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Item: Dusty Phrases / Пыльные фразы

2003

Installation
Materials: dust

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. M00032).

Anatoly Osmolovsky's Dusty Phrases consists of 21 slogans — critical or exclamatory statements made from dust that was taken from vacuum cleaner bags, which he used to ‘write’ on the wall using a set of cut-out letters and glue. The slogans, oddly, are installed at ankle’s height, and snake around the walls of the museum to form a series of polemical utterances, varying from the outright political to more speculative reflections on the place of art and the position of the artist in contemporary society: “each intellectual participates in the revolting pursuit of prestige and cannot but feel pangs of conscience”; “terror is not representative (real terrorists who got into conflict with the law always work in illegality; for perfectly understandable reasons, they hide their faces)”. Two other examples suggest that “Chaos and lack of motivation could become the basis of a new moral position”, and that “the world of today has arrived at a stage of the overproduction of everything: ideas, fashions, murders, hunger, consumption, products, sex, etc.”