Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti №86
The project prepared by the Hermitage for the Russian pavilion at the recently opened 58th Venice Biennale is completely different from what is on show at other national pavilions. It has, however, provided a paradoxical and precise response to the Biennale’s main project, which is running under the slogan “May you live in interesting times”.
The times are interesting now, as the Hermitage sees things, because museums have begun playing the main role in the preservation of human civilization. For present-day people they have replaced the temple. Mikhail Piotrovsky gave this definition of the three main functions of museums – custodians of memory; custodians of art that raises difficult questions; a tourist attraction, a spectacle that is available to unprepared visitors but that then prompts them to read something, to ponder something.
The Russian project talks about this three-in-one mission. It should be noted that there are more participants than are named on the website of the Biennale. Besides the main figures – the film director Alexander Sokurov and the artist Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai – mention should also be made of the sculptors Yekaterina Pilnikova and Vladimir Brodarsky, the artist Alexei Perepyolkin and the video-artist Alexander Zolotukhin. Together they made up the St Petersburg team.
The first thing that the viewer sees on entering the pavilion is a copy of the tensed legs of one of the Hermitage Atlantes. The famous sculptures have become not only a symbol of the museum; they are witnesses of 20th-century history. There was the attempt to turn the residence of the tsars into a museum of the revolution; the Atlantes were bombed during the siege. Now they are a city symbol visited by newly-weds, locals and tourists. That is the entrance to the temple.
The main subject is connected with the story of the return of the prodigal son told by St Luke in his Gospel. That tale about paternal love and all-forgivingness has fascinated artists for centuries. Piotrovsky reckons that now The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt is now the foremost painting in the Hermitage. In Soviet times that status was held by Leonardo’s Litta Madonna as the symbol of all things beautiful.
