Art after Primitive Accumulation: Or, on the Putin-Medvedev Cultural Politics

I
Genealogy of Contemporary Art’s Statism

The lack of cultural and art institutions was an urgent matter of debate and concern in Russian artistic circles throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. But it wasn’t until 2005 – in connection with the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art – that a sudden shift took place.⁰¹ State institutions, such as the Ministry of Culture and Rosiso (State Centre of Exhibiting Programmes), left behind their traditional indifference to contemporary art and decided to make the biennial the emblem of ‘New Russian’ progressive cultural politics. This coincided with the emergence of new galleries like Stella Art Foundation and Triumph Gallery in Moscow, whose founders emerged from the new upper classes. ⁰²

From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, the relationship between progressive intellectual and art initiatives, on the one hand, and business and state, on the other, was effectively non-existent. Various artistic events and educational and publishing endeavours were self-organised, and either lacked any external funding or received occasional support from foreign foundations (the Soros Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation). Perhaps because of this, artistic and intellectual spheres of production operated with relative independence, and, although lacking organisational capacity, were motivated by optimism and enthusiasm: these Moscow and St Petersburg self-organised groups included Logos publishers (founded in 1991) and Ad Marginem publishers (founded in 1993), specialising in philosophy and cultural theory; Visual Anthropology, a two-year laboratory of philosophers and artists launched by Viktor Misiano at the Philosophy Institute; TV gallery; Moscow Art Magazine (founded in 1993); groups founded by Anatoly Osmolovsky, such as the Radek art journal (1994-99), Radek community (1999-2000), ETI (Expropriation of Art Territory, 1991-92) and the Non-Governmental Control Commission (1998). Meanwhile state and business concerns focused on privatising the industrial and cultural heritage and resources of Soviet Russia. Culture in those years, as understood by the state and media, was embodied either by dissident, anti-Soviet or so-called non-conformist activities (the protagonists of Moscow Conceptualism – Andrei Monastyrsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Vadim Zakharov, Juri Albert and others – are often included in this context) or the country’s classical nineteenth-century cultural, particularly literary, heritage. Anything taking place in the ‘non-legitimate’ realm of contemporary art in the absence of institutions (e.g. the actionist period of the mid-1990s) was considered as quasi-hooliganism both in the media and in the highbrow circles of Moscow Conceptualism. But, as a whole, neither business nor the state took interest in new creative practices. Pleasure and enthusiasm from intellectual and artistic breakthroughs were still completely separate from profit-making motives. The 1990s were a unique period, when, lacking cultural institutions and with only a handful of galleries (XL, Guelman, Regina) constituting an art scene, a disparate group of young people obsessed by art produced a tendency within a couple of years – Moscow actionism (1991-99). The actionists – such as Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitry Gutov, Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener – were mostly self-proclaimed artists who had neither academic training nor the underground’s recognition or initiation.

In the absence of an art system, market or art spaces, the famous actions of the time – among them The Prick (1991, by Anatoly Osmolovsky, in which the artist’s students and collaborators laid out the word ‘XY ‘ (‘Prick’) on the Red Square by means of their own bodies), Barricade(1998, by Osmolovsky, Radek and a group of Moscow artists, in which the they blocked off Moscow’s central streets with heaps of artworks), The Man-Dog (1995, by Kulik and Brener) and Against All (1999, when Osmolovsky and Radek climbed Lenin’s Mausoleum to unfold the banner with the motto ‘against all’ on it) – were aimed at reclaiming the former symbols of socialist culture that after 1991 became the privatised territories of the new Russian capital. The paradox of the period lay in the fact that the more immature the contemporary art territory was, the more intensive and intellectually charged were its art events and exhibitions. The lack of art-market mediation and of commissioning enabled these events to develop in the direction of independent conceptualisation and experimentation, while Moscow Art Magazine became, under Viktor Misiano’s editorship, the means for documenting, recording and interpreting these events.

Around the end of Putin’s first term in 2004, when the economy was fuelled by oil and other natural resources, the new financial elite, the restructured state bureaucracy and the upper middle class – having guaranteed their welfare and having legitimated black and grey incomes ⁰³ – started to pay attention to a social area that provided symbolic capital: the culture of contemporary art. Glamorous show business and the traditional Russian and post-Soviet cultural preferences – theatre, literature, ballet – appeared unattractive for a generation that was well-travelled and had absorbed technocratic values of culture and political power. Theatre and literature were identified with Soviet and post-Soviet dissident culture, while contemporary art was associated with global contemporary cultural event-making. It is not surprising, then, that the First Moscow Biennale in 2005 reflected a tremendous shift in cultural politics and encouraged large-scale investment in art and its events, both from the government and independent donors. ⁰⁴

At first sight, it may seem that such proliferation of cultural venues and ‘big projects’ in the contemporary art field implies a cultural breakthrough, the cultivation and education of a middle class or an overall urban development. But that was not the case: adherence to new cultural venues doesn’t presuppose education or understanding. Rather, in Russia it enabled the middle class to acquire the illusion of gentrification and cultivation; those who voluntarily kept away from culture in the time of early post-Soviet artistic and intellectual production and pursued business and privatisation were now the ones moulding and controlling art and culture. As the result of the appropriation of formerly self-organised educational, publishing and artistic institutions and ventures, the sites acquired new interfaces. What are they like?

First and foremost, Russian contemporary art, like Russian culture, philosophy, politics and event-making of the post-Yeltsin era, is dominated by the promotion and self-promotion of producers and their personalities. Rather than developing certain institutions and spaces of art and education, its sponsors use the cultural sphere in order to establish themselves as the new ‘progressive’ elite. As a result the social impact of art resides in the names of the event-organisers (which is the case with Daria Zhukova and her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, and Maria Baibakova and her Baibakov Art Projects at the Red October chocolate factory) rather than acquiring potentialities for the new themes and opportunities. Moreover, the new capital’s legitimising of art is not reduced to just sponsoring and engineering the milieu and its production. Very often its new ‘engineers’ endeavour to act as artists, writers, critics and thinkers themselves. ⁰⁵

The artists involved in the ‘actual’ – as opposed to producer-driven – Moscow art scene from 2000 to 2003 believed that the new patrons, despite their lack of familiarity with the arts and humanities, would be gradually converted, refined and educated, and that they would be better allies for art than intellectuals, who produce criticism but provide no resources and facilities for development. This became a permanent debate among artists, art historians and critics as the new producers of the art world started to emerge. Many remembered the paradoxical motto of the writer, artist and former political activist Osmolovsky, who said in 2003 that artists of the time should ‘be for the masters’, ⁰⁶  which, on the one hand, implied an inevitable co-option of artists by the new elite, and, on the other, expressed a belief in the possibility of transforming their tastes and projections. In fact, the financial and bureaucratic elite made use of art’s general intellect and creative achievements to accomplish its own qualitative transformation from owners and sponsors into ‘sophisticated’ bourgeoisie, without any real appreciation of the work they were funding.

In addition to that, Putin’s second term brought about an extreme centripetal movement of various elites around statist and national values. Despite the initial expectation of agents of artistic and intellectual fields that contemporary art’s modernist and avant-garde background would draw the cultural milieu away from supporting the government, Russian cultural politics – as well as contemporary art and its practices – became, voluntarily or not, oriented towards power. As Michel Foucault demonstrates, power is not localised in some governing centre, nor is it personified and embodied, but rather finds itself dispersed and proliferating among social nuclei and institutions. However, this is only partly true in Russia (and not only in Russia, as Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the state of exception and sovereign power suggest).⁰⁷

In Russia there is a centralisation of sovereign power, although this centralisation derives not from a single person’s authority (as in a totalitarian regime) nor from somebody’s personal charisma or repressive power; it is, rather, a more complex phenomenon, motivated by a type and form of culture guaranteeing recognition both beyond expert criteria or market success. The new art institutions are quite able to function without government or state recognition (to function in the space of cultural production it is not compulsory for them to back up the state politically). In the field of art neither authority nor profit are generated by governmental or state structures.

But, in fact, Russian art institutions do not seek to operate without such recognition. They are either subservient to the state or subservient to a certain donor’s taste, which makes it impossible to talk about any art system functioning independently on its own. What makes the social and cultural movement collude with authority is not just aspiration to integrate with power.

The reason for such complicity is the following: various institutions and the business sector are friendly to government, since it instigates the ‘ideology’ that holds that government is enlightening and modernising the country, its economy and culture. Government and its political image-makers claim they are subjects of progress in politics, social life, science and art. Hence, it is a convenient illusion for many institutional and creative agents of culture that government and its friendly businesses are inevitably representing avantgarde strife. As Boris Groys has often remarked, even in the years of Soviet stagnation and the renaissance of dissident movements in Soviet Russia from 1960s up to late 80s, the rival or potential ally addressed by dissident activists had always been the power structures and rarely the majority of citizens – as if the aim had been the competition for symbolic power rather than solidarity in favour of certain common aims. The Russian intelligentsia have always believed that general intellect and ideas of progress emanate from wherever power resides. A number of the most influential non-governmental organisations today – such as the cultural foundation and publishing house Territory of Future (founded by Alexander Pogorelsky in 2005), the Institute for Social Planning (founded by Valery Fadeev in 2004), the Foundation of Effective Policy (founded by Gleb Pavlovksy in 1995), all based in Moscow – are pro-state; the functional format of such organisations is ‘political technologies’, and the main area of their activity is to guarantee public support for the governmental programmes in various layers of society, mainly among intellectuals and cultural workers. Although they develop virtuoso political and social nous and projects of significant cultural and economic scale, they are also openly subservient to the office of the President’s personal assistant, Vladislav Surkov. When all intellectual and creative resources and potentialities are dragged up by the centre, representatives of creative activity (if they search for any open social dimension at all) are drawn to participate in these projects even if they do not share the centre’s political programme.

The new biennial, as a state-sponsored cultural initiative, is then simply a decorative extension of the glamorous post-Soviet ‘modernisation’ and its ‘democratic’ image. Subservience to the government implies that the programmes of the above-mentioned cultural and research organisations (including publishing houses, journals, festivals, exhibitions and even scholarly ventures) try to combine the idea of the national First and foremost, Russian contemporary art, like Russian culture, philosophy, politics and event-making of the post- Yeltsin era, is dominated by the promotion and self-promotion of producers and their personalities.sovereignty with the sovereign power of the state, which practically coincide: it is the governmental status of a venue that even from the point of view of artists makes it internationally competitive. In this case, indoctrination about the state’s importance for society and culture and its internationally recognisable achievements go hand in hand. Moreover, the notion of democracy, which is widely debated and theoretically analysed by the country’s cultural institutions, is interpreted first and foremost as ‘power’ (from the suffix ‘-cracy’) – i.e. the power of people who form a sovereign nation in the sovereign state. What follows from such logic are odd oxymorons abounding in political texts and in mass media: ‘sovereign democracy’, ‘sovereign economy’, ‘democratic Empire’ or even ‘conservative modernisation’. Such phrases combine incompatible notions – a call for innovation, modernisation, quasi-leftist militant discourse of mobilisation and reactionary values – and reduce them to national interests and forged narratives of national glory. According to Vitaly Tretyakov, for example, a political analyst and chief editor of the journal Political Class, only national ideology can ensure the international influence of Russia as the country.

In addition, according to this reading, it is national sovereignty that makes it possible to gather smaller countries and peoples ‘under Russia’s wing’ (which is already a direct redefinition of the national state as Empire in the Negri/Hardt sense). Such neoconservative rhetoric goes together with self-criticality (therefore the presence of so many former leftists consulting the government on combatant and critical texts), its main drawback being that such criticality is imposed from above (Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s text ‘Go Russia’ (2009) is one of the most incisive texts in relation to Russia’s resource economy, corruption and the oligarchy’s social indifference). ⁰⁸ The political and cultural elites are well aware that in a period of crisis they have to take up a self-critical stance to weaken and disqualify all other subjects of political agency.

But instead of proliferating further into social practice, ideas of modernisation and criticism remain central to the ideology of the elite, which claims progress as its goal and abuses populist strategies, and at the same time rebukes the ‘masses’ (that very ‘sovereign people’) for backwardness, reactionary moods and political apathy. In the end, the apology of modernisation and innovation serves the consolidation of capital and its protection under the aegis of the business elite and technocratic bureaucracy, and demonstrates the reluctance of the governing elites to share both material and theoretical potentialities in concrete situations.

Another feature of the fully-fledged statist stance is that progressiveness and modernisation are identified in the media with conservative values, while the heritage of all revolutions – including that of October 1917 – is interpreted as damaging reactionary anarchy imported into Russia from abroad (resulting in another forged oxymoron: ‘revolutionary-reactionary’). As a result, the revolutionary period that started in Russia with the social democratic struggle of the 1870s and ran up to the late 1920s, with its leaders Lenin and Trotsky, is considered to be a period of disgrace in Russian history; Stalin’s totalitarian reaction (if one omits the gulags) becomes the embodiment of the country’s mobilisation and modernisation in various spheres, with Stalin himself (according to quite a number of politicians and parliament members) viewed as the image of an effective technocrat and manager.

II
Aesthetics of ‘Conservative Modernisation’

The Third Moscow Biennale in 2009, with its principal project, ‘Against Exclusion’, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and located in the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, fitted strangely into the post-crisis cultural politics of Russia’s ‘conservative modernisation’. Apart from Martin’s show, there were no other curatorial projects within the biennial’s main program. All other exhibitions (more than forty of them) formed a background around the Garage project and were destined to demonstrate the abundance of contemporary art in Russia rather than any curatorial ideas, or at least any conceptual or thematic attitudes. The suspicion that this was yet one more international biennial again suggested contemporary art’s being reduced to cultural production for the elites.

It is interesting that if up until recently the state’s aesthetic background was either literary-centrist pseudo-realism or show-business spectacle, starting from the First Moscow Biennale the direction of the government’s aesthetics changed into a combination of quasi-modernist formalism, ethnic ornamentalism and high-tech media innovations. Ornament, being the chief aesthetic value of Martin’s ‘Against Exclusion’, almost coincided with Putin and Medvedev’s merging of the rhetoric of statist traditionalism and modernisation, which was occurring at the same time. If the first two biennials, although produced by the Ministry of Culture, at least attempted to manifest the latest tendencies in contemporary art, the third one demonstrated full complicity with neocolonial and neoliberal rhetoric, which was neatly disguised in democratic demagogy, boasting of the total inclusion of anything. The principal impact of Martin’s show was to produce an antithesis to contemporary art’s avant-garde genealogy and to thus reconstitute the grounds for art’s returning to optical, sometimes even phantasmagoric richness and unmediated visual experience devoid of verbal, conceptual or reflexive impact. The focus on the ethnographic or exotic dimension of Third World art enabled the curator to de-intellectualise contemporary art’s goals, claiming that the ancient, the modern and the postmodern and the art and the craft differ only in style and material implementation, having no historical, political and cognitive background.

Here are the aesthetic mottos enumerated by Martin in his catalogue article: to detach personal creativity from the dimension of history; to end up with the abuse of conceptual elements in art; to reclaim inherent spectacular properties of art; and to use traditionalist and archaic heritage when reconstructing contemporary narratives.⁰⁹ It is true that Martin and his artistic priorities are not very influential in contemporary art today. Nevertheless his aesthetic ideology may well correspond to the latent imperialism of the First World’s global economic domination, as well as to the narcissistic neo-colonial generosity of big companies and financial alliances. Claiming that there is no cultural inferiority, that any work or object from ‘indigenous’ cultures is just a form, similar to any other, Martin neglects the economic and social inferiorities that exist between the First and non-First Worlds. No matter how subconscious it may be, such a stance discloses the West’s cultural hegemony, by which it claims the right to decide whom can be included. In this case the ornamental relics of indigenous cultures exhibited in the biennial seem forcefully torn from their context in rituals and everyday life, and as a result the exhibition concealed life rather than revealed it. If the point was to show the tension between indigenous and modern layers of life in the Third World (in works like Cargo (2006), by Romuald Hazoumé from Benin, or Debtor’s Prison (2008), by Chéri Cherin from the Democratic Republic of Congo), in the majority of quasi-tribal works from developing countries (such as tribe ornaments by Agatoack Ronny Kowspi from New Guinea, bark paintings by Djambawas Marawili from South Africa or zigzag paintings by Doreen Reid Nakamara from Central Australia) the artists take perhaps unfair advantage of the formal and spectacular relics of their indigenous traditions. They bring forward something that has long ago lost its original sacred function and is being reproduced as a regional cliché. When such objects lose their ritual and spiritual significance, they are no longer cult objects, but they are not necessarily able to become artistic phenomena, and instead remain exotic trompe l’oeil objects.

Martin’s Moscow exhibition is further confirmation of the fact that although the West has rejected its ideological and ‘spiritual’ colonial tools, its colonial aspirations are not overcome. Emancipatory idealism and its cognitive procedures – something that the West has turned down, and something that in its distorted form used to be often interpreted as colonisation – are now globally reduced to technocratic and economic optimisation that nevertheless carries out the project of Western hegemony effectively. The result is the domestication of art, dissecting it into diverse identities and particularities as against the values of the general and the common.

But if contemporary art is ashamed of modernity and its revolution-based history, why continue to export this ruined model as the one that could integrate relics from the Third World? Why should the Third World correspond to that rhetoric of art that apologises for its revolutionary history, while preserving its symbolic and economic priorities?

It is only natural that Vladislav Surkov, the First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Executive Office, would write in the biennial’s catalogue:

Today we can justly say that the Biennale has completed the process of creating a fully fledged infrastructure for Russian artistic culture as an integral component of the world’s international scene. “e “ird Moscow Biennale will differ from the other forums in that […] it will bring within the orbit of contemporary art those artists whose work could otherwise have been ignored because they tried to maintain fidelity to their traditions.’ ¹⁰

Such a stance perfectly corresponds to the Russian double-bind of ‘conservative modernisation’, demonstrating once more how modernist and avant-garde aspirations for art are reinterpreted within the Russian contemporary art scene as traditionalist rigidity and thus abused to serve an unusual goal (that is, to become the sacral decoration of fake sublimities) of a belief in the classical value of a masterpiece or the adoration and worship of a work of art.

This anomalous twist would fail if it were not supported by a number of conspicuous curators and artists. Let’s take the show ‘Second Dialogue’, in the section of the Third Biennale at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery and curated by Konstantine Bokhorov, Osmolovsky and Joulia /khonova (whose aesthetics resemble Martin’s). In the exhibition the curators and artists called for a return to the classical notion of a ‘work of art’ as necessarily embracing the interplay and formal methods deeply rooted in a national or ethnic formal heritage. In this case modernism is valued only for its formalist and visual aspects; the curators claim this position as neoconservative. In such a way modernism’s formalism, with its striving towards abstraction and precision, is deprived of its revolutionary genealogy, and is reinterpreted instead as decorative minimalism. Moreover, the preponderance of ornamental values within contemporary visual art mixes a formal understanding of the cult objects or ethnic artistry with the avant-garde’s and modernism’s formalist achievements – which cannot be reduced to form, but rather whose form demonstrates the extreme transcendence of artistic ideas.

The search within the exhibition ‘The Russian Povera’ – which was part of the Third Biennale (at the Red October factory), curated by gallerist Marat Guelman – for authentic Russianness in Russian art is another confirmation of the tendency towards viewing art as proof of locality rather than as artworks belonging to a transnational lineage. Even the work by the younger generation shown in ‘Really?’, curated by Alexander Sokolov at the ARTPLAY Design Center, and ‘Labor Movement’, curated by Arseni Jilyaev and Sergey Khachaturov at PROEKT FABRIKA, similarly rejected contemporary art’s conceptual and cognitive genealogy (no matter how nonsensical or paradoxical it might have been) and adhered instead to the purely visual merits of an art object – that is, form’s perception and its unmediated material presence. From the point of view of the participants of both shows (Alexandra Sukhareva, Stas Shuripa, Sergei Ogurtsov, Osmolovsky and Arseni Zhilyaev), such nominalism could achieve ‘the real’ in a Lacanian sense, understood as ‘the pure being of a de-contextualised aesthetic object’.¹¹

The representatives of a younger generation in contemporary Russian art, cherishing such hunger for visual formalism, would hardly agree that their adherence to the relics of the Russian avant-garde’s geometry or US Minimalism’s systematics has nothing to do with an avant-garde gesture today. Except for certain exceptions (Olga Chernysheva, the Factory of Found Clothes, Chto delat? and probably the new wave of realism in film-making), Russian contemporary art today keeps away from the vulnerable and problematic zones of post-Soviet reality. Much like the governmental elite and the new bourgeoisie, Russian contemporary art practices claim art’s public openness while indulging in the withdrawal of culture from the social. The brands of ‘avant-garde’, ‘utopia’ or ‘life engineering’ are equally fashionable and dominant among young curators and artists as among political bureaucracy and private supporters, but these concepts fall into the trap of associating ‘formalism’ and ‘avant-garde’ with the new elite’s refined spaces and its ‘sophisticated’ taste, aimed against the postmodernist gaudiness of populist show-business and mass-media. Much like the work of William Kentridge chosen by Martin for the biennial (I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, 2008), in which the Russian avant-garde and Revolution appear as casual ethnic particularities – something like a style à la Russe – the notions of ‘utopia’ and ‘avant-garde’ gradually acquire on the art scene the ‘made in Russia’ flavour. Recent exceptions from this tendency were two research projects in the form of exhibitions by Ekaterina Degot: ‘Battle for the Banner’ (2008) and ‘The Kudimkor – Future Locomotive’ (2009). But the double show that opened last March at the Garage – ‘Futurology’, curated by Herve Mikaeloff, and ‘Russian Utopias’, curated by Julia Aksenova – only confirmed the above-mentioned tendency: in search for recognition on the global art scene, quite a number of Russian artists and curators mechanically reproduce the avant-garde and turn it into the national brand. On the contrary, it enforces the rigidity and flatness of the Russian art field and the indifference of its abstract audiences. The situation can only change if the production of ideas, spaces and territories were politically, ethically and aesthetically re-appropriated by artistic practitioners and creative thinkers.