Partisan’s Boutique Transportable is an art-project consisting of an interactive installation (exposition/exhibition), musical program and a fast food+fast drink pub. It’s mixture of a Soviet-style village grocery store, antiques shop and a traditional Belarusian pub – karchma.
Partisan’s Boutique Transportable underscores the inanities of the contemporary epoch. The project involves out-of-the-ordinary things: unusual works of art, non-mainstream music, strange food and drinks. Oddness is the opposition to the system, mainstream, mass culture, and the general line of the modern civilization.
Partisan’s Boutique Transportableis a mobile store, mini-supermarket, which is moving from one forest to another, serving the partisans all the necessary stuff from matches, cheap laundry soap, faceted glasses, brushes for cleaning empty bottles, bread, plaster piggy banks, sex dolls, old porn magazines, lace curtains, postcards, maps of various localities and towns, fruit jelly, all kinds of documents (Lenin’s library passes, trade union cards, work record cards, US visas etc.) all the way to the works of art, ancient pictures, photos, placards, rugs with deer and swans, top-notch works of new-fangled authors etc.
Partisan’s Boutique Transportable is an explosive mixture of kitsch and high-brow culture, ball and intellectualism, of the serious and the absurd, pop culture and deep reflections on the ways and perspectives of our civilization. It is an artistic metaphor of the modern world, which is growing increasingly similar to a global supermarket with the elements of street fair buffoonery. It is idiocy elevated to the high pitch of the great art. It’s an art show, which is creating unique atmosphere of pagan conviviality. It is the esthetics of intellectual Makhnoism. It is Gogol’s “Marriage in Dikanka” and the scenography of Emir Kusturica’s films in one – as if the viewer finds himself in the Kusturica’s movie “Underground”. The psychotropic effect of the Boutique is achieved by a three-way attack on a viewer: visual, aural and internal; namely, through a specially crafted visual row, carefully compiled musical program and an exclusive assortment of spirits.
Partisan’s Boutique Transportable is a synthesis of art and commerce. Everything, which is not exacted by law, can be said to be justified in the name of the art.
© 2014 www.arturklinau.com. All rights reserved. For using texts from the site reference to the source is required. About using the images, please, contact arturklinau@gmail.com
The book “PARTISANEN. Kultur_Macht_Belarus” (edition.photoTAPETA, Berlin 2014) is a speccial edition about pARTisan as a conceptual project during its activity. The book includes the main articles from pARTisan issues with the guide-text by Artur Klinau. The structure of the guide is chapters every of which tells about the most important subjects of Belarusian context beginnig the country is got the independency in 1990.
