Vitaly Patsukov
Modus Operandi as an Art Strategy
“Everything is always decided at the level of symbolic exchanges.”
Jean Baudrillard
In the art of Marina Fomenko the concept of “modus operandi” is treated as a kind of a creative vector shaping her repeatedly emerging reality so rich in inner meanings. In this sense her “modus operandi” actually comes close to Kazimir Malevich’s principle of “surplus element” which enables the artist to produce organic blends of visual and acoustic constructions while preserving intact the wholeness of her artifacts in their processionality. Marina Fomenko’s uninterrupted visual montage arrangements follow a dramatic direction, which is seemingly accidental and unpredictable, compelling the viewer to immerse completely into the artist’s distinctive iconology. Her art strategies make her “modus operandi” work as an ideal event occurring in perfectly regular everyday circumstances with their functional orientation towards discovering magic in ordinary human existence and creating a free flight within the zones of gravity. Infusing everyday happenings with lofty inspiration the artist, like Konrad Lorenz’s butterfly, crosses the borderlines of geographical and art territories to take part in shellfish fishing in Mexico or to meditate in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto. Her artistic gesture draws the viewer into the whirlwind of the dance universe and thus unites Madrid, Moscow and Venice with the acoustic path of Paolo Ricci and the giant seaport of Shenzhen in China. In her acoustic-visual works the artist as it were moves along the power lines probing each of its points and thus forming a profoundly personal construction which cannot be separated from the person, as a diagram or a draft. She weaves the natural fabric of her toposes without leaving the confines of their inner dimensions, and she makes it possible for the space to open up to the world and engulf us, to exist in the passive voice.
At the same time our own vision will discover in the video installations of Marina Fomenko a different optics and a different language. Her phenomenal images will then be perceived in their dynamic states as they lose their structural qualities and start glimmering, get out of focus along the peripheries, revealing a conceptual outcome beyond its apparently fixed limits. Within this system the structure of these video works obeys some special geometry, its principles formulated back in the 1970s by Benoit Mandelbrot who named them fractals. This is the geometry of the outlines of a cloud, or the crown of a tree, or a seashore line. Its forms enable us to visualize new states in changed conditions and in completely unpredictable coordinates of reality. The artist’s methods allow her to spotlight special contexts of large-scale events – close-ups or, conversely, outlines of the limitless micro-world, – and thus acknowledge the relentless march of Nietzschean ideas of “eternal return”, and a cyclical understanding of historical and cultural progress. In view of this organic continuity of sound and image differentials and their mutual agreement the artist examines the free matrix of the universal artistic-genetic structures, which allow the absolutely new integrality to live on. Within their reliefs, depressions, niches, and elevations, within their lengths and durations the lost chronotope of the radical dialogue between space and time is being returned into contemporary culture.