 |
Articles
|
|
Moscow Biennale: Footnote No. 2
// Mikhail Bode, Kultura, vol. 10 (7571), March 15-21, 2007
15 march 2007
Mikhail Shvydkoy, the head of Roskultura, flourished a new definition of contemporary art at the press-conference held on the eve of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art: “Art that does not arouse dispute is an object for pathologist’s study”. I’d like to recall his other statement borrowed from Leo Tolstoy that almost provided a refrain for the First Biennale: “It is hard to love a Jew, but you must.” So the progress is obvious. People have deep feelings concerning contemporary art – they have organized a second festival already and allocated 52 million rubles from the government budget for it (not very much from the international point of view). People fell in love with it keeping in mind civilized political correctness – a manifestation of liberalism. Everybody has a biennale, so we must have one too.
Contemporary art is alive, and sometimes it even looks quite lively. And, surely, it raises questions, if not dispute. Take, for instance, the motto of the present Biennale: Footnotes: Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia. Well, there seems to be a link between geopolitics and markets, but how could one fit amnesia to it, and how one is to understand it is quite a problem. It is a psychopathological definition, generally speaking, just as an irritating “tion” in the puzzle on industrialization invented by old Sinitsky from the Gold Calf – it is hanging clumsily. But, if you treat amnesia as a cultural and historical phenomenon, it could short circuit with the “footnotes” preceding it.
Yet, let’s drop discussions, the favorite pastime of contemporary art community, and turn to exhibition reality. Contemporary, and especially actual art, prefers nonconforming and sometimes extreme venues on definition. It favors deserted factories, storage facilities, docks, hangars. The focus of the last Biennale was the deserted and neglected Lenin Museum. Today we have the Federation skyscraper of the Moscow City instead. It is a construction site in every sense of the word, where three almost finished storeys were allocated for the Biennale. It is an emblematic place to a certain degree, here one could play with metaphors: a country under construction, a tower to house offices of very respectable companies. Yet, for the time being, the general public is allowed to be involved in the high activities in every sense of the word. Artists settled new venues, just as students settle a boarding house. Somebody keeps repainting the walls (it is Nedko Solakov performance, in fact, displayed in Venice six years ago), somebody is resting on the heap of garbage, like Barthelemy Toguo from Cameroon. Others, resembling the students of the Friendship of Nations University where young people from developing countries study in Moscow, have a lively discussion around a bottle of rum ignoring a running TV-set (Yuri Leiderman performance). Flies are crawling everywhere. They are not real, they are painted. They leave traces on official ceremonies of the paintings by Diana Machulina and crawl over old political maps of the world in Ilya Trushevsky’s video installation. Gianni Motti from Italy probably addresses his reminder message to the future inhabitants of the tower: he displays a metal Brokers Cage where “white collars” are performed by actors.
The most zealous students have already begun their studies. Carsten Nikolae from Germany is growing artificial snowflakes, Donna Ong from Singapore has constructed an original hybrid of a desk, a workbench or ironing board and sat down to study psychoanalysis at it. That is, nobody seems to be idling. Some people from Latin America are traditionally on a strike: leftist artists from the Argentine Silk-Screening Studio has hung political posters and pamphlets everywhere and disappeared somewhere.
All the collective show in the tower (except the last storey featuring presentable enough paintings of various artists – that’s something for the market) was arranged by an international team of curators including Joseph Backstein, Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosa Martinez, Fuliya Erdemchi. All of them, except the latter, were the curators of the previous Moscow Biennale. Moreover, they often meet on various occasions at other biennales. Perhaps, this is why their conceptual handwriting has been almost unified. Just some tiny details help one guess (if one knows the curator’s CV) where this exhibition maker comes from – France, Spain or East Europe. A sort of biennale exhibition uniart emerges thus. Here “footnote” No. 1 comes relevant: see “globalization”.
The other part of the same curators’ team organized the viewing of American Video Art at the Start of the Third Millennium at the TSUM shopping center. The new wing of TSUM is another main venue of the Biennale which has not been completed by construction workers yet. As a whole, this project resembles a huge Nam June Pike TV-sets installation scattered over the area by some powerful hand. If you remember what was said about it, you are aware that there were quite enough hands and heads to do it. You need to have an incredible ability to abstract yourself from the surrounding flicker and noise to get what is happening on a certain large or small screen. Some videos are quite interesting to watch, but it is extremely dangerous to stay in this large dark hall for more than half an hour. So you’d better watch the videos in the tower where they are shown in small rooms. It is not that repressive there.
The general public and the special viewer have preferred the true cinematography. Cremaster and Drawing Restraint, films by Matthew Barney, were shown at the Central House of Writers for four days. The spectacular quality of the produce offered by this master of “new shamanism”, whose works present a mixture of absurdist but very expensive movie making and a performance with numerous dressed up participants, places a lay person on equal footing with a professional.
Alexander Ponomaryov tried to astonish the viewer with the Russian spectacle “parking” a real submarine on the Moscow river with loudspeaker blaring Soviet songs on navy topics in front of the Cathedral of Our Savior. Paris has been surprised by this art attraction recently when it discovered the tower of the submarine in the Tuileries pool. Now, it made its way to Moscow after some refurbishing. How, I wonder?
Now the special guests of the Biennale are in no hurry to arrive, and their artistic luggage is not of special value. We are expecting Robert Wilson; Yoko Ono is going to come in summer (as an art tourist already?). Jeff Wall escaped with hardly expressive photographs of littered landscapes, and people say that it is a part of his show which is touring somewhere. Pipilotti Rist brought a decade old video titled Sip My Ocean which was badly displayed at the ruined wing of the Architecture Museum into the bargain, where the viewer saw a crude brick wall instead of a sweet glamour movie. This artistic residue reduced the statute of the Architecture Museum. Involuntarily one compares this show to that during the last Biennale when it housed an impressive installation of Christian Boltanski. Obviously, it is really difficult to make an art star come to Moscow or bring quality artworks along. Valie Export was, perhaps, the only person who supported her guest statute displaying her own self and the documentary of her radical exhibitionistic feminist performances at the State Center of Contemporary Art. Like the one when she was walking a dog-man on a leash, which was a living reprimand to Oleg Kulik – these actions of the Austrian artist are more than 40 years old.
Vinzavod, or Wine Factory, an art center that opened recently, is packed with footnotes. Sometimes they are even more essential than the texts themselves. The Chinese political pop-art displayed there, for instance, is more interesting and, which is more important, more brutal than its Russian analogue displayed at the Tretyakov Gallery. At the Vinzavod, in a deep cellar resembling either a metro station or a Cordova mosque, If You Were by My Side, a lyrical video installation by Darren Almond, is displayed. Contemporary art does not really favor lyricism, so the cellar is just the place where one should actually look for it.
Eventually, the Biennale corresponds to its declared motto to a certain extent. It has something of globalization, of the markets and, surely, it provides a lot of footnotes. The only thing the Biennale failed to speak about was exactly amnesia. It must have been forgotten.
View all publications
|
|
