 |
Articles
|
|
“There is no such notion as a great artist today”
//The commissioner of the Moscow Biennale shared his views upon contemporary art with us. Anna Narinskaya heard him out.
// Anna Narinskay, Kommersant, Weekend Issue of February 22, 2007
22 february 2007
The Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens on the first of March. Contemporary art will be displayed to us within the whole month, and one could say that this country will turn into the center of the world art culture for the period. The organization of such an event is an affair of tremendous responsibility. For we must never do it better than other people do it, everything must be just as everywhere, according to the format. Joseph Backstein was appointed to supervise the format in Moscow. It is a well-known person who was the curator of the projects of Venice Biennale, a most important. His appearance is impressive. He looks somewhat like Bruce Willis, to my mind. He was even shortlisted in some official rating of bald sex symbols featuring the same Bruce Willis and Fyodor Bondarchuk. Officially Backstein is called “the Commissioner of the Biennale”.
Don’t you start when people call you a commissioner?
People seldom call me that in Russian, and in English it sounds quite neutral.
How did you become the Commissioner of the Moscow Biennale? Do you have to work to deserve this post?
No, not quite, it just happened. And, generally speaking, I never ask myself these questions. My life is in greater details.
I was told that you were appointed to this post because you have many friends among Western curators, and in the Western art establishment as a whole. That you have sold your connections in a way.
Well, everybody has advantages of his or her own. These are mine.
How did you get them?
Well, I never worked really hard at it. When I went to the West for the first time in 1988 I was 43 already. I’d just arrived in New York, and I had to make everything out really quick. And this is very difficult, especially in New York. Well, I made everything out. And my friends – most of my friends had left the country by that time – helped me.
What were you at the moment? I mean, what had you to do with art then?
Nothing at all. I was a pretender. I told them that I was a curator and an art critic. As a matter of fact, I was just culturally sensible.
Were you born with it?
No, I acquired it. At school I studied in the parallel group with Alik Melamid, the one from Komar & Melamid. We lived not far from each other at the Vavilov Street. He was from a really well-to-do professors’ family. They had a large five- room apartment. And my family had a room at a communal flat. But we were friends. We talked a lot. He gave me books to read. And when he took up art in the contemporary interpretation of it, i. e. in 1972, I gradually learned to understand the meaning of it all. It was so because I was filled with an unbreakable belief that Alik is a genius, and I had no doubt that everything he was doing is right. Just it was incomprehensible for me, alright, but I knew that I must understand it. That was when I heard these words for the first time. I mean “object”, “performance”, “installation”. People around Alik pronounced them, and I didn’t understand it, but I felt that Alik knew how things are to be done. Then Alik left the country, somewhere about 1976 or 77. At that period I made friends with Ilya Kabakov. He was older than Alik and I, he was a very famous artist by that time. But he was more traditional. Alik and his friends had great influence on him, he started to update his art and became what he became. He had the need to communicate then, to have an environment, since art demands for comment. And pictorial art is intellectually the most profound. It is greater than the theatre, the cinema, music, literature. Here, by the way, I have proved a theory. The one concerning the quality and professionalism in art. In the theatre, the cinema, music and literature these characteristics are a priori. And in pictorial art they are a posteriori. If you want to compose a symphony, you need to know musical notation, at least. That is, first comes the notation, then you get a symphony. And in pictorial art you start to bark, for instance. Everybody say – that idiot. But you go on barking for a day, a month, a year. Then everybody say it is an important artistic statement. So, pictorial art has its own specific arrangement. It is partially due to the fact that it operates with irreproducible objects. All the arts are reproduced, while we always have the same oil on canvas.
I think you have gone far from oil and canvas long ago.
Yes, that’s true. But another theory claims that all the history of 20th century art is a history of a fight against reproduction. The uniqueness is the basis of what we are engaged in. Video is the best example of it: when you watch a video as a movie, it is just something shown on the screen, while when we have video, it is a video installation. Video can be reproduced, and the video installation cannot be reproduced. It is an arrangement of displays, some other things, shifts to the left or to the right – that thing is important for us.
You don’t seem to be serious about contemporary art you are working with…
I have reached the level of absolute lies. I always say what my partner wants to hear. A woman, in your case. The way a person speaks, the way a person behaves are always subject to interpretation. My degree of seriousness is determined by your own assessment of it.
Do absolute lies help become a biennale commissioner?
Absolute lies are equal to absolute sincerity.
The Moscow Biennale is a thoroughly official event. Your roots are in the underground, you are practically a marginal personality. Have you sold yourself?
No, I haven’t. I have my own concept of public good. And today, to a certain degree, it coincides with the cultural policy of Russia’s democratic state. I am engaged in the things I am engaged in now out of my sense of duty, and nothing else. I believe that I have an understanding of what is to be done to make this country civilized. And I want to work for it. On principle, we were doing the same things in the 1970s, we just expressed common sense which was lost in this country during the Soviet period. Today I am doing the same.
What has an icicle of urine displayed at the previous Biennale to do with common sense?
This relation is mediated. This icicle is a component of contemporary aesthetic culture. It is a precious object, as a matter of fact. It is arranged in such a subtle way that you cannot say whether it is a brilliant icicle or it is a giftless icicle. In this sense it is the same as Malevich’s Black Square or Duchamp’s readymade. It is a good icicle. Besides that, it helps determine the degree of understanding of contemporary art by the society. You, for instance, seem to be an intellectually developed woman. But you don’t understand this icicle.
So, your civilizing function is to make me understand the icicle?
Not just that. But it is not a small matter. I act according to my understanding of the role art plays in society today.
And what is art’s role today?
It is a long story. We should start with the fact that the age of enlightenment ended somewhere between 1989 when the Berlin wall was destroyed and 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated. It was the epoch when an intellectual held a certain position in the society. It was an extremely ideologized epoch, when everybody was enlightening somebody. And who were the heroes of that period in the Soviet Union? They were intellectuals. Writers, composers, film directors. They were the most highly paid persons. I am not speaking of Party structures, it was quite different then. But I remember, my mother worked at the Academy institute, and the academicians were gods then. They had incredible salaries. Do you remember the dachas Stalin gave to academicians – they had fabulous life. Art is a part of ideology in the ideological epoch. It doesn’t matter if it is official or not, it is always treated with respect. Even at the emotional level. I remember when I met Brodsky I felt that I am speaking to a great person. And what is a great artist now? There is no such notion today. There is no such object today. The artist was deprived of the aura of greatness. The artist has exhausted it, to be more exact, with the end of the age of enlightenment, of the ideological epoch. Who are the heroes of our time? Rich Pinocchios? They have magic now. You meet a rich Pinocchio of that sort, and you feel the aura. You get it at once – this is an unusual person.
Some of these new aura carriers are involved in the process of contemporary art development. Like Zurab and Vasily Tseretely, for instance…
Well, I can be responsible only for something I am doing myself, you know. I am engaged in making my environment more civilized on the basis of my own concept of public good. If you, for instant, suggest that rubbing shoulders with myself and my colleagues made Zurab and his grandson Vasily produce better shows and better projects, if they have become more civilized, what’s bad in that? Nothing at all.
We still haven’t come down to the main thing: what is your view upon the role of art in the society today?
Art is not playing the main part today, from my point of view. It is reduced to the function of a footnote, of a commentary. So the present Biennale is titled Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia. As I have written in one press-release, the end of the age of enlightenment left the situation when we can only write footnotes on the margins of macroeconomic battles. It was a great phrase. I liked it myself.
View all publications
|
|
