Hail the new futurists! Hail Mikhail Maksimov, an artist, director, and designer creating games that operate like "a sanatorium for artists". In his latest work, Moscow Modern Art Massacre (MMAM), players can destroy art and burn down entire museums, like F.T. Marinetti recommended. You have sixty seconds to annihilate the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, obliterate the Garage Museum in Moscow, and vandalize the XL Galleries... You can also unlock new white walls - the mysterious 6th level gallery! - and inflict physical harm to conceptual art. MMAM actively encourages the player - an android-like type reminiscent of Bjork's "All is full of love" music video - to reject the dictates, rules, and conventions of modern art. Each gallery is full of destructible artworks - you must wreck havoc on a set number of masterpieces to progress to the next level. Even sculptures can be demolished. Photos can be burned. There's even an online leaderboard.
And don't get me started on the soundtrack.
Moscow Modern Art Massacre reminds me of such iconoclastic classics such as Hunter Jonakin's Jeff Koons Must Die (2011) and, obviously, Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson's Museum Meltdown (1996). But it is also the culmination of a series of projects critiquing the art system through game mechanics and ludic tropes, like The Pasture (2016) a "Russian Art System Simulation Game", an art gallery simulator and the precursor to MMAM, Rodchenko Rampage (2014). Technically speaking, Maksimov's games are the state of the art, no pun intended.
Mikhail Maksimov, Rodchenko Rampage, 2014. Screenshots, Windows platforms.
Mikhail Maksimov is a Russian artist and video director. He graduated at Moscow State Construction University and Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, and took part in several exhibitions and festivals including 3-th, 4-th, 5th Moscow Modern Art Biennale, New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland, 34rd and 36th Moscow International Film Festival (2013, 2014), Manifesta 10 (2014), 12nd and 13th, 14th Kansk Video Festival (2013, 2014, 2015, when he won the Best Russian Short Prize), 2morrow Film Festival (2015).
LINK: Mikhail Maksimov
