Discursive Interventions into Russian Art

By Andrey Shental

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

George Loukomski, Factory Party Committee Meeting (1937), depicting a discussion between workers

During the last two years, several major projects have taken place in Moscow that challenged the traditional concept of the contemporary art exhibition by cross-pollinating it with different forms of collective experience: social clubs, excursions, local history museums, art schools, communal kitchens and Marxist meet-up groups.

Auditorium Moscow, E-flux Time/Food, Pedagogical Poem and Theoretical Studies of Cultural Anthropology: all of these projects, each in its own way, are examples of what amounts to a turn towards ‘discursive interventions’. They make one think that artists, critics, curators and philosophers decided to, using the words of German curator Marion von Osten, ‘create a space to pause, to hold on for a moment, take a breath and to think’ before making a step further. Even though this discursive turn is a critique of the usual succession of non-engaging mainstream exhibitions, it is also a reaction to particular social, political, and cultural conditions in Russia that should be elucidated.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Critic Ekaterina Degot once said regarding the Russian art system: ‘…we don’t have anything completely. So far we only have artists, that’s what surprises me!’ Notwithstanding her ironic exaggeration, she is correct: there is no financial support system for artists, nor a developed art education comparable to European or American standards. Even recently opened independent art schools are nothing more than ‘Potemkin villages’, or, as Degot puts it, ‘palliative compromise options’. Art students are not properly taught how to conduct relevant research, how to speak and write about their own works, how to argue their case. After recent changes in Russian educational policy, one could lose all hope that the situation may ever improve. The new minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky – notorious for his xenophobic novels –decided to close or reform those universities that are not ‘effective’. Whereas he did not bother to properly explain what kind of effectiveness he’s after, we all know that an ‘effective’ university is the one that trains ‘cultural managers’ suitable for a capitalist service economy.

Apart from the deficiencies of art education, there is an even more serious problem: the absence of public spaces where artists could share their ideas. In the early 1990s when the Soviet art system collapsed, the so-called ‘Moscow Actionists’ – Oleg Kulik, Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alexander Brener – made their works in the streets of Moscow or even in the Red Square, while the main TV-channels willingly broadcasted these radical performances as ‘scandals’. The last twenty years, however, have witnessed a drastic consolidation of media control by the State. The streets and speech are increasingly controlled and monitored by police and censorship, respectively. It is especially strict when critique, art and activism are made from a leftist point of view, so this paradoxical situation has even been dubbed Russian ‘McCarthyism’ (a term used by Degot during one of the e-flux discussions). The shift towards a neoliberal market economy in the 1990s has also brought about the establishment of new galleries and museums exhibiting, selling and institutionalizing art works that previously had not been publicly shown. Discursive practices, in turn, were considered as a supplement to the shows and had to take the back seat. Talks, discussions and other ways of communication happened mostly in academic settings, serving to historise and institutionalise art.

It was against this background that artists, critics and curators started to look for other ways of producing and sharing knowledge. Museums, art galleries and foundations –less structured and stifling than universities or archaic Soviet academies of fine arts – seemed the most suitable sites for a shift towards the discursive. In these places it seemed possible to produce what British theorist Irit Rogoff calls ‘knowledge as disruption, knowledge as counter-subjugation, knowledge as constant exhortation on its own, often uncomfortable implications’. Three strategies can be distinguished: the first involves an ‘entryist’ policy – leftist cultural workers join private neo-liberal art-centers or small galleries in order to radicalise their political stance for a short period of time (‘E-flux Time/food’). The second strategy is to settle down in state-funded ‘non-artistic’ places such as historical museums, and to revitalize their moribund modus operandi, radicalizing its content and context (‘Pedagogical Poem’, ‘Auditorium Moscow’). The third strategy is a seemingly more classical one: to curate series of free public discussions in state art centers (‘Theoretical Studies for Cultural Anthropology’).

One of the first projects of this kind was Auditorium Moscow. A Sketch for a Public Space curated by Ekaterina Degot, Joanna Mytkowska and David Riff in 2011 during the 4th Moscow Biennale . Opposed to a spectacular and conventional biennale, it was conceived as a ‘dense program of workshops, screenings, and roundtables with artists and theoreticians… examining the question of public spaces and the constituencies that inhabit them, in both urbanism and art’. The result was very consistent: even the act of watching a film (for example, Hito Steyerl’s Die leere Mitte, the Empty Centre, 1998) mainly became a cue for the ensuing debates. Auditorium Moscow could also be characterized as a ‘site-specific’ transformative project since it took place at Belie Palati, a 17th century townhouse, and referred to the problems of gentrifications especially relevant for the local district (the so-called ‘Golden Mile’). As curators ironically noted about this site, ‘a Friedrich Engels monument sadly peers over to the reconstruction of the Christ the Savior Church, in the place where the Palace of the Soviets was never realized’. ‘And where Pussy Riot performed their famous prayer’ – one could add now.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Last year, the Russian-born artist Anton Vidokle, after taking part in the Moscow Symposium organized by Boris Groys and immortalized in a book of the same name, returned to Moscow with his nomadic project E-flux Time/Food (made in collaboration with Julieta Aranda and Ekaterina Degot). During several days the participants of the program consumed food cooked by the artists and gave lectures that triggered discussions on Russia’s current political situation. For example, poet and activist Pavel Arseniev read a paper arguing that Facebook impedes the actual physical presence of people in protests and gatherings, which sounded quite contradictory in this context. The point is that E-flux Time/Food was held in an ivory tower – a comfortable private ‘bourgeois’ foundation, at a time when thousands of people joined the Moscow Occupy movement (Occupy Abay). However, Ekaterina Degot in her essay Rebellion against hamburgers argues against the reproach for being hypocritical: ‘contemporary art indirectly gives the owners of such foundations the opportunity to improve their karma and reputation in society, which, I’m sure, will be counted to their credit after our victory. So art is fulfilling its social function of helping people to become better’. And, finally, this does not mean that the participants did not join the streets protest after the discussions.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Pedagogical poem was a more substantial and promising project that took place in one of the traditional historical museums, Presnya , in the center of Moscow. Its title refers to a book written by famous Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko, who developed the theory and methodology of self-governing child collectives. Although Makarenko writes about his educational work with underage criminal orphans, this project used his book more as a metaphor for a specific form of education based on horizontality, involvement and collective creativity. Usually curators open shows and only then organize series of discussions in order to support their projects. In the case of ‘Pedagogical poem’, artist and writer Arseniy Zhilyaev and historian Ilya Budraytskis , both members of the Russian Socialist Movement , decided to try a reversed model. Refusing to function as ‘curators’, they were rather initiators who ignited a series of lectures and artists’ presentations that took place every Thursday as well as Marxist reading groups led by Vlad Sofronov on Sundays. It was supposed that the consequent collective rearrangement of the museum’s display would become a kind of summary or a material manifestation of their meetings. The exhibition was supposed to become something between Fred Wilson’s deconstruction of traditional museum displays highlighting its limitations, and Group Material experiments inviting people to contribute their personal precious objects as a part of the show. However, because of a misunderstanding with the directorship they had to pile all the artifacts, books and videos in one room. Nevertheless, the series of around 100 discussions was no less important than its end product. For instance, Budraytskis, in his ‘triptych’ of lectures, deduced a theoretical proposition regarding conservative, liberal and socialist consciousness and theirs self-positioning within history. According to him, socialism, compared to liberalism, is a melancholic and historical model that is trying to find an alternative to the currently dominant system in the past. Thus a museum dedicated to Russian revolutions is the most suitable place for a leftist exhibition.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The Philosopher, poet and art theorist Keti Chukhrov organized another discursive project at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts under the conditional title Theoretical Studies of Cultural Anthropology . It may have initially appeared to have been a traditional, rigid and even academic series of discussions. However, it is important to emphasize that, in fact, it is not typical for a Russian museum to carry out such long-lasting, substantial and well-selected series of events, especially when they have no direct connection with the on-going shows. Apart from the invitation of several major German and Balkan thinkers, including Slavoj Zizek, it is more important that this program brings together emerging prominent representatives of Russian critical thought such as art critic Maria Chekhonadskikh, sociologist Alexander Bikbov, specialist in post-colonial studies Madina Tlostanova, Marxist Vlad Sofronov, literary theorist Igor Chubarov, and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva. Even though this event is not being discussed as much in the art community as the aforementioned projects, Theoretical Studies signifies a crucial moment in art and education history in Russia, because it brings together for the first time a number of major, like-minded proponents of critical theory, opens up their research for the art scene and the general public and will be preserved in the form of an online archive.

I tend to think positively about these changes in Russian art. In an overall situation characterized by the public sphere being under threat and shrinking, of the gradual commercialization of education, of the elimination of critical thinking and of the stigmatization of everything ‘left-wing’ with the pejorative word ‘Soviet’, the aforementioned events are especially significant as the sites of self-organized open source models of education, emancipation and the production of ‘unframed’ knowledge, countering the critical vacuum of the official discourse. Intervening into the private and the restricted public sphere, they bring ‘discoursivity’ and criticality into different communities. They become counter-hegemonic alternative spaces that attack the dominant ideology not in such a direct and openly confrontational as social unrest, mobilisation and ‘corporeal’ street protests, but precisely because of that go hand in hand with it. The fact that these practices are primarily immaterial gives them one privilege: counter to paintings or the printed word, they leave no evidence for forensic investigation. Notwithstanding that they are localized within the realm of contemporary art (even when occupying historical museums), they function as a crucible for the politicisation of art, making it more useful for society.

Thinking of these projects, one could recall Boris Groys’s controversial book The Communist Postscript (2009, German edition 2006) where he developed a theory that capitalist society is transcribed into the medium of money, while the communist society – into the medium of language. Looking at communism dialectically, he foresees the possibility of its repetition, but in a new guise and in different circumstances. Maybe it is too naive or idealist, but it is tempting to consider these discursive projects as a first step towards a “re-linguification” of Russian society.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.