Russian Soviet Camera
Marketing Practices Throughout the World
Marketing Practices throughout the World
Most of the contemporary business enterprises use marketing mix when establishing their marketing strategy. The four P's are: Product, which is cargo and passenger travel in the case, Place, which is worldwide, Price- determined by particular case and Promotion- involves many steps and techniques. The choice of marketing techniques may vary in the marketing of services from the marketing of products, but the basic principles and concepts of marketing are equally important and relevant in both. Basically selling is a micro function which means offering existing products at an agreed price. Often sales people do not control (although they may influence) the production level or quality. Marketing is a macro function, which, in addition to selling, is involved in many other tactical areas, such as: Collecting, storing and analyzing important information regarding markets, competition and future trends. Segmenting the market and identifying specific needs of different customers. Adjusting existing products and creating new products to suit the changing customer needs. Deciding on price levels acceptable to the customers and to the company (ensuring value for money to the customers and ensuring long-term profitability for the company) is another significant task of marketing people. Selecting suitable channels which can be used as 'pipelines', either to distribute the products to customers or attract customers to the products/services. In this paper we are going to analyze marketing practices of three different countries of various states of development: developed, developing and underdeveloped. We are going to use Canada, Russia and countries of Latin America as examples for our research.
People in today's global village are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than by their age or generation Contemporary marketing is, fundamentally, multicultural, as consumers live in a multicultural world. Multicultural marketing concentrates on learning about consumers rather than imposing definitions on them. Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when marketing could rely on sloganistic assumptions such as "generational," "ethnic" and "life cycle" uniformity. There may be generational, ethnic and life cycle aspects to a marketone may even argue that consideration of these is a necessary part of marketing researchbut one cannot argue that consideration of these aspects alone is sufficient.
Life cycle marketing, in contrast, holds that generations are not unique, that all behavior can be predicated by a person's age: It does not matter who you are, but merely how old you are. The limitations of both generational and life cycle marketing are most clearly shown when those who argue that the baby boom generation is uniquely defined, turn around and argue that as they age their behavior will follow life cycle patterns similar to those of previous generations. The reality of the marketplace is that consumers are defined by more than their age or the cohort they were born with. The consumer population of Canada has a diversity that is both wide and deep. One dimension of this diversity is ancestry based. Over five million Canadians, 18% of the population, were not born in Canada. Three percent of the population identify themselves as part of the aboriginal population, and 15% identify themselves as being part of a visible minority.
Only 64% of the Canadian population has a single ethnic origin, with 11% of British ethnic origin, 9% of French ethnic origin, and 43% of single ethnic origin other than British or French. Of the 36% of the population with multiple ethnic origins, 27% have at least one ethnic origin that is neither British nor French. Six and a half million people in Canada have some knowledge of languages other than English or French.
At first glance, this ancestry-based diversity may seem to offer support for what is often termed "ethnic" marketing, of approaching consumers as though their consumption patterns were solely defined by their ancestry. As with life cycle or generational marketing, ethnic marketing grossly oversimplifies the factors that determine consumer behavior: people, especially people in the global village, are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than they are defined by their age or their generation. What does determine people's consumer behavior is their uniqueness in terms of the combination of their heritage, ancestry, age, education, income, life experience and, fundamentally, their valueswhat they believe in. Consumer behavior is culturally defined, where culture means values, interests, life styles, beliefs and aspirations. In effective marketing, it is as important that someone is a vegan as it is that they were born in the 20-year period after the Second World War: that they crave power tools as it is that they were born in Guangzhou; that they are fiscal conservatives as it is that they are 26 years old.
Marketing must not only acknowledge the cultural foundation of consumer behavior, it must also acknowledge that people are multi-, not mono-, cultural. Consumers actively belong to many distinct groups of shared interests, moving fluidly back and forth across the myriad of cultural layers that define contemporary society. At one moment a person's behavior will be largely influenced by an ancestral context, in another by a peer context, in another by a career context and in another by chance. Today's consumers comfortably switch from hockey to hoops, hip-hop to classical, dim sum to doughnuts, rap to the Rankin Family, without the need of boundaries or borders.
Just as marketing was starting to be taken seriously across the financial-services sector, a dramatic shift in what constitutes marketing is underway. The marketing that banks had accepted and endorsed has changed. A straightforward application of the traditional "marketing mix," with the well-known "4Ps" - Product, Price, Place and Promotionis no longer sufficient in the financial marketplace of the 2000s. Instead, a new set of ideas has emerged, along with a new set of terms: individualized marketing, interactive marketing, relationship marketing and internal marketing. Banks can no longer be marketing-oriented; they must become market-oriented. To be marketing-oriented implies using a bag of promotional tricks to capture the bank consumer. To be market-oriented, on the other hand, banks must engage in dialogue with existing and potential customers. This requires bank services and approaches to be designed through close contact with the market.
It's estimated that the average consumer is bombarded with up to 3,000 advertising messages each day, and that they remember only 2-3% of these advertisements without prompting. All this competition and noise means that banks have to rethink their advertising strategies. One recent trend has been a shift to more print advertising. Although television remains important, as financial services have grown more complex, banks have been forced to use magazines and particularly newspapers to explain the details of their services.
Changing consumer demographics and lifestyles are another reason for the decline in the traditional marketing approach. Financial consumers no longer fall into neat, visible target groups. A rise in the number of women in the work force, more single-person households and the growing seniors population have caused significant marketing change. Today banks must cater to smaller and smaller market niches, and all these changes make mass marketing inappropriate. Associated with lifestyle is the availability of the most valued of all commodities: time. For most consumers, time seems to be continually shrinking. Bank customers want to be able to access their accounts through ABMs and phones, and use new mini-branches, drive-through tellers and boutique branches. This may in turn lead to saturation of the distribution channels.
To help address these changes and the move to relationship marketing, some experts argue that any future marketing strategy should draw on the base of knowledge and experience that already exists within a company, or in our case a bank. In other words, before attempting to develop an image and market position, a bank must look first to its strengths, its customers and its marketplace. Allied to knowledge-based marketing is experience-based marketing. This requires a bank to get close to the customer (an idea promoted by Peters and Waterman 10 years ago in In Search of Excellence). Close feedback about customer needs, competitors, and technology and marketplace characteristics keeps the marketing effort on target. When a bank has a firm handle on knowledge-based and experience-based marketing, it can develop its strategy and position its services in the market. Most important of all, however, is that bank marketing is no longer restricted to marketing specialists. It involves everyone within the bank.
Much of the mystery is now gone and this report is about a changed and a changing Russia. Our impressions of the Former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation were formed over 40+ years of the Cold War. These impressions are generally not very favorable, but we should not allow ourselves to remain influenced by them. Rather, we should now look at a country and a marketplace that is certain to have a profound effect on international business in the decade ahead. Spanning 11 time zones, Russia is the largest country on earth. With an area of 6.6 million square miles (almost twice the size of the United States) and 150 million people, Russia possesses the population base, the natural resources and the potential overall productivity to become an economy almost equivalent to the European Community.
In Russia, however, you will not see A-B split run testing, sophisticated mailing lists, fulfillment reports and analyses, direct response television, database and interactive marketing. Not yet. But you will see emerging forms of direct marketing to include elemental telemarketing, print and broadcast media planning, vertical positioning and back-end promotions. Russians are learning. They call it Bizness- Russians do not ordinarily make references to direct marketing. They have not yet had the time, the formal exposure, the training or competitive requirement to focus on the components of Bizness in which direct marketing applications have become so interwoven. That time is fast approaching, however, as direct marketing "sneaks up" on Russia- and the value added is recognized in fact and for what direct marketing can do.
It can be termed "stealth direct marketing" in that the Russians are currently practicing direct response advertising, without direct intention, in a form and a scope that will soon coalesce into more purposeful applications. Direct marketing will be upon Russia before they know it. It is happening now and applications are increasing rapidly. Most print and broadcast ads in Russia now carry or feature telephone numbers, encouraging the public to call them and to check on their product line and prices. The use of direct response is more prevalent both to accelerate feedback, as well as to improve and emphasize convenience. Russia's size, its widely scattered population centers and its rapid growth provide the necessary linkage for direct marketing. It is not simply a new Western concept- it is communications, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and marketing penetration and it is a necessity.
Direct marketing in Russia has not reached the point where there are esoteric discussions about predictability, media concentration, personalization or immediacy, but there is talk about reaching customers, response rates, acquisition costs and customer service. Marketing is a new (though not fully understood or appreciated) force in a new market. The marketplace that is Russia is clearly one of the biggest in the world with a dramatic and unfulfilled demand for consumer products and services. And direct marketing, as it is evolving, will help to propel the Russian economy forward.
Seen by many multinationals as a massive market with unrivalled scope for development, Latin America's potential can only be realized if economic uncertainties and piracy problems can be overcome. The mantra has been heard at trade shows, boardroom meetings and executive paw-wows for years: 'Keep watching Latin America. Keep watching Latin America.' The watch-and-wait attitude is now, by and large, over. Latin America is very much at the front of the multinationals' collective mind these days, thanks to robust sales, keen possibilities of crossover success both within and without the territory, and the feeling that the best is yet to come.
A regional economy is merging in the western hemisphere, and old stereotypes of poverty-stricken Latin Americans are out of date. Central and South American consumers are relatively sophisticated, and their culture remains different from the United States. Businesses can get on the right track by crossing national boundaries, targeting specific Latin groups, and taking their place in the New World's new order. Does your product have a money-back guarantee? In the United States, this is a tried-and-true way to get a customer's attention. But south of the Rio Grande, people simply don't believe such claims. Once they part with their money, they don't expect to get it back. Latin Americans are more likely than U.S. residents to believe celebrity endorsements, according to Roper Starch Worldwide. They are also more likely to believe the words "new and improved." They respond more positively to products labeled "the official" choice of a sports team, and they even like the old hidden camera trick. But only an average of 27 percent of consumers in the urban areas of Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina believe money-back guarantees, compared with 49 percent in the United States.
As novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende have written, people in Latin cultures believe that life is much more complex than it appears at first glance. This is an important lesson for U.S. marketers to learn in the 2000s. Trade policy, corporate economies of scale, immigration, and popular culture are pushing North America, Central America, and South America toward one big hemispheric marketplace. In the 2000s, the Monroe Doctrine has been replaced by Wal-Mart, the Internet, and MTV. The sometimes simplistic perceptions Norteamericanos have of Latin America obscure a complex reality. Yes, Latin America is home to the exotic landscapes and ancient civilizations of the Andes and the Amazon. But it is also home to the enormous and bustling cities of Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, and Buenos Aires. Latin Americans enjoy a dynamic consumer economy that is being reshaped by new technologies and media- just as it is in the United States.
Marketers who want to expand into Latin America will have to learn new rules for a different world. While the United States is dominated by a bulging middle class, Latin America is an economic pyramid. Ten percent of the Latin population is in our top ranking of socioeconomic status. Thirty-five percent are in the middle, which is somewhat poorer than the middle class of the United States. And most Latin households are truly poor, especially by North-American standards. Look closer, however, and you will find many similarities between north and south. Latin America, like the United States, is struggling to integrate traditional values with new ideas and attitudes. Even the family, the traditional bulwark of this Catholic-dominated region, is not immune. Only half of Latin Americans surveyed are optimistic about the institution of marriage and family, which is similar to the response in the United States. Despite this pessimism, Latin Americans and North Americans both like to spend time with their families. It is the most popular leisure-time activity, cited by at least three-quarters of those surveyed in all countries.
Among those who don't stand by their brands, however, United States and Latin-American consumers diverge. In the United States, shoppers who are not brand-loyal typically choose from among two or three favorite brands. In Latin America, they are equally likely to look around for what seems to be the best deal at the moment. For example, 28 percent of United States consumers choose from two or three favorite brands of shampoo, while 22 percent look around for what seems best at the moment. In Brazil, however, 33 percent of urban shoppers go with what looks best at the moment, while only 17 percent buy from a standard list of favorites. These shopping patterns indicate that consumers' brand "menus" are less developed in Latin America. Northern marketers may have opportunities to add their brands to Latin Americans' shopping lists.
Consequently we see a common trend in marketing, which is leading marketing practices towards more national approaches. Each nation needs its particular marketing approach as we see it from the abovementioned three countries. There is no doubt that there are still some global influences and commonly accepted marketing strategies like for example direct marketing, that do touch and will in the closer future all places of the world, but there will always be necessary some adjustments according to the origins of the place the strategy is being applied to. All in all, in reality, there is no similarity in consumer behavior between a 54-year-old wine-loving heterosexual herbalist from Halifax and a 37-year-old gay vegan oil-patch worker from Hinton, Alta., yet both are supposedly part of the same baby-boom market. A 20-year generational cohort is far, far too wide to draw any practical conclusions about market behavior.
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Postmodernism as an Artistic Space. the Photographic World of Chezhin the Artist
Black and white photography (and, latterly, colour photography) always emphasises the dividing line marking the intersection between time(s) and space(s), the intersection and interpenetration of today and yesterday, today and tomorrow - of my life and someone else’s. It points to the event experienced by a person (someone we know or don’t know, myself, just someone, nature, or society as a whole) at the moment when my attention is directed at the rectangular frame recording that which has already been and gone and which is yet present in my life just so long as I am looking at (remembering) it.
Those who turn our life, the reality of our experience, into photographic images measure it as a news reporter does, give it aesthetic order as does a film director, and ‘set up’ frames to ‘please the eye’ - just as the archivist who acts as custodian of the past. And yet sometimes subordination to the past (not to history, i.e. not to past time in the form of events) turns out to be too confining a role for the photographer and he becomes an Artist. An Artist who subordinates to himself and his will time, space, and the reality of time and space, directing the facial expressions of the main actors in his art - i.e. time (considered as a flow of passing moments) and events. In his hands the camera, negatives/positives, exhibits, and other tools of trade become instruments in the attainment of higher goals. This is how it was that at some point in his photographic career Andrey Chezhin became not a master of artistic photography or some particular genre of photography, but an artist uplifted by the coloured wings of the style of our age - that style which the critics love to slate, postmodernism.
Andrey Chezhin’s reincarnation occurred in the not so distant past, against the background of historic events that had broken the consciousness of generations condemned to witness the change of course undergone by the giant ghost ship USSR-Russia as it turned from socialism to capitalism and from total paralysis of its executive structures to idiocy.
It was oÂnly natural that the consciousness of the photographer/artist-to-be should energetically throw off torpidity and slip out of its old skin. Simple recording of social reality accompanied by clicks of the camera shutter gave way to interest in staged photography and experiments with exhibits (sometimes as many as three or more). Furthermore, Chezhin needed a suitable object of investigation - complete with hands, legs, and heads etc.; and this, for lack of other candidates prepared to surrender themselves to the required extent, turned out to be the artist himself, ever obedient to and trustful of his own direction. It was at this time, at the end of the 1980s, that Chezhin’s first composite works - Black Square (1988) and Red Square (1990) - made their appearance. These, of course, referred to Kazimir Malevich, a recent exhibition of whose works at the RussianMuseum had triumphantly signalled a new era in the history of art and, more specifically, the lifting of taboos oÂn interest in various stages in the development of 20th-century art.
Black Square and Red Square are, as already noted, composite works, each being made up of four parts. They were conceived by Chezhin not as a photographic series or a frame by frame sequence, as in film, but as structural works where each part is no more than a brick supporting the overall equilibrium of the entire structure. The main character here is man. In the first case, man is depicted with a black square oÂn his forehead/brain; in the second, he is shown taking off the fetters that bind him.
The first part of Red Square shows an individual standing upright with arms held out horizontally and legs placed wide apart. His figure is hemmed in (drawn round) at its extremities - which form the end points of a geometrical shape - by a line/rope which calls to mind Leonardo’s quest for the ‘golden section’ in the proportions of the human body. The red square contains all the space whose contours are marked and defined by the rope-line; and the man is himself enclosed in this space. Then, in the next two parts of this work, he manages to free himself from the rope as his head, arms, and legs are liberated in turn, while, at the same time, the area of control exercised by the red square oÂn the surface of the photograph grows progressively narrower. Finally, in the last part of this work, the rope/measure is seen lying inside he artist’s workshop oÂn a sheet of paper, within the red square. The viewer becomes a witness of how a cultural symbol - the ‘red square’, Malevich, Suprematism, etc. - is transformed into a sociocultural oÂne: the man casts off the rope - which initially marks the contours of a star (head, arms, legs) - and liberates himself from the red, i.e. throws off ideology (the rope/fetters/red - a sign of danger, as we remember). The red is overcome; man is free.
It was at this time, i.e. at the end of the 1980s - to be more exact, in 1988 - that Chezhin embarked oÂn a series of self-portraits which is unfinished to this day. The artist photographs himself - with hair, without hair, with his wife, with a ruler; photographs his hands (in Erotica); photographs himself, himself, and himself. At the same time he started working oÂn ‘types’ for his series Portraits (1990) and was continuing to record social reality (material that would be used in Pairs, a series executed in 1987-1990-1997).
Chezhin’s absurd, significant, and meaningless staged photographs of nameless types/characters give off a powerful, unpleasant semiphysiological sense/memory of a past age of male and female functionaries and workers stamped with the distinctive marks of the limited, if not curtailed consciousness of social invalidism. Here Chezhin’s photography emphatically avoids any attempt to convey the psychological state or mood of the subject; this is photography that stands outside pyschoanalysis or psychologism, outside any expression of the ‘psychical’. These are still-lifes where things (objects) are credited with neither spirit nor personal time, nor personal experience or living space or ‘physiognomy’. Individuality has been ironed out, leaving oÂnly the overall characteristic grimace of types in socialist society. This is what they managed to achieve in the 70 years of Soviet rule. And Chezhin the artist here merely reflects the success enjoyed by the now deposed ideology in shaping the Soviet personality.
It is personality shaping that in my opinion is the subject of the series of works entitled Kharmsiada executed in 1995 for an exhibition called ‘The absurd object. An exhibition of presents by St Petersburg artists to D. Kharms in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birthday’.
A brick face, facial features shorn off or sewn up with thread, a face transformed by a door handle or a drawing-pin: these and other pleasures associated with methods of forming ‘new people’ are used by Chezhin in this series to present a kind of handbook for incipient power-lovers or a diary of obedience - a warning to the ‘masses’, i.e. to precisely that material from which, it should be noted, all this is moulded. Man turns to plastic, Chezhin warns us, if he stops thinking and resisting the will outside him - if he forgets his own authenticity, essence, and individuality.
Especially interesting from this point of view is Chezhin’s work oÂn the creation of his epoch-making The Life of Drawing-Pins, which comprises the series Album for Drawing-Pins and The Drawing-Pin and Modernism. The drawing pin and its fellows are, as it turns out, highly convenient main characters in instances taken from daily experience/recording, absurd situations supplied by the artist and the reality that surrounds him. The unitary nature of the hero of the piece gives Chezhin unprecedented freedom to destroy individuality while setting up his own mythologised drawing-pin world, absurd to the point of recognizability, and while allowing the viewer to reach the conclusion - oÂnly partly forced upon us by Chezhin himself - that ‘we are all drawing-pins, my dear sirs ... ’.
Chezhin’s interest in personal expressions of humanity no doubt explains the constant use he makes of the genre of self-portraiture. Here we should observe a number of different stages in the artist’s study of himself as a representative of the human and natural worlds and of reality itself: generalization; reduction to a common denominator; and individualization of the image (himself). Here there is no opposition set up between ‘me’ and ‘they’. Chezhin is not concerned with asking himself ‘me or someone else?’; instead, he is out to find an answer to the problem ‘me’ as ‘they’. He studies man viewed statically - not in action and movement, but in the movement/change of time. What is important for him is the nature of man and the human body - not anatomy or anthropology as such, but man in his different dimensions, self-knowledge, and self-realizations (whether with a ruler or with or without hair).
The self-portraits of various different years, series, and cycles contain an element of play which comes out at transitional moments involving switches between, say, action/reality, artist/man, reality/photographic reality/artistic reality/deception/the reality of the artist’s desire and of his creative effort and destiny.
In all the photographs in the series Self-Portraits (1988-1997), Andrey Chezhin’s face is identical: the scarcely perceptible changes escape attention - even though Chezhin slips in, among the pile of material to be examined by the viewer, versions of himself both with and without hair. This deliberate recording of something intentionally, emphatically identical puts us oÂn edge, causes our eyes to slow and steady in their tracks ...
As Modernism and Postmodernism have developed art has frequently in oÂne way or another confronted and dealt with issues relating to time, space, and movement as process. Man, the human body and its parts, and the face as that which expresses and contains man’s essence have been recurring subjects for all kinds of artists and an object of general art discourse. But the oÂnly example that comes to mind of an artist engaging in thorough self-examination and meticulous recording of himself, his ‘I’, and his face as the image of that ‘I’ dates to the 18th century and Mr. Rembrandt’s self-portraits depicting mood, grimaces, etc.
For Chezhin the human being (the ‘I’) is an object in changing time and changed temporal space (which is practically non-existent), where the emphasis is oÂn paradox, e.g. oÂn the non-obligatory, casual nature of a situation, oÂn the oÂne hand, and the significance of the moment recorded and its recording, oÂn the other.
Another feature of Andrey Chezhin’s interest in man (himself; the ‘I’ of his self-portraits) is the self-sufficient way in which, quite independently of everything external, the ‘I’ dissolves in a second person’s world and that other person’s world dissolves in the ‘I’ (here I could mention the three 1991 series called Your-mine, where female and male elements merge into a unified ‘I’). Here the ‘I’ is the artist’s ‘I’ and that of his wife. The viewer is presented with a conflict-free interpenetration of the male and that which has its beginning in woman, in nature. In Chezhin’s work the self-portrait and depiction of man is an inexhaustible topic with many typical features. oÂne other such feature is Chezhin’s use of sociocultural signs and their symbolic resonances - e.g. the red square, the black square, the rope, man, a recognizable urban landscape.
Chezhin’s series of self-portraits present life as a series of changes in the artist. His multi-part work of self-observation Calendar (1990-1991) depicts a series of situations/days/incidences - in other words, routine daily life, - examining the idea of temporal changes experienced by a static subject in a situation where measurement of the passing of time is veiled. These works grow in time, with time, and with the artist.
In every structure/work created by Andrey Chezhin social reality undergoes change and there is a movement from state to state, a sliding before and after, an imperceptible movement from edge to edge. The series Pairs (1987-1997), for instance, comprises sheets composed in 1997 from pairs of snap photographs taken over the period 1987-1990. Together, they form a collection of works that are sign-like and legible. Their meaning is accessible oÂn the basis of associations and sensations as Chezhin exploits mechanisms of perception, alogism, absurdity, logic, and direct and reverse sense-formation. Take, for example, the sheet Why am I not Fond of Moscow? At the top of this piece Chezhin has placed a photographic trick - a superimposition of oÂne of Chechulin’s skyscrapers and a spreading birch tree. At the bottom, under the beautiful pattern formed by the branches of a shrub, a dead dog is seen lying oÂn the ground. What could give a clearer or more expressive impression of the artist’s lack of fondness for this city? The double denials, the absurd semantic situations, the fidelity of the image to reality, and the plastic coincidences /references: all this explodes correct, logical reasoning and judgement and finds an echo in the tonally correct way in which these pairs are perceived by the viewer. This is true of other sheets in the series too.
In his composite, multi-structure, cyclical work Transformations (1991-1997; cyclical in as much as a repetitive rhythm of beginning-end, beginning-end runs throughout) Chezhin sets up horizontal rows/films/moments. The heroes of these films are unchanging; what changes is the space around them, their surroundings, and the conditions governing the game or existence in which they are taking part. For example, Chezhin photographs the granite sphere oÂn the spit of Vasil’evsky Island from all sides. And, seen from every side, the sphere is a sphere, but the space in which it is set changes dramatically round about - from ripples oÂn water to architectural landscape.There could be no better illustration of Matyushin’s theory of ‘expanded looking’. Or take the sequence of clocks(street mechanisms/objects) photographed at particular moments in time. Here the main character is time and its attributes - dials, hands, and the structures that encase clock mechanisms. Or the subject could be seen as a film sequence: road-legs-road. And so oÂn. In this composite work each line is a question whose resolution is possible oÂnly for the given artist; a question/problem, moreover, which is to be dealt with not so much by resolving it as by living it through. Here you will find all the eternal questions posed by art in the 20th century: identification of oÂneself and the world in oÂneself; cognition of oÂneself and the outside world; examination of the basic categories for constructing (and creating) the reality of oÂne’s embodiment; the main questions of life and eternity; play in accordance with the laws of existence and contexts for such play; incidentalness and regularity. Finally, this work succeeds in personifying a sense of change in time and space and in space in time.
The photographic world created by the photographer and artist Andrey Chezhin likewise has room for the art of the comic strip, for a physiognomic constructor, for St Petersburg-as-city-and-text, and for geometric studies a la Esher. This world is vast, paradoxical, sometimes alogical (from the point of view of the ordinary person) - but fascinating. It is a space that acts like a vortex: you oÂnly have to take the first step in its direction, become a little interested, and you find yourself unable to stop looking, you lose your way out as you blunder about the labyrinth of the artist’s consciousness, jumping from level to level, from oÂne series of works to another, colliding with enigmas, laws, traps set by the carefully watching artist - and you gradually come to realize that the main hero of Chezhin’s works is time. Time for him is an important category by which we get to know - and record - the world. It divides into seconds, moments, instants, units of experience. Time sets like a sticky, viscous mass or flows freely like a homogeneous substance - liquid, elastic, fluid. In the Self-Portraits of 1988-1997 time is an existential substance, an attribute of history and of the historical development of society and of man as representative of this society and as a part of its culture. The artist is able to move about in time; and this becomes oÂne of the ludic features of his work (the presence of the physical in real and non-real space; the artist’s almost comic right to choose his own contemporaries - and their deeds - for himself). Likewise, he is able to impose simultaneity oÂn events which are separated in time, as in the works Group Self-Portrait (1994) and Visiting Bulla (1994).
Time for Andrey Chezhin is expressed in specific objects. In his hands it is something with clearly marked, definite boundaries. These boundaries, though, are in the dimension not of man, but of history, in the specific time/happening of a given event in the history of this country and in abstract time in general, in the archaic, timeless, stagnant changelessness of man’s presence in the world as he sets about discovering his own dimension. For Chezhin even today time is divided up into the smallest elements/units that flash past seen through a train window or oÂn the screen of a television, computer, or other chronometric miracle of the kind that devours human time, genius, and intuition.
It is the movement of time that defines the characteristic space of Chezhin’s works. In them space is real at every unit of time, but unreal, phantasmagoric, spectral at each post-unit of time-after-this-moment.
Space perceived, experienced, and recorded by equipment and man during the passing of time is in the power of the artist. This space changes at every moment of the advance of time, at every moment that this time is experienced by man, through the experiencing of this time in this space. The artist confronts the viewer not with the deformation of space, but with space that is changed over an extensive stretch of time.
There is nothing accidental in Chezhin’s choice of compositional structure for his works. As a rule, they are composite structures that show man through multiplicity (e.g. Group Portrait or Transformations). The framework of these pieces is a living structure whose active influence is felt oÂnly when its various elements form a semantic, plastic link with oÂne another. This link then becomes sensible; the elements of the structure feed and fuel oÂne another.
Time, space, man, object, play are the perpetual engines that drive the Petersburg photographer Andrey Chezhin’s interest in attaining an equilibrium in the relation between ‘the external world’ and‘the world in oÂneself’. The artist uses his craft and photography as instruments. The photographer Andrey Chezhin is an artist of the end of the 20th century, the heyday of Postmodernism.
About the Author
Mariya Sheynina (Terenya), member of the International Association of Art Critics (Russia);
Translated by John Nicolson;
Published by www.amassart.com
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