The extreme attention to language as a politicized space of human social existence is the focus of a number of significant academic movements of the 20th century: the Russian formalists, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the French poststructuralists, and many contemporary artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Marcel Broodthaers, from Cy Twombly to Mona Hatoum. In this context, any attempt to free the subject from the formulaicity of language is not new — it is prompted by the very literary-centered consciousness of European culture. Capitalism as a political-economic system has the ability to appropriate any critical position, to incorporate it into commodification, thus making the struggle against power discourses in the linguistic field permanently doomed to failure. Following this principle, capitalism “emancipates society from discourse in general”. In a post-discursive society, the medium of language absorbs everything, erasing the boundary between meanings — language loses its power. The legitimization of power becomes equivalent to the possibilities of its capitalization, a political slogan becomes an advertising slogan, and the logic of the existence of art is replaced by the logic of the corporation. The only way to resist is through the practice of “powerless-evil commentary”.
“Automation,” as Viktor Shklovsky wrote, ‘eats things, dress, furniture, wife, and fear of war’ — automated language, the language of our everyday life, turns out to be not only rooted in domestic prosaicism and mechanistic perception. Capitalist appropriation, shrouded in the fog of the automation of language, blurs any discursive boundaries, concealing in its apparent transparency the mechanisms of repressive power. Inheriting the critical tradition, in the Currant Project Andrei Andreev turns inside out the daily human encounter with the slogan, a construction of language whose content has been reduced by capitalism to an advertising jingle. The mechanistic nature of this kind of perception literally becomes the mechanics of his works, spewing out the devalued speech unit. The permanent “crumpling” in Andreev's works opposes both carving in stone and printing on an advertising banner. In a situation where the global telemarket department store narrows the world down to a set of meaningless adjectives that fetishize smartphones, crosses and curtains, the artist collides the pathetics of the political and the vulgarity of the bazaar. Andrei Andreev's artistic reflection appears as a radical questioning of language, leaving the viewer in the ringing void of the cacophony of linguistic forms.
