Pieces
author: Kiril Vasilev
After a 20 year pause Kosyo Minchev once again shows an exhibition in Sofia. In gallery Raiko Aleksiev of the Union of the Bulgarian Artists, he arranged sculptures of monumental sizes: five heads and a male torso. One of the heads was placed independently at the entrance, while the remaining four and the torso were exhibited in the central hall. The torso was set in the center, the four heads were arranged in a square around it.
The sculptures are made of resin, though at first glance they seem as if cast in bronze. The display of the works in the space of the gallery was submitted to a strict order and symmetry which stressed the expressive character of the sculptures. The exhibition was called Coarse which in English means physical coarseness, unrefined, raw, uneven, rude, vulgar. The title describes not only the sculptures’ appearance but paradoxically it is also an aesthetic position which insists on its anti-aestheticism. This stance occurs time and time again in European art throughout the 20 century – from expressionism through art brut to neo-expressionism. It stems from the understanding that “good taste” and the aesthetic norms in art discriminate the authentic expression of the deepest emotions and experiences of an individual. Children’s art, as is the art of psychiatric patients, serve as a model for these radical trends. Later in history their institutional and commercial success turns them into the next aesthetic convention, into the next normative artistic practice. Kosyo Minchev is aware of all of this and irrespectively decides to play this game once more, but changes the bets.
First, in his anti-aestheticism there is no strife to express some suppressed or caught in the pitfalls subjectivity of aesthetic conventions. That is to say, there is a wholly negative story, of a negative realization of the individual’s freedom in the sphere of art. The artists’ task in this case is to grasp which one is unacceptable, which is thought a display of bad taste and a lack of understanding of art at this particular moment and cultural context, and to try to use it against this situation. The return of tradition in sculpture, though deformed and exaggerated, is exactly such an experience. But Minchev is not naïve and hardly believes in the true return of traditions, to that idea of art of the Renaissance which dominated Western culture till the beginning of the 20th c. Nor does he believe in the emancipating program of modernism. His return to tradition is more demonstrative, a show of “bad taste”, rather than a search for the alternative. For such a demonstration, the presence of tradition in the artwork must have a most clichéd appearance. Such is the case with classical torso of the young man which was in the center of the exhibition gallery of Raiko Aleksiev. To this torso which reminds us of many similar such that we have seen in museums and parks of every European city, Kosyo Minchev adds a highly deformed head. In it tradition is both undermined and modified. Here the artist doesn’t use a ready-made classical sample, he rather deforms the structural elements of the human head to an extent of its total destruction. The face of one of the heads is totally broken down. On another we can make out a grotesque grin and in place of a mouth gaps wide open a huge hole. With these deformations Minchev tries to achieve the impression that they are probably the result of fierce natural processes of deterioration. In some places he has succeeded, in others he has not, but looked at from a distance the torso and the heads seem like museum exhibits of monumental proportions, victim of some explosion or fire. The tradition is just a piece left behind, it is not the living, breathing presence. It is sanctified with destruction, which as a negative expression of artistic freedom – sanctified by the bits and pieces of tradition.
In a peculiar way does Kosyo Minchev’s exhibition, with all its deterioration and sarcasm, introduce two at first glance entirely opposing nostalgia – the nostalgia for Great Art and that of the Great revolutionary gesture. Though Great revolutionary gestures are impossible without Great art. Contemporary art has refused to be Great art and that is why its great revolutionary gestures are impossible. It is reduced to an ordinary destruction, to an act of a natural force which hurls without stopping the pieces of a wrecked world.
This article is courtesy of the author, Kiril Vasilev and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Kultura, Koprinka Chervenkova.
Kultura – Issue 3 (2883), 27 January 2017
Coarse (2016), Косьо Минчев/Kosio Minchev, фотография/photot Людмила Господинова