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Articles
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Consumerism Logic
// Igor Grebelnikov, Vedomosti vol. 23 (1797)
9 february 2007
The road to the heart (i. e. to the main office of the Second Moscow Biennale) passes through an impressive womb of the former Lenin Museum. When you enter it from the Red Square, you have to pass a security post, a large yard littered with garbage, go through the maze of museum corridors and then, at last, ascend to the second storey where the biennale headquarters is located. Joseph Backstein’s office makes one feel that little seem to have changed here from the time when the commandant of the building lived there – the landscape painting and the map of the Moscow center on the wall, Soviet office furniture, old carpets are the same. The desk, as a matter of fact, is littered with catalogues of contemporary art shows. It is symbolic that contemporary art found its home in Russia changing little in the local social landscape. But does art strive to change anything? The theme of the Second Moscow Biennale sounds almost like a defeat statement: “Footnotes: Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia.” This is of globalization, consumerist growth, loss of historical memory. And it says that the artist is given a modest role of the person who comments, the author of “footnotes on the margins of macroeconomic battles”. The Biennale opens on March 1. The main display of it will be housed by the upper stories of the Federation tower constructed in the Moscow City and by the new building of the TSUM supermarket. Dozens of shows are planned for the event.
“The Biennale is under the patronage of the state, and it is mainly financed by the government, its budget exceeds 2 million euro. Doesn’t it look like art is in the service of authorities? It seems that the art that was non-official, oppositional, several years ago is quite official today, doesn’t it?”
“Any political regime would appeal to art and call upon it to serve the government, providing art with an important ideological function. I remember that from the Soviet period. Since 1970s non-official art looked autonomous to us, while the official art was functional in respect to authorities. Everything we see today is the aesthetical successor of that art, its origin is non-official. And the division of art into official and non-official is more like a metaphor today.
There was a direct social order in the Soviet period, it was very important whether you were a member of the Party, or not, or you had to belong to some union of creative workers. Ilya Kabakov, for instance [a famous conceptualist], was a member of the Artist Union, but he was registered in the section of book graphic. The artists from the painters’ section had greater responsibilities (they were expected to be painting landscapes, portraits of leaders), than book illustrators.
Ideological subtleties are still important today, but not that much. Take Dubossarsky and Vinogradov, or Oleg Kulik, for instance – is that official art? Today ideological engagement is reduced to things like the dispute behind the conflict between the deceased Ilya Kormiltsev and Vyacheslav Butusov, the leader of Nautilus Pompilius, for whom the former was writing songs in the past; they quarreled just because the group performed at the congress of the Nashi (Ours) movement promoted by the ruling party.”
“Is the artist to cooperate with the authorities, or is he or she to stay away from them? You seem to embrace the idea of cooperation.”
“The Biennale as a project was initiated by the government, it is a government order. We were aware of it when we agreed to cooperate, moreover, I have been a government official for several years (an art director of the ROSIZO State Museum and Exhibition Center – Friday). Our task was to make a project that could meet international standards. The biennale is a format that cannot have arbitrary form or content.”
“Could art follow the fate of mass-media? Most media are controlled by the authorities and mainly perform entertainment function.”
“The probability that art would experience the same transformation is much lower than that of mass media world. Art does not have such a tremendous potential influence as television and newspapers. The artist still has to speak of some local situation, of his region, his city, using an international visual language. The works of Shirin Neshat, for instance, tell us something of Iran. If we draw a parallel with the Soviet formula requiring that art should be national in its form, but socialist in its content, then we witness an opposite situation where art is international in its form, but it is addressed to a local situation, socially and politically. But our artists are not that deep in it as foreign ones.”
“The themes of the Second Moscow Biennale are global rather than local. And how could Russian artists and curators criticize authorities, when the same authorities pay for it? Doesn’t art lose its critical potential when it is financed by the government?”
“The Biennale budget is used to finance the organization of the shows, not the creation of artworks for them. The situation is not bad in the art market today, so the artist is not dependent on the government in this sense. Dependence on the market is quite a different matter. We select projects on the basis of curatorial interest, for lack of political engagement does not guarantee the quality of an artwork”.
“Works involved in the main project criticize the market, consumerism, advertising. Don’t you think that it is too early to discuss this problem in Russia, where most citizens have gained relative consumer freedom in quite recent past?”
“Well, we already have a cost to pay. Besides that, the well-to-do have already formed certain consumerist logic: at first they buy an apartment in Moscow, then they purchase a Bentley car, a suburban cottage near the Rublyovskoye highway, an apartment in London, a villa in Sardinia, a yacht. And last, but not least: Russian people travel a lot, and they see that contemporary art is a matter of high statute.”
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