Marat Guelman,
curator
Normally, an exhibition is preceded by a conceptual text to which the artists respond in some way. Then, the theme gets filled out with meanings, works, an artistic language, and as a result, a show comes together. For the exhibition "Russian Povera," not a single work was made specifically to accommodate the concept. Our project has brought together that which has already come about, and the few pieces that were commissioned for the exhibition are part of the overall flow of their makers' work. Due to this, "Russian Povera" is a general overview of Russian art and not a thematic exhibition; that which has already happened acquires its name in this project.
Of course, in naming the show "Russian Povera," I fully realize the consonance with the Italian Arte Povera, but even given the many similar formal elements, I also find the difference obvious - as obvious as the difference between starving out of poverty and refusing to eat for the benefit of one's health and figure.
The artists taking part in "Russian Povera" have never thought of themselves as a single group with a common aesthetic - unlike Arte Povera, which was a movement with a unified aesthetic manifesto. Therefore, "Russian Povera" is a unique exhibition insofar as it presents art to art and gives the artists a reason to consider that which they have in common. The exhibition presents this not as a reason for disappointment, but as something which shows itself despite our will and with which we can enter the history of world art.
An inner turn to art made out of simple materials is just as archetypal as the myth of the poor artist who makes art out of nothing. It's magic.
"Poor" art has an important subtext - its naturalness. It is much closer to nature than art that is rich, glossy, and built on technologies. The very material of "poor" art returns us to naturalness, breaks down the border between natural and artificial. This art grows out of nature itself.
For twenty years, I have been approaching some understanding of art, and each show is an aspiration to convey my current understanding, some broader picture. Each time, it is a fragment of the whole, but one that says something important about what is going on in art in general.
Today, art and artists are busy separating themselves from the spheres that they themselves brought into being.
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For example, there exists a threat to art from the direction of design. At international fairs, two thirds of the works are excellent designer objects. But design, unlike art, is a mass profession, which has its own technologies, a lot activity, and aggression. Therefore, an artist should block himself off from that.
At some point, art went down the path of communicational openness, of performance, and on its own created certain forms of interactive art as a particular type of entertainment. Now, entertainment also endangers art and threatens to invade its territory.
And most importantly, there is that which is called by the generic term "glamour." Aesthetics has become a science; it has spawned easily reproducible standards of beauty and glossy journalism. Mona Lisa looks at us from all the glossy magazines. And from this too art tries to separate itself.
By various means, art builds its own space.
"Poor" art, in my opinion, is what real art is. Wealth has migrated to other spheres; it has been co-opted, consumed, has turned into advertising, design, magazine beauty, what you will, having lost the ability to be art. Artists working with the aesthetic of the "poor," I am certain, think exactly this way.
This exhibition has a strong impulse for sharing its vision in social aspects. Better than anyone else, I understand how distorted the perception of contemporary Russian art is. There exists a clear concept of political art, and it is easily accepted by the West: if a country is unfree, then art should be socially aware and express protest. Because of this one-sided view, the most significant of names - Koshlyakov, Brodsky, Polissky - have fallen out of contemporaneity. They exist, but there is no discussion, no acuity of interest around them.
"Russian Povera" provides a different vision of contemporary art. It's a look from the position of a "poor" aesthetic at Russian art as a whole, and precisely because of this, aside from artists key for this theme, the exhibition contains works by a wide array of others.
This is a different look - an attempt at correcting the optics of examining Russian art. "Povera" turned out to be a very precise key to the understanding of our art as a whole. Today, success comes to clear images and clear artistic projects, and our exhibition helps to make looking at Russian art clearer.
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Vladimir Arkhipov collects home-made everyday things and perceives folk material culture as an inspirational living process. He has turned the collecting of DIYs into an interdisciplinary research activity; he has made his collection archive an Internet resource. He shows us a thing with a biography, adds to it video, audio, and an urgent need of a person for his object.
He explores a heretofore unseen area of marginal social practice as a wild forest, uprooting it for the new plow-land of art; he expands the horizon of the artistic.
Arkhipov transfers the home-made thing from underneath the crumbling margins of modernity into the spotlight of aesthetic relevance.
Alexander Brodsky creates impressive metaphors of contemporary reality which always have the air of the eternal and of otherworldly melancholy. His Pet Corner - a model of the unique life of human animals in urban cages - represented Russia at the architectural biennale in Venice. His Coma (in which oil slowly fills up a city) was said by Boris Orlov, a living Sots-Art master, to be the best work of the 1990s. Back then, it seemed to be a harbinger of doom; today, one remembers it as a prophecy coming true. Brodsky's visual language affirms the sublime, growing out of the ashes.
Many of his works are realized in destruction, and in touching the order of loss, they manage to convey to us unchanging truth about ourselves.
An artist of international stature, Dmitry Gutov creates out of completely heterogeneous sources - the conceptual tradition, the search for a painterly language, intellectual studies, graphic design, Eastern calligraphy - an inimitable aesthetic alloy, an organic authorial amalgamation. His objects evoke the feeling of the live process of the birth of art. Gutov has fundamentally reinvented the subject of inquiry of Moscow Conceptualists - Soviet culture. Out of its ruins, he has extracted the legacy of the philosopher of art Mikhail Lifshitz and connected it to the future.
Valery Koshlyakov thinks not in categories of time, but in categories of cultural spaces, where emptiness is more important than presence since it preserves within itself the spirit of the time, zeitgeist, which the artist then relays to the viewer. On giant pieces of corrugated cardboard, Koshlyakov creates monumental images of past grandeur, which amaze with their compositional rigor and the nobility of the fated fading. Like all monumentalists, he is totalitarian. The subjects of his paintings are Pompeian frescoes, Constructivist Moscow, Greek, Roman, and Stalinist architecture...
With the name of Anatoly Osmolovsky, last year's "artist of the year," one can connect all of the most notable milestones of Russian art of the last two decades. His works are kept in many of the world's important museums; his exhibitions are held worldwide. Osmolovsky is a figure of determined incarnation of his own aesthetic strategy. His radicalism has evolved from the social and political gesture of the 1990s to the purity of the avant-garde form and autonomy of art. Today, his objects affirm formal expression as a relevant statement.
More than ten years ago, Nikolay Polissky as then a Moscow member of the artist group Mit'ki held his last exhibition at the Central House of Artists, afterwards trading in his tools of an ardent painter for what French theorists call "relational aesthetics." He built a house in the village of Nikola-Lenivets two hundred kilometers away from Moscow and now, along with the residents of the village, makes snowmen, builds palaces out of firewood, pyramids out of hay, and towers out of vines. Thanks to "relational aesthetics," the inhabitants of a forsaken village found something to do, started making money.
Sergey Shekhovtsov, after studying at the Surikov Fine Art Academy and the Institute for Problems in Contemporary Art, has changed from a painter into a radical sculptor, who has chosen to work with Styrofoam, the material of postproduction and packaging, trash, and refuse that is ready to take on any form. Shekhovtsov has reformulated sculpture and deprived it of its birthright pathos. He shows the world as a synthetic illusion, as a total readiness for mutation.
The artists Alexander and Olga Florensky - headliners of numerous exhibitions, key members of the group Mit'ki - live in St. Petersburg and work at their country-house. Their works are kept in dozens of museums around the world. For over twenty years, they have been making impossible objects and other equally wonderful things. Their objects are incredibly organic coalescences of found objects of various kinds - sometimes ones that have lived at home for a long time, sometimes ones found on the trash heap, sometimes bought at an expensive antiques stores.
One of the deepest and subtlest of the St. Petersburg artists, Peter Bely concertedly explores the archaeology of cultural consciousness. For many years, he has been developing a project of "memorial modeling," in which he affirms culture as a current event outside of contemporaneity and contemporaneity as a future cultural layer for which trash is important.
The artist builds into our everyday reality a dimension of great responsibility - something akin to a fatedness to history.
For those who encounter Perm for the first time, this mysterious city-state astounds with its history. A city-cum-factory, the center, both physical and mythical, of the "metallurgy civilization" for the entire length of its existence, it has given birth to many an advance, miracle, and accomplishment. They start with the Paleozoic Permian period, the bronze casts of the Permian Animal Style, Sassanid silver, wooden sculpture, and the Stroganov school of icon painting and go up to the building of the first ships at the Vsevolzhsky factories, the invention of electrical welding by N.G. Slavyanov, the cannons and legendary engine D30F6 for MIG31 airplanes, and the Proton carrier rocket's matchless RD275 engine, which still has no equals in the world.
Artists brought together in this exhibition are quite diverse, and their artistic programs, for the most part, do not coincide. And yet there is something that unifies them - namely, their shared propensity towards do it yourself, artisanal mode of production of art objects.
