Alchemist’s cauldron. Tactile gaze and non-visual perception

March 15 at the Gallery of European and American Art of the XIX-XX centuries of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin, the exhibition “The Cauldron of the Alchemist. Tactile gaze and non-visual perception. The exposition presents works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin, as well as from art collections in Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, USA and Japan.

The partner of the exhibition is Absolute Insurance.

The habit of trusting one’s sight is much more fragile than is commonly believed. Exhibition “Alchemist’s Cauldron. Tactile gaze and non-sight perception” turns to the historical anthropology of the senses and phenomenology to talk about the images of sight and blindness, as well as the inclusion of different sensory sensations in the artistic process.

The focus of the project is the image of a blind person, presented in the culture of different eras, including contemporary art. In parallel, the exhibition explores the development of the concepts of near, "tactile" and far "optical" look in painting, drawing and sculpture. The experience of color blindness and tunnel vision, blind drawing and a radical reduction in palette, spiritual practices and affect, looking with the back of the head and heels - these and many other artistic experiments become part of the exhibition. The starting point for these searches was the experience of art mediation for the blind and visually impaired visitors of Pushkinsky within the framework of the Accessible Museum program.

In world and Russian practice, the experience of the simultaneous use of different sensory methods of perception is called multisensory. In this case, taste, sound, touch, sensation of one’s own body in space, and many other feelings can be used in the work instead of vision. It can be said that the viewer’s body becomes a retort, a cauldron in which the alchemical process of a unique reading of a work of art takes place, changing depending on individual cognitive, taste, bodily capabilities and sensations. In addition to this allegory, the name of the exhibition refers to the work of Sigmar Polke "The Alchemist’s Cauldron" of 1986, which is an experience of overcoming the trauma of totalitarianism through a protest against the totalitarian vision.

The exhibition is a study of the reduction of vision in the history of art, as well as an attempt to revise the hierarchy of feelings. Especially for this project at the Pushkin Museum, Japanese artist Yohei Nishimura created a series of multi-sensory objects that provide for the inclusion of different sensory capabilities of the viewer. Nishimura uses tactile and sound sensations in combination with vision, allowing for the equality of modes of perception in a work of art.

The central image of the project is Olafur Eliasson’s optical object Future eye seeing now (The eye of the future looks at today, 2020) refers us to the idea of an “inverted world” and “fluctuating vision”. The exhibition also features Olafur Eliasson’s installation The casting of soon after now (Soon depends on now, 2021).

Most of the Alchemist’s Cauldron exhibition is devoted to blind drawing, a method of creating art that was common in the early 20th century. The exposition presents rare drawings by Arnulf Rainer, as well as works by Hans Hartung, belonging to the early and mature period of his work. To talk about non-visual practices in contemporary art, it was important to present unique graphic works from the collection of collector and researcher Boris Fridman.

The work of the Italian Arte Povera painter Giuseppe Penone from 1970 also plays an important role in the project. Here, for example, is the iconic frame Reversing Vision - a portrait of the artist with mirrored contact lenses that temporarily deprive him of his vision, but share reflections with others. Through the use of photography, the artist has the opportunity to see in the future the images saved in the past.

“Gradually emerging from the periphery of vision into the center of public attention, multisensory experiments are becoming frequent participants in museum expositions. The exhibition “The Alchemist’s Cauldron” does not claim to fully reveal the theme of reduced and expanded perception, being rather a collection of approaches and concepts, which is conditioned by the vision of the curators and the collection of the Pushkin Museum. Our goal was to talk about the ambiguity of blindness in political, environmental, social and artistic contexts and about the endless variability of personal perception, which is inseparable from the artistic content and the meaning of the existence of a modern museum,” Evgenia Kiseleva, author of the idea, curator of the exhibition, head of the department of interdisciplinary projects of the Pushkin Museum them. A. S. Pushkin.

Among the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition: Hans Arp, Georg Baselitz, Andries Both, Louis-Leopold Boilly, Wols, Hendrik Goltzius, Jean-Marie Delaperche, Honoré Daumier, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Claude Lorrain, Giuseppe Castiglione, Imi Knobel, Maria Lassnig, Jan Lievens, Heinz Mack, Mikhail Matyushin, Yohei Nishimura, Pablo Picasso, Otto Pine, Arnulf Reiner, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giuseppe Penone, Hans Hartung, Bartholomeus Hall, Olafur Eliasson, Günther Uecker and others.

The museum expresses its gratitude to the Olafur Eliasson studio and the Neugerrimschneider gallery (Berlin, Germany); studios of Arnulf Reiner (Austria), Ilona Gallery (Moscow); Studio Giuseppe Penone (Italy), as well as the art department of "Deutsche Bank" for providing works for the exhibition.

The project will be accompanied by an extensive educational program that includes lectures, discussions, olfactory workshops and body-oriented mediation. The publication for the exhibition includes texts on blindness, insight and non-visual practices of perception by Hans Sedlmayr, Denis Diderot, Jacques Derrida, Honore de Balzac, Stepan Vaneyan, Karo Verbeek, as well as curators and curators of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin.