Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

That talent was formidable. Their joy may have been considerable, but the passage to it was too fraught to tempt anyone who was incapable of transcendence; moreover, the frustration of battling the all-encompassing Soviet system with an inadequate intellect quickly defeated fools. The Moscow artistic community had no room for the passive observer; the commitment of its members was enormous. Since the experience of their work always depended on the experience of them as people—since the hundred or so individuals who made up the avant-garde were both the creators of Soviet art and its audience—the artists’ personalities were key to what they created. Their strong personas are defined in part by the place they fill within the art world, and in part by the proclivities with which they came to the avant-garde, but their genius is, of necessity, that of the painter, the poet, and the actor. This curious concatenation makes them compelling, irresistible, implacable, and ultimately impenetrable. It is why they combine that rigorous trait of integrity with a sly elusiveness that can all too often masquerade as dishonesty. Their work is full of truth, but all told in slanted language.

Anufriev’s description of the Action was a witty lie. I was being cajoled into the belief that what had happened was comprehensible, coherent, and straightforward. What had gone on was, in fact, a fascinating comment on the problems of contemporary Soviet art, and at a fairly literal level it was explicable, but it was also an affirmation of the artistic community that oppression had created, a community that felt itself being shaken by freedom. The whole point was that it contained so many references that no one could begin to get them all. The artists in attendance could affirm their places in the avant-garde by getting many of them and could confirm the degree of their secrecy by failing to get the rest. The circle of the avant-garde, suddenly threatened by those who think that being an artist is an easy path to fame and fortune, holds such events to protect its terrible new fragility as loosening restrictions and foreign markets threaten its members’ psychic citadel.

I had come to Moscow to attend Sotheby’s sale of contemporary Soviet art. The hype surrounding the auction was blinding. Sotheby’s was organizing the ultimate Moscow tour, a package involving diplomatic entertainments, singing Gypsies, endless viewings of rarely seen icons, meetings with important persons, cases of imported champagne, and beluga buckshot previously reserved for czars and commissars. We were going not to a mere auction but to an important event in the history of East and West. On a drop-dead-smart brochure, the word Sotheby’s blazed red in both Latin and Cyrillic type against the sienna tones of an ancient map with illegible lettering. Charmed though travelers were by the prospect of fish eggs and icons, many were taken aback to discover that this map—the logo of the trip, reproduced time and again in the international press—was actually an old map of Bermuda. “It’s what sprang to hand,” one of the Sotheby’s directors told me.

As a for-profit company, Sotheby’s had reasons for staging the sale other than an interest in the work of the Soviet avant-garde. It was an opportunity to establish good relations with the Soviet government at the dawn of perestroika, with the possibility of monopoly contracts and other boons down the line. Initially, contemporary art and artists were seen as a means to an end. Although Soviet art had actually been discovered by the West incrementally during the decade preceding the Sotheby’s sale, when a few Soviet artists started to get exposure in Western Europe and New York, the big players in the art game didn’t pay much attention.

By the time Sotheby’s was revving up for its sale, gallery exhibitions in the West were taking place, notably an installation at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York by Ilya Kabakov. He had created a Moscow communal apartment in which each room belonged to someone driven to obsessiveness by the close quarters. In one room lived the Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, whose space was filled with cards on which tiny items were pasted to boards and labeled: “lint from my pocket,” “dust from the corner,” “a paper clip,” “an insect.” In another room, the Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment had rigged a seat in midair with four huge springs that ran to the four corners of his ceiling, planning to fling himself into the freedom of the stratosphere. In yet another lived the Man (perhaps Kabakov himself) Who Described His Life Through Characters. Such exhibitions had impelled a few serious collectors of Soviet art, but though theirs was no longer an eccentric taste, it was still a cultivated, obscure one.