Hasta La Ideas

“Nikolai Egorov’s Thread Spooler” (1994/2011) and “Igor Kachan’s Maraca” (1990/2011), from Vladimir Arkhipov’s Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts series.

A wall on the second floor of New York’s New Museum is currently filled with 35 photos of jerry-rigged objects that look to have been confiscated by the TSA or rescued from a thrift shop on Mars: a wafer of black rubber impaled by a fork, a tube of metal grating capped with a vaguely menacing wooden paddle, an empty Fanta can tethered to a hunk of foam-covered wood. Photographed with clinical precision against a pure white background, they are Vladimir Arkhipov‘s “Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts,” part of an ongoing series documenting the extreme DIY survival tools discovered by the artist throughout Russia. That fork/rubber combo? The ingenious bathtub plug of one Evgenii Vasiliev. The metal tube and Fanta can served as a rat trap and a maraca, respectively.

These fascinating traces of the communal apartment have come to the New Museum as part of “Ostalgia,” a survey exhibition devoted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics that opened today. “We wanted to bring to New York art that New York does not usually see,” said Massimiliano Gioni, associate director and director of exhibitions of the museum, at yesterday’s press preview. The title of the show is derived from ostologie, a German term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Standing in the lobby of the museum, temporarily transformed into a replica of a Polish puppet theater by artist Paulina Olowska, Gioni likened the show to memory itself. “It’s personal, often unreliable, and incredibly personally charged,” he said. “We knew it would be impossible to make an objective show.”
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