The Refuseniks
Russia’s “Poor Art” Makes Trash Monumental

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 fingernailsСgnarled, blackened, destroyedСoffers 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.”

Nikolay Palissky

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.

Yuri Shabelnikov

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.


Pyotr Beliy