London's biggest football club was bought by a Russian oligarch in 2003.
The same man paid the highest price ever for a work by a living artist
(Lucian Freud) in 2008. The next year, a former KGB agent acquired one
of the capital's most influential newspapers. 1
Shortly thereafter, a non-profit space and three commercial galleries
specialising in contemporary Russian art opened in central London. 2
Haunch of Venison's ‘The Art of Glasnost’ is the most recent
manifestation of this Russification process, and its catalogue pays
tribute to the phenomenon. Indeed, Josef Backstein's essay in the
catalogue associates the collapse of Soviet modernity with the author's
inaugural visit to the UK. The end of Perestroika was, he recounts,
announced by ‘the sight of the real Waterloo Bridge’. 3 He – the commissioner of the Moscow Biennale – currently resides in London.
The museum sector is being swept up in the Muscovite tide. Olga Sviblova
– the exhibition's Curatorial Adviser – brought the work of Alexander
Rodchenko to the Hayward Gallery in 2008. Tate Modern then staged
Margarita Tupitsyn's ‘Rodchenko and Popova’ in 2009, and is currently
planning a Malevich retrospective. However, living Russian artists are
not being granted the same exposure as the former avant-gardes. It has
been two decades since the ICA took a serious interest in promoting
Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art – showcasing Ilya Kabakov's seminal
Ten Characters installation and, the same year, granting his friend and
colleague Erik Bulatov a solo show. 4
Since then, their milieu has been the subject of large group
exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the US. Haunch
of Venison's project is billed as the next in this series – ‘the first
major survey of Soviet Non-Conformist art in the UK’. 5
As well as attempting to rectify the dearth of curatorial attention, the
exhibition is also a timely venture – coming a year after the twentieth
anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a year before the
twentieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's disintegration. For the most
part it surveys developments in unofficial art during the decade prior
to these events. Various themes are presented in separate galleries
dedicated to ‘Moscow Conceptualism’, ‘Sots Art and Satirical
Strategies’, ‘Photography and Hyperrealism’, ‘The New Artists of
Leningrad’, ‘Moscow Conceptualism and the Avant-Gardists' Club’, and,
finally, ‘After Glasnost’. Each of these sections is introduced by a
wall text highlighting key works, stylistic and aesthetic concerns, and
relevant social conditions affecting artistic production. While such
interpretive aids are standard for British museums and public galleries,
they are somewhat unusual in a commercial setting.
The pedagogical ambition is admirable. Contemporary Russian art is
little known in the West, despite the fact that the recent art-market
boom embraced work from various elsewheres. In relation to this issue
one has started to detect jealousy towards the competition on the part
of Russian curators. Andrei Erofeev's ‘Sots Art’ exhibition at the New
Tretyakov (part of the 2007 Moscow Biennale) attempted to show that
market-beating Chinese Political Pop was riding on Russian coat-tails,
by hanging Chinese paintings created the same year as the exhibition
alongside 1980s work by Alexander Kosolapov and colleagues. Furthermore,
according to Sviblova's catalogue essay, Chinese artists, along with
those from Brazil and India, have recently ‘diverted [Western]
attention’ from Russian art. 6
The term ‘Glasnost’ is a suitable curatorial rubric to the extent that –
with hindsight – it is associated with the Soviet state's decline. The
art on show is obviously not Soviet Socialist Realist, which is
to say that the featured pre-1991 works amount to a rejection of
mainstream cultural policy. In this respect they manifest ‘openness’ to
unorthodox ideas and taste. Yet, this does not mean that Gorbachev's
reforms were the first cause of their creators' irreverence. Komar and
Melamid authored the Sots Art manifesto, inaugurating play with Soviet
cultural signifiers, in 1972. Thus, one could have justifiably titled
the exhibition ‘Brezhnev's Children’. He of the great eyebrows makes a
one-off appearance in a painting by Dmitry Vrubel called God! Help Me To Survive Amongst This Deathly Love
(1991–2000) – his lips locked in a frigid male–male kiss with his East
German counterpart, Eric Honecker. The anti-eroticism of his likeness
stands in stark contrast to the fetish that is made of Gorbachev by
Vladimir Mamyshev-Monroe. In Gorby (1990), the leader wears theatrical eyeliner and red lipstick, while sporting a beaded necklace and a jewelled earring.
The exhibition does not only focus on political satire. Neither is it
fixated upon social difficulties of the sort recorded by Semyon
Faibisovich in photorealistic paintings of down-and-outs queuing for
vodka. Indeed, there is a palpable sense of whimsy in Dialogue
(1983), a photograph by Sergei Borisov which looks like album-cover art
for the best rock band never to exist in Moscow; like the Beatles' Abbey Road
(1969) in a world of zero gravity and Stalinist architecture. When
Soviet iconography does appear in Borisov's work, it is wonderfully
janus-faced in its implications. Catwalk (1987) depicts a rather
striking young woman clad in the Soviet flag, her left hand raised above
her brow in a quasi-salute, shielding her searching gaze from the
bright sun. While the reference to Socialist Realism is obvious, the
picture is closer to fashion photography – anticipating the New
Russian's predilection for all things designer-label. In a similarly
aspirational vein Gor Chahal's paintings resemble illustrations from
contemporaneous American and European fashion magazines. The figures
depicted in his For Cultural Recreation (1992) wear Converse trainers along with baggy trousers – betraying an encroaching Western influence.
Foreign power constitutes a more explicit subject in a painting by Andrei Roiter. “They are opening our eyes…”
Lord Gowrie (1988) commemorates Sotheby's 1988 auction in Moscow – an
event staged in cooperation with the Soviet Ministry of Culture. In the
middle of a red background, an emblematic white easel is inscribed with
the eponymous quote by the company's president. The auction was a
turning point on the Moscow art scene, briefly making some little known
artists into (international media) stars, while simultaneously upsetting
both the official and unofficial artistic hierarchies within the Soviet
Union. Ekaterina Degot describes the process:
… during the Gorbachev era, art became an object of
Glasnost, and for the first time, it was looked at from the outside.
This meant that art had to undergo an internal Perestroika, a break, a
painful separation of the art product from its creator and the
installation within it of an exhibitory ‘alienation’. 7
Such alienation was manifest in the money paid by wealthy Westerners for
works by Ilya Kabakov (the veritable king of Moscow Conceptualism) and
the party's favoured painter, Ilya Glazunov. To the surprise of
Muscovites, their art achieved far less in comparison with what was
offered for paintings by the young Grisha Bruskin and Igor and Svetlana
Kopystiansky. Though Bruskin would go on to be represented by the
Marlborough Gallery (and effectively owes his career to the
aforementioned opportunity created by Glasnost) he does not feature in
the Haunch exhibition.
Rightly, Ilya Kabakov is included. He makes a poetic appearance with I Sleep in the Orchard
(1991/2008): a lugubrious room containing a bed, a few pot plants, a
whiteboard and a bare low-watt light bulb. A nearby text, written in the
first person, recounts a halcyon youth spent outdoors in the
countryside, an idyll brought to a close by a move to the big city. A
life of urban pressure eventually proves too much to bear and the
narrator, leaving her husband and children, checks into (or is committed
to) an institution, where she subsequently whiles away her time in
pathetic reverie. It is the artist's signature cocktail of failure and
transcendence, and certainly the best work in the show. Significantly,
it introduces the visitor to another side of Soviet unofficial art.
Standing at a remove from the pizzazz and parody which dominates the
exhibition, Kabakov's installation forces the viewer to slow down. The
contrast may be effectively characterised as the difference between the
one-liner and the story. The first, which constitutes the actual content
of Rostislav Lebedev's Made in the USSR (1979), can be read in an instant. The second is like an intellectual lozenge – slow-release melancholy.
One has come to expect extravagant shows from Haunch of Venison – the
gallery that represents Bill Viola and other masters of spectacle.
However, while one cannot fail to be impressed by the number of pieces
in ‘Glasnost’, displayed in grand surroundings (the same neo-classical
building as the Royal Academy), the exhibition does not feature
consistently important material. While many senior artists are included,
their major works are omitted. Above all, Komar and Melamid are poorly
represented by an oil sketch and a well-painted but rather glib
depiction of a Jesus–Lenin hybrid, called Antichrist (1990–1991). Their capacity for greater intellectual subtlety could have been conveyed by including The People's Choice (1994–1997), or any work that the pair have attributed to fictional artists – such as Nikolai Buchumov
(1973). Likewise, while Sergei ‘Afrika’ Bugaev's embroidered flags are
visually appealing, they do not match the power of his contribution to
the 1999 Venice Biennale – MIR: Made in the XXth Century: a large
installation incorporating benign Soviet propaganda photographs and a
video of a man undergoing electroshock therapy. Of course, it is not
fair to expect wall-to-wall museum-quality pieces from a private gallery
as many key artworks are not available for sale. However, this does not
change the fact that in Glasnost some important figures get lost in the
crowd.
Moreover, some are not included. Dmitri Prigov is a serious omission
from the ‘Moscow Conceptualism’ section, especially as he is quoted in a
wall text elsewhere. Viktor Pivovarov is another no show, as is Elena
Elagina – despite the fact that her long-time collaborator, Igor
Makarevich, is featured. Furthermore, the Collective Actions group make
no appearance – symptomatic of the show's overall neglect of performance
documentation, as well as the general preponderance of painting. As
before, commercial conditions explain such matters. The curator has this
issue in mind when, in the catalogue, she states that the exhibition is
‘by no means an exhaustive account of the period’. Hers is an honest
admission, but it is contradicted by the first line of the exhibition's
press release, which describes the display as a ‘comprehensive survey’.
The omissions are not a major transgression. However, they are not
mitigated by the presence of a consistent curatorial thesis. In the
introduction to the catalogue, we read that the featured works are
characterised by ‘the spirit of individuality’. 8
Yet, for many artists in the show, collective and group identity was a
major theme. The display seems to concede this very point – organised
into ‘isms’ and, more importantly, social constellations. Other
exhibitions of similar material have acknowledged the group context. In
the catalogue for his 2008 exhibition, ‘Total Enlightenment’, Boris
Groys wrote that Moscow Conceptualism was a systematically organised
‘micro-public’ (a specific ‘movement’ or ‘scene’) with its own
‘quasi-institutional internal organization’ and binding ideology. 9
Elsewhere, in a recent book, Victor Tupitsyn has outlined the
phenomenon of a ‘communal optic’, manifest in works by artists who also
feature in the Haunch of Venison show. 10
Glasnost is a museum-scale survey that provides a welcome
introduction to various currents in Soviet nonconformist art. However,
this introduction is partial and inconsistent. It is now time for a
British public institution to take on this material.