++++ No matter how enlightened a society wants to pretend it is, no matter how many theories it constructs about the half-life of relationships, no matter how many books are written about the incompatibility of man and woman, people get married. Even people who are consciously in search of another, unconventional model of a relationship can get tears in their eyes when they think about the apparently greatest possible proof of love. The longing to find someone to provide a hold in life and to confirm it contractually is obviously ineradicable.
The video Happy Ending by Lyudmila Gorlova, who was born in 1968, shows weddings in Moscow. Brides are carried up a narrow path in the arms of their bridegrooms and, after the end of the ceremony, they are carried back down again. Friends and the happy couple have dressed up and dance in a funny, stiff way to the clanging music of a brass band. The Beatles’ Yesterday seems to be popular, along with all sorts of folk tunes. To the accompaniment of the hooting of those around them, the wedding couple kiss in ways ranging from a blown kiss with coyly downcast eyes up to a passionate massage of the tonsils.
So far everything is quite normal. But the location of the party is disconcerting. It is a kind of drab crossroads, grey, with a lot of traffic, and anything but romantic. And the fact that several weddings are taking place in parallel there without commingling.
The action resembles conveyor belt production more than the happiest day in the life of two lovers. Some of the grooms pull a face as if they had got into something which was too much for them. The brides, on the other hand, seem quite resolved when they gather up their wide skirts and defiantly throw their veils back. Almost all of them are beautiful and touchingly young.
Gorlova's video documents an attempted outbreak — the attempt to create a small oasis of happiness and exuberance in the midst of economically and socially difficult times. But the reality is apparent in the brutality of the surroundings, in the cheap clothes of the dressed-up women, in the wonky brass band music of the four-man band and in the crampedness with which those involved try to act relaxed. In the end there is nothing else for it but to wish the couple starting out on a common life together much happiness. jdv
Video program 3 at the Städelsches Kunstintitut, Holbeinstraße 1, until 25 August