15 MINUTES OF FAME: the personal project of Andriy Galashin
27.05 - 27.06.2010
15 MINUTES OF FAME
From the Lwiw artist from Costa-Rica
Kyiv, Thursday, the 27th of May, 19.00 - Collection Gallery opens new personal project "15 Minutes of Fame" of young Ukrainian author, the finalist of the prize Pinchuk Art Prize ANDRIY GALASHIN.
Nearly 10 paintings and 2 monumental sculptures are dedicated to the social templates of eternal youth and fame that influence a modern human being. The heroines of the new series of Andriy Galashin died in this struggle but didn't admit their defeat - that is the tragicomedy of the situation.
A woman on the beach, that tries to look young, reminds Donatella Versace with a new bust that looks like as f it was glued to the body - is a winner among the women of the same age category. But it's the Pyrrhic victory. As one of the classics said about the rejuvenation mania: one can smooth out the wrinkles, but what to do with senility?
Thinking ironically - Andriy Galashin uses the stylistics of pop-art (where for the first time body was advertised as goods). The advertising vice versa appears here, anti-advertising - the offered "goods" are not in the best condition. From the arsenal of pop-art (that as criteria of evaluations appeals to the notion of "pop-taste") Galashin borrows the reproduced on the surface of canvases text logos that bring the main code messages for the zombie of our time - average consumer.
They seem to be borrowed from "the board of wishes": I'm genius, I'm a star, and I'm fashionable… All these affirmations sound falsely and funny. But it doesn't matter if you criticize them or not, there was no chance to doubt their influence on the mass consciousness...
Though the author is young, it's his 7th personal exhibition. Previous personal and group projects took part in the USA. The best young artists' competition of PinchukArtPrize returned the author's name to Ukraine.
Andriy Galashin: "What about my artistic return… Before returning to Kyiv I was busy opening art markets of North and South America for me. And Costa-Rica in this case - is my tropical studio and a convenient strategic placement for work, "Because in the modern global world you can create wherever you want without forgetting your own heritage". "That's why to make exhibitions in Ukraine is very important for me."
The opening of the exhibition will take part on the 27th of May, on Thursday as usual, at 19.00 at the address, Kyiv, vyl. Pankivska, 8, Collection Gallery. For further information, commentaries and reproductions please contact Daryna Zholdak, director of Collection Gallery zholdak@collectiongallery.com.ua or zholdak@gmail.com or telephone +380674011201.
www.collectiongallery.com.ua
Victoria Burlaka
Andriy Galashin's project in Collection Gallery 27.05.2010
15 MINUTES OF FAME
Andy Warhol promised that in future everybody can claim on own 15 minutes of fame. These words became a prophecy , absolute reality, with the difference that everybody must claim on own 15 minutes of fame - maybe even forcibly. You must be in the public eye - be a public personality, not "a person of the crowd". Mass-culture is holding on this division - crowd and its idols, "stars" - and their fans. The period of staying in the "star" status is relatively short - they fade as fast as they appear: wild concurrence leads to a momentary rotation…
It's not a big deal: to claim up one need to catch the time rhythm, correspond to its mobility. That is why "losers" fall out of the "furious" tempus of life: it could be observant or active earlier. Today our choices are taken away, like time for a self-knowledge. Despite of all popular coaching programs for a personality harmonization, only few of us are listening to themselves and understand what they really need. All this individuation "lyrics" is associated with wrong goals and wrong values. Social adaptation - that is what our time demands. We are forced to need the offered welfare. It's the rhetoric of lost freedom. Success becomes "the categorical imperative" of society towards a personality. You don't have any right to be slow - jump in the last wagon of the success train. Society is like a fat housewife, who tries to fill her own unrealization with social and professional realization of her child. She is dragging her child, who is trying to escape, to the Olympus. In the psychology there is a notion of "maternal scripts" - that aren't basically ours. Formed in our childhood - at a mature age they continue leading a person into a direction opposite to the understanding of her own goal. The main script - is a well-known " be cool"…
Another social guideline that forms the problems of mass-culture - is to be forever young. The body cult is the circumstance of so-called bio-politics, all-round state control over the destiny of a person who has no control over her life and even her death. A person has to exhaust herself in gyms and use all "know-how" in the sphere of healthy nourishment, pharmaceutics and cosmetology, be healthy and pretty. Such person must be always in a good shape, because body is becoming goods, and one of the most needed. That is why people who feel themselves and look adequately to their age - are people "out of trend". We become more infantile in our thinking: our psychological age doesn't catch up after our biological age… According to Beigbeder - real machos don't look at adult women. The beauty "ideal" has a taste of pedophilia - the most popular are the 15-year old anorexic girls. If the reality is cruel and "the star time" of modern beauties is running out so quickly - Botox and silicon were invented for its prolongation. But all of these temporary measures don't solve this problem cardinally. The theme of getting irretrievably old raises a panic fear, that gets to the list f "eternal questions" that raise the biggest excitement together with death and sex. The most visited are internet-sites that are full of rumors about stars' lives, with their photos and videos with the names "they have lost in the fight with time"…
The heroines of the new series of Andriy Galashin died in this struggle but didn't admit their defeat - that is the tragicomedy of the situation. A woman on the beach, that tries to look young, reminds Donatella Versace with a new bust that looks like as f it was glued to the body - is a winner among the women of the same age category. But it's the Pyrrhic victory. As one of the classics said about the rejuvenation mania: one can smooth out the wrinkles, but what to do with senility?
Thinking ironically - Andriy Galashin uses the stylistics of pop-art (where for the first time body was advertised as goods). The advertising vice versa appears here, anti-advertising - the offered "goods" are not in the best condition. From the arsenal of pop-art (that as criteria of evaluations appeals to the notion of "pop-taste") Galashin borrows the reproduced on the surface of canvases text logos that bring the main code messages for the zombie of our time - average consumer.
They are like borrowed from "the board of wishes": I'm genius, I'm a star, I'm fashionable… All these affirmations sound falsely and funny. But it doesn't matter if you criticize them or not, there was no chance to doubt their influence on the mass consciousness...
© Victoria Burlaka, 2010
