Calvert 22’s David Thorp and Joseph Backstein of Moscow’s Institute for Contemporary Art adapted their title for this show from French theorist Marcel de Certeau’s ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, with its rather appropriate double entendre. Since where in the West is everyday life something that requires practice?
Four of these eight young Russian artists have latched on to the repetitious nature of everyday activity: Alexander Ditmarov, Taus Makhacheva and Arseniy Zhilyaev all have films on continuous play, while Sergey Ogurtsov fashions looping sculptures out of open books.
Pretension, unfortunately, is everywhere: Ogurtsov’s pieces make reference to Freud, Artaud etc, while Anya Titova’s uninspiring installation ‘House of Culture’ purports to critique minimalism. Zhilyaev, meanwhile, is channelling Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Luc Godard in one piece, which ought to get him some kind of pseud’s award, except that any artist who claims a porn film expresses female desire obviously has bigger issues than pseudishness.
But there are a couple of artists here who make the trip worthwhile. Ditmarov’s film of a ski lift in summer, set to soaring classical music, is a hymn to futility: it’s impossible to watch it without pondering Five Year Plans and utopian thinking. His game of billiards, in a drab room, where the balls look like chipped and dessicated versions of those globes that every fine bourgeois family once used to pinpoint parts of the world, is equally touching.
Tanya Akhmetgalieva’s embroidery is an eerily beautiful conflation of imagination and domesticity. And Yulia Ivashkina’s paintings are like Daliesque bad dreams: in a perfectly ordinary room, a hole in the floor gapes, or a wall morphs into a sheet held up by a stick. The world is a flimsy, unreliable place, and no amount of practice will perfect it.