On 1 July 2017 the General Staff building of the State Hermitage was the setting for the art-marathon “Kiefer and Khlebnikov: painting – literature –music”. The space of the Main Atrium and the four courtyards of the Forum of the General Staff remained open until 3 o’clock in the night.
The first public intellectual marathon in the General Staff, devoted to the Hermitage exhibition “Realisms”, took place in June last year and became a cultural event in the life of the city. This time the occasion for holding it was the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer: for Velimir Khlebnikov”. The marathon was opened by Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage.
The marathon’s rich and extensive agenda – the culmination of the Youth Centre’s general educational programme for the Kiefer exhibition – consisted of a variety of creative actions: discussions, performances, lectures, exhibition projects. live music performances and film screenings, in which prominent cultural and artistic figures participated. It was attended by around 1,500 Petersburgers and guests of the city.
In the lecture and discussion part of the evening, which took place in the Atrium of the General Staff, introductory lectures on Anselm Kiefer and Velimir Khlebnikov were given by the well-known Petersburg art scholars, Ivan Chechot and Stanislav Savitsky. In the discussion that followed there were clashes of opinion between museum specialists, curators, artists, historians and musicians on Kiefer’s work, on Modernism and Post-Modernism, on the philosophy of the Russian avant-garde and about pressing issues in contemporary art in Russia and the West.
The discussions alternated with a brilliant piece of improvisation on the double-bass by the musician Vladimir Volkov and the audio-performance Granular Piano by Dmitry Shubin.
The Second and Fourth Courtyards of the General Staff turned into a theatrical venue for a dramatic performance based on selections from Khlebnikov’s “super-tale” Zangezi (curator Daria Boldyreva) and an acoustic performance with readings of Khlebinikov’s verse by Alexander Savchuk.
The Third Courtyard was the setting for several projects by contemporary Petersburg artists: the graphic art series bIRds and figIRes, celebrating the 130th anniversary of Velimir Khlebnikov’s birth (curator Mikhail Karasik); “Contemporaries/Born in 1945”: Valery Lukka, Piotr Ignatyev, Valery Riabchinsky, Viacheslav Mikhailov. Selected works by Petersburg Artists the same ages as Anselm Kiefer (curator Sophia Kudriavtseva); a performance by the sculptor Pavel Ignatyeva entitled Kiefer-Khlebnikov-Dürer, and the video-installation The Road by Liudmila Belova.
The marathon concluded with a half-hour performative lecture-concert The Relevance of Neo-Expressionism, which combined rap from the group Shortparis with a performance by the artist Stas Bags (curator Ladomir Zelinsky) and was a gift to the youngest element of the audience.
