Logutov Vladimir – Cyland Video Archive

Park

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 04:19:12 +0000

In the video work Park the artist, as in many of his early videos, provokes the spectator to a higher level of focus. Before us is a park in the evening in the city of Stuttgart – at first glance, everything is as in life: a beautiful theater building on the shore of a lake, it’s warm, birds are singing, people are walking, riding bikes, the smoothness of the water is gently rippling. But gradually we notice that something transient and strange is happening. The reflections of the people in the water don’t move like the people: sometimes they are slower, sometimes they overtake their masters. Some of the statues on the roof of the theater, from time to time, come to life and move slowly, and on the facade of the building you can see the same ripples that are moving across the water. And above all these, in the contours of a large tree, we can make out the silhouette of the artist’s face. All of these artefacts balance on the level of an optical illusion, being barely distinguishable, and they are aimed at arousing the spectator’s attention.

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Twilight

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 04:13:10 +0000

The video Twilight is a work about the twilight of our consciousness and perception which, lacking any protection against the sheer volume of information that assails it, is very vulnerable.

The camera is static, it’s set up in a window with a view of a crossroads. At first glance, it appears that we’re just observing a boring city landscape. An additional dejection is added by the insipid colors of a winter evening. It seems as if there is nothing artistic here… But it’s not that simple: the spectator’s attention to detail is crucial. Looking carefully, we can see that at times the objects don’t cast shadows. The cars drive when the traffic light is red, stop when it’s green, and sometimes disappear as they turn, driving round the post. Some of the pedestrians, going beyond the same post, disappear forever, whilst others are identical to the others walking near to them; there are also people without any heads.

Twilight is one of Logutov’s first video works. It was back then that the artist had the idea that his video could be seen as a video-picture, where the emphasis would not be on the events taking place in time, but rather on the changes taking place within the shot. It is enough for the spectator to notice one of these by chance for him to begin to doubt his attentiveness and to switch to a deeper level of perception. And then it is very possible that much will be revealed.

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Episode

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 04:06:08 +0000

In this video, the artist grips the viewers’ attention with a provocative scene depicting a group of people fighting against the background of a winter cityscape and the pedestri-ans passing by.

“For me, it was an important, almost formal goal, I created different flows of time within a single video. Usually, the video can slow down, speed up or translate time in the same way that we perceive it in reality. I tried to carry out an ex-periment with different speeds in different planes of the same composition. In the same way that the different planes in Perugio’s pictures are precisely divided: the fore-ground, middle ground, background. The people in the foreground move five times slower than the pedestrians behind them, which, in principle, is impossible according to the laws of video materials. But if you look carefully, you see that in all the different planes, the people are the same,” the artist explains.

The entire experiment, however, is difficult to capture, it is camouflaged. The foreground provokes the viewer into re-flections on its contents.

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