Well Roasted Telephone

// Kara Miskaryan, Ogonyok, №11 12—18 march 2007
12 march 2007

It is still hard to believe it: an International Biennale of Contemporary Art is held in Russia. It is not only that our public en masse is more than conservative – it has loved and still loves Itinerants with Shilov and Glazunov – even intellectuals treat various installations as an outrage. And the government hasn’t manifested any love for contemporary art. So the First Biennale of 2005 astounded everybody by the very fact that it was held in Moscow, although the main display of it at the Lenin Museum looked more like a dumping site for garbage than an art show. The situation was anecdotic when people passed a museum keeper in one of the halls never knowing that this was a project of Tino Segal titled This is Good.

Yet, the First Biennale was forgiven for everything – for its courage. For one could end up at a police precinct if some shows were not a part of the Biennale. Take, for instance, a giant stalactite of frozen urine (Gelatin, Australia) hanging down from the wall of the Lenin Museum! It was a challenge to the society and a triumph of justice, the pictorial has been made legal in this country, at last. People were looking forward for the second Biennale, but they expected something different – after the chaotic first festival everybody expected that the second one would provide a thoughtful cross section of the main developments in contemporary global art. On the face of it, the Second Biennale actually looks more civilized; the theme of the main project sounds quite highbrow: Footnotes: Geopolitics, Markets, Amnesia. Its main message is that the place of art in the globalized world is on the side of the road, and its function is to provide footnotes on the margins of trans-international capital and masscult. Yet, no matter how hard the curators try to persuade us that all the four parts of the main project are chapters of one book, it doesn’t look convincing, for each of them speaks “of its own”. To be objective, this is “just” high-quality contemporary art which displays an unpleasant back side of the consumer society. Nobody doubts that it is unpleasant, but it is such a double-dyed cliché as far as contemporary art is concerned that one longs for something else.

The main attractions of the Second Biennale have become its venues, not its themes and ideas, as a result: its two most popular venues are not just improper for art, these are anti-art places. The Biennale projects are displayed on the three storeys of the Federation Tower of the Moscow City, still under construction, and on the fourth, uncompleted, storey of the Moscow TSUM shopping center (the show of American video art). On the opening day it was really a treat to see the frightened faces of salesmen offering Armani and Dolce&Gabbana who could not understand what incredible public streamed into the most chic shopping center of Moscow! This, of course, was good for art, for the richer are the sections of the TSUM, the more urgent becomes the video about marginal people, even if they are Americans. The works displayed here provoke the consumer of the goods of civilization in the literal sense of the word. Take the project of Mike Buche, for instance (Programi Derene de Vojag Agentejo, 2001): a cell phone, new tennis shoes, clothing are fried till they burn on the frying pan. Or the work of Allora and Casadigla tandem titled At the Discussion (2005) where a person is off for a mini cruise, not on a yacht, but on an upturned dinner table equipped with an outboard drive, observing dumping sites with piles of consumer waste on his way.

When you are at the Federation Tower, somewhere near the 20th storey of the unfinished skyscraper, it seems that some artworks have been produced for this construction site. Firstly, it is the performance of Nedko Solakov from Bulgaria where two men, taking turns, are painting the opposite walls of the same room with white and black paint, non-stop. Or the work of Liu Jianhua from China with its container featuring a pile of cheap plastic goods pouring outer of it, a voluble illustration of the consumerism theme.

Actually, installations, paintings, video and objects have become more expressive in this unusual context. It is hard to imagine old art in gold frames on bare walls showing structural beams and iron fixtures, on this glass and concrete, while contemporary art with its extreme means fits this environment wonderfully.

Other shows of the Biennale have been displayed at almost 35 venues of the city. When you try to cover it all, your perception is numbed, and you begin to fear that you have skipped something important, but, fortunately or not, art that is displayed here is not for eternity. So usually you don’t have any qualms that you haven’t seen something.

Artworks of “special guests” of the Biennale, of world classics who are practically unknown in this country, are remarkable. Here you can see a video project of heavenly beauty by Pipilotti Rist from Switzerland titled Drink my Ocean and featuring the artist herself swimming and singing among the beauties of the sea (Architecture Museum), and the video installation titled If You Were by My Side by Darren Almond, a star of video art, which was dedicated to the deceased grandmother of the artist. And don’t forget Jeff Wall’s light-boxes with photographic slides resembling 19th century paintings at the Architecture Museum that leave viewers spellbound, videos of Valie Export, a leading feminist of the contemporary art from Austria…

So, is it possible to sum up the impressions of it? No matter what the organizers of the Biennale claim, it looks more like a tremendous festival of contemporary art rather than a biennale organized strictly according to the curators’ plans. There is a certain impression that the Second Biennale still wants to introduce every person to contemporary art. But the wide public would never fall in love with contemporary art, even abroad, and not just in this country, for this art is not convenient. It would rather raise questions than console. So even such large-scale art forums turn into festivals “for the initiated”. Isn’t that too expensive then? The government allocated 52 million rubles for the Biennale, a substantial sum. A high ranking official from the Culture Ministry declared with pathos at the opening of the Biennale that it was high time for Russia to be integrated in the civilized global art context, and he was sure to present a new politics of the government in respect to contemporary art. Well, that is not bad. For it is really high time we did it.

OPINION

DMITRY VRUBEL
artist

Well, yes, I can find the same fault in the Second Biennale I saw in the first one: it is chaotic, sometimes even obscure… But you must understand that I have been observing this milieu since about 1975. And, if you want to trace back the share of of contemporary art in Russia during the last 30 years (apartment shows – Malaya Gruzinskaya street – apartment shows again – the first Russian Sotheby – the first Biennale, at last), excuse me, but look: we went to this Vinzavod… And we lost our way! You see, it’s art here, it’s art there, and there is art on your way there… And you can’t find your way out. We didn’t even go to the opening ceremony at the Federation Tower, because we were afraid of the HUSTLE. You see – you couldn’t even dream of such scale, and now it is real.

From my point of view, this is what contemporary art needs today – a sort of healthy imperialism, colonialism registering the very fact of existence and legitimacy of contemporary art in people’s mentality. For the first time its presence has reached the level of the cinema, the theatre, of masscult... You can hate or like it, but it is here – that is what makes the Biennale important. As for its quality… Contemporary art is critical in itself, so it is not afraid of criticism. Perhaps, it even strives for it. For the most terrible thing for it today is to remain unnoticed. As it happens with most art shows in Moscow, unfortunately. So, to occupy the space is the most important thing for artists today.

And, last but not least, it is for the first time that such a provocative event is conducted with public or discrete support of the government. On the other hand, it is wonderful that authorities have contemporary mentality, for contemporary art is a symbol and an attribute of tolerance. But the authorities might be consciously sending a signal to artists: look, this is possible with sovereign democracy, make your conclusions. And our artists are, according to my experience, mostly quite loyal to authorities: nobody is going to rebel, they are tired, and they are not accustomed to it.

DMITRY GUTOV
artist

I am hardly enthusiastic concerning the scale of the Biennale : I’ve seen the TSUM show of American video art on a weekday, and there were few people there. About a couple viewers for every screen (and there are about 30 of them there). So one should hardly speak about any mass interest in contemporary art, but the Biennale didn’t seem to tackle this task. The Western biennales, by the way, always have a strict count of the number of visitors which determines whether the show is recognized as successful, or not. I don’t think anybody does it here, but they should. Take the TSUM show, for instance, its arrangement is quite dull: the screens are too close to each other, for instance, and the sound of one video interferes with its neighbors. The curators obviously have not planned the details thoroughly, but the curators are always like that. Generally speaking, it is always easy to criticize curators, but I still call for humanism – they did quite a lot. There were things that were really amazing for me, like Jeff Wall at the Architecture Museum, video works of Valie Export… And I Believe, the show of Kulik, was the most conceptual event. It is fascinating in its clear concept and stylistic solution, although everybody is going to criticize it for being reactionary though. Well, let them do it.

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