Alex-Anikina-Cosmic-Shift-Russian-Contemporary-Art-Writing.Pdf
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Cosmic Shift Cosmic Shift Russian Contemporary Art Writing Contents Foreword – Bart De Baere ix Acknowledgments – Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina xv Introduction – Elena Zaytseva 1 Part One Past futures 1 Keti Chukhrov 25 The nomadic theater of the communist 2 Ilya and Emilia Kabakov 33 The center of cosmic energy 3 Boris Groys 53 The truth of art 4 Andrey Monastyrsky 69 VDNKh, the capital of the world 5 Anton Vidokle 91 The Communist Revolution was caused by the Sun Part Two Inherited aesthetics 6 Joseph Backstein 111 History of angels 7 Dmitry Gutov and Anatoly Osmolovsky 127 Concerning abstractionism 8 Olga Chernysheva 157 Screens 9 Dmitry Prigov 171 Two manifestos 10 Maria Chehonadskih 191 The form of art as mediation 11 Artemy Magun 209 Soviet communism and the paradox of alienation 12 Alexander Brener 231 The Russian avant-garde as an uncontrollable beast Part Three From the archive 13 Vadim Zakharov 247 Author, cosmos, archive 14 Bogdan Mamonov 259 A binary system 15 Maria Kapajeva 267 You can call him another man 16 Andrey Kuzkin 283 Running to the nest 17 Masha Sumnina 301 Brink, kerbside, fence, margin Part Four Russia, today 18 Ilya Budraitskis 313 A heritage without an heir 19 Dmitry Venkov 333 Krisis 20 Gleb Napreenko 341 Questions without answers, answers without questions 21 Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya) 353 The Utopian Union of the Unemployed 22 Dmitry Vilensky 371 Chto Delat? and method 23 Yevgeny Granilshchikov 383 Weakness Part Five Future futures 24 Oxana Timofeeva 399 Ultra black 25 Arseny Zhilyaev 413 Demand full automation of contemporary art 26 Alex Anikina 433 The Antichthon 27 Ivan Novikov 461 I want to be afraid of the forest 28 Pavel Pepperstein 467 The skyscraper-cleaner pine marten About the contributors 489 Text credits 500 Image credits 503 Index 506 Foreword A REPORT FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD Strangely enough, the center of the world is out of view at this moment. This makes it very different from those other places that may claim this status for both historical and contemporary reasons. Beijing may be foggy but is somehow visible, and certainly present. New York now tends to be slightly obsolete and outdated, greyish and fading out, much like its historical predecessor, London. But they are present in our mind as concrete cities all the same. Unlike those places, Moscow, the center of the world, is at present virtually invisible. With its 20 million inhabitants it is by far the largest city of Europe, but it is largely left to the Muscovites themselves. Hardly any image or word is getting out. This is not because the empire forbids visits, and nor is it because communication lines are cut by a big divide. It must be because of both of us, because of you and me, the readers of this book. Until now we were not curious and outspoken enough, we did not care enough about the well-being of our shared world spirit, however important that became in times in which both ecological challenges and ballistic missiles are shared globally. We are on the right track now, though; we can read this book and are actually doing so. It is impossible to write the stories of modern and contemporary art in any meaningful way without including Russia in a major way. Over the past decades, we have become increasingly aware of the multitude of narratives and perspectives that have to be acknowledged alongside the traditional master narrative of contemporary art. There are still grand moments that remain unavoidable foundational references, if not for the history, then at least for the capacity of art as an emancipatory field after the bourgeois long nineteenth century. Russia can claim two of those moments, of the greatest magnitude for the role art continues to search in relation to societal change. To start with, there is obviously the intense engagement of constructivism with the new state that had to find its own shape after the 1917 revolution. At the end of the Soviet epoch, there is a second moment. In many ways it is the opposite pole of the grand publicness of its predecessor, yet it is equally powerful as an example of how art can position itself in the heart of societal change. When Mikhail Gorbachev launches his attempt to “reconstruct” his country in 1985, the “dissident” artists of Moscow conceptualism see their position drastically changed almost overnight. Up to that point, their marginal but highly articulated positions in visual art and literature are – certainly at home – determined by an internal emigration in which the audience is limited to their own little community and the KGB, the Committee for State Security. With perestroika, these intellectuals become a concrete reference for a new ethos that is needed instantly; they are suddenly seen to be a new, Foreword x contemporary symbol for a spirit to identify with. In the tidal wave of a general enlivened global interest at the end of the 1980s, the unofficial late Soviet avant-garde gets some international interest as part of a blossoming art scene. It is to a substantial extent export-driven like the Chinese scene of the same period, but it is rife with the radicalism of Moscow conceptualism. A symbolical work of the period is the Brobdingnag performance by Anatoly Osmolovsky, an artist who opposes Moscow conceptualism. He sits on the shoulders of the giant statue of the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, referring both to Jonathan Swift and to Isaac Newton, from whom he borrows the phrase “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This new art scene initially represents the radiating hope of a new Russia, like its loss of international clout comes to stand for the loss of that hope. That loss is strange, and not only because Moscow is the center of the world, and the largest city in Europe. It also continues to be home to a complex artistic scene, with a setup from which many of us may learn. In its present state of relative abandonment it may remind us of the Brazilian art scene at the end of the 1980s, when the art world preferred not to consider the possibility of there being valid art in Brazil. That was, obviously, before it was integrated into the North American market system and validated on its own behalf as a proper perspective adding substantial complexity to the global art reality. What is the specificity of the space of Russian contemporary art? This book bears witness to a crucial dimension of that space. Russia is an intellectual and a literary culture. Its early avant-garde is that of Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as that of the constructivists, just like Moscow conceptualism is the movement of the poet Dmitri Prigov as well as that of Andrey Foreword Monastyrsky or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The present art scene xi is a scene that is marvelously embedded in intellectual terms, as is for already more than a decade proved by the Moscow Art Magazine, published by the critic and thinker Viktor Misiano. It is a thoroughly international framework, represented by the philosopher Boris Groys, who is one of the iconic references of global reflection in the field of contemporary art, or in a very different way by Anton Vidokle, the founder of e-flux. Yet what makes the Russian scene unique is not the traditional discursive frame that over the past three decades became a standard instrument to position and market art, to the extent that also artists are now trained to develop it. The relation between language and art is in this field not predominantly discursive, and certainly not discursive in an instrumental way. It is far wider and far more open than that. One might say that it remains part of the artistic gesture – indeed, by far the largest part of the authors in this book are artists – but that would risk leading to another simplification. The field of thinking-through-language surrounding art is related to those possibilities and to much more. It is both informed by the canonical philosophical network that surrounds art in Western Europe – where even sidetracks are neatly positioned in that network – but it has beside those a second, completely different field of philosophical or quasi- philosophical potential references, often consciously critical of the canon when formulated. This second world, mirroring the international references, remains hidden behind the Cyrillic alphabet, the Russian language, and a different mapping, but on the other hand also by our lack of interest. It is heterodox to Western Europe but often orthodox to Russia. These autonomous developments lead to a parallel intellectual world, Foreword one that is well related to the global canon yet at the same time xii superbly resistant to it, connections turning into idiosyncrasy and back into connections. The result of this is a continuous possibility of reconfiguration, different from the Atlantic system that is the basis for the ‘globalized’ one, because that has only one coherence, a history of ideas that is only slowly being reedited. We may know of glimpses of it, we may for example have heard of the noosphere of the geochemicist Vladimir Vernadsky, the sphere of human awareness, because of his influence on the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The present book is in its structure – starting with the future and ending with posthumanism – influenced by one of those strands that recently has seemed to rise again from the past, cosmism, the philosophical and cultural movement initiated by the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolay Fedorov, of influence on the avant-garde as well as on space travel.