the cinema but to the discipline in whole.
“Why vision and visuality, why these terms? Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical: here, the difference between the terms signals a difference within the visual-between the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations - a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein. With its own rhetoric and representations, each scopic regime seeks to close out these differences” (Foster, 1988, ix).
Jay Martin defined three Scopic regimes and while trying to define which one is more relevant to this work I thought that even medium itself already would change the perception – vision and visuality will be different. In other words, if I saw this video on the big screen in Moscow, it will be not the same as you will see it on your iPhone...
Third, here we are coming to the post-medium. “video was in fact television, which maens a broadcast medium, one that splinters spatial continuity into remote sites of transmission and reception. … it proclaimed the end of the medium-specificity. In the age of television, so it broadcast, we inhabit a post-medium condition.” (Krauss (1999) 31-32). How can this statement change if for example part of this video would be presented as a kind of performance online?
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