“So where do we start?” As I sat in RIGroup, at Boris Mikhailov’s current solo exhibition Historical Insinuations, I heard people asking the same question over and over again. This is no surprise; it says at the door that the show is celebrating the photographer’s 70th birthday, so that most people probably expect something like a retrospective. And retrospectives always have a beginning, middle, and end. Again and again, I heard the guard give the wrong answer. She was telling the visitors to start with Suzi Et Cetera (Syuzi i drugie), the earliest series in the show. Personally, I think this is a bad idea.
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Viktor Alimpiev. Thrown banners look like an arable land 1, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 175 x 150
Everybody in Moscow loves Viktor Alimpiev. But no one really understands his work. Its meaning is hidden so carefully that you start to think that it might not be there at all. So I just can’t help being skeptical when everyone professes their love. I mean, come on. It’s Yuppie art. I like neo minimalist painting and Hollywood quality video and everything, but why does it all have to be pink, so poetic, so pathetic, so unreal, and so empty?
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Where is Gursky?
I stood outside of Ekaterina Foundation for about twenty minutes with the other losers. The security was tight and the opening was packed. Everyone was eager to get in. It was an official occasion, a binding confirmation of the art scene’s hierarchy, but without too many artists or intellectuals. Socialites, curators, and collectors were all there, eager to make contact. Nobody knew what Andreas Gursky looks like.
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Imagine a provincial late Soviet department store with half-empty shelves, sparse decorations behind the bleary windows. All the goods and appliances are a little dusty and old, held up by welded stand-screens of vertical iron rods falling askance Sixties style. A vacuum cleaner flies through space like a Sputnik. Handbags form suprematist compositions; transistor radios hang suspended on welded prison bar insets. There are op art shutterblind effects whenever you change position. The whole display is amazingly sparse and stylish, but also a little crude, an autistic fusion of decorative abstraction and pop produced by local virtuosos with the material sensibility for improvising quick solutions. Bicycles, clothes hangers, portable washing machines: so many satellites of a consumer communist Atlantis about to sink. These goods may have already seemed obsolescent when they were made. But somehow you know that they still work. They look like they were actually built to last for lifetimes.
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A False Memory of Peter Doig
Peter Doig. Photo from Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin
The word capitalism itself says it all. There is nothing to hide. There is no free lunch. Artworks are commodities. It is what it is. Get used to it… Many artists and intellectuals hate such bourgeois bluntness. That’s why they would never go to the Tate Britain’s current retrospective of the British painter Peter Doig. Doig was once an outsider too, in the orbit of the younger artists of YBA, a little like our Dima Gutov maybe (they happen to be the same age). But now, after an amazing price spiral over the last five years (see here), he is one of the most expensive painters in Europe, and lives on Trinidad.
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Criticality or truth?
Previously published in Chto delat 18: Critique or Truth, March 2008
1.
A specter haunts the world of cultural production, the specter of criticality. All too often, this specter is truthless, little more than a caricature of a ruthless critique. Its appearance invokes an “aesthetic of administration,” born of too many compromises between market, state, and freelance rebellion. This kind of criticality pretends to found upon Foucauldian parrhesia or Brechtian “plumpes Denken,” but it does not articulate the interests of “class conscious culture workers.” Instead, it is the global petit bourgeoisie’s version of what was called paidea in late antiquity, the polite and deferent gestural-discursive code of conduct for educated (i.e. recognized) subjects at court.
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Garden by the Sea
Roman Korovin. From the series “Garden by the Sea,” 2005-2007
I remember Latvia in the mid-1990s. Somehow, it was a romantic place. The landscape was picturesque: trenches from World War Two overwrote the pinehills on the Kurland peninsula hiding one-family-house villages from the beachwinds of the Baltic sea. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought squalor and chauvinism. It also brought a widespread misconception: namely, that privatization would be about national and personal individuation, that it would bring a “grounding” of the “groundless” world, that it would reinstate the intimacy of the interior. This romantic idea has become impossible today. Privatization is clearly a public affair, as one could see at “Public Mirrors,” a retrospective of the Latvian poster, and “PRIVATE,” a show of young Latvian photography, both currently on display at Winzavod. Both insist upon a national tradition of individualism and private property, one that eased the transition to full-fledged capitalism and EU membership.
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I wish I were…in Liechtenstein
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, photo via Wikipedia
Liechtenstein’s capital Vaduz has a population of 5.000. Other than the castle (upper left of the image), the main tourist attraction of this village is the Kunstmuseum. In the neighboring countries of Switzerland and Austria or even Germany, almost every larger town has a Kunsthalle or two. Most of them are modernist kasbahs like the one in the photo above.
The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is currently showing an exhibition of early work by Thomas Schütte.
Schütte (born 1958) is one of the most famous artists of his generation to emerge from the Düsseldorf art scene in the early 1980s, best known for working on the border between architecture, stage design , and ceramic figurative sculpture. Recently, he designed a plastic “Model for a Hotel,” which is now on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
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Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.
Spiral Jetty. Photo via mbuitron at flickr
The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970.
Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a 450 m long and 4 m wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. (Wikipedia on Spiral Jetty, Utah.)
It is considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson,
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Tags: landart, minimal, Smithson
Spiral Jetty Threatened
Via Artfagcity:
This just in via MAN: A new drilling contract in Utah threatens Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an emergency email from the artist’s widow, Nancy Holt, informs journalists. A number of pipes and pumps will be laid beneath the water and shore, as well as roads built for oil tank trucks, and cranes for other development needs, all of which promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral Jetty.
By the way, “Spiral Jetty” belongs to DIA Foundation. Will they save it?
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Recent Entries
- Boris Mikhailov and Disposable Time
- Viktor Alimpiev at Ekaterina Foundation
- Where is Gursky?
- Used Goods. A Series by Dmitry Gutov
- A False Memory of Peter Doig
- Criticality or truth?
- Garden by the Sea
- I wish I were…in Liechtenstein
- Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.
- Spiral Jetty Threatened
- Home is where the art is…
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