One can assume, that acquiring a solo show at a solid commercial contemporary art gallery in Berlin can be a sure indicator of a mastership in ones own artistic field. But truth be told, one never stops learning. Being a perfectionist and risk taker, this is how i embarked on a journey to the alma mater of many bright art stars – Central Saint Martins School of Arts in London. Having built up an intense artist practice already, i was not just looking for treasures or useful advice, my demand was to find nothing else but a HOLY GRAIL of Contemporary Art.
Putting myself once again in a position of a scholar and looking forward to feed my never satisfied curiosity, i entered this temple of knowledge with very high expectations. I wanted The Truth.
I wanted to inspect the beast from top to button.
I wanted the [ART] World ! And i wasn’t going to stop until i found out what the hell Contemporary Art is. This is how my one month long course started. Like in every art school, the system here was based on practical, project oriented practise and “learning while doing” principle.
So, Lesson One.
The first project was called “Where does one thing end and the next thing begin?” Where and how an object leaves the simple material reality and enters the magic reality of an Art form? Like a real life Harry Potter, i wished to know, what is the magic gate, where is the platform 9 3/4 ?! And by the way, you will be laughing, but the school was located exactly at the Kings Cross station, where the above mentioned magic platform was originally placed by Joan Rolling.
Coincidence ? No way.
It all starts with the context. The context creates a story and the story creates an identity. And identity.. Identity consists of a concept and aesthetics. Thats the basic formula of contemporary art I learned. That postmodernist dada approach to art, pioneered by Marcel Dushamp’s pissoirs and bettered by the famous shark of Damien Hirst. These guys clearly established the three-dimensional world of an artwork, and stretched its narrrative into four and five dimensional one. Because, what else is an an idea, a concept but an ethereal realm , constructed by a powerful mind. Something palpable but only virtually existing. Pure magic.
THAT is, indeed, the true mysticism of the Contemporary Art. There are no rules. Almost anything, any found object can become a piece of Art. Any old rug from a market, if you put it into 2000 euro museum glass frame and attach a story behind it, merging the biography and fiction and a pinch of art history can become a masterpiece in a White Cube.
And so i learned, that Art world is a perfect anarchist playground. An Artwork is never what you see. Its what you feel, what you imagine, what is behind it and above it. An Artwork is a well curated world of itself. What else is an artist but a true magician? Its been already stated by Sol LeWitt in 1969 that:
Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
And this was just lesson number one.
Lesson Two: “Something from Nothing”. So, if rule number one was that there are no rules, rule number two is this: BE PLAYFUL. Toy around with the lowest and highest ways of thinking, dissolve and coagulate. Be a Fool and an Atman at the same time. Play with life and death, with religion, sex, morality, politics, money, yourself. Take nothing seriously. Transgress, transcend. Balance. BE BOLD. Because fortune favours bold ones and we know it. Be “ballsy”, because art is indeed anything you can get away with – as stated by the biggest and still most successful of them all , Damien Hirst. He is more then an artist , he is a cult in itself and no one judges the winners. Ai Wei Wei, Anish Kapoor, Julian Schnabel – at the recent Art Basel they were not like stars, no. Those guys are like whole own Planets, each being an art form itself. And god damn it, you can wear pyjamas to the Oscar´s and take selfies with Paris Hilton, you can have 100 workers making art for you – whatever it takes. There are NO rules.
And here comes lesson number three:
Don’t think too much. A mind is your tool, not your Master. Kazemir Malevitch was the first one to bring the eastern concept of DAO into the context of fine art. With his understated and almost forgotten now Suprematism, he pointed out the supreme position of a pure perception above all the physical matter and form it can take and ways it could be expressed.
He was the first one to try to uncover and explain the concept of ZERO, of nothingness, of fulfilled emptiness. With the visual means of a canvas and a brush. Being a philosopher, he tried to transcend the actual plastic means of his art, and , paint nothing. His ZERO looked like a total black, total white and total red square on canvas. But what is that for an unprepared mind ? Nothing. Zero. Paradox in itself.
On the last week of the studies, after I have tried pretty much everything from collage to sculpture to painting to constructive work with found objects, I came back to paper and colors. If art can be anything and nothing… And what is ZERO anyway? And this is the time we turn our attention to the alchemical tradition and tarot. Zero is the card of the Fool, the one and only – Hermaphrodite God, Pan- creator. He is empty exactly because he is nothing else but a vessel of Divine Will… Eternal Youth, Joy and Abundance of Life – all of this is a Zero, a Fool, a Holy Grail. So, I am nothing else but a Fool, I know that I don’t know nothing, the highest mind is above my comprehension and all I need to do is to manifest it’s will through me. Fools are blessed. I am a Fool, I am the Holy Grail. The journey is complete. I am the Art itself, manifesting my own being. When I asked one of my professors on the last day of school, so how then do I get into the contemporary art context ? And he answered: darling, you ARE in the contemporary art context already. Enjoy it !!!
London/ Berlin
2016
Vera Kochubey
You can see Vera Kochubey’s new works
At the Enter Art Foundation Pop-up show during Berlin Art Week
13-25 September , Gleisdreieck Berlin
http://www.enterart.com
Like 0 
