Regardless of the nature of our pursuits, we are always on stage, and it would be naïve to think that aesthetic practices are any exception. The difference between different (or, should I say heterogenic?) regimes of spectacle, peculiar to past and present, lies in the fact that today (through electronic media) we are already moving swiftly, if not instantaneously, from one theater to another and, moreover, that the arena for spectacularization is first and foremost our own consciousness. It is in fact structuring itself in the likeness of the theater. Stéphane Mallarmé’s phrase “theater of the mind” best captures the present state of affairs.

Andrei Molodkin’s context is a political spectacle fueled by imperial ambitions of power brokers whose dream is to monitor the whole world from the top of the oil rig. The latter is the 21st Century’s Mount Olympus-the theatrical lodge, from which politicians and corporate executives enjoy watching battle scenes, executions, and other horrors inflicted by them upon people’s lives. Bordering on this theme, Molodkin’s installation Sweet Crude American Dream exposes not only the shocking theatricality of score settling (murdering of murderer), but also the ways in which our “innocent” addiction to oil plays into it.

Irrespective of time span, death converts organic life into oil. Death’s “exhibitability” (Golgotha, mass funerals, laying in state, public executions, etc.) is a well known phenomenon; its oil related nature does not discriminate between those who prey and those who fall prey, thereby turning us all into connected vessels, linked by oil hosepipes-whether symbolic or real. Death by hanging evokes Lenin’s portrayal of a “typical” capitalist who in order to make a profit supplies his executioners with a rope while knowing it will be used to hang him. Ironically, this low-tech execution is no longer compatible with the American Dream: in the States we have long entered the new age – the era of high-tech death. “No one has a right to deprive a man of his death,”—said Sartre. Perhaps we’ve taken this statement too literally. (Victor Tupitsyn)