AES+F: Seduction and Amorality

The collective AES+F (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes) was formed at the end of the 1980s in Moscow. The very selection of the name, as if it were an acronym for a multinational corporation, communicates the work strategy of these artists. Under the expressive, seductive guise of advertising language and full of references to mannerist and baroque art, their works never avoid politically-incorrect themes such as childhood manipulation, violence, the clash of civilizations or the behavior of the new oligarchies.

By F. Javier Panera Cuevas*

One of the works that caused a major impact -but also fiercely conflicting points of view- within events collateral to the 53^rd Venice Biennial was The Feast of Trimalchio, a huge multi-screen video installation by the collective of Russian artists AES+F (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes), which was part of the project “Unconditional Love.” The Feast of Trimalchio is directly inspired by a famous text by the poet Gaio Petronio (1^st Century BC.), whose central theme was the reconstruction of a lavish dinner celebrated by Trimalchio -a freed Roman slave who became nouveau riche- in an orgiastic, decadent and amoral environment that -just as in Fellini’s controversial 1969 Satyricon- was not difficult to interpret as a metaphor for the behavior of certain contemporary oligarchies.

DYSTOPIAS IN PARADISE

Every banquet lends itself to an exuberant mise en scène and in this respect AES+F do not disappoint. Their The Feast of Trimalchio is definitely an excessive work and, taking into account that it was conceived one year before controversial photographs came to light of scandalous private parties held at the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private residence Villa Certosa, it was incredibly prophetic.

The Dystopian Arcadia, a luxury hotel in the midst of a heavenly island, where The Feast of Trimalchio now takes place, is an amalgam of digitally recreated oriental and neoclassic architecture. Assorted personages roam through it. They are polyphonously related and their poses emulate the iconographic archetypes of mannerist painting as well as the frozen and distant gestures of high fashion models.This has become the stylistic hallmark of this collective of artists. These figures personify a new oligarchy. Just as in Nero’s time, they continually seek pulsional satisfaction from pleasure, with the addendum that now they watch their cholesterol, eat balanced meals and Japanese seaweed; they relax in the sauna and spend long hours at the gym in the company of young boys and girls with sculptured bodies … AES+F plays with our scopic pulsion, and the suggestive and slow “travelings” of the video installation function like the glance of a voyeur who spies on the relationships of seduction and power established among all of the personages. The Feast of Trimalchio does not take place at Villa Certosa, but rather on an exotic island suspended in time. Nevertheless, what truly upset many Italians who saw the installation in the summer of 2009 was the feeling that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

“GLAMOUR TO KILL 2″

The heavenly island on which The Feast of Trimalchio takes place is in reality not very different from the mountain where Last Riot (2007) their previous video installation presented at the 52^nd Venice Biennial took place. As the members of AES+F themselves commented: It “celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics (…)”² The protagonists of the Last Riot are young warriors without ideology, dressed in trendy camouflage gear, who “fight for the pleasure of fighting”; the guests at Trimalchio’s dinner are professional hedonists who seek “unconditional pleasure.”  We thus witness the final rebellion in which everybody fights against everybody else and against they themselves, where there is no longer any difference between victim and aggressor. Next to the end of time, the exhaustion of modernity, the crack in ideologies and the “im-possibility” of history, the artists suffer from aphasia and confront (as Donald Kuspit suggests), more than the death of art, the deactivation of meanings.

The bacchanalian nature of “fashion violence” in the Last Riot (2007) and the photographs of the series Action Half Life (2005-2006) constitute a psychological and social portrait of a youth that has been educated in a structurally violent system in which the values of image and consumption have replaced the naturalness/originality of the individual. This provokes a state of seduction and estrangement in the spectator similar to that experienced when the “live” transmission of wars on television appears like a video game and torture taking place in prisons presents itself as a sophisticated sexually sadistic exercise.

“WE ARE THE WORLD, WE ARE THE CHILDREN”

I have always been interested in the ambiguous ideological ambience of AES+F’s oeuvre: the ability to cross the boundary that separates grotesque reality from credible fiction, the narcissism of political incorrectness. In fact, this is not the first time that the work of these artists has revealed a surprising prophetic ability. I recall that my first contact with their work occurred thanks to their participation in the exhibition “Barrocos y Neobarrocos. El infierno de lo bello”³, which took place at Salamanca’s DA2 from October through December 2005. The video trilogy entitled The King of the Forest (2001-2003) interested me because of its clever combination of historical and transcultural references, its more or less literal “references” to the work of “fashion” artists, such as, Vanessa Beecroft or Shirin Neshat and its aesthetics close to the world of fashion and advertising in which, using children as protagonists, it was closely related to the “multiculturalism of fiction” of Benetton and the adolescent nonchalance of Calvin Klein models. The result is perfectly controlled sensationalism; it wields a hypnotic appeal over the spectator and leaves him psychologically defenseless, since there is not a single element of attraction in it that does not imply, directly or indirectly, an underlying threat … In effect, the hypnotic “build-up” of “very attractive” children posing in underwear, whose innocence is threatened by the power of religion, politics and advertising -and also by the shameful, lascivious leer of the spectator- perfectly exemplified “The hell of the beautiful,” the famous essay by Karl Rosenkranz (1853), which today has become a metaphor for “extreme moral tension,” generating in a great many contemporary artists the sensation that beauty, “can disguise the real and dazzle and distract us from suffering and injustice (…)” (Panera, 28).

Just as the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York appeared to emulate the disaster movie Made in Hollywood in real time, crude reality reproduced in the media the performative fiction created by AES+F in The King of the Forest some months earlier. On September 1, 2004 a group of Chechnyan terrorists kidnapped hundreds of children at a school in Beslan, Russia. The children were held captive inside the school gymnasium, deprived of food and water and in order to withstand the suffocating heat, they had to take all their clothes off or remain in their underwear … Three days later, an armed confrontation between the terrorists and security forces resulted in the death of the kidnappers and more than 300 hostages, among them 170 children … At the time, the terrorists were able to garner worldwide attention by aiming their weapons at innocent children, and the broadcast media contributed to this by broadcasting the terrible images on television during prime time, thereby guaranteeing the sponsors additional exposure … Although broadcast media stressed the cruelty of the terrorist attack, public opinion was especially offended because television cameras repeatedly broadcast images of the few children who were able to escape from the school, running through the streets in their underwear, their faces filled with terror … As Robert Leonard has noted⁴, it is on occasions such as this that our moral panic regarding the abuse of children is spectacularly aligned with reality, and then, alongside our obsession to safeguard childhood innocence, the morbid and “pornographic” facets of the media are revealed.

In this same order of things, the most disturbing aspect of AES+F’s oeuvre is that it is situated on the slippery slope that separates social criticism from indulgent exaltation and -interestingly enough- appearance, probably because they themselves are conscious of the fact that today criticism can no longer be anything other than “pure appearance.” In the presence of marketing image saturation, on occasion visual artists have sought to have the contemporary eye react to “overexposure” and have the marketing image itself abet in the artist’s critique. One can recognize, however, that this strategy involves the neutralization of the message itself. As Fredric Jameson notes: “The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it (…), that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological maneuver and not a creative resource.” (135)

MEMENTO MORI

To end our interpretation in “neo-baroque code,” I believe that all the work of AES+F should be read as a memento mori in which time appears to stand still. Their videos and photographs merge the extreme temporality of fashion with the constant and inevitable nature of death … the offensive beauty and youth of the protagonists remind us that in our society aspects, such as, illness, old age and death are taboo. It is perhaps, because of this, since their very first photographs and videos, cadavers -dressed in high fashion- have come to life, moving to the rhythm of pop music (Defile, 2001, We Want to Live Forever, 1999), manifesting our identity crisis and above all, the fragility and inconsistency of our history.

NOTES

1 “Unconditional  Love”  was shown at Arsenale Novissimo y Tese di San Cristoforo and was curated by Alexandrina Markvo, Alinda Sbraagia and Christina Steinbreceher. It assembled 18 artistas including Marina Abramovic, Jaume Plensa, Win Delvoye, Angelo Fusco, Miltos Manetas, Angelo Bucarelli as well as AES+F.

² The quotation: “This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics” comes from a text drafted by the artists for the presentation of their series of videos and photographs: Last Riot and Last Riot 2, 2005-2007. It can be found on their web page:  www.aes-group.org/last_riot.asp. Furthermore, it was used in the press release for their installation in the Russian pavilion at the                                   2007 Venice Biennial.

³ The exhibition “Barrocos y Neobarrocos. El infierno de lo bello” (Baroque and Neo-baroque. The Hell of the Beautiful) was a project by Javier Panera in which Paco Barragán and Omar Pascual participated as guest curators.

⁴ Leonard Robert, and Janita Craw. “Somos el mundo, somos los niños”. Press release for AES+F’s exhibition “The King of the Forest” at the Juan Ruiz Galería, Maracaibo, Venezuela, 2005: http://www.juanruizgaleria.com. Furthermore, Robert Leonard and Janita Craw were the curators of the exhibition entitled “Mixed-Up Childhood” (2005) at the Auckland Art Gallery in which they also used the same concepts.

WORKS CITED

Jameson, Fredric. “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London and New York: Verso Books, 1998.

Kuspit, Donald. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Panera, F. J., ed. Barrocos y Neobarrocos el infierno de lo bello. Salamanca: Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, 2005.

Rosenkranz, Karl. Estética de lo feo (1853), Madrid: Julio Ollero Editor, 1992.

* F. Javier Panera Cuevas is the director of DA2, Domus Artium 02, in Salamanca and professor of Art Criticism at the Universidad de Salamanca. His most recent publication is Música para tus ojos: Artes visuales y estética del videoclip (2009). He has curated retrospectives of artists such as Kendell Geers, Fabian Marcaccio, Franz Ackermann, Ulrike Rosenbach and Chris Cunningham.