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"BOUTIQUE
ESCAPE". Installation, performance,
"Art-Moscow" Fair,
April, 2001.
In the course of the "Boutique ESCAPE" project the artists
Lliza Morozova, Valeriy Ayzenberg, Anton Litvin and Bogdan Mamonov
exhibited and sold their personal belongings.
The aim of this project was criticizing the mechanics of the art
market, which, according to the ESCAPE artists, puts for sale images
and contexts. Selling personal underwear and bits and pieces from
their pockets amidst Moscow commercial galleries, the curators of
ESCAPE wanted to emphasize that true art is the artist himself and
this art isn't sold!
 The
ESCAPE members claim: "We are living - we are art". But
any piece of art above all things is a generator of interpretations.
And what is interpretation in case the artist declares himself a
piece of art? Apparently, the interpretation here is the artist's
image, or more precisely, his brand - the clothes he wears, the
items he carries in his pockets - so, everything what makes his
"outer shell".
A piece of actual art needs an approval of its own existence, and
by virtue of this circumstance it gravitates to a frame, to a gallery,
to a museum.
 There,
in the expositional field, the art clothes with an interpretation
for it gets the context. Without all this it feels naked. If we
withdraw Warhall's soup tin from the museum, it would become barely
a tin. The same is true about the actual man: he is a sum of his
belongings, he is unreal without them and starts feeling ashamed.
However it is a wrong feeling: the bareness should be carried openly
and meekly. Art should get naked, believe in its own reality and
reject contextuality!
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