Oleg Baranov
Going Down

Oleg Baranov’s new work for Garage Archive Commissions, Going Down, is a continuation of his project A Theory of the Broken Heart, in which the artist’s constant protagonist, also called Oleg Baranov, experiences the consequences of the split with his wife. Begun in 2019, the series comprises several videos in which he reflects on his personal catastrophe using the format of performative monologue.

The Baranov character’s monologues are “written into” various everyday situations, such as at a party or when watching a video sent by his ex-wife. They involve routine subjects and demonstrate the openly naive and vulnerable position of the speaker. An important part of the series is a computer game developed by the artist that tells the story of the Baranov character’s journeys to an unknown city and the world of dreams, which will be presented in the World Gone By Computer Class.

A Theory of the Broken Heart is neither a confessional nor a therapeutic project. By giving the protagonist his own name and appearance, but invented stories, Baranov the artist sets before the audience the classic trap of associating a character with the personality and biography of the author. Here, the story of the split between the Baranov character and his wife plays the role of an emotionally intense image through which the artist explores various general issues that concern him: questions of identity, anxious thoughts about a world on the brink of catastrophe, altered perceptions and relationships between people due to the spread of virtual reality.

In Going Down, Baranov the artist focuses his attention on systems of communication, distribution, preservation, and production of information. He is interested in accidental and deliberate ruptures, distortions, and the various imperfections of these systems, which enable the radicalization of the imagination, the mythologization of images, and the appearance of confusion between reality and fiction. Baranov’s research in Garage Archive Collection was based on materials from the exhibition The Artist Instead of the Art Work, or A Leap into the Void, which took place in May and June 1994 in the Central House of Artists (now the West Wing of the New Tretyakov). Created by a group of Russian and international curators, including Andrei Erofeev (the materials referred to are mainly from his archive), the exhibition was one of the first major presentations in Moscow of works by contemporary and key postwar artists from Western Europe and the USA. The project also included works by the main participants of Moscow’s unofficial art scene. In this way, the curators tried not only to demystify “western” contemporary art for the Moscow audience and the Russian organizers themselves but also to create an “adhesion” of art scenes which had developed on different sides of the Iron Curtain.

Work with the problematics of interrupted communication and the constructs of “western” art and “Soviet unofficial art” is not the only reason why the project The Artist Instead of the Art Work was of interest to Baranov. Thematically, the exhibition was constructed around practices engaging with the artist’s alter-ego, which is close to Baranov’s method. He was also intrigued by the confusion created by the involvement in the project of his favorite artist, Andy Warhol. The information in the archive regarding this fact varies, and the witnesses and organizers of the exhibition all remember things differently. Warhol’s presence can be felt in many aspects of Baranov’s practice, for example he borrows the deliberately simple, somewhat detached, and occasionally sentimental tone of narration from the “father” of pop art’s texts and dedicates his approach to creating video to Warhol’s films. For Baranov, his personal fantasy about the appearance of Warhol’s works at the exhibition The Artist Instead of the Art Work, which he arrived at while working with Garage Archive Collection, has a personal, sentimental significance and comprises the semantic nerve of the project.