a cultural revolution?

The collection and display of contemporary Russian artists and the associated public art commissions - most notably the wooden arched п of artist Nikolay Polissky which has been artfully placed on a roundabout - seem to be what are causing the most complaint in Perm, both because of the cost and because of a general lack of enthusiasm for modern art. Interestingly my interpreter calls all the current activities not a 'city of culture' but a 'cultural revolution'.

For a sense of the debate read Yelena Fedotova, Moscow-based art critic, in her piece 'In praise of little red men: cultural revolution in Perm'.

To enter one of Perm's Public Art competitions go here.

the place of art

The Perm contemporary art gallery (now re-badged PERMM) is currently housed in an old ferry terminal, down by the river Yama. It had been abandoned, and still looks both small and frayed at the edges; not quite of the calibre of its references (Bilbao, MOMA, Tate Modern, CaixaForum, etc., etc.) But at the same time, the ambition is impressive. I met a young curator who is involved in the task of building a permanent russian contemporary art collection. Perm may not want it, but still nothing of that scale is happening in either St. Petersburg or Moscow as far as I know. And her enthusaiasm was a lovely thing to see.

my all time hero

In my continuing saga of missing fantastic artists who are visiting Moscow, I failed to notice that William Kentridge was giving a performance at Garage yesterday. But never mind, because the exhibition - Five Themes - which is a traveling show from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art*, presents a truly breath-taking and brilliant selection of his work to date; covering sketches, animations, made objects, films, 3D projections and multi-screen installations, all showing his obsessive versatility, fantastical imagination and - often clownish - humour.  He should be as famous as, I don't know, artists like Gerhard Richter and Jake/Dinos Chapman  (or maybe he is and I was just foolish to only discover him accidentally a few years ago).

And somehow his work seems particularly relevant right here, right now. Both because it sits outside much western contemporary art, being not conceptual, intellectual and self-referential but graphic, metaphorical and narrative-based (that is, much more like contemporary Russian art) and because it has a way of incorporating politics that is very engaged and explicit without being didactic - something other (rather more inward and personal) artists here could learn from.

So - a must see if you happen to be in Moscow before 4th December 2011.

* To be properly accurate, from the San Francisco Museum, together with the Norton Museum of Art.  Show curated by Mark Rosenthal.

getting in with the in-crowd

Feeling v. pleased with myself for managing to blag into the biennale opening. Just marched up to security and said the artist Susan Hiller had invited me. This was - in its way - a complete truth. At the end of her talk, I asked the artist if she could tell my where her work was being exhibited.  This is because there is absolutely no information on the biennale website about things like that (no programme of events either; its all a guessing game, to the extent that on opening night the whole of the ArtPlay area was full of very posh, very lost, looking people asking plaintive directions.)

To which she replied (and I quote) 'you should come to the opening, it's tonight.' So I did. And before I knew it the nice woman organiser was apologising for the lack of me having an actual ticket, and shepherding us to the front of the queue.

the 4th

The 4th Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale has crept up from behind, or rather, everything is happening very suddenly without much warning. It turns out that ArtPlay where I work, is one of the major exhibition sponsors; that really famous (and fabulous) artists are speaking in this very building one after another; and that the next door building - which was a complete wreck until yesterday - has been finished practically overnight and now houses some amazing contemporary art, both international and Russian. And will do so until 30th October 2011.

Thus, it came to pass that I found out the day before that Issac Julien, Susan Hiller and Rebecca Horn were all down to give talks right here (along with many others). An amazing treat.


Photo of Issac Julien introducing Ten Thousand Waves at BHSAD, Moscow. Susan Hiller is showing Witness (2000) and Rebecca Horn Moon Mirror Journey (2011) at the Biennale.

more beautiful people

Found myself at a cocktail reception yesterday evening. Organised by Christies, the event was presumably aimed at promoting the art auctioneers to Russian art collectors again - a sign that the financial crisis is seen as on its way out here. Slightly miscellaneous artworks on the walls by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Claude Monet, Ilya Repin and Lucien Freud among others; but mainly I was staring at all the beautiful people (and the scrum of photographers).

My problem being that I never recognise celebrities on my own home-ground, let alone Russian ones. So no idea who these women are, just love/want their poise and style.

Meanwhile I showed my lack of class by wearing jeans, getting VERY over-excited at the Chanel No.5 goodie bag and going on to Moo Moo* for dinner.


* Moo Moo/ му му is one of two main chains of buffet-type 'cheap-n-cheerful' Russian food restuarants, decorated in a 'Russian village'/ cow motif style. The other is 'Mongolian style', called Elki Palki/ёлки палки.

contemporary Russian video art

Went recently to the third in a series of exhibitions entitled 'The History of Russian Video Art' at MMOMA. The first of these was held in 2007, and has only just got up to the current period.


All the usual suspects - Blue Noses (above) AES+F, Iced Over Architects, Victor Alimpiev, Olga Chernysheva - were there, and then both some seemingly banal work and some really unexpected and interesting pieces. In the first group came rather a lot of water-based work, including the BlueSoup Group (who look more interesting on their website) and Dimitry Gutov. His Thaw (2006) is a literal interpretation of the gradual shift out of the Soviet period's 'cultural freeze', presented as a man stumbling about in melting snow, supported by a wonderfully grumpy poem about getting into a fight.


Despite a generally literal translation between art presented here and its meaning, I really liked a couple of slightly surreal, laugh-out-loud works. One  involved a series of minature model house interiors into were projected tiny animated  people, doing silly things. The other showing a blue, cloudy sky into which you could make two people appear by working old-fashioned hand pumps. If you pushed long enough they inflated like ballons, grinned and floated away. Embarassingly I don't know who the artists were for either of these pieces, so any help here appreciated.


The whole thing has clearly been a huge research project, curated by Antonio Geusa, with the aim of finding and reclaiming video art in the Russian context. As the MMOMA website says: "Video appeared at the same time when contemporary art emerged from the semi-clandestinity of the underground and was shown in the first independent contemporary art spaces." The first recognised work was only in 1985 (Andrey Monastyrsky’s Conversation with a Lamp, in case you wanted to know). The very shortness of video's art's history here together with, as Geusa says, the need 'to shout' outside of a the previously rigid control of art, helps to explain something about both the literalness and the maudlin, gaudy belly-laughing humour.



The show finished on January 30, 2011 and was at the  Moscow Museum of Modern Art at 17 Yermolaevsky Lane.

deja-vu view

Finally got to the New Decor exhibition at Garage yesterday (which is touring - with some changes - from the Hayward Gallery in London). I went to see the curator Ralph Rugoff talk about the show some time ago, with the kind of simultaneous Russian translation that reduced everything to pretty mindless sound-bites.

But then, the show itself is quite peculiar. Many contemporary artists work with found objects such as furniture and environments in various ways to subvert their everyday ordinariness; and the best pieces here do indeed resonate to some degree with the 'uncanny'.  But there is something distractingly odd about collecting them all together in one show, even in a space as big and relaxed as Garage. Some of the curation is actually sharper than at the Hayward; but still there is an overall aura of the furniture warehouse, of elderly chairs and tables scattered unceremoniously about in varying degrees of distress and without much logic.

Maybe it is to do with smallness and repetition; once you have seen one piece of furniture cut in half and its edges bandaged you have seen...etc etc. The end result was quite unsatisfying; and not only because I saw it before at the Hayward.

Garage is also running it's first photography exhibition called How Soon is it Now which as the promo says "presents fifteen of the most interesting contemporary artists working with the photographic medium."  They were selected by five curators –Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf - as a bit of a statement about what international contemporary photography is, or should, be about.


Which was also weird to see, not so much the work - although it does tend to the highly conceptual - but because (unexpectedly) I have seen this show before too. At the Arles International Photography Festival last year. Which either means I am right there culturally deep in the thick of things; or just very pretentious.


New Decor closes on Feb 6th and How Soon is it Now on Feb 8th.

Cuban artists Los Carpinteros, photo from Artguide Moscow (too many guards to take pictures)

resolutions

I am not a great fan of New Years’ resolutions but –following a long conversation with Russian colleagues about the many important sights/sites in Moscow I have NOT yet visited - have returned here determined to regain my inner tourist in 2011. 

I guess that after a while living in any country/city you get out of the habit of really looking at what’s there and just begin to live in that state of everyday distraction which constitutes normality. Which is nice in one way, but also feels like a blurring of the reasons for moving somewhere else in the first place.  As a method for reviving my initial enthusiasms I have begun making a list of things to see. This starts with the major museums (Tretyakov, Pushkin, MMOMA, all of which I can’t believe I have not yet been to); goes on to all those fabulous looking house museums and other architectural stuff (such as the Shchusev Museum of Architecture) for which Moscow ought to be more famous; and then moves towards a, as yet, rather rougher and shorter list of contemporary culture and events – restaurants, bars, shops etc, which I consider my answer to the Wallpaper City Guides. In fact, the whole project keeps threatening to segue into one of those 10 Best Things to See in Moscow if you are a Culture Vulture lists, an inclination I am trying to resist. And this is even before I get to all the potential sights near the city, let alone trips further afield.

Anyway, I decided to make my NYR public here, so that you all can keep me to these good intentions (which I always thought was the only way to keep to a New Year’s resolution). Oh, and any recommendations for good and unusual places to add to my ‘tourist’ visits are also welcome. 

There remains only one issue, and slight crisis, which is to do with photography. This will only be of interest to camera buffs, so everyone else can stop reading here. I set a rule when I first started this blog – not that I told anyone else – that each post would only have one photographic illustration and that I would only use my little ‘point and shot’ compact (a Ricoh GR since you asked). I liked the idea of a restriction, a kind of what -you-see is-what-you-get approach without the possibility of any fancy footwork. I still like this idea; the problem is that the Ricoh collapsed on me when I was in Sydney – cameras do like to pack up when you are on trip-of-a-lifetime type excursions – and is still behaving very eccentrically. I also have a Lumix GF1with a couple of lens, a relatively recent purchase after my original much-loved, elderly and very oversized Fuji S2Pro digital SLR finally died and Fuji stopped making high-end consumer cameras, damn them.

This, then, is the issue. Whether to just go over to using my Lumix (which breaks the initial rule) or to go out and buy another compact, which will take a lot of fluffing around in selection, cost, country of purchase etc. A difficult decision...

(....and sorted almost immediately by buying a the cheapest Fuji compact available at the airport, and using my Lumix just when I feel like it!)

Photo above is of a photograph I bought recently - just to show I do get out and about a bit - from the first student art fair being run at ArtPlay. Interesting to see what the next generation are doing; much still quite derivative, but lots of creativity.... this is by Alena Beljakova. For more go to http://perhydrol.deviantart.com/gallery/

So now I know I live somewhere trendy

My neighbourhood is very like bits of East London - rundown with several derelict factories  but also with pockets of cultural activity (Winzavod, ArtPlay) and many bright young things in evidence at weekends. But now I know the area has really arrived. Instead of the usual drunks on the stairs, there has been a many-personed film crew occupying several floors for the whole day. With the whole works, including external floodlights.

And they have kindly given us extra graffiti, together with a considerable amount of shouting, music and chasing about.

That special thing

I already know what it is that represents Moscow for me, as I come to the end of this first year.

This is mainly because I keep taking pictures. Of those painted patches over graffiti you see everywhere. I like the care with which it is done, the oddly decorative patterns the painters-over make, and the complete impossibility of getting any sort of colour match.

is smooth good?

This smoothness (lack of) also affects 'high' culture; from lack of advanced warning to exhibitions that are not finished to deadline (these are stands still being built after ARCH Moscow opened) to the weird experience of the current Rothko show at Garage.

Here, the pictures are well hung but the lighting is pretty poor and the alarm sensors oversensitive. The effect is a kind of sound installation ballet. You have to lean forward to read the captions to each work, which sets off the alarms (each at a slightly different pitch). A resigned security guard walks towards you gesticulating, so you back off. They retire, only to have to do the same thing as another alarm sounds. This is non-stop and - for a while - quite amusing. But in a London gallery we are so used to everything being smooth; with the amount of effort behind each exhibition made invisible precisely because of obsessive professionalism.

Well, I think that is what it is.....

City bingo 5: concert posters for (ex)rock stars - need I say more?

Angels

Crossing the bridge to the Red October Chocolate Factory I saw a couple of young angels. Found out after that they are part of an ongoing art project, a whole group, although no one quite seems to know whether there is a point.

More art and stuff

More exhibitions today - this time off to the Baibakov Art Project at the Red October Chocolate Factory (nearest metro Kropotkinskaya/кропоткинская) to see Luc Tuymans (Against the Day) and Olga Chernysheva (Present Past). Brilliant pair of well curated shows and fabulous work. Here the owner is an oligarch's daughter - only in her early 20s - but clearly a talent to watch.

Also a lot of other work on show throughout the string of buildings because the ex-factory is currently a major place for artists studios, galleries and impromptu shows. This is a relatively good, although potentially temporary, outcome following campaigns against the move of chocolate production to another site. Every one is worried that the location on the island right by the newly rebuilt Christ the Saviour cathedral makes it vulnerable to yet more commercial development.

Me, what I miss is the open-air swimming pool previously on the cathedral site which I remember from a visit 30 years ago. It was a massive lido, with sleek, high diving boards and water steaming in the freezing air; which was entered by swimming out from inside the changing rooms. This, in turn, was the result of a hole made for a planned Palace of the Soviets (never built and seeing the competition entries we should all be relieved) - a hole created by the destruction of the previous cathedral by Stalin in 1931.