Artist use poetry, which is naturally inherent to the creation of a closed space detached from the reality, with a determined intent to overcome this detachment, to reinforce the word with action and grant the poetic text materiality. Arsenev invokes in his work the verse poet of the conceptual school of Vsevolod Nekrasov, which, having found themselves on the territory of art, follow one after the other, materializing in letters made of Styrofoam. Poetry takes on the form of the object in space and evolvement of the time, which is inherent to the action. For Pavel Arsenev, poetry’s departure from the boundaries of the printed page is related to its injection into the social every day, as is vividly demonstrated by the fate of the banner he created with the phrase, “You don’t even represent/can’t even imagine us,” which became a symbol of the civil upsurge of the recent protest movement.
However, the work “Original spelling preserved” is also a meditation on the power of art and the role of the artist. The “investigator’s office” and the author’s poem “Expertise” which resounds in it serve as a counterpoint to this materialized poetic lines, problematizing the emancipatory pathos of art and the unrelenting appeal to redirect art towards life. Delineating the space between poetry and reality, language and experience, desire and possibility, the installation “Original spelling preserved” frames the question of what it means for the artist to interact with reality as the most pressing one today.
Elena Iaichnikova, curator
“Establishing as their task the de-alienation of everyday life through the saturation of it with poetry, spatial textual compositions aim to embed something poetic in those parts of the urban space, where they are not supposed to be and where they might catch the attention of the passer-by. It is also important for me to establish a new understanding of poetry itself, which, as I see it, is realized today largely beyond the boundaries of the printed page.”
Pavel Arsenev
Venues:
- Start gallery, Moscow (2012)
- III Moscow Biennale of Young Artists, Moscow (2013)
- Manifesta10 Parallel programm, Petersburg (2014)