https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1389132
https://doi.org/10.60056/Lit.2025.35.151–176
Genadi Gatev
The essay traces how 20th–21st-century art dissolves boundaries between text, image, and sound, recovering an ancient ritual unity while overturning modern hierarchies. From Duchamp’s readymade and Beuys’s “social sculpture” to Cage’s chance procedures, conceptualism reframed the artwork as idea and process. Photography’s “facticity” and mass reproducibility enabled dematerialized practices (Kosuth, Art & Language) and a culture dominated by images. Video and installation art—Paik’s electronic environments, Hill’s language-body experiments, Sugimoto’s time-compressed cinemas, Nauman’s claustrophobic loops, Viola’s slowed meditations—fuse media and activate viewers. Digital technologies and AI accelerate production, risking standardization, shallow reception, and a “deficit of imagination.” Drawing on Bachelard, the author contrasts a necessary “creative silence” of reverie with today’s “technological dream,” asking whether algorithmic generation can substitute for lived experience, authorship, and human imagination. The conclusion: technology expands form and access yet threatens depth; the task is to reclaim attentiveness and cultivate images that think in contemporary culture.
Кeywords: Art, Conceptual Art, Image, Imagination, Reality, New Media, AI
About the author: Genadi Gatev is a visual artist, culturologist and curator. He works in the fields of painting, photography, video and installation art.
In his works, the author explores the stereotypes of human perceptions and feelings, often associated or provoked by pre-established social, cultural, political or ethnic norms. Examining this problem from a different angle through optical illusion and the relativity of place, Genadi Gatev questions the correctness of this normativity and makes the viewer focus on its influence on human behavior. The author looks for the internal opposition between everyday actions and pre-established societal paradigms. He analyzes the universal postulates imposed in the modern global world, which often create tensions that are difficult to overcome. At the same time, the individual must live accepting the “correct” incorrectness of these norms and rules without questioning their essence and functions, or he is forced to face complete marginalization.
Genadi Gatev also explores the effects of time on places and situations that have both universal and personal resonance. He combines painting, text, photography and drawing, creating visual transformations by addressing both sight and belief in the “mechanics” of observation and perceptual habits. For the author, issues related to observation are important – directing the viewer‘s attention to what he sees and losing him in the idea that he is aware of what he is looking at. It is a deliberate dissolution of the image, a deconstruction of the visual representation, in order to explore the limits of observation and perception.
