Painting In Action
By Olga Khoroshilova
Alina Blumis
It’s been a century since Malevich proclaimed painting dead; nevertheless, paint on canvas still matters, even if it’s been stripped of much of its mystical primacy. The time of velvet-jacketed artists espousing on the immortality of painting is arguably over — but so is the time of raving conceptualists building careers on adolescent rejection thereof.
Nowadays, the canvas is no longer a "co-creator" of art process nor an "antagonist" of the artist. It is simply a medium, one raw material among many.
In that sense, "Pink and Pong", a new project by Russian-born, New York City-based Alina Blumis, is very much to the point. It was on display throughout October at St. Petersburg’s KvadraT gallery. It seemed to be the right place to exhibit such an "in-between" project: KvadraT focuses both on contemporary video/media art and works by local high priests of old-school painting.
Blumis’ animation shows how contemporary painting turns from an object into a means for creating one. The artist created a cartoon by shooting twelve paintings per second, all of which she made especially for filming. In so doing, she transformed canvases into frames. "Pink and Pong" looks like a caustic caricature of cheesy pop painting, redolent of bubblegum; it’s hard to guess whether there was some sarcasm at play here, or if the consumer-society zeitgeist indeed influenced Blumis’ in earnest – or am I overanalyzing a bit (just as likely).
There is no plot to the animated story. Visuals change at a manic pace – streets, busses, dogs, a saxophone, pink mugs… An upbeat soundtrack by Igor Vdovin sets the tone and provides some editing cues for the entire-three minute movie. Animators, even "traditional" ones toiling in the ever-increasing Disney fold, often use unusual media for their work. They paint with oil on glass, use colored powder and re-contextualized household objects (nails and such). But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tried to turn painting itself, with each frame an independent artwork, into an animation.
Animation is just a part of the exhibition; "Pink and Pong" is a package deal. The movie is at its best when taken in together with individual canvases–frames hanging on the gallery walls. This device opens up the "process" a bit, forcing the viewer to mentally disassemble the kinetic, fun, comic-strip experience of the animation down to the hundreds of "classic" artifacts that comprise it. Not to mention big, pink and furry Pink and Pong welcoming visitors at the
doors, which momentarily transformed KvadraT into a playpen for adults.
"Pink and Pong" by Alina Blumis at KvadraT gallery
St. Petersburg, Russia
