Articles
HoustonPress
Petrol Station
A Russian artist explores the force behind American foreign policy.
By
Kelly KlaasmeyerWednesday, Nov 30 2011
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Culture Map Houston
BLACK GOLD
Andrei Molodkin’s oily heart of darkness pulses in Crude at Station Museum
By Joseph Campana 12.03.11|11:30 am
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Arts+Culture Magazine Houston
Works of Note: December 2011
If there ever were a time to be outraged by the course of American Empire, it is now.
CHARISSA N. TERRANOVA
Based in Dallas, Charissa Terranova is a freelance critic and curator working globally.
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Andrei Molodkin is an internationally recognized contemporary Russian artist engaged in deconstructing the economic realities of geopolitical praxis. Consisting of his monumental ballpoint-pen drawings and his three-dimensional constructions filled with crude oil, Molodkin’s exhibition CRUDE effectively articulates the space between people’s peaceful, democratic aspirations and the unending conflicts perpetuated by oil-politics. CRUDE is a laboratory environment that radicalizes the dynamic between the artwork and the viewer.
Molodkin’s visual and conceptual strategies recall some of the basic principles of Constructivist Art, the early 20th century Russian avant-garde movement, which upheld art as the domain of pure feeling and social harmony and which focused on utopian ideals, production, and process. Molodkin pushes the boundaries of Constructivist Art by engineering clear solid constructions with hollow imprints that become active as crude oil circulates within these forms through a network of pumps and tubes. His artworks also expand the practice of Minimal Art, an unembellished, formalist late 20th century American approach to factory art-making. Like the work of the American artist Mark Lombardi who investigated international banking impropriety and theft through his art, Molodkin links crude oil to democracy, justice, liberty, and revolution as well as to icons such as the Statue of Liberty and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Crude oil, in all of its manifestations as energy, petroleum, natural gas, plastics, medicine, asphalt, fertilizers, and pesticides, is the principle industrial commodity and the world’s most valuable natural resource. An ancient substance, crude oil is continuously reborn in its applications and implementations. Molodkin’s incorporation of crude oil into his works provokes an open dialogue on how culture and geopolitical systems are influenced by oil. In one of his constructions, Molodkin analyzes the concept of democracy through the universal vernacular of oil. The work, titled Democracy, is a mirror reflecting the commodification of the democratic ideal. Empire at War, Molodkin’s portrait of an evangelistic George W. Bush, embodies the danger of theocracy – patriotism, nationalism, and religion are used to justify the most horrifying war crimes. Like a prismatic chessboard, Molodkin’s artworks articulate the contradictions between utopian ideals and reality.