AES+F Group Helps Art Conquer Mass Media
By Elena Zaytseva
Art of our days aspires to unprecedented levels of visual richness. Impressively strong figuration, museum installation and photography all strive to challenge mass culture’s overwrought movies, TV clips and glossy magazines. The Moscow based group of artists, "AES" (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky) artists are preparing for a total attack on mass media with a new project, The No Rules Game. Using large format photographs and video they are setting out to create a virtual reality, "the end of geography, the end of history, the end of gender, the end of age, the end of substance". Can this virtual paradise, in which all causes of conflicts are removed, be the next step in the artists’ game with media?
In their early works, such as The Witnesses of the Future: Islamic Project (1996-1997), they used computer-generated imagery to produce cityscapes of the Western capitals – New York, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Moscow etc., as though they are under Islamic occupation. Envisioning the west’s paranoia about the spread of Islam, they created such images as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum crowned with a Muslim dome and the Statue of Liberty covered by an Islamic veil, with the Declaration of Independence in her hand replaced by the Koran. The object of mocking here is the ‘theory of the Clash of Civilizations’ by the American futurologist Samuel Huntington. To continue with this ironic strategy, the artists set up the AES Travel Agency to the Future in 1997, in which their imagery was put on sale in the form of postcards, mugs, T-shirts etc, while questionnaires were distributed to visitors. Showing at Rutgars University in 1998, the exhibition caused a major scandal, and, receiving worldwide press coverage, raised questions of censorship in art. The public’s reaction confirmed that the group had struck a cord with the cultural unconscious.
Noted for their conceptually driven projects, the group first began to collaborate with fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1996. Their collaborative works represented the human body in shocking, raw contexts. By inviting a fashion photographer for aid in the realization of their new works, the artists accepted mass media’s language as their own and entered into a dialogue with the glamorized images of idealized figures.
In The Suspects, Seven Innocent, Seven Sinners (1997-98) spectators are invited to distinguish seven murderous girls from seven innocent ones in a set of standard, neutral portraits. As Roland Barthes notably stated, "the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police." It uncovers prejudices and fears of common morality and releases common fears, inspired by mass media. The project is led by real events, which have been described by the press. The impossibility of the task effectively raises the question: what is the truth in photography? Furthermore, the project evoked overwhelmingly stronger emotions than news reports, which are generally considered as "more real". Russian artist, Oleg Kulik, commented: "Mass media cannot achieve as high a level of realism as art. The art images go too far".
This "high level of realism" results from the additional meaning which artists introduce into images. Appropriating the language of mass media, art not only deconstructs its myths, but also liberates the spectator’s conscious and suggests a new point of view to replace habituated pictures. The King of the Forest (2001 – 2002) by AES offers a new look at the exploitation of children in commercial photography. The series presents crowds of extremely beautiful children in splendid architectural surroundings — a Baroque palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg, Times Square, New York, the castle of Mohammed Ali, Cairo, Egypt.
The unsmiling children give the viewer a sense of anxiety and are reminiscent of the story about the mythological creature of medieval Europe, the King of the Forest, who kidnapped beautiful children to admire them in his palace. He was a prototype of the protagonist of Michel Tournier’s "Le Roi des Aulnes�", a pedophilic photographer. It is appropriate, then, to cite here Rolan Barthes’ The Camera Lucida: "In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a spectator".
The other sort of "kidnapping" committed mass culture became a theme of The Action Half Life (2003), named after 3D computer game. It shows slender teens, cast from among more than 500 top applicants screened by modeling agencies, in classical postures holding arm blusters, as if they advertising weapons. The project was shown at this year’s Sidney Biennial. One of the pictures was put on bills and posters of the festival and entered the city context, expanding into the territory occupied by advertising.
