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Articles
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The Zone of High Classified Risk
// Milena Orlova, Kommersant, vol. 32 (3608) of March 01, 2007
1 march 2007
Two years ago, when the head of the Federation Agency for Culture and Cinematography (FACC) opened the First Biennale, he compared classified risk to a Jew, that is, an unlovable person one needs to love. In this case the former minister of culture might enhance his comparison and associate contemporary artists with mentally ill persons, people with disabilities or some other minority – don’t see any evil in it, for it is very positive since democratic society must be tolerant and politically correct. Well, you can have a dislike for somebody, but don’t attack him or her, for God’s sake.
In a certain sense contemporary art is a minority, just as any other professional community. It has its own slang, its own star hierarchy, its system of values. Yet, one thing is paradoxical – while in other spheres of culture, such as ballet or rock music, to say nothing of the theatre and movies, the ignorance of professional realities is a complete responsibility of the consumer, here the activists of classified risk always find themselves in the position of the accused who are forced to justify themselves in front of the hypothetical viewer explaining their “incomprehensibility” and “lack of spiritual values”.
Nevertheless, contemporary art does not need any justification of that sort. It is so for the simple reason that – you can laugh at it, but still – it is an elite kind of creation. Yet, the availability, if you resort to Marxist terminology, of its means of production – of photographic and video cameras, in particular, to say nothing of the artist’s own body – creates the illusion of availability concerning this very (highly spiritual and super-intellectual in reality) activity expressed in the sacramental maxim of “I can do that too”. But that is a profound mistake. Surely, if you have a voice of any kind, you can have success in karaoke, but you need some training and talent to become Anna Netrebko. And classified risk is like ballet, nuances are important in it, and you need a no less sharp mind to assess what makes Michelangelo’s Pistoletto’s garbage different from the garbage of Ilya Kabakov, the sharpness that helps to understand the huge gap separating Diana Vishneva and Anastasia Volochkova.
Naturally, it is impossible to guarantee that there will be no mediocrities among almost a hundred artists from 33 countries involved in the main program of the Biennale. The international art board of eight curators who selected the Biennale participants was especially concerned, judging by their declarations, that no so called commercial artists penetrate into the Biennale program, those who are successful in the market, and who, using show-business terminology, are raking money in tours, i. e. copying their success. This could happen even to the most outstanding masters. So there’s no sense in looking for superstars among the participants of the main program for they are involved in the Biennale as special guests, such as American Matthew Barney, Jeff Wall from Canada (his light-box window-cases are sold for a million each in hard currency at art fairs), Pipilotti Rist from Switzerland, front-cover stars Pierre and Gilles and Yoko Ono, a Japanese, promised as a dessert to conclude the festival. As a matter of fact, she dropped from the classified risk zone when she married John Lennon, and still sharks on his fame.
One shouldn’t expect any patriotic bonuses like the formulation of the new image of Russia from the international biennale. This image could only be improved a little by the incredible fact that a biennale is held in Moscow, just as the conduct of the Olympics in Sochi. Classified risk is no team sport, it is a competition of individualists. Ethnic affiliation plays essentially no role in the fact what number some art player would have. Even the Venice Biennale which retained an archaic system of national pavilions from the end of the 19th century does not have an Italian pavilion. That is, it has a building with the word “Italy” on it, but is has been allocated to purely international shows for several decades already. So, it won’t be anything strange or dishonorable in the fact that the main program of the Moscow Biennale would not feature any Russians. But they are present in it, like the Art Business Consulting Group, for instance, operating with quite an international theme of office culture dictatorship and the problems of contemporary hired workforce. And Aidan Salakhova, a society lion, was chosen as an artist developing hot Muslim topicality, not just because she is a member of the Public Chamber.
And one cannot say that the Biennale curators avoid politics: Joseph Backstein, the Commissioner of the Biennale, recalls the period of cold war and big ideology with nostalgia. But they still prefer artists who do not work on a direct political order (essentially, representing the market too, but the market wearing a different hat), but follow their own artistic missions. You can take it for granted that a huge show titled American Video Art of 21st Century collected by three curators does not feature a single artwork which was made by a young artist after a edifying talk in the White House concerning the need to improve the cultural image of the United States of America on the global stage. On the contrary, the generic attribute of classified risk is its resistance to the dominating ideology which is proved by the display at the Tretyakov Gallery housing the tremendous show of Russian and Chinese Sots-Art as a special project of the Biennale.
There are 25 special Biennale projects all in all, if you don’t count five main shows. They are amplified by an infinite number of the parallel program shows displayed at almost every Moscow museum and the least cited gallery where they also prepared a bottle of Biennale champagne. The international Biennale is a brilliant incentive for local art muscle to catch up with the international scene, and this activity finds its sponsors, private museums and new art centers are opened to support it. So one shouldn’t believe the coquetry of curators’ team who modesty titled their brainchild Footnotes: Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia. What footnotes, what marginality they are talking about when the two main venues of the Biennale are the Central Supermarket (TSUM), a wonderful place to criticize markets in general, and the Federation skyscraper of the Moscow City, a true geopolitical ivory tower.
Yes, I quite forgot, the government has spent 2 million dollars on the Biennale. It was the cost of Varangians on Dnepr, a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, sold at the Sotheby’s last year. I don’t know about you, but I, personally, am not prepared to exchange all the classified risk for one (i. e. one more) Aivazovsky.
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