Putin on the Ritz

Seeing as how fascination with Russia seems to be on the rise in the wake of the latest election and Putin's other maneuvers to maintain power, I thought I'd recommend Andrew Jack's Inside Putin's Russia as a primer on the man and his ways. I'm eager to read also Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia, though that was published in 2004, a year before Jack's book, so for something more current you might want to look elsewhere.

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.

In Soviet Russia, Biennial Curates You

In Inside Putin's Russia, Andrew Jack describes a meeting with a Russian official:

As I prepared to leave Moscow at the end of 2004, I went to the ministry of foreign affairs to receive my annual press accreditation card.

"Andrew, why do you keep writing about Yukos? Why not something more positive?" said my kurator, a young shaven-headed man who had recently replaced his end-of-career predecessor as ‘handler’ of the English-speaking media. "That way when I show my boss your articles next year, he will be able to say you are a serious correspondent and offer no objection to renewing your card."

So kurators mind the media—that certainly fits the story behind the Whitney Museum's NYT ads.

More on the Whitney Biennial very soon—stay tuned.

From Russia With Extreme Prejudice

I knew the news was bad before I'd even heard the news. It started with a pair of voice messages from Susan, which were unexpected, since she knew that I'd be far from the phone in honor of next-to-last football Sunday. I'm not an invested fan but I'm observant, and that means beer and chips & salsa and lots of guys delivering the People's Elbow at one another. She wouldn't want to interrupt that, but in an irritable voice her second message asked whether I was, like, still watching football, god, which was also the gist of the first message she left minutes earlier.

So I dial her up. She doesn't waste a breath: "What's the news from Georgia?" That salutation usually runs vice versa, so I'm assuming that I exited the maelstrom of masculinity playing out in the living room with a concussion. When I obediently load up the news, I realize that there were three disasters on Sunday:

1. The AFC championship
   
2. The NFC championship
   
3. A series of explosions in southern Russia, which severed primary gas and electrical lines to the republics of Georgia and Armenia

I read her the details from the wires, and she stammers out the scene from the ground in Georgia, where an acute energy crisis is at hand. The scene from the ground: a lot of Susan screaming "Russian perfidy!"

As it turns out, that's what Georgian President Saakashvili is saying, too. No Russian terrorist group has any real beef with Georgia; it's not obvious why a Georgian proto-separatist group would want to cut off Russian gas, which both heats Georgia and also furnishes electricty. (Or at least such a group wouldn't cut off the power and not claim it.) Saakashvili went so far as to call the explosions Russian policy—a muscular form of oilpolitik.

The Kremlin's been throwing its weight around lately—pressuring Georgia to sell its oil pipeline network; cutting gas exports to nations like Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine and demanding fourfold price increases to restore the juice. The sudden cutoff is poorly (or sharply) timed: Georgia is looking at a cold snap of its own, and since it depends almost wholly on Russia for its energy, it will be days before Georgia can establish a link to another country (Azerbaijan or Iran).

The Russians have called Saakashvili's remarks "hysteria and bacchanalia." While his comments were hyperbolic and even arch, the circumstantial evidence against Russia is telling. But nevermind all that—it's obviously Azerbaijan carving out its own market.

Anyway, that's my short synopsis. What it means for Susan, bizarrely, is that she got to take a blistering hot shower—she came home to find her notably unreliable furnace blazing. Hope that situation holds. And if she finds electricity tomorrow, she may be able to upload some pictures she's shot with her new camera, which just recently arrived. (Hooray!) In a different vein, nothing can redeem today's sorry excuses for football contests.

Absolut Zero

The Russian cold snap. The temperature in Moscow as of this writing (it's night there) is a frigid -10º F, but apparently it feels like an apocalyptically bitter -30º F. Unbelievably, it's predicted to get colder before the February thaw. And yet Epiphany frost is such a pleasant phrase.