Unreliable Sample

The standard kilogram, which until 2019 served as the single international standard of mass measurement, has now been abolished. Over a hundred years, the platinum-iridium ingot gradually lost mass, but since it is by definition equal to the standard, what changed was not the physical object but the quantity itself, which is to say that a kilogram a hundred years ago and a kilogram today have different masses. The exhibition takes place in the pre-revolutionary building of a mutual credit society. In 1918 the mutual credit societies were liquidated, the consensus on the value of these papers was destroyed by decree, deposits and loans were seized. The kilogram, like the ruble or the dollar, is a fantasy based on faith in statehood and law: as long as national institutions exist, a kilogram equals a kilogram, and a bank account is not just a random set of numbers. Art, too, had its models. The Renaissance chose antiquity as its point of reference, and by imitating Greek and Roman masters it consistently struck out everything created after Rome. The system of academies established criteria for the evaluation and analysis of works, conformity with which required the multiple reproduction of plaster figures of Apollos, Discus Throwers and Laocoöns. The standard kilogram was kept under two airtight domes, in a vacuum, and still, over time, it underwent "drying out." The Academy acted in a similar way: like a dome, it protected the canon from outside interference. But under the onslaught of industrialization, the crisis of monarchies and the spread of leftist ideas, this shell began to crack. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the rapid pace of technological know-how reshapes the very experience of time: the era of isms begins, and artistic methods are reinvented. But half a century later, after two world wars, faith in inevitable progress ceases to be convincing: artists abandon the race for the new. The past turns out to be performative and open to change. Money, units of measurement, art exist only insofar as they are reproduced by the institutions that establish them. The works presented in the exhibition turn to iconic images of the past and show them in a state of destruction: what seemed to be the nature of things reveals itself as a historical construct.