Art:
Two
of Russia's preeminent modern
art personalities go
head-to-head tackling the Big
Questions. Ante up.
(Curated by
Marat Guelman)
Blue
Noses
Over the past eight years, a
group of artists called the Blue
Noses have made their way from
an abandoned bomb shelter in
Siberia to the most famous
museums in the West. The group
got its name from the blue caps
from water bottles that the
artists once put on their faces
as part of their work.
Alexander Shaburov and
Vyacheslav Misin form the
backbone of the Blue Noses. For
the last several years, they
have been studying the Russian
subconscious, and there’s not a
single mass media cliché or
urban superstition that is
likely to escape their scrutiny.
Blue Noses turned a scrawny boy
named Harry Potter into a
Russian magician, Harry Shaburov,
who fights prostitution and
homosexuals. They mock public
service announcements, offering
the slogan “It’s hip to work” as
a new fad. Shaburov and Misin
are prone to poke fun of
anything, from the Russian space
program to their own bodies.
Even the war on terror, which
these days is turning into a TV
game show, is not too sacred for
the artists.
The Blue Noses stand for the
larger accessibility of
contemporary art, and therefore,
they talk to viewers in the
language of movie comedies and
TV shows. Minimal scenery and
maximum fantasy is their
artistic motto.
Valery Koshlyakov
Moscow
painter Valeriy Koshlyakov
paints emblems of great cultural
epochs on enormous pieces of
cardboard. His works stun
viewers with their compositional
precision. The subjects of his
cultural experiments range from
Pompeii frescoes to Moscow
constructivism, from Greek and
Roman architecture to Stalin-era
“classicism,” from Gothic
cathedrals and Renaissance
statues to contemporary
architecture.
There is an explicit focus on
archeology in his works
manifested not only in their
subject matter, but also in
their formal qualities: they
feel like the old time artifacts
accidentally stumbled upon
today. To a great degree, this
effect is created by the
artist's chosen medium: oil
paint on cardboard. Under his
brush, any piece of trash
becomes an object for
meditation.
A refined and appreciative
connoisseur of art history,
Koshlyakov conceives of the
world in cultural, rather than
temporal space. For him,
emptiness is more important than
presence insofar as it contains
the very air of the epoch the
artist is attempting to
capture.
Questions:
How does the political situation
in Russia affect your work?
Koshlyakov:
In a
positive way. Only since
perestroika have I become a
well-known artist in Russia and
abroad. The current situation is
good because it offers the
chance for an even newer
situation to emerge, one which
is more attractive to the
artist. What kind of situation?
Nobody knows. But it is
intriguing.
Shaburov:
When we visit exhibitions in the
West, we are always confronted
with the same questions: what's
Mr. Putin's opinion of your
work? Do you feel a lot of
pressure from the KGB?
Unfortunately, Putin and the KGB
know as much about our art as
Bush knows about Angela Merkel.
If artists during the Cold War
were concerned with important
issues and their every sneeze
was broadcast by “The Voice of
America”, artists today are by
and large marginalized. In the
Soviet days, artists used to
speak to either the powers that
be or an imaginary Western
audience. Now they are forced to
communicate with ordinary people
on their own terms. The state
and the KGB neither restrain nor
help them. Artists are reduced
to petty litigations with
equally marginal groups such as
radical Orthodox believers. This
is a very painful period.
Formerly, you fought with the
KGB; now, anyone can take
offense and sue you. But artists
are not willing to put up with
it. They want to exaggerate
their own importance and try to
play the old games, but it's not
panning out.
What is the difference between
Western and Russian viewers?
Koshlyakov:
The main
difference between the Russian
and the Western viewer is the
former's ignorance of the
culture of the second half of
the 20th century. A lack of
respect for it comes from the
lack of knowledge.
Shaburov:
An artist sends a message to an
imaginary group of his or her
peers. Ideally, these peers
should be people everywhere.
Essentially, the Western viewer
does not differ from the Russian
one. Both are completely devoid
of private life. In place of
private life are media
personalities. Every day the
viewers are visited by President
Bush, Osama bin Laden or, say,
Harry Potter. Mens’ brains are
filled with the content of TV
channels. At the very least, the
function of artists is to
attempt to clear their own
brains of this junk. The only
difference is that the Western
viewer still has clichés
regarding Russians. In popular
opinion, Russians are drunken
peasants in fur hats á la
Rasputin, who have leapt from
the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s
books. Sometimes we take these
clichés to their absurd extreme.
If a Western curator seeks such
images, we are happy to supply
their idiotic needs.
