ABSOLUT GENERATION

TV> interview with Oleg Kulik

TV> interview with Hans Hollein and Lois Renner

TV> interview with Eva Kempe Forsberg, the Absolut Company

The Blue Noses
‘Even a bear should be able to understand our art.’
As well as working in their native Siberia, Moscow and St Petersburg, The Blue Noses have exhibited and performed in London, Vienna and Berlin. The group was founded in 1999 when 12 artists locked themselves in a bomb shelter and refused to create any art. As well as live performance, The Blue Noses make short films, photography and installation. In Venice, the group is represented by Viacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov. One’s first instinct is to see The Blue Noses as descendants of the Marx Brothers, Keaton and Chaplin. In fact their work has an older lineage in the tradition of the skomorokhs – jesters of the tzars’ courts. Holding cultural clichés up to ridicule is part of their heritage, as it is for all Russians, so they wear the ear-flapped hats which identify them as Russian artists : destructive, bearded, drunks infatuated with
Mother Russia. Their Russian-ness also extends to their adoption of Tolstoy’s views that the future artist will live the life of an ordinary person and that writing a touching song or a fairytale is much more important than the creation of an epic or a symphony. Thus, in the manner befitting any serious absurdists, they consider real art to be seducing somebody on a one-night stand - or perhaps sleeping with your dog. Like all great clowns, they seduce with charm, self-deprication and laughter only to whack you a moment later with biting social and political satire – or the realisation that the idiot in this scene is you.

Together in ABSOLUT GENERATIONS
The humour in Oleg Kulik’s work is often overshadowed by its threatening nature and what is absurd in his work is sometimes obscured by a century of art during which the absurd was normalised. While The Blue Noses claim to have been influenced by no one, Kulik’s performance work has clearly been a reference point. For ABSOLUT GENERATIONS, the mentor has made a number of impressive verité waxworks, one of which has already been exhibited. He calls it ‘The Sportswoman’ and it bears a striking resemblance to Anna Kournikova. In exhibition with the four new figures, it is an engagement with the global symbols that form an evolving, ubiquitous language where words are replaced by human beings, or rather, their public image. Referencing Kulik’s ‘Dead Monkeys’ series, The Blue Noses present a film featuring a monkey who drinks ABSOLUT and evolves into Charles Darwin.

Absolut Renner>>>

Aspassio Haronitaki>>>

Richard Wentworth and Semiconductor>Interacting with Art Online: ABSOLUT NEXT GENERATION

foto: www.absolut.com, Oleg Kulik