Czar Peter the Great introduced Russia to the ideas of European civilization, importing the constructions and the material values, the ideas and forms. To the Russian Emperor, Europe, and in particular Holland, became the embodiment of new essences.

At the dawn of perestroika, when the first young foreign artists came to Moscow and spoke in admiration of Moscow's architecture, they were met with great skepticism from their local colleagues. Back then it seemed that over there, beyond the iron curtain, from where only brave dreams had reached us in the form of lectures on the history of architecture, lay an architectural Eden. The bursars of the Berlin Brotfabrik and the students of all sorts of Kunsthochschule worked painstakingly on visual projects in the new districts (Biberevo, Butovo, Medvedkovo,) recalling our childhoods spent in multi-story buildings with a view on a building identical to your own, but nothing came to capture the delights of those explorations.

megastructure


Architects, artists and photographers still travel to Moscow for a sense of the physical manifestation of the utopian idea. Today, these "new" districts have an historical patina, and their perception is modified through shades of reflective nostalgia, even for the Russian viewer. These areas are now advertised by real estate agencies as 'oasis of established infrastructure.' Overgrown with the least capricious of trees most resistant to urban conditions, the spaces between the building blocks are now referred to as ecologically clean green zones; the court yards crammed with cars are now 'territories equipped with modern enmities.' The overcrowded highways separating industrial zones from residential areas are now proudly titled 'the capital's successive transportation rings' …

Gradually, the clean spaces and lines designed for the city's constructivist boxes are contaminated, and this new disorder seems pleasant to the sentimental Russian eye. The ongoing ruination of the starkness of the architectural canons of the 1960s and 70s is synchronous with public acceptance. Celebrating the melancholy poetry of aging areas, the younger generation of photographers sometimes underscores the infectiousness of the revised perception of places which people for so long have tried to escape and to disengage from. For local authors it is important for this architectural environment to feel like home, so that, in all its grayness and monotony, it may be loved for its layers of humanization.

Bee Flowers, raised in humane and clean Holland, and now a Moscow resident, takes a different view. At the recent "European Neo-constructivism" exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art it became clear to me that Bee Flowers' attitude to the Moscow landscape is akin to that deferential dialogue that contemporary artists around the world conduct with Russian constructivism. Flowers came to Moscow to get in touch with an idea that was cultivated here in a purity of form. The megastructures form the embodiment of mega-ideas for the megapolis, allowing for a compact stacking of many thousands of residents into efficient living spaces. To register the history of the old-new city areas he chooses the Winter season - the time when the monochrome landscape provides no distraction from the structures. Flowers' journey reminds, perversely, of the travels of Peter the First: a Dutchman comes to Moscow to witness the materialization of the 'new world' idea, which regardless of what one might think of its present form, was indeed implemented.

 

Bee Flowers, in his exploration of the architectural megastructures of the 'ideal' areas of Moscow, chooses for objectivity emerging from polysemy; his project is constructed from a diversity of opinions. Three views are presented, three optics, three photographic styles. The photographer thus creates an effect of gradual proximation, of accustomization, of penetration into the environment. The first part of the project is wonderful architectural photography which would pride any follower of the school of typological architectural photography, from Germany to Japan. The second part consists of fragments of the environment, from which a deconstruction of the whole from the viewpoint of the passing viewer emerges. This part of the project, in sharpness and optical accuracy is in a way the ideal center of a tri-part construction, the balance between the object itself (external) and the object's perceptive reproduction (internal).

The third part sees from the point of view of a traveler moving through the areas on a bus. It is the most subjective and sensitive: windows covered with condensate and dirt, twilight turning into night, city lights and smokestacks of energy plants. Such aesthetic transformations of objects such as energy plants and transportation hubs, with endless views of monotonous houses, can be glimpsed in art films of recent years. Executed in an aesthetic that balances between historical pictorialism and contemporary objective reproduction, in Moscow there was no such project about this reality of the city, until Bee Flowers' exhibition.

Within the pictorial third part of Bee Flowers' project the city becomes a poeticized substance, metaphorically widening the viewer's space outwards, creating a soft, enveloping cocoon separating the hardness of the idea-based megastructures and the personality of the viewer. The artist does not go for direct enlargements of details. It's not 'blow up.' Not a dissecting of a whole into particulars, but an nearing through kindred personalization and subjectification and familiarization.

Bee Flowers, casting a new look onto the familiar but under-analyzed Moscow environment, formulates questions towards a re-thinking of history. What is thought of by Muscovites as a conclusively evaluated situation ('Cheremushki is horrible,' 'Medvedkovo is all concrete boxes,' etc…) is in actual fact a subjective myth, disproportionate with the scale of the idea at the foundation of this construction type. Myth - the inside view in time, and science - and the view capturing an historical period post factum, are the opposites between which the tension of intrigue of this exhibition emerges.