The solo exhibition “It Has Never Been Otherwise” is comprised of four interrelated works that spatially aligned in accordance with the artist’s narrative creating a conceptual installation that starts with the exhibition’s title. “It Has Never Been Otherwise” signifies a stopped frame, a moment frozen in time, perhaps even a utopian timelessness where history has come to an end. By attempting to arrest time, the artist leaves elements of motion within the installation, particularly in the sculpture The Headless Horseman, which in the end turns out to be deceptive. In fact, it is two neon sculptures (turning on and off), rendered in separate time intervals, as a simple, looped animation of a running horse. It is a symbolic return from video format back to the original source of the moving image – chronophotography (or photographic dynamism), the arrangement of frames representing different phases of motion.
The narrative begins immediately upon arrival, as the visitor encounters a neon sculpture above the entryway from the street. It displays à mutation of the famous cartoon by Benjamin Franklin that was first published in the “Pennsylvania Gazette”, May 9, 1754, an early graphical representation of the colonial union. Instead of Franklin's original "Join or Die", Ginzburg has added a playful slash, giving the viewer a choice: “Join and/or die”. The phrase itself invokes Dante’s inscription on the gates of Hell. Entering into the realm of the contemporary artist’s mental space one might as well abandon all hope.
Once inside, the visitor, having been prepared at the entrance, enters into an altered space of woven laser beams reflecting from metallic mirror-like surfaces. This is a limited reproduction of the trajectory of the beam of light in the famous Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. That which the inhabitants of Versailles did not see and or even guess at is presented here to the viewer as the dematerialization of the objective world of art, a reminder of high style instead of the real thing — reflections and constructions of the ideal, that which remains as a memory, competing with ever disappointing reality.
To the left of this rather disconcerting, even precarious laser installation (reminiscent of Hollywood film heroes and laser security systems) towards the animated neon sculpture of a rider, is another object – the literal symbol of the “great chain of being” (Scala Naturae). It is a medieval, hierarchical model of the divine world order based on the works of the Neoplatonists and the Church Fathers. It portrays the descent of the Holy Spirit from God to man through a host of celestial beings, and further, from man to inanimate objects via animals, birds, fish, and plants. This universal theory was used to justify the social inequities of the Feudal system, i.e. the “divine” segregation of society into three classes. In modern terms these are the poor, the middle class, and the monied class. Considering the current trend of viewing contemporary art as a kind of sectarian temple for the initiated — the very thing it aimed to escape a half-century ago — this shows that in reality it has always been such. The way out of this false impenetrability, elitism, and arena of the metaphysical game is quite perplexing. Naturally, it has never been otherwise.
— Andrey Parshikov
