Art After Dark 10 x 10 Summer Project: Russian Vibe.
Watson, Joseph Benjamin
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Art After Dark 10 x 10 Summer
Project: Russian Vibe
Louise T Blouin Institute, London
4 September 2008
If it is cruel to review an exhibition that few readers of ACE will
have seen, it was crueller still of the organisers of 'Russian Vibe
to stage such an important porthole onto contemporary Russian art for
one evening only. The penultimate evening of ten Thursdays staged as the
summer project of the Blouin Institute in London, it was a decadent yet
generous way of giving ten curators carte blanche in this immense
gallery space, without the risk of hosting a failure for any length of
time--the converse being that a gem such as 'Russian Vibe'
could pass without the attention it richly deserved.
Curated with a multi-layered narrative in mind, the viewer was
engulfed upon entry to the exhibition by a dark and watery underworld
occupying the entire ground floor of the Institute. Alexander
Ponomarev's Narcissus is a large-scale installation comprising four
moving images, recorded by the artist as he was strapped crucifix-like
to the bows of four different research vessels in polar oceans.
Surrounded by their own expanses of water, it is these four videos--each
at a compass point of the ships cutting through water and ice, projected
and reflected, which recall the myth of a man so beautiful he
continually searched for his own image in the water. Powerful and
allimmersing, this work is characteristic of an artist most famous for
causing the island of Maya to disappear in a literal cloud of smoke.
Remaining always tantalizingly out of shot and playfully challenging the
perception of boundary by bringing the outside in through a real water
surface reflecting a filmed water surface (itself a reflection of the
boat bow), Ponomarev has totally dispensed with frontiers, lending a
powerful sense of uncertainty and possibility to the installation.
The exhibition moves from the mythical to the religious and from
darkness to Light by Elizaveta Berezovskaya, Yuri Kalendarev's
Sound Sculptures and Hermes Zygott's Reanimated Icons. Most
provocative among these, Zygott's works are a series of mounted
light boxes with painted glass 'icons' featuring decaying
images of the saints. These works play with space in a very different
way to Narcissus, re-articulating the traditional interior, sacred space of the icon, both by making it an actual physical dimension of tangible
light and, more importantly, through having the light projecting out of
the 'icon into the gallery space. If traditional icons are
dependent (as the artist suggests) on the sacred context within which
they are placed, these reanimated icons, with their resonances of the
Orthodox Church, appear to make even the most sterile white cube sacred
by flooding it with their presence.
Reaching the summit (metaphorically and literally--the top floor)
the exhibition turns overtly political with Sergei Bugaev Afrika and
Sergei Anufrievs' images of their infamous 1990
'happening' that saw them spontaneously and violently remove
the door between the legs of a monumental statue of a female farm
worker, a totem of the Soviet regime. In the artists' own words,
'the door into the kolkhoznitsa was like the hymen of Mother Earth.
Tearing it from its hinges was like marking the end of the sacredness of
the USSR, and the opening of the sacred in the wider world.'
Apprehending in multiple ways the complex relationships of politics and
religion, the work considers a very different type of icon, through
recognising that every society has 'sacred symbols that influence
mass consciousness, whether they be Lenin or Mickey Mouse.'
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If a particular type of discourse has understood Soviet-era
politics to be quasi-religious, it should not be a surprise that recent
theorists have also reconsidered religion in the light of politics.
Slavoj Zizek's elucidation of parallels between the relationships
of Christ and Paul, Marx and Lenin suggests uncomfortable conclusions
about the shared nature of religious and political ideologies. And, as
we confront the prospect of a second Cold War, the missing link in the
exhibitions reflection on religion and politics is the Russian artist,
Andrei Molodkin, who would have confronted these issues even more
explicitly. In a recent body of work entitled Cold War II that
articulates in a moment what cultural theorists would spend pages
unpacking, Molodkin pumps Iraqi crude oil from an ugly barrel into a
hollow glass image of Christ on the Cross. His point is not to
deconstruct religion, but rather to highlight the way in which religion
has been hijacked for political and economic evil. Put indelicately by
the artist: 'Were witnessing the start of a new crusade in which
the image of Christ is used to fuck the Muslims, grab the oil,
etc.'
The spiritual in art may mean something very different to these
artists than it did to Kandinsky, but I am inclined to agree with
curator Victoria Ioninas assessment that there is a parallel between
that revolutionary artistic moment and this one. Furthermore, in her
narrative approach to curating and the unabashed carving out of a sacred
space for art, Ionina has prised open the possibility of reanimating our
engagement with the sacred spaces of art. After all sacred space--in
whatever form--is not supposed to constitute a temple of the known, but
of the unknown.
Joseph Benjamin Watson works for the Victoria & Albert Museum
and is a member of the Arts Policy & Planning Committee of St
Paul's Cathedral
