Collective actions
S. AUERBAKH. AN ACCOUNT OF THE ACTION INSTALLATION AUERBAKH (SEH-2)
Andrei Monastyrski invited me to make an object or several objects for a KD action. I was supposed to come to Losinyi Ostrov park and leave these objects in the appointed place in the forest. I picked an old gilded frame from Soviet times. I sawed this frame apart into six different pieces, in accordance with the number of members in Collective Actions.
On October 3, German Titov and I arrived at the appointed place where the prepared pieces of the frame were glued and hung by me on different trees around the main KD tree.
Also, in the process of gluing the frame pieces and photo-documenting this process, each of us found a piece of the peacock frame from the other KD action. As far as I understand, this was the action Decoration-2010. We decided not to touch these pieces and left them beneath the trees. After the pieces of my frame had been glued to the trees, German and I left this place. In the course of the next several days, the members of KD were supposed to go there without us and reflect on what they saw and possibly leave their own objects.
The choice of the old gilded frame in six parts as a metaphor for the members of KD I can explain this way: having received an invitation to a place inaccessible to me as an outside person where a KD action would take place, I could not leave something personal, in the same way that I could not allude to specific KD actions for example, not being a part of them. That is why I chose to simply “frame” ahead of time and in my own way the place of the future action with a golden frame. The result was a spatial installation, since the pieces of the frame were “thrown up” on the different trees around the main KD tree, and they grew like tree mushrooms from trunks and others peeked out from behind them.
On October 4, after the KD action had taken place, I returned to this spot. There I discovered on the main KD tree a little frame with a photograph of the Golden Ear fountain. On a nearby cluster of 6 trees, I fairly quickly discovered 6 little frames with photographs of KD members.
All but one of the pieces of my frame were in their original places. The sixth piece had simply fallen from the tree and laid beneath it.
I experienced a feeling of closure, since the Golden Ear fountain formally in its texture and color correlated with my frames and, roughly speaking, I read it for myself as a kind of form, even though in reality, I do not know why A.M. left specifically this photograph on the tree. Possibly, it is because this particular fountain figures in A.M.’s 1986 text “VDNKh – Capital of the World” about the collective unconscious, which in a certain way let itself be known in this action where my metaphorical 6 parts of one golden frame were repeated in the form of 6 concrete photographs of the members of Collective Actions.
10.4.2010.