AES+F' GROUP by Virginia Billeaud Anderson & Douglas Britt

DISTURBING VIEWS OF TODAY'S YOUTH

Macabre exhibit pictures kids in violent scenarios

By Douglas Britt

The roles of youth in today's culture come under
scrutiny in an exhibition by four Russian
collaborative artists known as the AES+F group.

Curated by Olga Sviblova, director of the
Multimedia Art Center in Moscow, the show at the
Station Museum of Contemporary Art brings
together two photographic installations and a
mind-blowing, post-apocalyptic video that show
why the group's members - Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev
Evzovich, Evengy Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes -
are in demand on the international art circuit.

The three-channel, high-definition video, Last
Riot (2007), pictures the rapid expansion of the
virtual world taken to end-of-history extremes.

Androgynous teens

"Epochs of the past exist simultaneously with the
future, and creation walks hand in hand with
disintegration," Sviblova writes in the
exhibition booklet of the eerie cyber paradise
AES+F has created to spectacular effect using 3-D
animation.

Apparently the only people left in this brave new
world are a group of androgynous teen models
locked in never-ending, choreographed combat,
which Sviblova aptly describes as a
"somnambulistic dance battle" reminiscent of
Caravaggio's aesthetic, not to mention those of
countless magazine ads and video games.

As the music of Richard Wagner plays, signs of
the world's continued destruction and renewal
abound around the oblivious combatants.

Missiles fire and planes crash, but meanwhile,
rodents copulate, and pterodactyl-like creatures
share the landscape - sometimes arctic, sometimes
desert, sometimes green with tanks.

Remnants of the cultural residue of all nations
and times pervade the new epoch.

Nobody feels

Meanwhile, the teens keep at it in slow motion,
firing their guns, slitting each other's throats,
pounding one another with baseball bats. But not
one drop of blood gets spilled, and nobody gets
hurt. Nobody seems to feel anything.

As the artists write in the booklet, "there is no
longer any difference between victim and
aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates
the end of ideology, history and ethics."

And along with it, the end of passion.

There's a lot of commentary here about the
sanitizing of war and the narcotizing effects of
advertising.

The artists have struck an ideal balance between
using seduction and repulsion to make their
points. They've created a truly mesmerizing video
in the process.

It's easy to see why this video was well received at the 52nd Venice
Biennale.

Half and half

For Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous
(1997), AES+F photographed 14 girls between the
ages of 11 and 15. Shot against neutral
backgrounds, these straightforward images could
be enlarged yearbook photos, but there's a twist:
Half the girls were photographed in a Moscow
school, and the other seven were shot in a
reformatory for criminal girls. The members of
the latter group had all committed murders, often
during arguments. Their victims were frequently
men they said were coming on to them.

The installation surrounds you with the
photographs of all 14 girls and challenges you to
try and figure out which ones are the murderers.
Of course, it's impossible to tell, and the
artists are withholding the girls' identities.

Seeing a piece like this in Texas, with our brisk
pace of executions and overturned death-penalty
convictions, is particularly unnerving after you
realize you have a 50-50 chance of being wrong
about who the killers around you are. But the
artists are also presenting the phenomenon of
juvenile female murderers as a symptom of the
social and economic upheavals of Russia in the
mid-90s when, as Sviblova writes, "one was
desperately seeking for a way to survive in the
new circumstances of 'wild capitalism.' Women and
children, who sometimes turned out to be the
'weak link,' sometimes reacted to the situation
in destructive and inadequate ways."

Decked-out corpses

Defile (2000-2007) consists of digital collages
mounted on seven lightboxes. To create the
series, the artists photographed and videotaped
seven unknown bodies in a morgue, then shot live
models wearing fashion garments. They then
manipulated the imagery to create a Project
Runway nightmare: corpses decked out in
high-fashion attire, clothes fluttering as if the
dead models were on the set of a photo shoot or
breezing down a catwalk.

As the artists point out, humans have been
"decorating death" for a long time. The way they
pair the youth-fixated temporality of high
fashion with the inevitability of decay and death
is interesting, but does it, as AES+F writes,
grant "these morbid forms a sense of dignity and
beauty in death"?

Maybe. Since these corpses were classified as
unknown, perhaps this project gives them the
proper send-off they never had.

Pics <http://www.aes-group.org/default.asp>

Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7X07ZDnu2o>

<http://en.rian.ru/video/20071225/94089919.html>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TbvFyabrg&feature=related>

* Where: The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 1502 Alabama.

* When: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, through Feb. 29.

* Admission: Free.

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

>>>

AES+F'S "LAST RIOT" AT THE STATION

by Virginia Billeaud Anderson

December 2007

Could an entire generation be psychically altered
by media images of violence and war? By computer
technology and its virtual capabilities? What
about the unsparing assault of advertising? Last
Riot (2007), a video by the Russian collaborative
artists AES+F at the Station Museum of
Contemporary Art, jacks around in a big way with
these questions. Last Riot is a breathtaking,
unhinged piece of work that draws from fashion
photography, print-ads, video gaming, popular
culture, film animation and Caravaggio. And then
there are the fornicating mice.

"It was the strongest thing there," said Station
Museum's Jim Harithas about Last Riot's success
at the 52nd Venice Biennale . "I did everything I
could to get it here," he said, which was not
easy given the artists' heavy exhibition
schedules. "They're the biggest thing in Europe,"
Harithas said. The "they" in AES+F are
Moscow-based video and photo artists Tatiana
Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and
Vladimir Fridkes. The exhibition's curator is
Olga Sviblova, Director of Moscow's Multimedia
Art Center. Presented on three HD screens, the
Station Museum's exhibition of Last Riot marks
the first time the work has been shown in an
American museum.

A battle fought by fashion model-looking young
people dressed in Benetton-type sportswear drives
the video's narrative. They swing swords,
daggers, and other obscene weapons in a
constantly changing landscape. As the rioters'
figures slowly and majestically shift in battle,
their pimply adolescence is magnified,
exacerbating the horror of their machine guns.
The Leonardo putti face of a curly-headed male
child is a brilliant casting choice. The battle
scenes are interspersed with allusions to
death-dark clouds, flying nuke warheads, rolling
Desert Storm tanks, 9/11 crashing planes? all
vivid metaphors for cataclysmic doom and worldly
destruction. Meanwhile, those humping lab mice,
along with random flying dinosaurs, conjure
visions of an earth repopulated without humans.
Check out the music -you don't have to be capable
of discerning Tristan from Valkyries to be moved
by the power and sweeping majesty of Wagner. This
music is big like death.

Despite the video's death imagery, blood and
dying are absent from the kiddie battle.
Stylistically, Last Riot's battle action borrows
from video gaming; it's a commentary on computer
game warfare that permits virtual annihilation of
an enemy without risk of death. There exists a
Western-world generation for whom war has become
sanitized. "We lost the knowledge of war,"
Sviblova explained. "Death has become separated
from our consciousness. Blood, death?it's not a
reality. That can change human nature!"

Just as Last Riot dissects virtual war, it also
offers discourse on the advertising world's
cultivation of un-caged consumerism. The rioters'
mall clothes, media-genic beauty and runway
physiques, along with print-ad style
compositional arrangements, parody advertising's
glossy packaging, which is gangsterish in its
persuasive power.

There can't be a more damaged crackpot in all of
art history than Caravaggio, a murderer and
fugitive whose dissipation, homoerotic
utterances, extensive police record and sublime
talent make him perhaps the weirdest of the old
masters. AES+F pay homage to the painter by
appropriating Caravaggio posed androgynous youths
in mythological compositions, staged scenes of
dramatic struggles and grotesque torture in his
religious works, and created dizzying emotional
intensity in his paintings' conversion and burial
narratives. A boy staring into the water like the
mythical Narcissus is one of AES+F's many
allusions to the Baroque master.

Along with Last Riot, AES+F present two powerful
but warped photographic series. Defile
(2000-2007), offers jaw-dropping conceptual
creepiness with life-size light box photographs
of morgue corpses digitally dressed in high
fashion. The viewer is not spared grotesque
deathbed details such as IV punctures, bruises,
edema, and ghoulish opened-mouth rigor mortis.
Pairing the faddishness of designer fashion with
the inevitability of death devilishly mocks the
funeral practice of trying to dress-up death. Try
to imagine the artists' refrigerated photo
sessions. These images are as shocking as they
are beautiful.

Suspects (1997), in which the artists
photographed fourteen young girls-seven of them
are convicted murderers, and seven aren't. All of
the portraits are shot in the same attractive
frontal style, making it a game for the viewer to
guess who is a killer and who is innocent.
Included in the installation is chilling wall
plaque text describing each crime-a 13-year-old
kitchen-knifed her 40-year-old male neighbor, a
15-year-old stabbed her uncle, a 15-year-old
helped her friends kick a man to death, etc. The
series addresses the tragedy of those who
detonated due to the tremendous societal changes
during mid-1990s post-Soviet "wild capitalism."
"Women and children were the weakest link. The
evidence can be seen in the prisons," Sviblova
said,

Controversial art can get your ass in trouble. A
now iconic work from the group's 1996 series,
Witnesses of the Future: The Islamic Project,
which depicted the Statue of Liberty holding a
Koran and covered in a burka, caused some fuss.
The work's ironic commentary on Western paranoia
about the spread of Islam was lost in the
post-9/11 climate, drawing inconvenient attention
to the artists. AES (this was the pre-Fridkes
era) was dubbed "anti-Islamic" and called "media
terrorists." Curator Olga Sviblova has also been
controversial. This is the woman who brought the
work of Mapplethorpe to Russia when things were
"opening up." She has also exhibited images by
Andres Serrano of "Piss Christ" fame. The
exhibition at the Station continues the
provocation.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson is an artist and
writer currently living in Houston. Add Comment

C 2001 - 2007 Glasstire Jan. 4, 2008