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From Shooting Images
Gusov's photographs... Wait a minute, these are not photographs at all. Not in the sense that here's a pretty girl wearing a pashmina, and there's Uncle Ronnie doing what lie does best, and look, here's a car that looks just like Peter's old Aston Martin. Not in the sense in winch photography has been understood since the invention of the daguerreotype, which is to say as the final abasement of the ideal of verisimilitude pursued in painting since Uccello.
Gusov's photographs are lightning fissures, apertures, openings. They are neat as the bullet marks made in the moving target or time by a master of the craft and the weird and hopeless dawn that streams through these tightly clustered pinholes is the light of the future.
Same of them, at first glance, appear humorous. Don't bet on it. These may be tears wept by other means, for nature can be as cruel as any act of genocide. Others, at first glance, are serious. Don't be deceived. One who has glimpsed the future cannot stop laughing. He knows that while his craft is absolute, his art — all art — will make no difference to the world, none whatsoever. Men in shirt sleeves will still carry items of heavy furniture from place to place, grunting at the passerby. Young beautiful women will still take off their clothes for the pleasure or the bald and the wicked. Tyrants will massacre populations, snakes will shed their skins, melons will grow less sweet with every passing August. Ice cubes will clink in cocktail glasses, the unhappy will grow richer, and the poor will not be any the wiser. What, in Heaven's name, is art to do with any of that?
For the joy of the artist, his playful, gamboling joy, is without recompense. It has no moral or social significance. It is but the excitement of the future, glimpsed in the briefest of moments, just as the ball drops, as the shutter clicks, as the rifle recoils, and recorded with the blinding clarity of an absolutely incontrovertible I am right. Recorded for whom? For the artist and for the artist alone, the one for whose sake the multitude will one day gel baptised under the cowardly name of posterity, waving palm branches and chanting He was right.
What Gusov's photographs have to say to the world is just that. What you do with them is your business.
He likes taking them.
Andrei Navrozov
Venice - Palermo
Gusov's photographs are lightning fissures, apertures, openings. They are neat as the bullet marks made in the moving target or time by a master of the craft and the weird and hopeless dawn that streams through these tightly clustered pinholes is the light of the future.
Same of them, at first glance, appear humorous. Don't bet on it. These may be tears wept by other means, for nature can be as cruel as any act of genocide. Others, at first glance, are serious. Don't be deceived. One who has glimpsed the future cannot stop laughing. He knows that while his craft is absolute, his art — all art — will make no difference to the world, none whatsoever. Men in shirt sleeves will still carry items of heavy furniture from place to place, grunting at the passerby. Young beautiful women will still take off their clothes for the pleasure or the bald and the wicked. Tyrants will massacre populations, snakes will shed their skins, melons will grow less sweet with every passing August. Ice cubes will clink in cocktail glasses, the unhappy will grow richer, and the poor will not be any the wiser. What, in Heaven's name, is art to do with any of that?
For the joy of the artist, his playful, gamboling joy, is without recompense. It has no moral or social significance. It is but the excitement of the future, glimpsed in the briefest of moments, just as the ball drops, as the shutter clicks, as the rifle recoils, and recorded with the blinding clarity of an absolutely incontrovertible I am right. Recorded for whom? For the artist and for the artist alone, the one for whose sake the multitude will one day gel baptised under the cowardly name of posterity, waving palm branches and chanting He was right.
What Gusov's photographs have to say to the world is just that. What you do with them is your business.
He likes taking them.
Andrei Navrozov
Venice - Palermo