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Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001
Freedom
and the West: Shifting Meaning in Post-Soviet Culture
by Olesya Turkina
   
The history
of interaction in the formation of cultural hegemony and the search
for the country's own originality started in Russia about 10 years
ago. At the end of the 1980s Perestroika was under way in the USSR
- a rapid change of the uniform political, economic, and aesthetic
order which had predominated earlier to a multitude of other orders.
The Great Stories about the creative work of the Communist Party,
the superiority of socialist economics, and the truth of social
realism art were discredited in an instant. What happened to the
Uniform Order might be called the New Disorder. In the world of
the New Disorder, where all earlier values were lost, and the new
had not yet been formed, the key concept was: Freedom, and the West
as the embodiment of this freedom. In spite of all the changes -
the "leftward" movement and "rightward" movement
of politics course, proclamations of the economic transition to
the free market and the rejection of it, acceptance of democratic
values and the violation of human rights - Freedom and the West
preserved their attractiveness during the post-perestroika decade.
However, the concrete meanings which were inserted in to these words
changed. These changes help us to illustrate the displacement of
cultural paradigms that occurred. Two advertising campaigns, at
the very end of the 1980s - Tampax - and the second half of the
1990s - Winston - serve as examples of this cultural dislocation.
Tampax was one of the first advertising campaigns that emerged on
the Soviet market. This campaign was accompanied by the image of
the Statue of Liberty with a Tampax held in her upraised hand instead
of the torch. Tampax was not only the symbol of the emancipation
of the female body from the power of nature, but the identification
of Freedom (in the broadest sense of this word, including freedom
from one's own biological needs) with America. The Statue of Liberty
(=America = the West) with Tampax in her hand satisfied the special
eroticism of the new revolutionary time. This eroticism was described
in the novels of Evgenii Zamyatin, in the articles of Aleksandr
Zalkind, and on the pages of Soviet newspapers of the 1920s, and
called citizens to sublimate erotic energy in order to give all
efforts to rebuilding the world. Thus in one of the articles of
the 1920s, a Komsomol (Communist Youth League) girl appealed to
readers, saying directly that now there was no time to waste energy
on seeking a sexual partner. Therefore masturbation could be accepted
as useful for the revolution. Moreover, self-satisfaction saved
one from the previous patriarchal order, and now obtaining pleasure
was no longer connected with an external source. Freedom = America
= the West, which came to the USSR with Tampax in hand at the start
of Perestroika, in a paradoxical way demonstrated the fundamental
change that occurred in the consciousness of Soviet people in this
new revolutionary period. Specifically the rescue from external
dependence, from the opposition between Subjection and Freedom,
East and the West, the USSR and America. The search for oneself
was fulfilled in a universal (that is, a Western) context. The wish
was directed not so much toward the partner, toward the West, as
toward oneself. This self-sufficiency was supported from without.
Along
with the beginning of Perestroika arose the fashion for a new self-sufficient
Soviet art. The political fashion was supported by economic levers.
In Moscow there was a Sotheby's auction with sensational prices
for new Russian art which up to that time had been unknown in the
Western market. Now, when a new revolution was taking place in Soviet
Russia, the West expected the appearance of a revolutionary take-off
in culture, similar to the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. In
a paradoxical way, in order to become original, the new Soviet artist
needed the historical aureole of the Russian avant-garde. The image
of the new Soviet artist of the end of the 1980s is amalgamated
with the image of his/ her revolutionary grandparents. Sometimes
there is a literal coincidence performing on the artistic stage.
Thus the Moscow artist Gosha Ostretsov arranged his Revolutionary
Wedding in 1988, planning the costumes in the style of Agitprop.
The romantic image of the artist was developed by the Western mass
media. Thus, critics who at that time made a trip to the newly opened
Russia were already prepared for the artistic freedom and exotic
revolutionism of authentic art. For example, the chief editor of
the magazine "Arts and Antiques", Geoffrey Sheer, after
a visit to the studio of Leningrad artist Vadim Ovchinnikov, printed
on the cover of a 1987 issue of the magazine the reverse side of
Ovchinnikov's picture, as the artist had asked him to. In 1988 the
magazine "Art in America" placed on the cover a letter
from New York by the young Leningrad artist, Sergei Bugaev a.k.a.
Afrika, addressed to his friend, the artist Timur Novikov. The futurism
of the not-yet-manifested, not validated culture also embraced agents
of the Western art market in the person of specialized journals
and auctions, and Western intellectuals. Intellectual tourism to
the USSR was already began in 1987, as soon as the Iron Curtain
opened. In particular, Felix Guattari (1987), John Cage (1988),
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1993) and many others came to Leningrad,
drawn by curiosity and their "leftist" predilections.
In the process of self-identification in the spirit of the 1920s,
Universalism and the indigenous were united in the history of one's
own revolutionary culture. Instead of the denial of "revolutionary
culture" expected by the non-conformists, who had been discredited
by direct collaboration with the authorities, the artists turned
directly to the art of the 1920s. In the 1980s Timur Novikov elaborated
a theory of re-composition based on Lev Kuleshov's theory of collage.
In the 1920s the famous Soviet director had devised the theory of
rearranging ready cinema material. Having noticed that the meaning
of this or that frame changes depending on the context in which
it appears, Kuleshov proposed to rearrange already existing "bourgeois"
material in order to obtain a new effect. Thus the face of the well-known
movie actor Mozzhukhin, depending on which frame preceded his appearance
on the screen and which followed it, could express grief, enthusiasm,
or joy. The artist Sergei Bugaev Afrika started to develop the tradition
of political art, reappropriating at first Soviet, and later Tibetan,
Mexican, and other artifacts, and achieving in his creative work
the effect of semantic aphasia, peculiar to a time of transition.
In the 1980s the Necrorealism movement emerged in Leningrad. Exemplified
by the works of Yegeny Yfit, it signals an original gothic direction.
Under the guidance of this founder of Necrorealism, Yufit, a group
of artists and musicians periodically travelled into the suburbs
where they inacted meaningless battles. Yufit also invented a special
zombie make-up, which consists of bandages and tomato paste, which
he used for spectacular photography. Soon Yufit began to record
the necro-activity with a 16 mm cinema camera. The very combination
of the idea "necro" and "realism" arouses associations
with socialist realism and made the first Western researchers write
about Necrorealism as a distinctive parodied interpretation of official
Soviet style in the spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin. In connection with
the political mode in Soviet art a whole series of exhibitions were
held in the largest museums of contemporary art, such as the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle in Duesseldorf. With rare exceptions,
these were collective exhibitions, that presented to the Western
viewer a clearly-read phenomenon - the phenomenon of an easily recognized
art, understandable by means of historical analogies and thus easily
validated. The individualization of new Soviet art consisted only
in the case of Ilya Kabakov, who almost immediately after his first
exhibition in the West was perceived not only as a Soviet artist,
but also as a product ready for the Western art market. To a great
extent this was facilitated by the circumstance that Kabakov developed
in a conceptual tradition. That is, to quote Dennis Oppenheim, "Kabakov
spoke in a language that we understood, but talked about his own
experience," - the psychopathology of the ordinary life of
the little Soviet man.
In the
second of these advertising campaign, campaign for Winston cigarette,
which took place in the mid-1990s, we can see the new representation
of Freedom and West in Russian culture. In the advertising billboards
the recognizable image of Free America is incarnated in a white
eagle soaring over the famous Golden Gate Bridge. The advertising
slogan was: "Complete Freedom". This is in contrast to
the self-sufficient cultural situation portrayed the first period
in the Tampax. Nevertheless, satisfying the Western demand, the
demand for independence, in this campaign, the new relations between
Russia and the West were embodied. Above all, the oral dependence
on the West, which gives Complete Freedom, not understood anymore
as freedom from ideological or biological dependence, but consumer
freedom. The self-sufficiency of the revolutionary gave way to the
dependence of the consumer. The West was perceived not as a part
of our shared universe, not as a mirror, but as a bread-winner,
obligated to support Russia. The answer to this unconscious demand
was the activity of the Moscow actionists, confirmed on the Moscow
art scene as a counterweight to conceptual and post-conceptual directions.
For example, the artist Oleg Kulik created the image of a Russian
dog biting the hand that fed it. His actions were perceived in the
West as satisfying cultural expectations, as a confirmation of the
impossibility of uniting East and West (newspapers and magazines
explain the brutality of his actions such as, for example, biting
a sponsor at an exhibition in Stockholm, by the fact that he is
a Russian artist).
Since
the second half of the 1990s a change has been occurring in the
political structure, it has taken a sharp turn to the left. The
hierarchy of power has been reinforced. In culture, revanchist moods
have appeared, a new governmental style is emerging. The sculptor
Zurab Tseretelli created an ensemble on Manezh Square in Moscow,
where the luxury of consumer commercial series was joined with stylisation
in fashion a la Russe. This appeal to tradition was perceived not
simply as the yearning for the lost Great Stories about authenticity
and national character, but especially as a counterbalance to Western
culture. Artist Timur Novikov responded to this situation with the
creation of the "New Russian Classicism" movement. He
propagated opposition to Europe and America, spoke of preserving
European classical traditions, and compiled two histories of art:
good and bad. The Western mass media perceived the ideology of the
New Russian Classicism as a return to totalitarianism. As a whole
this period can be called the "Empire strikes back". It
can be illustrated by an advertising campaign for the Russian cigarette
"Java" On the billboards a stylised scene from George
Lucas "Star Wars" is presented, with opposites being turned
around. The Evil Empire is not the USSR, but the West (America),
which must be defeated. The imperialistic mood in society was manifested
in literature, music, and visual arts. In 2000, in iterature the
most popular book was "The Bite of the Angel" by the Petersburg
writer Pavel Krusanov. Its main hero is evil incarnate, Nekitaev
(the name means literally not Chinese), who despotically rules the
Russian empire. Mass fantasies about Great Russian (or Soviet) power,
presented by writers and artists to the reader and viewer, began
to play a critical role. Thus in the project "Novonovosibirsk",
artists A. Molodkin, A. Belyaev-Gintovt, and G. Kosorukov presented
an architectural fantasy, executed in the spirit of Soviet projection
architecture of the 20th. The artists proposed to transfer the capital
of Russia to its geographic centre which, according to their calculations,
must be located not far from the city of Novosibirsk in Siberia.
The new capital city of Russia, imperial Russia, should begin, in
the scheme of the artists, with the erection of huge monuments -
gigantic statues of Apollo with SS30 rockets instead of arrows in
his quiver, in whose head the Ministry of Education should be placed.
(Here everyone who is familiar with the history of Soviet architecture
inevitably is reminded of the similarity to the plan of Ionafan's
House of the Soviets in Moscow in the form of a tremendous statue
of Lenin, in whose head a library was supposed to be built.) The
Lebed (Swan) monument serves as the starting place for the cosmodrome,
the vast Rzhanoi (rye) colossus is occupied by the Ministry of Agriculture.
The future monuments were presented by the artists on enormous canvases.
However, the modernist enthusiasm of the project was partly diminished
by the fact that the sketches of the future monuments had been executed
with blue ball-point pen. Invented in 1940, the ball-point pen can
be considered the most democratic artistic instrument. The ball-point
pen is accessible even in such places of temporary confinement as
prisons and military institutions. Moreover, the blue color resembles
tattooing which in Soviet times served the most important function
of identification.
At present
the accent in relations to Western cultural hegemony has given way
to meeting the demand for the authentic revolutionary quality of
the first period, away from the commercial-monetary dependence of
the second period, and the revanchism of the third period and toward
problems of functioning modern Russian art within the framework
of the Western art market. Thus, this or that regional tendency
frequently is perceived as a direct reply to the demand of the West.
We will cite only two interpretations of an installation of Sergei
Bugaev Afrika, "MIR: Made in the 20th century". This installation,
shown in the Russian pavilion at the 48th Venice biennial, presented
a video recording of a real session of electro-shock therapy in
a Crimean psychiatric hospital, projected on the iron floor of an
enormous metal sphere, and encircled by Soviet photographs from
the 1930s to the 1970s, reproduced on enamelised metal. A critic
from the magazine "Art Monthly" wrote about the abominable
"frightening" effect of the installation, exploiting ideological
idioms. The director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Stockholm,
David Elliott, recalled that electroshock was used as a political
tool by the state against Soviet dissidents. The narrative ideological
context of the installation makes the viewer perceive it as an illustration
of political realia, as a farewell to the horrors of "Soviet
Russia in the 20th Century".
In 2000,
the demand for authenticity, revolutionism, brutality, were replaced
by the need to comply with the rules. We will cite two illustrative
stories: 1. Pictures from the project "Novonovosibirsk"
were shown by the artists to the brother of the inventor of the
ball-point pen, Baron Bic. Attentively looking at the gigantic pictures
drawn with a ball-point pen, Mr. Bic was horrified by the fact one
of the defects of the ball-point pen appeared in them - the coagulated
ink spots left by the ink cartridge - and he wondered whether it
was impossible to draw such pictures without the smudges. The authenticity
of the artistic gesture today must be inscribed in the system of
the established economic relations. It could be the relations with
a ball-point pen producer or a large art-book publisher such as
Thames and Hudson how it happened in the second story. In 2001 this
publishing house republished a book by critic Edward Lucie-Smith,
devoted to Movements in Modern Art. As one of the illustrations,
he suggested publishing a computer collage of the work of Petersburg
artist Olga Tobreluts, from the series "Sacred Figures"
where the artist introduced pop-stars against the canvases of old
masters: Elvis Presley - in Carpaccio, Naomi Campbell - in Parmigianino,
Kate Moss - in Antonello da Messina, Michael Jackson - in Giorgione.
In this series, Olga Tobreluts combined images canonised by Western
European art history with images instantly canonised by 20th century
mass culture. In this work the artist united the picture of Antonello
da Messina and the face of Leonardo di Caprio. However, it proved
imposible to publish this work. The publisher's lawyers urgently
advised not taking the risk, since unsanctioned use of the face
of Leonardo da Caprio could lead to major problems for the publishing
house. Such censorship caused the critic to associate it with the
fascist regime of Germany in the 1930s. We will only note that the
crossing of borders, always considered an indispensable condition
for the rise of art, in this case collided with a more inflexible
force than the power of the ideological or political, it clashed
with the power of capital. Thus the ideas of Freedom and the West,
so important for interrelations between original culture and cultural
hegemony has been anew subjected to transformation, and apparently
not for the last time.
©2001
Olesya Turkina |
