Alexander Felch land art projects presentation at the conclusion of work in Art residence in Kronshtadt
Vien, Austria – St.Petersburg, Russia
Contemporary
The beginning at 6:00 pm on 15 July
- Heap сontemporary
- Culture place release: roundabout
- Tramway to Kronstadt! – Kronstadt’s tramway legend
- Future avenue
National Centre for contemporary arts, St. Petersburg
Adress: Emb. of the river of Fontanka, 34, A (a wing of the Sheremetevsky palace).
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1. Heap “Contemporary”
Text / Photographs: Alexander Felch
Curator / Creator of the Heap: Mikhael A. Crest
Translation: Jason Strudler
Mikhael A. Crest – Heap
Alexander Felch – Contemporary
An excellent example of modernity is the restaurant “Teremok.” “Modern Russian Cuisine,” as someone once called it. There they make pancakes in the modern style and at the same time in the way that pancakes have always been made. Eternal pancakes.
Pancakes, in this sense, have something in common with art.
If we return to the source of “Contemporary,” we might say that everything began with a mirror. That mirror lived in a courtyard on Ulitsa Marata; in front of it lived bums. On its crooked surface someone had engraved the word “CONTEMPORARY.” Later I moved the mirror to the Dirty Gallery, where it began to reflect modernity and the art of modernity. No questions were asked, everyone understood that the mirror reflected all of that ephemerality and authenticity that exists in reality. The most authentic “Contemporary.”
Traveling to Kronstadt 3 years later, I observed how Mikhael Crest piled up contemporary art into a big heap. When he proposed that I name the heap, I, of course, immediately answered that it should be called “Contemporary,” thus logically continuing the story with the mirror.
The heap “Contemporary” is the peak of modernity in art. Contemporaneity simply cannot be more contemporary than a heap. “It is impossible not to agree with this heap,” says Mikhael Crest. Now, having named the heap “Contemporary,” we no longer refer to contemporary art as such. Only art remains – pure, in a certain sense, and simply authentic art. There is no reason to strive for modernity in art – art created in the present is by its very nature contemporary.
The “Carousel” cultural playground, the Kronstadt tram and the Prospekt Budushchego (“Prospect of the Future”), like the heap, are proposals, not givens and not obligations. In my opinion, this is how art should be. Made for people. Who else could it be for? For people – just like pancakes. Bon appétit!
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Alexander Felch, Mikhael A. Crest: Heap “Contemporary”, 2010
Alexander Felch, Mikhael A Crest: Mirror “Contemporary”, 2007
2. Alexander Felch: A Tram for Kronstadt!
Video Fairy Tale DV-PAL, 16:9, 9’58”
C-Prints, 30×20
The Legend of the Kronstadt Tramway
As part of the festival Kronfest III, I planned the birth of a new legend about the Kronstadt railway system. The realization of the installation “A Tram for Kronstadt!” was designated for the period between June 5 and June 12, 2010, along the strip of Prospekt Lenina between its intersections with Ulitsa Grazhdanskaia and Ulitsa Sovetskaia.
Through the use of a custom recording and the playback of sound through 6 stereo channels, I sought to create a spacial illusion that would be based on the subjective, associative perception of the presence of a tramway / city.
A Tram for Kronstadt!
The tramway is associated with city life due to the fact that the noise produced by this form of transport is one of the most characteristic, one of the most subconsciously-perceived of regular city noises. Therefore, this installation was conceived, on the one hand, as an allusion to the big city and its intensity of sounds. On the other hand, as a result of being translocated from the place where it was recorded to a new location, it evokes by means of acoustics an archaic Urgestalt of fear, which arises in the face of the choreography of a sound born from emptiness. The unexpected appearance of a sound associated with the tramway causes confusion and alarm. The phases of silence that fall between these intervals of sound have no lesser significance. Due to the lack of external noises (passengers, tram stop announcements), an idealized acoustic environment is created. When the tram turns a corner, silence sets in as if after an accident, but also calm, as if nothing terrible had happened. In this sense, the tramway represents an idiosyncratic register of anxiety and calm, a symphony of horror threatening to drown a small city in the daily life of a large metropolis.
At the same time, the installation achieves an effect of habituation through regular repetition over the course of a week, allowing the local residents to overcome their fear that their city will be swallowed up by the neighboring metropolis. Ideally, by the end of the week, one would be able to hear dialogues such as:
“When are we meeting?”
“Around tram #7!”
Realization
Despite the various proposals for realizing this project, “A Tram for Kronstadt” did not make it into the program of Kronfest III. Instead, it is being presented today in the form of a video fairy tale.
The organizers of the Kronfest take full responsibility for the project’s lack of realization.
What Happened
My time at the State Center for Contemporary Art in Kronstadt and my observation of the cultural environment of the city gave birth to a new project, which was successfully realized in the Summer Garden with the help of a large assemblage of local residents. Instead of a simulating a tramway, we cleaned a “Cultural Playground,” and thus “A Tram for Kronstadt” was transformed into “A Cultural Playground for Kronstadt!”
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Alexander Felch, Mikhael A. Crest: Namarata (insane tram), dvpal, 16:9, 1`13“, 2006
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3. Alexander Felch: Liberating a Cultural Playground: “Carousel”
Performance / Video Documentation, DV-PAL, 25’23”
C-Prints, 30×20
Liberating a Cultural Playground: “The Carousel”
Our liberation of a cultural playground over a period of two weeks was a direct reaction to art objects that foreign participants in the Kronfest had made of trash from the Gulf of Finland. At the heart of the campaign was the idea of reverse sculpture: instead of building something new, we decided to simply liberate something that already existed, but which no one had paid attention to.
The playground is one of several mysterious areas of the Summer Garden in Kronstadt. The residents of the city themselves have differing ideas as to what existed there earlier: an orchestra, a pavilion, a carousel, a dance floor, a heap of construction waste. Opinions similarly vary on the location of Peter the Great’s first cabin, which, legend has it, was located somewhere in the Summer Garden as well. Our cleaning of the abandoned playground was conceived as a proposal to the local residents to use existing sites for cultural activity.
What Happened
The performance of cleaning the ground of trash was seen by the local residents as an absurd act. The artists participating in the process of sweeping the forest gradually came to agree with this opinion as well. Three weeks after its opening, the cultural playground once again became a beerground, reflecting the local recreational culture.
4. Snezhana Vinogradova, Alexander Felch: Prospekt Budushego (Prospekt Of The Future)
Petition for renaming of the “Lenin Prospekt” into “Prospekt Of The Future”, A4
List of signatures, A4
Street signs, 80x25cm
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Alexander Karl Felch, *22.6.1978 in Vienna, Austria
2003 – 2008 Academy Of Fine Arts Vienna
Lives and Works in Vienna (Austria) and Sankt Petersburg (RF)
Since 2001 participation in exhibitions and festivals (Austria, China, Denmark, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Rumania, Russian Federation, USA).
