Grisha Bruskin’s theater of the world was shown in the Tretyakov Gallery

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Scenes of Armed Intelligence

Artist Grisha Bruskin is considered one of the most intelligent authors and insightful witnesses of the era of the second half of the 20th – early 21st century. The fairness of this assessment can be seen at the exhibition “Change of scenery” in the Tretyakov Gallery, which presents the master’s works from the early 1980s to 2020. But this is not a retrospective, this is an integral installation – a theater of life and death, where each hall becomes the stage of a single performance called “Theater of the World”. Here the viewer plays his role – a rider in a protective gas mask, who flies on a dashing horse over the authorities and the crowd, finds himself face to face with the silent majority standing on the edge of the abyss, collides with the archetypes of the Soviet era and, finally, falls into the funnel of time, where through layers of the past and present, you can guess the contours of the future.

Theatrum mundi, translated from Latin, means “theater of the world” – this is the name of Grisha Bruskin’s performance, which absorbed his old works, many of which had not been shown in Russia before, into a single dramatic work. This play has nine scenes. The first captures the viewer completely and completely, turning him into a hero of the action. In the darkness, a blue rider in a gas mask appears before us, who rushes along the walls towards an unknown deity, reminiscent of the idol of one of the most ancient and mysterious civilizations – the Maya. The image of a rider riding time evokes associations with Kandinsky’s “Blue Rider”, which has become a symbol of liberation from petrified traditions in art, and with the horsemen of the Apocalypse, who, according to the Revelation of St. John the Theologian, bring plague, war, famine and a new world order. In the light of this dynamic projection, we see two sculptures – another rider on a horse with many legs and the head of the “Sleeping Muse”, reminiscent of the famous sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, only with a face-mask twisted to horror. “The gas mask protects the rider from the misfortunes of our time: deadly viruses, chemical and biological weapons. The messenger carries the news that the world has changed,” reads the prologue to Bruskin’s play.





The following scenes bring monuments before us again. These are dilapidated greenish sculptures – in one room they are presented in the form of miniatures on the table, in the other – in the form of large monuments in huge boxes. These peaceful and military images (from generals and soldiers to pioneers and athletes) are reminiscent of the iconoclastic pandemic (toppling of monuments) in the former USSR. However, the gods removed from the pedestal do not immediately lose their ideological power and magical aura, they remain in the subcortex of memory, haunt us like ghosts, while new heroes take their places on the stage. The theatrical repertoire is changing, but how fundamentally new is it?





The theater of the world is impossible without scenes of “pink happiness”, which in Soviet times was drawn on postcards and posters, but now social networks are filled with idyllic pictures. Grisha Bruskin in scene No. 6 depicts instead of them a real, but painfully comical life, where many heroes, like the blue rider, live in a gas mask. We look at reality as if through a dull glass – this is how this scene is called, a quote from the New Testament (the letter to the Corinthians of the holy Apostle Paul). The next scene is multi-figured. Here the religion, in which there is a ban on the image (Judaism), takes on visible fantastic forms on a multi-colored giant trellis. The ancients compared the world with a carpet woven by God, the author explains the choice of material. This Universe of Fantastic Creatures is also divided into scenes, each with four heroes. This multi-layered metaphor prepares us for the finale of the performance, where the viewer once again encounters archetype figures woven from world and purely Soviet myths. Mechanical babies, tanks and soldiers, towers and idols all together resemble Bosch paintings. And the last scene called “Change of scenery” is turned into a shadow theater, where a new hero enters the stage – the “Russian idea”. It is depicted as a complex communicating vessel and many other sculptures, where different myths are mixed, above which the double-headed symbol of the empire again hovers …





The artist, born in 1945, who grew up and developed as a personality during the years of the Cold War, paints the world armed and the war disarmed. This performance, assembled from works that were created even before the pandemic, could be titled in the same way as Leo Tolstoy his most weighty and significant novel. It is much wider than our time, but from today it looks like a prophecy.





Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28760 dated April 8, 2022

Newspaper headline:
Scenes of Armed Intelligence

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