The Underground Gallery Crawl

Cute couple, huh? Shame that they broke up. (Komar got the Web site out of the deal.)

I cringed when I read in the Boston Globe about "Territories of Terror: Mythologies and Memories of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art". Yes, title's a mouthful, and the show's a dreary prospect, but that's not my issue. It brought back in a rush all those college debates about the Russian memory, and how, long ago, I used to have opinions on the signs of nascent capitalism in pre-revolutionary representational paintings of Russian peasant communes. Any mental capacity I once had for the topic has long been rented out for Friday Night Lights plotlines and the biographies of various X-Men. But Cate McQuaid's article sparked to life some of the upstairs tenants who've been presumed dead all this time.

In her writeup, which is otherwise helpful, McQuaid makes a tiny error that got me thinking. She writes:

Part of [curator Svetlana] Boym's agenda is the reimagining of space as a response to imprisonment. Komar and Melamid pioneered unorthodox exhibition venues in the 1970s; their "Paradise/Pantheon" was a daring installation in a small apartment, featuring images of deities and prophets presented as a dream conjured from a prison cell.

Now, these days Moscow isn't so different from any other Western European art capital, with white cubes like XL, Shcola, and 1.0 showing the chintzy painting and clunky installations you'll find everywhere. But it was different behind the red veil, right up until shortly before glasnost: Official art spaces showed official, Soviet Realist art, whereas unofficial and dissident artwork proliferated on the underground Apt-Art scene. Apt Art—a response to the Gulag but also something of an ideological movement—started in the 60s, before Komar and Melamid came along with ironic, nosethumbing Sots Art. (Back when I knew things, I could rattle off the names of those curators, radicals, and nogoodnik artists from the Underground Gallery Crawl.)

The Moscow Biennale celebrated that dissident heritage, sort of, by showing works in apartments or spaces meant to evoke the Apt-Art scene; listed as a venue, for example, is the residence of one V. Buivit. It strikes me as gross&mdahs;it misses the point of the original moment—for an institution to pimp Russian art history this way. Better a biennial than a fair, though.

Chalk it up to a failure of the imagination, but the Apt Art angle has proven to be an obvious theme for curators. Russian art developed in the dark: Russian art today doesn't totally correspond with its Western counterparts, and unofficial Soviet art never did at all. So you see more crutches, more hand-holds, in shows of Russian art that curators bring here.

But I think something gets lost or transforms in context over here. Apt Art was not guerrilla—not a happening—not an architectural gesture. It was never an investigation of space—it was fugitive. So I'm piqued by the Boston show about the Gulag and memory: suspicious, for sure, because the Gulag occupies already such a problematic place in the Russian historical memory; irritated that the show seems to slap Western artspeak on Russian art about the Soviet horror; and perhaps even dubious that the show is coherent, even on its own terms. Entirely independent of the question of whether Russian needs one, Russia has no Anselm Keifer.

However, Russian art does have Komar and Melamid. (The show does not.)

Komar and Melamid, What Is To Be Done? 1970s?

Every once in a while, you see, this cranky old Sovietologist delights in the opportunity to muse about Sokov and Bruskin and of course Nakhova, while everyone else is talking about the new hot Iranian art.

Posted by Kriston at January 10, 2007 2:02 PM