During the course of the 20th Century there was a lot of talk about bringing art into life. Especially Russian art of the last Century was fascinated by this idea – from the early Russian avant-garde through the monumental art of Soviet time up to contemporary Russian visual culture that is very much about design and glamour. Olga Chernysheva takes an opposite route: she tries to find art in life. Chernysheva’s interest in the everyday life is genuine and persistent. And that already makes her art being an original, almost unique phenomenon in the context of the contemporary Russian culture. At the same time this interest is not dictated by a desire to discover the ugly, repulsive, violent aspects of the everyday life experience that are usually concealed from us by an official propaganda or commercially oriented art. Chernysheva’s art is critical but it is critical not in a sense in which today’s mainstream critical art functions – Chernysheva is not engaged in a political struggle or social critique. Rather, she is skeptical and critical of certain claims and presuppositions that are connected with her own profession and with her own social role, e.g. with art in general and the figure of the artist in particular.

Some decades ago Joseph Beuys said that everybody has to become an artist. This requirement presupposed that, originally, “everybody” is not an artist – and has to be taught by a “true artist”, like Beuys himself, how to do art. For Chernysheva everybody is always already an artist. Or maybe more precisely: for her this “everybody” simply does not exist. Instead, she sees herself surrounded by isolated, lonely individuals trying to design their life, to produce beauty, to experience aesthetic pleasure. Chernysheva is infinitely attentive and sympathetic to all these almost unconscious, and in any case non-strategic artistic endeavors. The heroes of her photographs and videos are doing a kind of everyday art by singing, dancing, making gymnastic or going onto a site-seeing. And they are doing art without any wish and any chance to impress somebody by what they are doing. They are living namely mostly in the lower strata of society and it does not occur to them that what they are doing or feeling could be interpreted as a specific form of aesthetic experience. It is this unpretensious, sincere attitude to themselves and their life that fascinates Chernysheva in the first place. She recognizes the fellow artists in them – driven by the same inner impulses by which her own art is driven. These everyday artists do not try and would not know how to situate their art in the context of the contemporary art world but they still remain artists. And maybe precisely because of their modesty they seem to be genuinely true, authentic artists – unlike the busy crowd that populates today’s art system. And they are not only artists but also true philosophers. More and more Chernysheva is interested in documenting the life of people whose work is consisting of doing nothing, like fisher on the ice spending hours without making a movement, security guards that are staying hours and hours on the same place and just looking around etc. These ordinary people embody the contemporary modes of vita contemplativa in the middle of the usual urban frenzy – something that the contemporary intellectuals do not.

Chernysheva’s videos and photographs are beautiful and peaceful but they have at the same time a certain moralistic edge and make a certain accusatory gesture that do not escape from the attentive spectator. And that makes these videos and photographs very modern and critical, indeed. Chernysheva work is deeply rousseauistic. She hopes to find in the middle of the everyday life and among the common people those human qualities that she misses in the artistic milieu to which she actually belongs. At the same time Chernysheva is contemporary enough to react to her own rousseaustic dream with the great deal of irony. Documenting everyday art instead of everyday life Chernysheva treats the protagonists of her photographs and videos as readymade artists – admiring them from an ironic distance and double-aestheticizing their artistic practice.

Text by Boris Groys