The Refuseniks

Yury Shabelnikov won’t reveal how he managed to make a camping tent out of concrete. “That’s a secret,” the middle-aged artist says with a wink. He doesn’t want to quash the appealing thought that perhaps he just pitched the thing and walked away as it magically hardened. But a glance at his fingernails - gnarled, blackened, destroyed - offers a hint about his process. It’s messy.

It’s this willingness to seek out cheap, undesirable material, be it concrete, scrap metal, broken toys or Styrofoam, and painstakingly shape it into art that links Shabelnikov and a handful of other post-Soviet artists. Critics describe their work using an Italian term, Arte Povera.“I don’t like how Italian it sounds, but there’s no good translation for Arte Povera in English,” says Boris Groys, professor of Slavic Studies at NYU and an expert on late-Soviet postmodern art. “It just comes out as ‘Poor Art,’ like bad art, which is completely misleading.”

“There’s no good translation for Arte Povera in English. It just comes out as ‘Poor Art,’ like bad art, which is completely misleading.”

Despite the obvious common threads in their work–choice of material, dark sense of humor, a dissident streak–Russia’s “poor artists” are not a unified bunch. “This is not a movement,” Groys cautions. “They are individual artists with their own specific attitudes and aesthetics.” Valery Koshlyakov addresses cultural degradation with cardboard Parthenons and scotch-tape Mona Lisas. Alexander Brodsky’s ghostly plaster city flooded with crude oil, meanwhile, has more direct political implications. And then there’s Shabelnikov, some of whose work–including table settings made with ink-stamped slabs of pig fat–is near-inscrutable.

Groys, who is authoring the catalog to an upcoming exhibition of Russian Arte Povera, sees the group’s work as a reaction to two decades of rampant capitalism. Russia’s middle class, he argues, has come to associate possession of designer products with being part of a successful, globalized culture. Artists who want no part in this delusion have, in response, turned to the most basic materials at hand. And, in a break with centuries of Russian artistic perfectionism, they actually want their work to look spontaneous, handcrafted, even – gasp – shoddy.

Dmitry Gutov with Konstantin Bokhorov, Birdies, 1992. For this project, the artists suspended 3,000 badminton birdies in flight using fishing line.

Nikolai Polissky, from the series “Media-Tower,” 2003. Collected branches, mixed media. For monumental sculptures like this one, Polissky enlists the help of entire villages. After they have stood for a while, the towers are burned to the ground.

Yury Shabelnikov with Yury Khorovsky, Last Encampment, 2004. Concrete, metal.

Pyotr Bely, Metaphysical Slide Monument, 2004. Mixed media. Slides have only recently become obsolete, but Bely is ahead of the curve. In his architectural models, they act as surreal windows on miniature worlds within.

Alexander Brodsky, Coma, 2000. Installation view. Plaster, metal, oil with photo and video components. This eerie plaster city is slowly flooded with crude oil dripped in from IV tubes dangling above.

Vladimir Anzelm, from the series “Migrant Workers of the Soul,” 2007. Coal, tar. This piece serves as a clever rejoinder to Damien Hurst’s $100 million diamond-encrusted skull, also from 2007. Coal, after all, is just a diamond waiting to form.

(Photos courtesy of Geulman Gallery)