| Art Business Consulting (Maxim Iliukhin, Mikhail Kosolapov, Natasha Struchkova) has been working as a group since 2000. Each member graduated from the first class of The New Art Strategies School (started by the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Soros Center). At that time, the Russian economy was undergoing radical changes, and so a lot of the students had to combine their art practice with their regular jobs, and mostly within office spaces. Many art students spent their lives in the office, but this particular group has found an optimal balance between art and reality. The office became the medium in which they worked. |  |
A Conversation with ABC Group-Elena Selina
Art Business Consulting (Maxim Iliukhin, Mikhail Kosolapov, Natasha Struchkova) has been working as a group since 2000. Each member graduated from the first class of The New Art Strategies School (started by the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Soros Center). At that time, the Russian economy was undergoing radical changes, and so a lot of the students had to combine their art practice with their regular jobs, and mostly within office spaces. Many art students spent their lives in the office, but this particular group has found an optimal balance between art and reality. The office became the medium in which they worked. Each ABC group member transforms, masters or repels the idea of the office with a whole body of ideas and forms. They have also opened the gallery-office ABC to put projects on display by young artists, many of whom are today far from the office theme in their focus. The projects made and shown by ABC group are some of the most interesting creations in Moscow’s contemporary art scene. Because of this, I’m happy that these three curators will have a lot to work with in the future.
Elena Selina: Your group, Art Business Consulting, has been working on the issues of office life since the beginning. Why the office?
Maxim Iliukhin: When we started the group, Mikhail and Natasha had already been working in an office setting, but I hadn’t. On the one hand, I wanted to get into the office place since I needed the money. At the same time, though, I was really afraid of it. I didn’t understand what I could possibly do there or how long it would last. So, when we created our first projects, including the first photo series in which we replayed corporate meetings within the exhibition space, I personally experienced feelings of both alienation and estrangement alongside a strong desire to break into that world. At the same time, I was horrified.
Natasha Struchkova: I’ve always seen the phenomenon of the office in Russia as a strange thing that might vanish just as fast as it appeared. It seemed that we found ourselves there by chance, and that it could all end at any point. That’s why we needed to turn it into eternity through our art, to record the epoch. Here comes the capitalism. Everybody’s working in these offices, white collars afraid to sneeze. It couldn’t last forever and it must finish, I thought, at least by the end of our lifetime.
Mikhail Kosolapov: For me, office was very different—something forever established, something that you can’t ignore and that you have to live with. Here, one had to make an inner shift, to change oneself—this was the sort of conformist view at hand. Indians have the saying, “What you can’t cure, you can endure…”
NS: And even start to like.
ES: For Max, the office space is a trauma, for you it’s self-harmonization, right?
MK: There’s no harmony there. We provide the harmony. If you’re sentenced for life and realize that there’s nothing that you can change in your prison cell for the next 50 years, then pick up a spider or a rat, admire a sunbeam on a Sunday morning and take delight in prison broth.
ES: For you, Natasha, turning the office space into art is a pure art, a hole in time from which you’re trying to fish something out?
NS: Partly, yes. But, at some point, I begin to agree with Mikhail’s position. I live in the office, I’ve spent ten years there. I have to ask myself, should I paint seascapes instead?
MK: When we created the group, we agreed that the office would be our landscape, our portrait, our still life and our battle scene. It’s our plein air—and we’re looking for an adequate art form for what we see all around us there.
