Reality is disloyal to art: sometimes external shocks urge the artists to perform roles that are rather far from traditional view on the arts. For example, the Clean Room project that was in operation for only one night at the Kyiv Promzona Club appeared to be more social and relevant than its organizers supposed. The project is a second part of the Crimean Nuclear Station. The investment project is a long term action announced last summer and is timed to coincide with Quasar- Micro Corporation’s tenth anniversary that provided technical support for the exposition. The room’s relevance is that the project’s participants and curators appeal to the public’s simple but strong feeling: the wish for the best possible, aesthetically arranged life.
Indeed, according to the Crimea Nuclear concept, it is supposed to create no less than a recreation area in the neighborhood of the deserted construction of the Crimean Nuclear Power Station, where modern art, high technologies, and profitable business, are supposed to peacefully coexist and flourish. It is not known whether this kind of arrangement in South Ukrainian Hong Kong style is in the plans of the organizers or is it a kind of a long-playing sociocultural provocation (looks more like a second option). In any case, Clean Room is interpreted in the manner of virtual prosperity. At the most popular as for today’s Kyiv Club, next door to the extreme sports fans’ crashing party, a quite comfortable, blinking with lights of monitors and television screens, space, something like the fifth dimension in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The participants’ stuff was habitual — a set of names almost constantly present at all media arts shows. The central element undoubtedly was Vasyl Tsaholov’s performance, Parallel World: Experiment 1: Raking Up. People in white radiation protection costumes were hoeing soil around cabbage-heads on a vegetable patch in the middle of the hall, the artist himself commented the performance, and all this was broadcast on a huge screen. In fact, this work stressed the artist’s intention to create for one night a kind of art laboratory where craving for technique would be counterbalanced with the spectators’ interest. Clean Room actually looked like a self-sufficient experimental workshop or, more likely, which is typical for this kind of project, a play room. In fact, the spectator was offered electrified sideshows of various grades of attractiveness. The True and Real by Mykhailo Shevchenko looked witty — a pictorial composition where painted park’s pastoral peace is trespassed by holographic phantoms. However, handmade monsters also surrounded the exhibition visitors. Most of the works seemed to be a part of one big installation where mechanisms and fragments of human faces and bodies were flickering and twitching in a nervous web, a film with no plot and no author, self-sufficient with respect to the spectator, scattered on many screens. Against this background black and white women’s photo portraits of the I’m Going to Have a Baby Boy series by Serhiy Bratkov looked unexpectedly fresh and original. Even a small hint of a vivid, not phantom existence was most essential in this kingdom of machinery. For the same reason Dmytro Dulfan’s No name should be noted, because along with the traditional curved neon lights here were well-considered compositions of stones, miniature fountains, and bonsai.
The laboratory is a place where a vaccine against mortal diseases or killing viruses can be created. Everything depends on what you bring to the humanity. Art by its nature is like an infection, except that it has an opposed sign: infecting itself, it provides a chance for a more elegant variant of reality where there are no unfinished “objects,” pigsty beaches, and insatiable humanoids. The culture that was born in the Clean Room to the processors’ noise seems to be condemned to an existence in retort to secluded experiments not coming across their borders. Perhaps this is not so little.
