Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We all went off to a place of bucolic vista, about two hours outside Moscow. Only one person—there were about forty of us—knew where we were going, and even he didn’t know what we would find when we got there. We were on our way to an Action, by the Collective Action Group (K/D), and this mystery was part of it all. When we left the train we found ourselves at the edge of a thin strip of woods, and we walked single file, talking in low voices, sometimes laughing, waiting to see what would happen. After the first bit of woods we arrived at sweeping fields of corn, with odd, tumbledown houses beyond them; then came a wood of birches, then a lake surrounded by reeds newly gone to seed, then a pine woods with stolid trunks rising from a smooth floor. Imagine this: all the Moscow vanguard, the many faces of genius and the eager eyes of their acolytes, walking through a forest as still as the first day of creation.

We came into a field with a river running through it. On the river, fishermen in rubber boats were casting their lines and watching—with some puzzlement but not much interest—the procession of artists. At last we came to a rise, where we stopped, stood in a row, and watched the river. Soon we saw an artist, Georgi Kisevalter, standing by the water. He jumped in, swam across, and disappeared on the other side. We kept our eyes on the spot where he had disappeared. He returned to the water’s edge carrying a huge, flat package, leaped in, and swam back. He went to a hill opposite our knoll, where he was joined by the leader of K/D, Andrei Monastyrsky, and another artist. They removed the brightly colored outer wrapping from the package to reveal a large black-and-white painting. They carefully took out the nails that held the canvas to the stretcher and laid the canvas on the ground. They disassembled the stretcher, which was of complicated design, until they had reduced it to its component strips of wood. They wrapped the wood in the black-and-white canvas and wrapped that in the outer covering. Then Monastyrsky distributed photocopies of the painting to the onlookers.

All the while, on a hill behind us, a bell was ringing in a blue box and no one heard it.

That was the Action. Two hours to get there, two hours back (not to mention the time to go to and from the station), and ten minutes of what I took to be ponderously self-important performance art. We had a picnic by the river afterward, which should have been jolly, but I was annoyed. I was glad to have seen the woods, and the bread and cheese were dandy, but the rest seemed pure idiocy. Sergey Anufriev, one of the leaders of the Medical Hermeneutics movement, took me aside and explained it in detail, articulating elaborate references to previous performance pieces, art’s connections to nature, old and outmoded Soviet aesthetic concerns, and episodes in individual people’s lives. When he finished, I had a moment of thinking I understood. By that time, I was too tired to worry about it.

Only later did I understand that I had understood nothing, and that that had been the point. By then, I had begun to realize why we had been toasting Brezhnev, the oppressor, and not Gorbachev, the liberator. Under Brezhnev, as under Khrushchev, the Soviet avant-gardists were unable to exhibit their work in public, so they would hang it in their apartments or studios and invite people to come look at it. The only people who ever saw their work were other avant-gardists. They were, in their own phrase, “like the early Christians, or like Freemasons.” They could recognize one another at a glance, and they stuck together through thick and thin, never betraying the members of the circle. They believed that they knew a higher truth than was vouchsafed to the rest of the Soviet people, but they knew also that its time had not yet come. From their circumstances of difficulty, they learned integrity and built a world of mutuality. Though shot through with intense ironies and petty conflicts, this life force still gave their work urgency in a country where, for so many people, all gesture had come to seem futile. In the face of misery they achieved their tightly shared joy, and the constant surprise of such a profound sense of purpose taught them the value of their talent.