Bruce Sterling on Fri, 30 Jul 1999 09:36:25 -0700 (PDT) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Syndicate: Neo-Academists Have No Money and Need None! |
How Nice to See the Neo-Akademists Pulling Down Some Sympathetic English-Language Arts Coverage *8-) >From ST. PETERSBURG TIMES FESTIVAL & ARTS SUPPLEMENT 'Ship of Artistic Fools' Sails On St. Petersburg's newly born contemporary art scene has evolved into an unselfish and passionate neoclassical avant-garde, bravely exploring new fields. Gleb Yershov reports. JUST 10 years ago in St. Petersburg, the words "object," "installation" and "performance" - in an artistic context - provoked only a perplexed, even irritated response. But today it is all familiar territory: The city's contemporary art has its own institutions, galleries, movements and even its own areas of influence. If one was to sum up the evolution of art in this city over the last decade, one might say that the late '80s and early '90s were dedicated to "Neoxpressionism." A kind of humor and irony infected artists - an indulgence in heroic but childlike passions, fraternization with rock musicians, and an endless string of performances from "new" artists held in their homes or in various clubs. Now, in its place, we have a "new seriousness" - a calmer, more conservative and businesslike attitude to art. The carnival atmosphere of the past has given way to the grandeur and majesty of "Neoacademism," to the cult of Petersburg's classicism and its restrained, Apollonian beauty. That "ship of artistic fools" once inhabiting a squat at Pushkinskaya 10, once the most exotic and notorious artistic address in St.Petersburg, has also been reborn. The artists have migrated to a newly renovated part of the building, with a new entrance at 53 Liteiny Prospect, a proud new sign saying "Municipal Cultural Center - Free Arts Foundation," and unnervingly clean walls - a far cry from the grimy and dilapidated workshops and stairwells, covered in graffiti and mold, that used to be their home. They've been there a year now, and a few ironic comments on their trendy, bourgeois Eurostandard lodgings haven't deterred the Petersburg avant-garde from completing a fair few successful projects in this short space of time. Among them: the pioneering, "unofficial" Museum of Nonconformist Art, and the New Academy Museum of Timur Novikov - St. Petersburg's leading Neoacademic practitioner, now blind, but still probably the city's most clear-sighted artist. The space also houses Gallery 103, the "Amplitude" Humanitarian Studio, the Cyberfeminist Center, the Navicula Artis gallery, and the recently opened Poligon gallery, a round-the-clock workshop for young artists. The August '98 economic crisis hasn't had much of an effect on the city's level of artistic activity, since artists didn't have any money in the first place, and weren't trying to earn any, either. According to Andrei Khlobystin, editor of the newspaper Artistic Will (Khudozhestvennaya Volya) and a man with an optimistic outlook on contemporary art in this city, the situation here is far more attractive than in, say, Paris. Here, he says, things are more straightforward: People are artists because they wouldn't be doing anything else; they work unselfishly, passionately, and at their own risk. Khlobystin, an art buff ever-responsive to what happens around him, defines art as "an area of highly positive and frank communication and interaction." In this respect, contemporary art in St. Petersburg is a success, closely connected to numerous intellectual circles, both artistic and scientific, and forming an unbreakable link between Petersburg art and the written word. Out of the many discussions of contemporary art - marginal, nonprofessional, dilettantish and otherwise - arise thoughts of establishing educational, enlightened academic institutes with a genuinely original objective: the bringing together of representatives of university-style academia and true "activists" from the world of "alternative" art. In this field, George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Humanitarian College of Free Arts, the Russian Museum and various other parties are all displaying an interest. Furthermore, the St. Petersburg State University has opened a Center of Contemporary Art as well as a museum dedicated to the subject, and plans for the creation of courses and lecture programs on 20th-century art are taking shape. New Classicism The most prominent movement in St. Petersburg art today is Neoacademism - or the new Russian classicism - which has had an influence on more or less everybody. On the one hand, Neoacademism is a conservative movement; on the other, it is Russian art's last radical gesture of the 20th century, cutting through the modernist mud clogging up the West. Critics often accuse St. Petersburg Neoacademists of lacking professionalism and the most basic artistic technique. But it would be hard to make such accusations stick to those artists working primarily with new techniques, using computer and video art and up-to-date printing methods - artists such as Olga Tobreluts, Yegor Ostrov, Grigory Guryanov or Andrei Ventslov, to name a few, whose work can be found in the galleries of Pushkinskaya 10. The new Russian classicism is what sets St.Petersburg apart from Moscow. The absence in this city of such post-Soviet monsters as the academic Ilya Glazunov and Zurab Tsereteli, with their mania for the gigantic, does not mean that there are no artists ready to stage expensive, large-scale projects - something along the lines of Sergei Bugayev's exhibit "The Subjugation of Space in the Soviet Union," which he hopes will be Russia's entry at this year's Venice Biennial. Alexei Kostroma's "feathering" of the Bronze Horseman statue, and of the cannons at the Peter and Paul Fortress, was created in the same vein, as was his impressive interactive video installation "A Spiral of Penguins" in the Marble Hall of the Russian Museum. But there are other, foreign movements in St. Petersburg as well. For example, the city's art scene as a whole been has infected by the conceptualist virus that rules Moscow, and Neoacademism has not escaped exposure. The conceptualist element in modern art troubles all those artists trying their hand at the more academic tasks of designing exhibits and mounting other projects, just as - in reverse - it troubles art historians and critics, who are trying to become artists. The artist Yury Alexandrov is a case in point. His exhibition, "Without Gutenburg," was a presentation of handwritten notes, address books, telephone directories, songbooks and soldiers' "albums" (a sort of demobilization yearbook) dating back to the 1930s. This unique collection turned the gallery into a reading room that was open for all of three hours, and was, in essence, one big installation in which Alexandrov presented himself as a conceptualist "arranger" of exhibits. But the most topical and promising new current found expression in the "Open City" project of Sergei Denisov, Alexander Skidan and Kirill Shubalov. The idea was that the city itself, in its current state, is the best artist of all: reckless, witty and resourceful. Together with the poetry of the Neva, it creates impromptu objects, installations, frescos, reliefs, abstractions, graffiti ... a series of aesthetic photographs that invite one to join the city in creation. It was a light, springtime affair, a moment of delicate contact, a set of thinly carved slices of a city familiar and open to everyone, but by no means transparent or banal, a city seen through the warm, childlike eyes of the artist. And it is this vital look at the urban environment that gives one hope that St. Petersburg, as Russia's cultural capital, will continue to draw both the neoclassicists and the most demanding modernists and experimenters, as it nears its 300th anniversary. ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress