Andrey Shcherbenok
The enormous 3-D installation “The Process of Passing”, created in Yekaterinburg specifically for the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, transformed the Concert Hall in the “Ordzhonikidze” House of Culture into a grand temple of the bygone Soviet era. The latter was built in the constructivist style on the demand of the workers of the Club n. a. Stalin, and lay unused for many years. The building of the Concert Hall has been gradually falling into disrepair, and the era itself has passed, leaving only forms, materials, sounds...
Ivan Plusch offers a fundamentally new approach to the Soviet cultural legacy. Despite the obvious analogy with Kabakov’s total installations, the temporality of Plusch’s work is radically different. This is not a re-creation of an era through the prism of individual memory, but neither is it an appropriation of the Soviet style in order to convey prevailing artistic meanings. Returning the former visual grandeur to the dilapidated building of the Concert Hall of the proletarian House of Culture, Plusch does not hide the destruction, but brings it to the fore. The continuous decay of the past epoch, paradoxically, does not negate its transcendental dimension, but liberates it from the immanently transient. The fact that Plusch’s work is devoid of ideology evokes the feeling of the current historical moment very well, when the very division into Soviet and post-Soviet has surprisingly lost its relevance.
