Duchamp is the source of all the problems. After Fountain, art lost the ability to be comprehensible, unambiguous, and homogeneous. The use of a profane object – in this case, a urinal – to create art showed how necessary it was to look for new materials. In addition to assemblages, collages, and found objects – art forms in which artistic media were mixed with non-artistic objects/insertions – the concept of the ready-made gave informal legitimacy to the use of any and every material in art, given that it implied that anything at all could be placed in an artistic context and, as a consequence, anything at all could lay claim to the status of work of art. Criteria previously accepted as applicable to art objects – criteria of quality, beauty, and expressiveness – were rendered irrelevant.
In time, criticism of traditional art forms became the norm, and ready-mades, the making of which was initially innovative and was conceived as a mechanism for overcoming art’s mortifying rigidity, began to give themselves airs in museum display cases. After ready-made and dada-, came other -isms: minimalism, Fluxus, performance, op art, pop art, land art, superflat, Internet art, and post-Internet art. People, it seems, are already tired of all this. And any of us who have not grown weary of these art forms simply haven’t had the time to do so. And now we’ve arrived at the present moment, where we find the most discomforting erosion of criteria and boundaries – leading to extreme heterogeneity in the art being produced. Fatigue caused by conceptual overload is exacerbated by the global feeling of lack of clarity, indeterminacy, and strangeness, a feeling that is spreading in more fields than just culture. What should art do now to continue performing its supporting/moralising function and yet be able to survive among the appetites let loose by capitalism?
We are again placing art in the hands of form for form to use as it will, handing it over as prisoner to ubiquitous aestheticization – with the qualification that all this is for its own good. We turn to what Duchamp began, to the quest for new materials – only now not so as to reject aesthetics but to attract attention. New materials – or, to be more precise, unusual ones – are capable of ensuring modern art’s survival thanks to the effect of newness and unexpectedness – those good old catalysts of quick pleasure. The question is: will we be content with the mere fact of art’s survival? Or will we be able to remember its more fertile states? Will we still have space in our minds for the questions and thoughts of a different kind that we associated with art before it was reduced to the need to survive?
Aleksey Golovin’s quest for an unfamiliar material began in a field that was familiar to him – a tactic that was both safe and smart. After graduating from the construction faculty of the University of Roads and Railways, which gave him a solid foundation in structural performance of materials and theoretical mechanics, Aleksey took a job as an engineer with Siemens. As happens with creative people, at a certain moment ‘ordinary work’ stopped making sense to him. The restrictions imposed during the pandemic and the switch to remote working helped remind him of his true love and capabilities. The upshot was that a compact easel took up position in his kitchen, and his rented apartment filled with the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. Instead of his routine five hours of drawing after work, Aleksey began painting day and night on end. Drawing was not a new occupation for him or simply a way of staving off boredom: he had always drawn, ever since he was a child:
Aleksey had to combine drawing portraits for clients with studying construction. Later, he painted walls while building high-speed railway lines. His attempts to work for a company after the pandemic was over ended with him giving up his job, to his great relief. This left him entirely in his own company – or, to be more exact, in the company of his drawing.
The idea of using screws in his art first took shape at one of Aleksey’s first meetings with a client. At the end of 2021 ATO Gallery commissioned a portrait, and as an experiment, it was decided to combine realist painting with screws covering only a particular part of the surface of the canvas. This assemblage technique had its origins in Aleksey’s past work but became a firm part of his method and one of his principal visual media. In addition to the considerable amount of physical effort needed to screw thousands of screws into a painting, the process of assembling a work in this way involves an expenditure of emotion. The act of pressing the screw into the surface re-channels the strong emotional impulse that Golovin feels at a specific moment. The coherence of the painted canvas is disrupted by the need to record, process, and find external space for the residual emotion. In this process figurative painting plays the role of limiter or contour chosen by the artist in order to fill it with his imagination. Let’s step back from psychoanalytical interpretations, however, and concentrate just on the screws.
Initially, the use of materials not previously known in art derived from avant-garde artists’ desire to drop everything old and turn towards everything new. The Cubists experimented with departing from the two-dimensional space of the painting dictated by the adoption of single-point perspective; this led to the creation of three-dimensional compositions. Picasso’s Still Life with wooden components and a piece of tablecloth is one of the best known such experiments, while Jean Dubuffet’s collage Assemblage of Butterflies is one of the earliest. The ability to assemble a work from parts – to synthesize it as opposed to creating a work in the likeness of the surrounding environment, mimetically – led to a shift in the balance between idea and shape and between meaning and aesthetics. The preparation for conceptual art is felt especially keenly in works by artists in the middle of the century – including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, for whom the collage method was the main expression of their anti-aesthetic impulse and a way of finally banishing visual attractiveness from the list of criteria for art. The experience of interacting with art was transformed from a matter of receiving aesthetic pleasure to one of studying authors’ motivations and reading the explanatory notes they leave behind. To understand a work of art, it was no longer enough to look at its visual aspects: it was necessary to read everything affiliated with the work.
The way in which Aleksey Golovin’s assemblages work is different. They cannot be said to be a protest against aesthetics. The contrast between the traditional painting medium and non-traditional construction materials is something that’s impossible to miss, but not one of these works shocks, sets outs to be provocative, communicates bolshiness, or has a repulsive effect. The unnatural material is tamed and controlled by the author – is subordinated to the author’s concept and is entirely dissolved in the work. The functionality of the material used is not permitted to be greater than the non-functionality of the work of art. A screw is a profane object, and Golovin uses it in such a way as to preserve the artistic origin of the work.
By entirely removing its original function from the experimental part – from the household object – Golovin ensures that the two mediums are on an equal footing and restrained from impinging on one another. He gives his screws an unusual tint but also manoeuvres them as if they were a unified mass. Each single screw performs like a brushstroke of paint, a pencil mark, or a piece of smalt. This is especially noticeable in ‘Origin’, a series of works that refers simultaneously to Japanese calligraphy and Rorschach’s cards. The rough, unevenly glinting mass of the screws moves as if directed by a magnet, forming hypnotic, centred compositions, and gleams iridescently like an ink blot. Lost in meditative contemplation of line, you forget that the abstract outline you are observing has been drilled with nails. The screws are not nails but that which does the drawing. Were Golovin to allow the origin of the household material to be slightly more legible, his works in this medium would be more like the kind of decorative DIY you find tutorials on on Pinterest. Happily, though, this is not what his art is about. And it differs advantageously too from works in this medium by his fellow artists – e.g. screw portraits by Andrew Myers or realist nail drawings by Marcus Levine.
In the same way that when we look at a mosaic, we are able to distinguish the pieces of glass from which it has been assembled, to see parts that form an overall picture, works by Golovin do not conceal how they have been made. They are not something that in an exhibition space you could ever confuse with things left there by chance. The clarity, labour intensiveness, and degree of manifestation of the form provide the materiality that was characteristic of works of art prior to the epoch of their technical reproducibility. This is a feeling that people have forgotten following Postmodernism – the feeling of interacting with art and noticing in it at first hand the craftsmanship with which it has been made. The mosaic character of the image is especially noticeable in Golovin’s early works, where he uses screws as links from which to assemble the image as a whole or concentrates attention on that which is not obvious in the picture. These include portraits without portraits, where the subject is not visible due to a mask/balaclava/shield entirely covering the silhouette and leaving the subject’s gaze as the only point of contact. While artists working in pixel art hyperbolize the pixellation of digital images and artists working in net or post-Internet art digitize objects in the real world or materialize symbols from digital space, Golovin creates an analogue one-bit mosaic from screws.
Just as pixel art supplies information about what the content on the screen is made up of (or deliberately distorts the placement of each pixel), an effect that is in some respects similar to pointillism, Golovin’s screw mosaics remind us that everything in this world is made up of parts. Working with fine details allows Golovin to create images that fall apart, fluctuate through diffusion, are instable and fragile and at the same time are monolithic, stable, coherent, and firm. Take his Wanderer, for instance, a precise but careful echo of the generational trend for new-age ‘aura’ and other modern substitutes for the divine. Wanderer is a universal portrait of each of us. Autonomous but belonging to something larger; ordinary but riven with a special crack; dissolving in space and formed from particles of space. Each of us consists of inseparable parts.
Despite the synthetic nature of Golovin’s method, his works are not perfused with that troubling strangeness which is often exploited by contemporary art. Both media – paintings and screw assemblages – co-exist harmoniously in his works, reinforcing their aesthetic aspect, not avoiding it. This tactic seems radically different from that which has been driving art from the middle of the past century. Modern reality with its mandatory social media, high information load, ubiquitous post-irony, and the subject’s loss of subjectivity have introduced considerable changes whose embryonic development we have had opportunity to observe over the last ten years or so. To survive in today’s cultural agenda, it’s necessary to make public that which used to be concealed behind the walls of the artist’s studio; to make easily comprehensible that which previously had to be presented as more complex; to make attractive that which was previously stripped of aestheticism and did not aim to please. Texts beneath posts in social media are read by the same people who write the explanatory captions for objects of art; fatigue in the face of serious sterile minimalism has become a desire for chaotic infantile decorativeness; the manifesto as a channel of communication has been replaced with the meme carousel.
The idea is still important. Its originality and the number of reposts that bear witness to this originality are capable of attracting attention and at this same moment of annulling innovation through the stream of remakes that follows. In a space where abstract images, not meanings, are produced, the medium overcomes the message and form becomes more important than significance. For this reason, for art to be visible in the current situation, it is better for it to be simple. And photogenic: documentation of objects will ensure their viral distribution but will bring recognition only among a niche audience. And, again, it’s best for art to grab people’s attention amidst their compulsive scrolling. After all, what can be more appealing than the brutal visuality of subtle images? A like awarded for each screw twisted into the canvas of the painting.