Lorenz. Sin No. 2

A series of eco-themed collages presented at the RayON.0 exhibition at the Museum of Moscow in 2019.

In Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist and Nobel Prize winner (1973) "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins", sin No 2 describes the "devastation of living space" caused by the activities of man who ignores nature.

Project “Lorenz. Sin No 2" intervenes with elements of urbanization processes in works of art from previous periods in order to deconstruct the process of urbanization and illustrate the problems faced by a contemporary city dweller.

The Statement

Just yesterday Konrad Lorenz of Vienna was watching the geese with one eye and observing people with the other.

How they live, what they do, what comes out of it.

And then spoke at length about his findings.

Among other things, he was drawn to the sight of modern cities.

Go to any urban outskirts.

The first thing you will see is a succession of monotonous and haphazardly placed in space high-rise boxes and asphalt-filled planes.

It is quite possible that you live in exactly these conditions.

He saw them too in his 1972.

And he compared the old center of any German city with its outskirts.

And he noticed that the point of contact between nature and civilization is very similar to the point of contact between healthy tissue and a malignant tumor.

The homogeneous tumor tissue reminded him terribly of an aerial photograph of a modern urban suburb with its uniform houses, which are designed by culturally impoverished architects in the rush of competition.

Go into any maps with “Satellite” mode and you will see this.

The basis of this phenomenon is loss of information.

A malignant tumor cell differs from a normal cell primarily in that it is devoid of the genetic information necessary to be a useful member of the body's community of cells.

It behaves like a single-celled animal.

It has no special structure and reproduces unrestrained.

It has no memory and no values.

In contrast to today, many old cities were built according to very different and complementary plans.

Their harmony was achieved through information passed down from generation to generation.

Everything was taken into account: the landscape, the location of natural objects, the trajectory of the sun, historical and cultural experience.

Now this experience has been forgotten and lost.

The blooming areas of nature are devastated by modern technology and filled with few extremely simplistic constructions.

In them people spend their lives.

The striking difference between the harmonious images of the paintings of a previous time and the everyday texture of the modern human habitat vividly affirms the traces of the era imprinted on our lives.

The aesthetic flattening and simplification of reality led to violence against the individual.

This became especially clear during the Soviet era, when the individual was relegated to the position of a function in a chain of functions.

At the same time, the contradiction between the real landscapes of natural depth and the flat surrounding reality, which we ourselves have created by trading our will for the beautiful for a share in the necessary, became particularly clear.

This statement was conceived in 2013 and began with the black and white photograph I present below.

A detailed and striking description of the phenomenon we call Sin No 2 can be found in Chapter 3 of Konrad Lorenz's Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins.

Konrad Lorenz was a zoologist, one of the founders of the science of animal behavior, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1973).

List of works:

1. Jakob Philipp Hackert. Ruins of the Temple at Segesta. 1778

2. Valentin Serov. Portrait of Maria Zetlin. 1910

3. Alexei Savrasov. The Rooks Have Arrived. 1871

4. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. Peasant Girls. Nizhnyaya Topornya. Sheksna River. 1909

5. Jacob Philipp Hackert. Hare in the bushes. 1803

6. Jakob Philipp Hackert. River Landscape with a Church. 1765

7. Ivan Kramskoi. Christ in the Desert. 1872

8. Ivan Shishkin. Morning in a Pine Forest. 1889

9. Shot 11.01.2013

People are poor.

And there are a lot of them.

And everyone is striving to earn and overtake his or her own kind.

This race hangs a heavy stamp on the look of modern cities with their hundreds of thousands of mass dwellings.

They differ from each other only in numbers.

And by their appearance and content they do not reckon with the human soul, nor with his craving for beauty, nor with nature, which it is customary to mercilessly rape under one's own thought and lust.

Thus whole generations have been thrown out of their private homes and placed in “human cattle stalls” (ger. Nutzmenschen).

This is how it is considered acceptable to keep chickens, geese and cows.

This is also the way it is considered acceptable to build a dwelling for man, who is the least able to bear total impersonalization and simplification in nature.

The wretchedness and ugliness of the constructions created by the perpetually hurrying poor man rapes tastes and lives.

In this artificial realm of synthetics, only a shuttle bus and a grocery store with endorphin vodka are seen as a chance for salvation and a life full of joy.

This is how alienation from the living nature, monetary and spiritual nullification led to the emptying of the living space inside and outside the human being.