The clay project

Base Level. The Clay Project.

This project brings us back to the "days of creation, " to primary plastic art. Each new generation of artists begins at the beginning, starts with a cutting of ties, a revaluation of the past, a recasting of everything, making a "clean slate," and is longing to create something out of nothing, "ex nihilo," like the biblical God.

A hand compressing a piece of clay creates an elementary pliable object " pulota" (the empty space inside a fist).

Elementary gesture and primary matter combine in this subiective object.

The Kazakh people, as did the ancient Turks, call a handful of grain compressed in the palm of a hand "Kut," - a blessing, the power of life, the spirit, the state of real existence. Kut and " pulota", the synonyms of plasticity, this is the base level.

An 18-meter long habitable model of the human body, lying in a free pose and representing a three-dimensional shell, is cut into separate fragments by the walls of the building. Each room is penetrated by a strange object that recodes and recharges the space. In one case it is a receptacle of exposition objects: a book depository, spectators' box and a refuge for sheep. In another case it expands up to the dimensions of the exposition space itself, where the audience becomes a participant in the creative process and observes itself.

The right knee. in the form of an island and hoth wrists of hands emerge on the first floor, together with drawings, photographs and images on silk: they comprise our version of the "Base Level" of art in the late 1990s.

The figure of a dissected clay hero is a metaphor of people's estrangement in the modern world and in our art community, in particular. It makes a call for consolidation, comprehension of the situation in modern art and developing a strategy for presenting Kazakhstan to the world cultural community.

Returning back to our handicraft origins, we distance ourselves from avant-garde and ideology and actualize the tactile perception of the world using a point - blank view to sense the curvilinear corporeal surface.

"The nomad's space is defined in tactile manner, not visually, by the events of individual meetings; it strives for breaking the ice of estrangement and is circular in nature.

EVERYTHING IS AROUND ME"

It is the surface that has special meaning, "ALL EVENTS OCCUR ON THE SURFACE, on the membrane, on the skin..." (J. Deleuze).

THE BODY'S SURFACE is also a LANDSCAPE OF DESIRES. The double video film of the same name demonstrates sexual intercourse between a man and a woman on two screens: one on the floor and the other on the ceiling. The viewer finds himself between the participants in the flow of desires within this super-tactile, dangerously explosive zone.

Rustam Khalfin

In the Zone of Tactile Attention.

This art project, performed under the supervision of Almaty artists Rustam Khalfin and Georgy Tryakin-Bukharox, transports us to the nomad experience of space perception, the experience analyzed by the French Postmodernism philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their paper know as "The Treatise of Nomadology” (1980).

The autors of the above paper characterize nomad space as a “space of minimal distances”, “space of individual events of contact”, “space which is more taclile than visual”. None the less, independently of the analysis of French theoreticians, the artists decided to demonstrate visually their specific experience of assimilating tactile space. This experience is unique due to a number of essential features: first, the gigantic 18-meter anthropomorphic figure constitutes a hollow shell, partly covered by a layer of clay.

The figure is in the basement, whose walls and ceiling represent planes cutting the figure into a number of separate fragments. Second, the floor of the first storey, representing the base level, is zoned and assimilated in a tactile manner. It is precisely that "space of deterritorialization" which sets the tone of nomad movement from the center to the periphery. Here we are dealing with the strategy of sensuality making us, the spectators, close to the world during its creation. Two hands erected on the base level, one exhibiting pulota (elementary pliable object) and the other in the shape of a tube and manifesting the simplest optical device, create special tactile rhythms around themselves which are not subject to optical illusions. These hands form a tactile aura and a certin type of hieroglyphs denoting primary matrices of world perception. The third element is a video film displaying scenes of intercourse between a man and a woman.

The camera angle is extremely important for the film; since the authors decided to simulate the incorporation of the video camera into the partner's eyesight system, all episodes were shot from such close distance that it created the effect of a subjective eye appearing in the video camera lens. Located between two screens showing the film, a spectator seems to be involved into the action. All three of these elements come together to produce the impression that the flesh is a landscape surface, something free-flowing from one topography into another.

It is in the flesh surface that all internal and external horizons of things are inscribed. The flesh surface does not allow man's body experience to be lost due to disintegration.

The combined exposition space indicates that the integral form of our Ego is not conciousness, but rather the body, with its convexities and concavities. For instance, the sieve-like structure of the character's figure is a peculiar metaphor of a collective body plunged into fully engrossing and intensive desire. The figure also expresses the economy of desire associated not so much with a lack but with an abundance, which paradoxically is located on one plane with ironical refusal, with non-desire or non-act. In its turn, the Base Level should mark a rather vast area of contact as one of the most fundamental properties of desire.

In general, this project also probes the guidelines of art's progress driven out to the periphery of the artist's desire to be above the reality, under reality, beyond reality, thereby constructing a discursive-subtle simulation and change of meanings.

Today's art has an urge to return to original sources as never before, i.e. to the condition when it was called "techne," meaning not only art and craftwork, but also ingenuity, resourcefulness, sensitivity, subtleness of mind and feeling. To be perceptive and resourceful it is necessary to be on the surface of a thin membrane, on the Base Level, to be a membrane that responds to the touch of real things in a sensitive way.

Reducing the sensitivity sphere to tactile space, this project thereby offers us closer forms of contact with reality and art absorbed by reality. What once seemed so far becomes close in its tactile completeness.

Zhanat Baimukhametov

You can view the works and photos of the exhibition on our website by following the link.