Andreas Broeckmann on Mon, 21 Apr 1997 20:30:46 +0100 |
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Syndicate: Gallery 21: A Conversation |
Gallery 21: A Conversation The participants in this discussion were: Irina "Ira" Aktuganova (IA), gallery director; Alla Mitrofanova (AM), ideologist, media critic and curator; and Dmitry "Dima" Pilikin (DP), artist and gallery curator. DP: Any new project originates in the feeling that it's what's necessary in the given instance. So far as I remember, in our case the impulse was mutual. But let's begin with you two. Ira, you had a commercial gallery: what caused you to jump to non-profit work? IA: That's such a personal question... Anything I take up, I take up not in the hope of success, but because I want to play some kind of role. In Gallery 10-10 I worked with artists as an art critic. Then I wanted to try myself in the role of businesswoman and I opened a commercial gallery in House of the Journalist. When I figured out how that works, I became bored. Aside from that, I understood that in Russia business is not respectable. The difference between selling paintings and selling cars isn't so great. You find yourself in certain social circles, social circles that don't suit me personally. So, as soon as the chance to open my own gallery on Pushkinskaya 10 appeared, I changed social circles. It was a fairly sad time - the early Nineties. Galleries were closing because they had no way to survive, and the ones that survived turned into stores. I could tell that success depended solely on new ideas. Although when I began working in the non-profit world, of course I fostered illusions about there being an infrastructure here in Russia similar to that which exists in the West, an infrastructure that could support non-profit work. DP: But you couldn't help taking into account the trends and names that had already established themselves. IA: During the three years I worked in Gallery 10-10, I came to know the Petersburg art scene well, because I was visiting three studios a day. Back then Timur Novikov was just beginning his new strategy with the New Academy, and it was unclear how successful this would be. The necrorealists had exhausted themselves ideawise; this had happened to the Mitki even earlier. There was no temptation to play around with the usual intrigues. DP: Alla, around this time you had already amassed a fair amount of practical experience and had made a name as an ideological curator. How did the new media become something you were interested in? AM: The art critics of my generation (at very least, those people with whom I socialized and worked) were ideologically formed by the conceptualist style. Then the conceptualist approach to creativity began to withdraw. It no longer was a matter of finding the position of one's own semiosis, but rather of acquiring personal corporeal experiences and generally moving from intellectual models to real-life practice. The time for new means of self-expression (including technical ones) had arrived. In the early Nineties I was awfully busy, overloading myself with reading international anthologies of criticism, going to video festivals (as I saw things then, video was the sphere most open to the new potentials); and then suddenly, on a whim, I became interested in virtual reality. To some degree I'm indebted to the artist Mike Hens: it was he who introduced a totally new understanding of multimedia arts into my life, the idea of this form of creativity as something synthetic, directed not towards the museum space, but towards the construction of life, like the avant-garde Russian productivists in the Twenties. In 1993 he invited me to this seminar in Geneva. This was an insignificant event, but I was gradually getting the hang of things. And finally I matured to the point where I wanted to do something that could be quickly realized, something that in one swoop would unite all the things I was interested in. The Stubnitz project's giganticness arose from this desire. I wanted to try everything at once - computer installations and techno-philosophy. To put together a local team, creative and theoretical. Some things worked out. For instance, thanks to my efforts an East-West panel with its own translator was planned for ISEA '94; though our lecturers didn't end up making it there due to organizational difficulties. DP: You've called your former interest in virtual reality something you did for fun. How did you think about it back then? AM: Back then I experimented heavily with drugs and techno-parties; any form of altered consciousness was more than actual for me. In this sense electronic means grabbed me right away and I began classifying these states on a par with psychodelic states. Then I went to this expo in London of the latest computer equipment - there were already VR helmets there, etc. I worked with a VR simulator for a very long time, investigating inner sensations. DP: I recall that this was when you were always travelling to various electronic conferences - and at a time when here in Russia there wasn't any of this stuff as yet. AM: Yeah, but as I've already said, before this I spent three or four years reading the corresponding literature and experimenting with myself, and that's why I found myself in the same ideological and creative field with the entire Euro-American crowd. DP: How would you assess the results of the Stubnitz project? AM: Speaking strictly in practical terms, on that project forces were brought together, forces which expressed themselves in Gallery 21's new politics. IA: When the Stubnitz project ended, problems really emerged. This was the aftertaste of a big project. On the one hand, the project gave us organizers and many of the participants a gamma of completely new and intense experiences; for the majority of the Russian participants it was the first time in their lives they'd encountered that previously unseen "Western" reality called the new media. Psychologically speaking, after that kind of project it's very hard to return to the everyday but outmoded grind of exhibitions, however perfected it might be. And then we thought up this form, "New Media Studios." This name also determined the structure and form of our work for some time to come. DP: We've been working with new media for three years already and the gallery has gotten a good amount of exposure with this direction. But periodically questions from the sidelines arise: well, what have you really accomplished? where are your computer artists? I have an answer to this question. What would you two say? AM: The realized projects are there, an initiation into this new genre has taken place; my consciousness, at very least, has changed. Although it would seem that I was in the cyclone's center and knew what I was doing. Everything was new and unexpected. And this newness and unexpectedness went off like a gun. At any rate, the latest version of our Internet journal, "Virtual Anatomy," suits me. Of course, intentions and realization didn't coincide, but both one and the other proved to be equally intriguing. On the level of "intentions" there was the task of creating a conceptual problem field on a vacant lot, which provoked extreme theoretical foolhardiness. On the level of "realization" it was essential to bind up personal ambitions and learn how to hypertextually reorganize the creative impulse. IA: We haven't produced any computer artists, but we didn't set ourselves this task, insofar as a computer artist is someone who has already closely merged with a constantly changing instrument base and, consequently, has the need to work, in the commercial sense of that word. We carried out the first Internet art projects in Petersburg; projects with which, by the way, we participated in the opening of the first Internet cafe in Petersburg, Tetris. And for the time being there's no else in Petersburg who has assimilated the Internet as an artistic space. DP: When I'm asked about it, I always recall that it was on the Stubnitz that I touched a PC keyboard for the first time. And in the three years since that moment so much has happened - the Internet project and now the experience of working with interactive CD-ROM. The cultivation of the field was carried out and has borne fruit. AM: The most interesting thing is that it's happened not only for us. Nowadays even the most moss-covered, traditional artist has some notion of this method of artistic realization. By studying continuously, we learned to do something ourselves. And now there's no longer any reason to propagandize and instruct: the process has already been launched. IA: It would interesting, by the way, to ask you about this, Dima. When we were invited to the conference in Rotterdam and the necessity of doing an Internet project arose, I asked various artists to think about it, but it was precisely with you that something clicked. What do you think, what qualities were essential for that? DP: It's hard to assess oneself. Although right now I recall how much ground was covered in the space of a month. My netsurfing experience was fairly modest and when the time came to realize the project, I suddenly understood with horror that the idea, which had already been proposed and launched, didn't fit into the form. It was then that I was forced to switch on to full power and master a new space. But what else could I do? IA: When Lev Manovich came here to lecture, he made two essential observations having to do with artistic practice in the Internet. First, the Internet is an area that attracts unrealized n'er-do-wells. Second, artists relate to "computer anything" with mistrust. How you would comment on this? DP: One can't ignore the fact that 90% of the artists in Petersburg express themselves primarily as painters and that in many ways this tendency determines the structure of consciousness. Contemporary artistic practice, however, gravitates more towards the project form - that is, to a multi-instrumental, conceptually organized utterance. This disposition is fully exhausted by the division into "physicists" and "poets" characteristic of the Sixties. It goes without saying that computers and other sorts of technology relate to the "physicists" and, consequently, cause mistrust. As far as "n'er-do-wells" are concerned, some very amusing processes are taking place. The Internet created the illusion of romantic democratism. It seemed to many aggrieved artists that now it would be possible to bypass the whole institution of critics and art historians and savor the high of self-realization. But once more democracy turned into graphomania, and now the need for creating new mechanisms for appraisal is already apparent, however undemocratic this might seem. Otherwise we'll drown under a heap of informational garbage. But let's get back to Gallery 21. If we speak of multi-instrumentalism, then is it at all possible to consider what we have a gallery? IA: The word 'gallery' is compromising. When people are introduced to you and hear that word, they ask what it is that you sell, what's hanging on your walls. I'm forced to explain at length that nothing is hanging on our walls. I relate to this name like I do to my own name. Our partners from the Rotterdam organization V2 used to be called a gallery as well, but now V2 is an organization. So we easily could call ourselves the organization "Gallery 21," since the diapason of the work we carry out more nearly corresponds to this. DP: If one analyzes the gallery's work, then one might note that in our ideological projects we passionately throw ourselves upon all the new and the latest, after which, having hurdled this barrier, we lose interest in what's already been done and look for new experiences. AM: I think that "in life" everyone has a chance to "open the trapdoor" and define a new space, but in practice few are able to do this and even more rarely to do it twice - because when you've opened the door and crawled out, then you need to slave away until once again you're bogged down in claustrophobia. But if you've opened the trapdoor properly, then there is so much space out there that you won't soon master it. From a conquistador you turn into a ploughman and farmer. But in the pleasures of conquistadorismo lies its downfall. We've already made space for our personal lives and what remains is the ravishing and absorbing problem of filling it with artefacts. To endlessly open trapdoors, what kind of childishness is that? DP: One wouldn't expect to hear those kinds of words from a well-known radical... AM: The forms of radicalism change. At first you're radical in that you cursed your mother with four-letter words; later, because you mastered a new book; later still, because you gave birth to kiddies; and finally, that you died elegantly. DP: Okay, let's look into how one of the latest ideological elaborations came into being - "Post-informational Utopia." AM: That was Ira's idea, so I can only comment on it. She came back from her trip to DEAF-ISEA '96 in Rotterdam with this idea. In terms of undercurrents it was a pretty logical move, because our entire theoretical and philosophical orientation towards the nonreflectivity of experience, corporeality, nondiscursivity - all the philosophy we tried to tack onto post-computer art - all of this was, in terms of intentions, precisely post-informational. We were never concerned with theory of informational glut, with the theory of hidden information - all of those cyberpunk trips from the Eighties. Right now we're part of a wholly different situation, a situation in which our personal experience is one of living through and constructing a new semiotic space; this poses the problem not of a collective informational space, but rather one of open, personal, psychocorporeal experience. DP: To what extent was this idea a reaction to intellectual conferences taking place in the West? Keeping in mind that we Russians reflect on tendencies and perspectives even without having the technical realia linked to those things. IA: This wasn't linked to my trip per se, but the conference undoubtedly served as the catalyst. I had the feeling that the "electronic" scene had changed a great deal. The intellectual freedom had vanished; hierarchies and, consequently, careerists had emerged. The pragmatists and businessmen had arrived. The establishment had caught up with us. Besides, when I saw what Western cultural organizations do with the powerful support of various foundations, I became miserable. It's senseless for us to compete with them in terms of technical potentials - yeah, in general there's no reason to. I came back from my trip and began discussing my doubts with the intellectuals who're associated with our gallery and it turned out that the rhythm of life set by this game caused many of them to suffer from a deficit of real experiences, a certain flavor of life. Well, what can there be after an informationally saturated space? Only a post-informational one. And "utopia" because our desires are utopian all the same. AM: Ira had a reaction to the alternative politics of non-commercial arts organizations. Like us, they're seriously engaged in surviving and, in connection with this, the working-out of democratic political procedures, procedures with which they could harmonize; therefore they're forced to engage in political semiotics and so forth. For many of them the problem of survival has turned from a practical problem into a philosophical one. That is, they drown the creative and philosophical pathos in the problems of survival. When all of this started to get under Ira's skin, she resolved to think up such a form of ideological delivery that there wouldn't be a glint of combinatory democracy in it. DP: All the same, let's sum up. How does the gallery's ongoing work shape up? IA: The previous, event-based policy, in which something had to happen in the gallery every week, has exhausted itself. The way we see it now, the gallery should become a fairly "quiet" place in which there will be a few more or less permanent expositions. That after moving we divided the gallery into six spaces with different functions, spaces concentrated in one site, is optimal. In the present situation your idea for a six meter square microgallery is right on for Petersburg exhibitions. One can demonstrate an idea without enclosing it in decorations. DP: It turns out that now exhibition work exists in the background, supporting the traditional gallery status, as it were. IA: Since after a number of big projects we ran up against the fact there is no cultural infrastructure, it became clear that in order to exist in a civilized manner and turn out, at very least, some kind of artefacts, one needs money. But there isn't any money, and the elementary problem of survival arises. And so it's already not the organization of exhibitions that you're busy with, but the search for funds, foundations; you engage in politics, public relations, you "get chummy" with somebody. DP: At the same time a number of big city events have taken place, such as the festival in New York, events in which Gallery 21 was an indispensable participant. IA: This is sooner the result of a correctly chosen strategy. And the credit for this should go primarily to Alla. When you choose a direction correctly, a direction that's actual, then by the time you've already pumped up your muscles in that individual work of yours, the social situation is just maturing and naturally calls for that actualness. We worked for three years, but it was only this year that suddenly everyone understood that without the new technologies you just can't get by. And besides us, there's no else to turn to (at very least, in terms of solving artistic problems in the new technological environment). DP: Do you harbor any sort of optimism? IA: The fact of the matter is that we live quite richly. Nobody in Russia gets their paychecks, there's no money in city, but we continue to plan, to write projects and cherish the bright hope of having a constant budget. DP: How do you assess gallery life in Petersburg? The types of galleries, cultural strategies? AM: The gallery surge came to a head about three years ago, when one could still speak of gallery life, strategies, competition. Nowadays in Petersburg all of cultural and gallery life has assembled around Pushkinskaya 10. But no longer in the form of galleries, but in the form of the creative activeness of a squat. And here, in Petersburg, we still have the right to speak of the presence of a non-profit creative life. While in Moscow, it seems to me, it's already gone. The most interesting thing is that galleries which had the potential to develop in the big gallery scene ended up enclosed in little cubbyholes, but each one of them had prospects for its own, original field. Thus, squeezed into these corners, they proved to be not just communal apartment neighbors, but, let's say, shadowy cardinals. We judge the present situation not by visible representation, but by hidden, secret ambitions. And that, basically, is normal during a certain cultural-historical period, but this period is coming to an end. Most likely, starting next year one won't have to talk about "kings in exile," since the next wave will overtake us and force us to move to a daily level of realization. We're losing the abstract grandeur of our ambitions. But on the other hand we will have to construct a new internal mechanism of realization. Maybe none of us will remain; or, having lost our personal ambitions, we'll meld into a common organism. And here it's also to the point that our entire cultural and political life has passed through a period of chaotic searching, a search which for the most part was based on the destruction of the previous political and cultural formation. But now the very delicate creative task arises of getting energy not from destruction, but from positivity. DP: Do you have any kind of hope for the future of Pushkinskaya 10? IA: If some sort of monstrous cataclysm doesn't happen, then most likely we'll end up with an ordinary, civil cultural center of the Western type, and we'll be offered jobs there as hired workers. But this will no longer have any relationship to the actualities of the present. AM: I'm not so pessimistic. I think that "pushkinskaya" cultural life differs from the life of, say, the Rotterdam organization V2 in that Western cultural centers are directed towards fairly quality cultural production. You see, between the idea and its realization there has to be genuine, responsible work. And I see the next period as a period of deep creative unfolding and development, taking into account how our consciousness unfolded thanks to that very same Internet. There is no longer any feeling of spatial boundaries, but the pleasure kicks in only when you've got the apparatus of action in hand and you know how to use it well. A big, realizational high - that's what's in store for us. DP: How would assess the experience of producing our last project on CD-ROM? AM: For me it can be summed up quite simply. I approached that project with a great deal of anxiety. First, this was the initiation of the artistic impulse in the transition to a more strictly structured and demanding medium. You can daub something, draw, do actions and videos - but in the terms of the present day and age those media are fairly watery and allow for prolixities and trivialities. But with CD-ROM we have a severely compressed means of utterance and I thought that most of the artists whom we asked to play in this game would end up being creatively impotent and out of fright would begin their statements with the usual trivialities. But it worked out just the opposite. Everyone was able to pull himself together. And this is a serious hurdle, being this demanding on oneself. In the previous paradigm one could hang out, but now one has to deliver, leaving the socializing to one's free time. And the programmers also rose to the occasion, the whole time they held up and "carried" the level of artistic ideas. DP: I remember how glad I was that we taught people to play unfamiliar games and they didn't wrack their brains thinking about it, but simply played. IA: That's exactly why I go into raptures over working in a non-profit. You can come out with any proposal - the reaction to it is absolutely open and childlike. AM: In general it seems to me that CD-ROM as a means of realizing artistic ideas and projects has a big future ahead of it: it requires a great amount of informational engagement and the invention of interactive models for organizing the utterance. For the time being it's impossible to imagine creative means more adventurous than CR-ROM in combination with the World Wide Web - for installations, performances and any sort of creative project. IA: Yeah. I just remembered - you asked me at the beginning of our conversation what kinds of ideas I had when I opened the gallery. Strictly speaking, there were exactly two. The first had to do with ambition: to make it into any art guide. The second - to break free of the gallery; that is, to translate it into some kind of incorporeal and maximally compact space, a space free of hassle. Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas Campbell