Kollektsia! – the Final View
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KOLLEKTSIA! – THE FINAL VIEW Our International Editor Simon Hewitt has been reporting on Russian Contemporary Art since 2007, travelling from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok in the process. Here he delivers his judgment on the juggernaut Pompidou Centre exhibition Kollektsia! Contemporary Art in the USSR & Russia 1950-2000 that has just closed in Paris after a six-month run. The opening of the Kollektsia! exhibition in Paris on 13 September 2016 was one of those blockbuster social events in which the Russian art fraternity delights. Many of its seventy featured artists jetted in from Moscow. It was a good time to renew old acquaintances, less so for viewing works of art. I returned five months later for a quieter look, just after the original 250-work exhibition had received a further 100 pieces. Kollektsia! was assembled under the auspices of the Potanin Foundation, launched in 1999 to support culture and education by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men. In 2001 he became a Trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2003 he was made Chairman of Trustees at the St Petersburg Hermitage. In 2007 he was created an Officer of the Order of Arts & Literature by the French Ministry of Culture. There were high hopes that a show at one of Europe’s top museums, with such a major backer, would snap Western art-lovers out of their indifference to Russian contemporary art. But the exhibition’s very title suggested that might be tough. ‘Kollektsia’ (Collection) would sound fatuously banal were it not accompanied by a self- important exclamation-mark, borrowed from the RUSSIA! exhibition held at the New York and Bilbao Guggenheims in 2005/6 (with Vladimir Potanin as Co-Chairman of the ‘Leadership Committee’). RUSSIA! justified its exclamation-mark with some of the finest works by 130 Russian artists down the centuries. Kollektsia! featured the work of about 70 artists – hardly any of them represented by their finest work. This was no ‘collection’ in the usual sense of the word, lovingly amassed over a number of years – but an array of works hurriedly acquired on a shoestring budget, and beefed up by donations from artists and collectors. The reason? The Pompidou Centre claimed to have no space for a lending exhibition before 2020, whereas an exhibition of works donated to the museum could be swiftly slotted in. The subtitle Contemporary Art in the USSR & Russia 1950-2000 was equally misleading, and not just because the word ‘contemporary’ is superfluous when dates are specified. Referring to the USSR wrongly suggested the exhibition included works from territories not part of today’s Russian Federation; it was, in fact, obsessed with artists from Moscow. (The celebrated Norton Dodge Collection of Russian Post-War Art, in contrast, includes numerous works from Soviet Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.) Then, it is barmy for the word ‘contemporary’ to include 1950 but not 2016. The 2000 cut- off point was bizarre (and often ignored). It exuded self-censorship, chosen to avoid any political controversy capable of displeasing the leadership of Russia in place since the start of the millennium. Yet Russian art has long been heavily political. The story of Russian contemporary art is not complete without reference to the headline-grabbing Piotr Pavlensky and Pussy Riot; the irreverence of Vasily Slonov, which helped get Marat Guelman kicked out of Perm; or the satirical textiles of Gluklya, widely admired at the 2015 Venice Biennale. To balance the spurious end-point of 2000, the organizers had to settle on an equally rounded starting-point – hence the choice of 1950. But this wrongly implied the exhibition would feature works painted during Stalin’s reign, when Alexander Deneika was still going strong; in fact, the earliest works on show came from 1957. It is worth noting that the earliest works in the great Dodge and Ludwig collections of Soviet Art date from 1956 and 1958 respectively. SNAKING THROUGH THE GALLERIES Kollektsia! was held on the fourth floor of the Pompidou Centre, part of which was boarded up due to a massive renovation programme marking the building’s 40 th anniversary. Visitors were greeted by a grimacing 1989 Lenin by Dmitry Vrubel & Victoria Timofeyeva. Lenin’s Mausoleum , playfully made of dominoes by Yuri Avvakumov in 2008, occupied the ‘high altar’ position at the far end of the 60-yard corridor that ran the length of the show. There was even a 2005 Blue Noses video of an actor impersonating Lenin Turning In His Coffin (a cardboard-box) for 9 minutes 25 seconds. Kollektsia’s approach to political art, then, was embodied by a man who died over ninety years ago, with all reference to Russia’s current leaders eschewed. That was misleading and depressing. This persistent Lenin fixation is one reason why Russian contemporary art arouses so little interest around the globe. Despite its specific dateline, the exhibition made no attempt to place works in their historical or political context. There was scant logic as to their presentation, which occupied twenty or so halls of varying sizes – some numbered, others not (with the numbers running bafflingly from 2 to 33). The wall of one side of the main corridor was left mainly blank and topped by plastic sheeting. The ugliness was reinforced by the murky lighting generated by cheap neon tubes dangling high above the works. Such abject display conditions would have embarrassed a small-town museum in La France Profonde : it felt like something between a building-site and a morgue. One particularly arid room near the start was dominated by 36 photographs from Komar & Melamid’s 1977 Catalogue of Super-Objects , shown in Paris by Benoît Sapiro in 2007. Opposite lurked the Blue Noses, a tandem who originate from western Siberia but have long integrated the Moscow mainstream. Their irreverent sixth-form humour has its Pythonesque moments, although its status as art is a matter of taste. Their videos and photos included their elaborately staged Era Of Mercy photograph of two Russian soldiers embracing in the snow surrounded by silver birch trees, taken in 2005 but here in a 2017 reprint that made further mockery of the exhibition dateline. This iconic homosexual image was the nearest Kollektsia! came to challenging the prurient diktats of the Motherland. Several halls were devoted to Dmitry Prigov (1940-2007), one of the most versatile Moscow Conceptualists. I was fortunate to meet him shortly before his death; he chatted to me in a modest, matter-of-fact way about his incarceration in a mental hospital under Gorbachov. Prigov was a witty wordsmith with an aesthetic approach to lettering all his own. This was apparent in his large Glasnost corner installation of paint and newspapers, but – with the exception of a Bouquet of flowers made from rolled up paper and tape – Kollektsia’s earnest, archival display had none of the visual panache generated by Katya Degot in her superb Prigov retrospective at the MMoMA (Moscow Museum of Modern Art) in 2008. The exhibition then shifted zanily back to the 1960s, with an early Roginsky, beneath 1970s wooden reliefs by Shelkovsky, opposite 1990s abstractions by Zlotnikov and, around the corner, a host of paintings by the neo-Suprematist Edik Steinberg, dating from 1963 to 2010 (sic) . There were too many of them for a city that has been weened for years on the copious helpings of Steinberg dished out by his gallerist Claude Bernard. Another artist was showcased even more spectacularly: Vladimir Yankilevsky – who not only had a room all to himself, but some spotlights to go with it, ensuring this was the only part of Kollektsia! to be properly lit. The room included four 1963 male portraits where one would have sufficed, as well as a giant 2013 triptych that should have been time-barred. A tasteful section next door featured drawings, photographs and a 1962 kinetic sculpture by the elegantly inventive Francisco-Infante, accompanied by understated abstract drawings from the late 1950s: some psychedelic – by Mikhnov-Voitenko; others monochrome – three drawings by Turetsky acquired from Igor Markin. The exhibition then lurched into another room starring Komar & Melamid, this time associated with Sots Art companions Boris Orlov and Grisha Bruskin (to be featured at this year’s Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale), who had donated seven plaster figures from his 1985 series Birth of a Hero .... one of them brandishing a portrait of Lenin. The irreverent Moscow groups Mukhomor (‘Toadstool’) and Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate were generously granted rooms of their own. Of greater historic interest was a work by the youthful Mikhail Fedorov-Roshal, salvaged from the legendary open- air exhibition at Belyayevo, bulldozed by the KGB in 1974. The relentless emphasis on Moscow was interrupted by a small, boldly coloured array of works from Leningrad acquired from Paris collector Paquita Escofet-Miro, who worked in Russia in the 1980s and was on intimate terms with most of the artists concerned. Many of these works feature in the delightful 2013 catalogue of her collection, Underground , and were shown at the splendid exhibition she organized at Door Studios in Paris in 2010. That, and the Glasnost show at London’s Haunch of Venison the same year, showed the cheerful, provocative, whimsical, eye-pleasing nature of so much Russian contemporary art – qualities also in evidence at the excellent shows staged by the Ekaterina Foundation in 2011 and Igor Tsukanov at the Saatchi Gallery in 2012... yet in short supply amidst the drab, plodding self-importance of Kollektsia! With typical generosity, Paquita also donated four works to Kollektsia! for free, including a giant 3 x 4m theatre curtain designed by Konstantin Latyshev in 1988.