Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Though the work of many artists of the late Soviet avant-garde was commercialized by the West, they soon achieved a degree of visibility in their own country as well. The Russian capital now boasts the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Multimedia Art Museum, and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; the Garage is housed in a lavishly converted fifty-eight-thousand-square-foot former restaurant in Gorky Park, with an atrium that features two thirty-foot-high murals by Erik Bulatov. Artists work in studio spaces in a former power plant in Moscow and in what was once St. Petersburg’s Smolinsky industrial bread bakery. Independent art schools in Russia include the British Higher School of Art and Design (established in 2003), the Rodchenko School of Art (2006), the Institute Baza (2011), and the Open School Manege/Media Art Lab (2013). The Hermitage was the site of the last Manifesta, an important pan-European exhibition, and the Moscow Biennale is going strong, along with commercial art fairs such as Cosmoscow.

Vladimir Putin’s government disdains free expression, however, and Russian authorities frequently ban or close down exhibitions that offend conservatives. The women of the feminist rock band Pussy Riot were imprisoned following a 2012 performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior; their story captivated the international press, but is only one of many such episodes. The “art-anarch-punk gang” Voina, “War,” seeks to challenge “outdated repressive-patriarchal symbols and ideologies.” Voina staged an orgy at the Timiryazev Museum of Biology in Moscow concurrent with the 2008 Russian presidential election. In 2010, five of its members sketched a two-hundred-foot-high phallus on St. Petersburg’s Liteiny drawbridge so it would be visible from the offices of the Federal Security Service when the bridge was raised. Many members of Voina are currently serving time. Alex Plutser-Sarno, who remains at liberty, said that the locus of the group is behind “a high, impenetrable wall of the St. Petersburg prison,” where the artists Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev are “slowly fading away.”

Some of the exhibitions shut down in the past decade or so include Forbidden Art at the Sakharov Center Moscow (2006), which cost the director his job; Spiritual Invective at Moscow’s Marat Guelman Gallery (2012), after which the organizers were brought in for questioning; and Welcome to Sochi, shown in Perm (2013), of which Putin-loyalist parliamentarian Andrei Klimov wrote, “The works brought together reminded me of the way Russia was portrayed by Hitler’s propagandists, and by Napoléon’s flunkeys before them. Goebbels, I’m sure, would be pleased.” Most recently, the Moscow Exhibition Halls Association shut down Be Happy at the Bogorodskoe Gallery, Moscow (2015); and Being Yourself: Stories of LGBT Teenagers at Red Square gallery, Moscow (2015). When the organizers of the latter exhibition attempted to show their photos outdoors, the pictures were destroyed and photographer Denis Styazhkin, who is an activist for LGBT rights, and a sixteen-year-old onlooker were detained. Funding for the Moscow Premiere film festival was abruptly redirected to a new “Youth Festival of Life-Affirming Film” run by one of Putin’s cronies. Russian authorities have even tried to impede exhibitions abroad: the minister of culture objected to the public display of pieces slated for the Paris show Sots Art: Political Art from Russia, so he prevented them from leaving the country.

Nor is the market easy even for those whose exhibitions don’t get shuttered. The proliferation of museums in Moscow notwithstanding, affluent, glamour-besotted Russians generally prefer flashier, more prestigious contemporary Western art to what is produced by their countrymen. Although global prices for Russian contemporary art have stabilized somewhat, the domestic art market has suffered a deep recession. Moscow’s three best-established galleries—Aydan Gallery, Marat Guelman Gallery, and XL Gallery—have had to reinvent themselves as nonprofits. Vladimir Ovcharenko, director of the Regina Gallery, said, “Most artists are working in their kitchens as they did in Soviet times.” It is not clear whether, as in Soviet times, they are working with moral purpose.

USSR

Three Days in August

New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1991