Aleksander Konstantinov’s "View of Town N," a New Approach to the Geometric Tradition in Russia.
Aleksander Konstantinov’s "View of Town N"
By Yulia Tulovsky
Aleksander Konstantinov’s "View of Town N," a New Approach to the Geometric Tradition in Russia
In Russia, the tradition of geometric abstraction — a tradition to which the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde contributed much, but which was interrupted for many decades by the communist regime — is today not only alive, but also moving forward with a new and unusual approach. In a series of outdoor projects called View of Town N, Aleksander Konstantinov, reconciles constructivist concepts with ancient traditions of European art (which avant-garde artists rejected) and places them into the context of contemporary pop-culture, wedding hostile tendencies within twentieth-century art practice.
The series View of Town N was initiated in summer 2002 when Konstantinov was commissioned to create a piece for the fa�ade of the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow. Since then, the project has acquired international scale, with installations in various cities in Russia and abroad, including Moscow and Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia), Dornbirn (Austria), Stein am Rhein and Geneva (Switzerland). Last spring, Konstantinov extended the project to New York City with the help of the Deutsches Haus at NYU.
Konstantinov’s outdoor works represent a new genre of gigantic, fa�ade-scale "drawings" or "prints." Placed on the walls and facades of buildings, the works impart a new character to city spaces and are an innovative approach to the practice of installation. Unlike conventional examples of outdoor installation, Konstantinov’s works are not built into the real space of the viewer. On the contrary, these gigantic drawings and prints depict a very particular transcendental space and introduce it into the real space of a city. The co-existence of the actual buildings of the town and fa�ade imitations by Konstantinov casts doubt on the materiality of the former and promotes the reality of the latter. In a playful and ironic way, Konstantinov realizes the utopian dream of the Russian avant-garde artists, who aspired to transform the real word, including nature, into the language of art.
The geometry of the works clearly continues the tradition of post-constructivism and concrete art. At the same time, according to the artist, the structures depicted in the fa�ade works are based on the visual language of late fifteenth-century woodcuts of the Nuremberg School. Konstantinov’s structures are enlarged and modified transcriptions of prints of town views. These images of a town, superimposed over the buildings of a real town, make layers of time transparent, as if the town is reflecting itself through the prism of history. At the same time, the geometry of Konstantinov’s installations resembles a regular city plan — a concept realized in most contemporary megapolises. Meanwhile, the surface of the "facades" refers to the mirror-like facades of skyscrapers. The very technique with which the works are made — a combination of plastic film and hand-glued tape — relates to contemporary plastic civilization, where synthesized materials substitute for traditional ones. These cheap, temporary materials correspond with another principal aspect of the works: they are completely not-for-profit. Like advertisements on huge city billboards or scaffoldings, the works promote the notion of contemporary art among the general public, but they themselves are meant to be discarded after use, like advertisement panels or plastic cups from a fast food restaurant. This popularization of the ideas of high art by means of the materials of contemporary mass culture is akin to the popularization of visual images in the fifteenth century through the mass-produced woodcut that Konstantinov’s works imitate.
Konstantinov’s works bring the ideas of contemporary art into people’s lives in a natural and harmonious way, unlike the artificial situation of a museum. Everyday life, playing out against the background of the drawings, becomes a part of the installation. And in turn, the installation transforms the life of a town’s inhabitants. The artistic space becomes an arena for their everyday concerns, turning a routine road to work into an art happening. This interactivity constitutes an important social aspect of the works, which is specially accentuated by the artist.
The installations integrate multiple aspects of city life, ancient and contemporary. Realized in towns very different in their history, architecture, culture, and society, they emphasize the individuality of each place, and at the same time unite them all into an idea of a town per se, a "Town N". Placed in historic European towns, the works bring into the cozy, fairy-tale streets the spirit of a large city. And, on the contrary, incorporated into the middle of contemporary megapolises, they revive the memory of their origin — small cities of the middle-ages (or, in the case of New York, the colonial period). The viewers synthesize perception of the fa�ade itself with the depicted "project" of a fa�ade, the perspective of a real city with a historical print portraying a city view, a city plan with an actual city environment, historical buildings with pop-culture advertising. Town dwellers, recognizing these logical reflections and substitutions, experience a spatial complexity and the multilayered interrelations of epochs and locations.
