Art of Transition

The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia

Elise Herrala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429657160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought a massive change in every domain of life, particularly in the cultural sector, where artists were suddenly "free" from party-mandated modes of representation and now could promote and sell their work globally. But in Russia, the encounter with Western art markets was fraught. The Russian field of art still remains on the periphery of the international art world, struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of foreign experts and collectors. This book examines the challenges Russian art world actors faced in building a field of art in a society undergoing rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation and traces those challenges into the twenty-first century. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, Art of Transition traces the ways the field of art has developed, evolved, and been sustained in Russia after socialism. It shows how Russia's art world has grappled with its Soviet past and negotiated its standing in an unequal, globalized present. By attending to the historical legacy of Russian art throughout the twentieth century, this book constructs a genealogy of the contemporary field of postsocialist art that illuminates how Russians have come to understand themselves and their place in the world.

1
FROM LAST TO FIRSTTwo Generations of Postsocialist Russian Artists

DOI: 10.4324/9780429023767-2

My generation, we had a good experience. Until 30, we lived in a society where money meant nothing. There was freedom in that. And then in one second, everything changed.

— Dmitry Gutov, Artist of the Last Soviet Generation

In September 2014, I attended the opening of Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky’s exhibition Moscow: Vanishing Reality, ¹ an ambitious and thoughtful meditation on the city by two of its best-known contemporary artists. Located in the Museum of Moscow’s cavernous Proviantsky Warehouse, both the scale of the show and its paintings matched the size of the space: there were 83 in total, some as large as 195 × 435 cm. In spite of the high vaulted ceilings and concrete floors, the personal nature of their work, aided by soft light, made the space feel surprisingly intimate. The artists’ cinéma-vérité depictions of Moscow—past and present, iconic and banal—revealed their personal visions of the city, creating a timeline of meaningful markers and memories. Their representations of the city charted its changing landscape, offering the viewer (particularly those of their generation) a familiar and relatable collection of shared memories. One could not help but be seduced by the exhibition’s intimacy.

I was particularly excited to be there: several years earlier, seeing a painting by Vinogradov and Dubossarsky had sparked my interest in Russian contemporary art. Born in the early 1960s, they are, according to curator and critic Viktor Misiano (2009), “the artists of a generation.” At the opening’s after-party, I ran into Sasha, 27, a photographer and video artist. Tightly clutching books and old exhibition catalogues of Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, he clearly shared my enthusiasm for the duo. He proudly showed me their autographs and discussed at length how they—and others of their generation—were trailblazers in post-Soviet Russian contemporary art. The artists of Vinogradov and Dubossarsky’s generation were in the unique position of producing art under both socialism and postsocialism: they had received a classical Soviet art education, yet had built their careers as professional artists in the chaos of the postsocialist 1990s. By the 2000s, their reputations and careers had solidified in the new climate of relative economic and political stability.

By contrast, Sasha’s generation was born at the end of the Soviet period. This generation’s experiences of socialism are a palimpsest, living in the once-removed forms of others’ memories and the muted vestiges of Soviet societal and bureaucratic organization. Sasha and his cohort were free to explore contemporary Western art and access artistic training outside of the traditional figurative style that characterized Soviet art education. Further, their formative years had not been defined by transition; they did not have to create an artistic identity during the disorientation of perestroika, when the competing ideologies of capitalism and socialism experienced uncomfortable contemporaneity. Nor did they have to establish their careers during the confusion, uncertainty, and economic precariousness of the 1990s, when there was an almost complete lack of institutional or market structure for the arts. As children or young teenagers, this generation knew chaos and instability, but crisis did not define it.

While Vinogradov and Dubossarsky’s depiction of Moscow resonated with the childhood of Sasha’s generation in certain ways, its evocative representations of the city reveal important differences between the generations. Whereas Vinogradov and Dubossarsky focused on memory and transition, emphasizing the replacement of socialist forms with postsocialist ones, the artists of Sasha’s generation were more interested in exploring the present on its own terms. Earlier that day, I had interviewed Sasha and another artist, Danil, about their current project, a film in which they were attempting to capture the condition and atmosphere of present-day Moscow. They were adamant about not portraying the city through what they considered Russian clichés, such as the bleak remains of Soviet architecture or the orgy of opulence accompanying post-Soviet oligarchic wealth. For them, art was not about reconciling with the socialist past or even reckoning with the “new” capitalist present. It was about dealing with reality as they experienced it.

What does it mean to be an artist in postsocialist Russia? This chapter examines the ways in which postsocialist Russian artists came to understand the categories of art and artist. For social scientists, what makes someone an “artist” is not determined solely by the act of making art. ² Rather, they look at a set of social relations and institutions that produce the conditions that make art possible. Cultural production is situated within a web of actors and institutions that provide definitions for what is art and police the boundaries of those definitions through consecration, credentialing, and classification. This chapter centers on the artists but aims to tell the story of how the broader field of art allowed them to develop. It shows the importance of all the actors and institutions that contribute to creating the condition for art and artists.

The world in which the Russian field of art under postsocialism developed changed rapidly in a manner of a few decades. The institutional landscape and the web of social relations necessary for forging the categories of art and artist were dismantled and then reconstructed anew. Art education was freed from the control of the state. Similarly, government support for working artists largely disappeared, leaving artists to figure out new ways to support themselves. The end of the Soviet Union coincided with the beginning of the information age, allowing for unforeseen access to technology and communication and connections to the outside world, including the international art world from which they had been excluded for decades. So although the younger generation of artists such as Danil and Sasha were operating within the same field of artistic production as the older generation of artists such as Dubossarsky and Vinogradov, the rapidly changing nature of Russian society and the world in general since 1991 has meant that they have had divergent experiences of becoming and being artists.

To accommodate the diversity of generational experience within the broader category of postsocialist, I use the concept of generation to show how the field of art in Russia has evolved. The rapid rate of change from the 1980s to the 2010s in Russia has, in part, stressed the generational boundaries in more dramatic ways than it may have otherwise. This is consistent with Karl Mannheim’s (1959) original theory of generations, which argues that generations are a socially constructed category informed by historical circumstance, in which generational consciousness tends to increase during periods of social upheaval or instability. Generations are formed by the shared “modes of behavior, feeling, and thought” that have been largely shaped by political and social experiences in their formative years, which is often during youth. ³ The circumstances of one’s youth has a profound impact on the ways in which life is filtered and experienced thereafter, creating, as Lisa Rofel (1999) suggests, “telling fault lines through which meaning is transformed” (22). Within this understanding, generation as an analytic category has the potential to illuminate changes within a culture. ⁴

While there is certainly an overlap between these two generations, distinct characteristics of both become visible. ⁵ Thus, I separate “postsocialist artists” into two generations: (1) the Last Soviet Generation, born between 1951 and 1970, and (2) the First Postsocialist Generation, born between 1971 and 1990. The artists with whom I spoke were 25–75 years old and had a range of “success” in the Russian art world, from some of the most recognizable to those who have only been in a show or two in small galleries. But regardless of their level of success, all of the artists had achieved some measure of recognition and thus consecration by the larger field of art; in other words, they had been accepted by others in the field as “artists.” ⁶ Although I am comparing these two groups on the basis of shared generation, I am by no means suggesting an internal or ideological homogeneity within each generation, whether in terms of belief or style. On the contrary, I contend that the significant continuities that do exist within each generation reveal the very evolution of the field of contemporary Russian art. Perhaps the most traditional or obvious way to compare the two generations would be on the basis of the type or subject of art each creates. While form is indeed important, ⁷ and something which I also examine, it is not my central focus for establishing the trajectories of these artists. Further, the actual product itself—art—is what results from my object of analysis, which is the field of art as a whole. Because my research is centered on how a field of art emerges, develops, and persists in a specific historical and global context, I instead focus on the experiences that make up both the emergence and evolution, and how that can impact art. I contend that this is captured by the coexistence of two generations of artists: one that straddles the transition and one that was born either during or after it. In this way, I move beyond an analysis based on different aesthetics, and instead toward a systematic examination of differences and similarities within the field of production itself.

As Bourdieu argues, understanding artists and their art necessarily “entails understanding that they are the result of the meeting of two histories: the history of the positions they occupy and the history of their dispositions” (1993:61). To do this, I use three categories to examine the artists of both generations: (1) their relationship to Russia’s socialist past and its transition to capitalism; (2) the process by which they developed their identities as artists, including education and career development; and (3) their orientation to the international field of art. Categorizing as such produces a more nuanced account of how art is understood and produced in a culturally specific way as the result of historical factors—both at the time of the field’s emergence and throughout its evolution. In particular, focusing on generation helps to reveal how the various parts of a field of art, such as institutions, the art community, and the broader international art world, not to mention the economic organization of society (in this case, socialism and capitalism) have worked in tandem to produce and reproduce this category. By paying attention to these differences we can better understand the ways in which “artists” have been forged in the postsocialist space.

The Last Soviet Generation (Artists Born 1951–1970)

The artists born roughly between 1951 and 1970 occupy a liminal space in Russian art history. They came of age during the Soviet period and received classical Soviet art training, which focused on the figurative style of Socialist Realism and was dismissive of Western art. Although they began their careers in the chaos of the 1990s, they achieved success during the relative economic and political stability of the 2000s. What did it mean for these artists to come of age during the Soviet period, only to have their adulthood split between socialism and capitalism? And because of their unique position of producing art under both socialism and postsocialism, do we consider them the last generation of Soviet artists or the first generation of postsocialist artists? Following Alexei Yurchak (2006; see also Boym 1994), I refer to this cohort as the Last Soviet Generation. Unlike the generations before and after them, Yurchak argues, this generation had no defining historical event to bind it together as a cohort. The October Revolution, World War II, and Stalinism marked the older Soviet generations, while the succeeding generation was shaped during the collapse of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the Last Soviet Generation came of age facing the “normalized, ubiquitous, and immutable authoritative discourse of the Brezhnev years” (32). As Svetlana Boym (1994) remarks, they were the “children of stagnation.”

The artists of the Last Soviet Generation used art to both critique and make intelligible the societal, political, and economic changes happening around them. But it was not just the subject matter of their work that reflected the transition; style and form did so as well. The Last Soviet Generation was caught in a temporal triad: looking ahead to a more promising postsocialist future, reckoning with the uncertainty of the present in the 1990s, and retaining the training, memories, and nostalgia of the socialist past. In this section I explore the ways in which that triangle affected the development of the Last Soviet Generation. I first examine how, under postsocialism, its artists differentiated ...